Columbus A/S

CSE:COLUM

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Operator]

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the presentation of Q3 2023 Results and New Strategy. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Soren Knudsen, CEO. Please go ahead.

[Soren Knudsen, executive]

Thank you very much. Thank you, and welcome to you all to this Q3 investor call. As the operator just said, my name is Soren Knudsen, and I'm the CEO and President of Columbus. And I'm accompanied here today by our Group CFO, Brian Iversen, who will also cover part of the presentation. So let's start with going through the agenda on the next slide, please. We will start off by presenting the financial highlights and the financial review for the third quarter, followed by a deeper look into the performance of the respective business lines and market units. Then we will cover our outlook for 2023 and long-term financial ambitions. Today, we will also present our new strategy for the next 3 years, which is called New Heights. And therefore, this call will be extended by an additional 15 minutes. We will conclude with a short Q&A. This call is going to be fairly busy. So we're going to proceed at pace, but we really do hope that we will have a minute for Q&A at the end as well. Let's go to the Slide 6, please and have a look at the financial highlights. So in Q3, our growth from previous quarters continued and showcasing positive developments. Our top line growth remains robust, exhibiting a 15% organic increase when excluding the ICY security acquisition and also factoring out the negative currency effects. Efficiency showed very good improvements, now reaching 65% from a previous 61% in the same quarter last year. Now traditionally, Q3 efficiency in our company and in our industry as such is impacted by summer vacations resulting in a lower rate than our Q2 this year, which was a at a peak of 70%. So this was much as expected. Our EBITDA experienced a 28% uptick from Q3 of 2022 and now totaling DKK 21 million. The EBITDA margin also saw an improvement, reaching 6% compared to 5.2% in Q3 last year. And while these improvements are promising, the quality of earnings has not yet aligned with our ambitions and expectations and what we see as the potential margin level. And consequently, enhancing the EBITDA margin remains focused in our new strategy, as you will see later on. A key insight from Q3 is the significant enhancement of our core business compared to previous year, although still with some room for improvement, key indicators of this includes the efficiency tools that I just alluded to, but also the much improved cash flow from operations compared to previous year. And given that we've talked so much about currency lately, Brian, could you please provide an update on the currency impact on the results please?

[Brian Iversen, executive]

Yes. Thank you, Soren, and as in the past 2 quarters, we talked briefly about the currency that do give us some headwind, especially when we look at our top line. This continued in Q3. Both the Swedish kroner and the Norwegian kroner are the 2 most used currencies in the group, except for the DKK and in Q3, 48% of the group's revenue came from the Swedish and the Norwegian kroner. So all the fluctuations do have quite a significant impact to the group in Q3, it amounts to DKK 22 million corresponding to a 6 percentage point when we compare in constant currencies. We do actively work with calibrating our operations to mitigate the changing currencies, although impact do besides the top line, also affects slightly our bottom line on the short term. So that was all on the currency for this Q.

So I will hand back to Soren, who will deep dive into the business lines performance.

[Soren Knudsen, executive]

So thank you, Brian. And we're now on Slide 8. I'll be going through the business lines. And we're actually seeing growth in almost all business lines. We have a few slowdowns. Given the impact of the currencies, as Brian just alluded to, we continue to also incorporate the growth rates in constant currencies for your benefit, and this allows -- I think to get a better grasp on the actual activity level and for you to see how we develop in terms of market share. So you have that in constant currencies as well the growth percentage.

Going to Dynamics first, our biggest line, we can see that it's progressing well, moving fast. The U.K., Sweden and Denmark are the strongest underlying growth drivers of our Dynamics business unit.

Moving to M3, that's a bit of a different picture. M3 has a very high geographical market dependency on Sweden. And thus, it is a business line that's significantly impacted by the decrease of the devaluation of the Swedish krona. We talked about M3 here, and I said to you that M3 is a business line that really caters to very major global players in the industry.

Their sales processes are quite long and we have over a long period of time, reinvested in rebuilding our pipeline. We can say, we very actively manage this, and it -- we are starting to see the benefits from this, especially we can start to see upticks now in October, which will obviously be part of our Q4. But I do think it's fair to say that we start to benefit from a very sort of foundational investment we started many months ago in rebuilding our sales pipeline of M3.

Moving on to Digital Commerce. We see substantial growth from the major market in Sweden. However, our Digital Commerce business unit in Norway is really facing some headwind, and it's probably one of the units which are not contributed to the growth.

Data & Analytics continues with very robust growth, and it's primarily led by the U.K. and Sweden, our CXE business unit demonstrates growth and is actually progressing across all of our main markets.

Having a look at our new business line security, we obviously don't have comparative figures yet. Nevertheless, it's fair to say that the team has continued their strong focus on integrating with Columbus, adapting to our operating model and really working with our existing Columbus sales teams to establish a cross business line pipeline for both existing and new customers. The demand for services in this business line is very evident and relevant to many of our customers. So our expectations for this business area, although it's still early days for us are very high.

When it comes to the small business line of the strategy and change, it's so small in number of people that it's very heavily reliant on a few active projects. So we can see some pretty big swings there. But I think more importantly is really to focus on their key attributes as when we have them involved, we tend to have a much better go-to-market approach. And as such, they serve as a facilitator for all business lines in terms of business development approach.

So overall, we're satisfied with the revenue growth in our business lines, and we do anticipate continued growth in coming quarters.

So now moving over to the business line contribution. And obviously, that's a very crucial performance factor for our business. In comparison or in difference really to EBITDA, it helps us assess the actual business performance, particularly since we have all our enabling functions excluded from this picture.

Dynamics continues to be our business line with the best margin even though Q3 this year saw a slower business ramp-up after the summer period, partly due to a higher volume of actually product sales, which we had in Q3 2022. And that very positively influenced the margin. In addition, the business line remains to have a high efficiency, which we are very satisfied with given that it is our sort of anchor business line and sets the tone of the entire business.

M3 concluded the quarter with a contribution margin higher than usual, primarily attributed to a significant product sales during the period. And this is something that we might see more of as we are discussing how we -- the commercial aspects of our relationship with Infor, the parent company behind the M3 platform.

Digital commerce has demonstrated really a rapid growth in both revenue and substantial improvement in its contribution margin over the past 3 years. Although the Q3 margin was impacted by currency fluctuations, signs of the improvement are really evident.

In tandem with the high growth in Data & Analytics and CXE, we observed satisfactory progress in contribution margins, recognizing that they do make ongoing investments still in their top line growth, given that they are sort of earlier stage business lines.

Security is in the early stages of aligning with the Columbus business model, as I said before, and there's still work ahead for us to meet our full expectations. The interest from customers still makes us confident that the business line will become an important part of our business in the future.

So let me have the next slide, please...

[Brian Iversen, executive]

That's the update on our market units. And as currency makes it a bit difficult to compare and to have a like-for-like comparison, I will speak to the development in constant currencies.

Our largest market, Sweden, which accounts for 34% of our total revenue in the Q came out of the quarter with a 50% growth. This is a strong result compared with the general market condition in Sweden at the current stage. Denmark continued to show fast growth 30% in Q3, whereof 17% came from our newly acquired security business, ICY. The Danish market began with the year with a very high pace, which they actually have continued during the year so far.

We are pleased to see the strong progress, especially after a very slow period the previous years. Also, U.K. came out with a very impressive Q, delivering 51% increase compared to the same quarter last year. And what makes it very strong is that it actually arises from all our business lines in U.K.

So a pretty healthy sign for this country. The development in Q3 was less impressive in Norway, where we saw a 4% decrease in constant currencies. We are, of course, following this closely and do expect some stabilization in the coming quarters.

U.S., although not our largest market in the group, we are happy to see a growth and the U.S. team has worked hard to rebuild a strong pipeline, and it seems slowly to move in the right direction.

So overall, the development in our market units is definitely approved for the quarter. And if we take a current slightly weakened market into consideration, it's actually a very strong performance.

Next slide. I'll briefly comment on our efficiency and recurring revenue to APIs that we follow closely, as you know, efficiency has kept increasing compared to the same period last year. And in Q3, reached 65% compared to 61% last year. This is the result from our focus on optimizing our organizational setup and even more important, our very strong customer wins. The majority of our business lines has been optimized to a strong level, although we constantly work on fine-tuning this area.

Recurring revenue has remained relatively stable and remains to account for around 14% of our total revenue. The increase in recurring follows the growth in total revenue. Subscriptions is slowly becoming an insignificant part of the total revenue as cloud products is taking over. Care is our most important stream of recurring revenue, and this has increased in line with our total revenue increase. We keep a high focus on this -- on growing the recurring revenue percentage and do see an increased interest from our customers to outsource this key area of their IT setup.

Good, then I will finish off with the outlook before I will hand back to Soren. So very briefly, we maintain our guidance for 2023, which was adjusted with the ICY acquisitions back in April. Revenue is expected in the range of DKK 1.550 billion to DKK 1.6 billion, corresponding to a growth of 8% to 12% in constant currencies. As mentioned earlier, in the FX development -- FX development do have a negative impact on our revenue growth, as you saw. So -- but obviously, not our growth expectation in constant currencies.

EBITDA margin is expected to be in the range -- the margin range of 7.4% to 9% as presented in previous quarters. And as always, the outlook is subject to the general uncertainties in the market, such as the current macroeconomic conditions, higher-than-normal exchange rate, volatility and recession fear in some countries. Although we continue to see a strong demand for our digital solution and transformation, we do anticipate that a slower decision pace on new projects and the need to divide project up in smaller bites will continue throughout the year.

If the general uncertainties worsened the last few months. I know it's only almost 1 month left, it might, of course, impact the growth and the margin negatively. That was all for the guidance. And now I'm excited to hear you again, Soren on our new strategy.

[Soren Knudsen, executive]

Yes. Thank you, Brian. So what I will do now is I will try to do our new strategies of justice in about 20 minutes' time. So we've obviously spent months and months and had a lot of our people involved in building this strategy, and it's going to be hard to do it justice in 20 minutes.

But I hope it will be interesting for you to have a little look under the bonnet of what we will be up to in our next strategy period. So with that said, welcome to new heights. This is our growth strategy for the period spanning from 2024 and 2 and including 2026. It's basically designed to accelerate our company toward continued strong growth, but also very much to increase our profitability significantly.

New Heights explain both where we come from, but also where we are going, So we have been through a period with the last strategy, as you know, the one that was called Focus23, which was about turning the company to strong growth. Now the time has come to build on that and accelerate to what we call New Heights and adding more profit to our growth journey. And also to become a company that's even more for our both customers and employees and which continues to build on the integrity, which we are now known for in the market.

Next slide, please. So a key element in the previous Focus23 strategy has been to focus on serving larger customers within our key industries, focusing really strong on that. That was manufacturing, retail and distribution and food and beverages and really having this vision as a lifetime partner and thus improving cross-selling and customer satisfaction, also leading to larger engagements with these customers. We've also divested non-focus areas such as our software business, which was called to increase. We've also stepped out of geographical markets such as Russia, the Baltics and others. And we've also divested business units which were focused on -- or a business unit, which was focused on smaller customers in the U.S. Very importantly, in addition, we have strengthened our business model with an entirely new operating model, which is sort of -- is a global operating model with global delivery capacity and focus on local market presence. It has also served well in terms of increasing transparency in our business with a new global business platform or ERP system, as we call it, in our business. So -- and we have then continued to further specialize in these key industries. We will leverage the stronghold built during the last strategic period and improved our customer focus further focusing on customer intimacy continued and also continue our focus on building further advisory skills. We have a solid financial platform from where we have potential to add acquisitive growth now and to further strengthen our market position. We are going to further leverage our streamlined global OPUS operating model. We see that as a major differentiator to competition. And this will allow us to use -- or bring to bear basically the full global delivery capacity we have in each market and also makes it easier for us to attract top talent into our operating companies as they get a chance to operate globally. Let' go to the next one. I think just in time, we will go straight to the one that's called New Heights. So the New Heights strategy [indiscernible] notable signal, ambition and the strong foundation and new means we have already achieved height before in the previous Focus23 period. We have a foundation to build from, and now we have an opportunity to take it to the next level. Also in terms of what height means, it signals our ambition and confidence, which we are increasingly gaining as an organization as we win in the market and upwards driving for something better. We are now not only going to continue our growth journey of 10% revenue growth, which now means really increasing our market share, but also grow our bottom line to new heights, which is exemplified or stated with the 15% EBITDA margin. This is a significant improvement from our current levels and consequently, reaching new heights from a capability and performance perspective. We have the ambition to be the proven leader in delivering core business technology and lasting value in key industries. So this slide is basically meant to show you 4 strategic bets, which we are placing. If you look at the first one there, I talked about expanding our service portfolio and investing in our service portfolio. This is something we're already doing today. I think the new thing will be that we are adding acquisitions as a significant driver here, which is not something we've been using very actively before. So you should expect to see increased levels of activity here, also driven by the fact that we now have a very streamlined operating model. We have a financial foundation for this but also I think the market is much more reasonable compared to the previous 3 years. So this seems like an opportune time to include this. The second box talks about entering the life science industry. This might seem like a very big leap. And I would just like to explain a little bit about what's happened. So we're actually already in there. It has already partly happened. We have some 50, 54 customers in this industry already. So our strategy is very driven by demand here. And we are very clear on life sciences, what do we mean by life sciences and explaining that shortly to you, it's the private part of life sciences. We're not talking about public health services. It's the same customer segment as in the 3 other industries. So that means we're going for those large multinational companies, but we're not going for what's called blue chip pharma, the very, very big ones. Also on the service side, our intention is to stick fairly close to the service portfolio we already have. There are some specific needs to life sciences even within that, but there are also parts of our service sets that are fairly transferable directly to life sciences. So basically, what this means, we are not going into what is sort of hard core life science laboratory document systems, QC systems or things that are highly bespoke to the life science industry yet. So we stay fairly close to our current skill set, although we are going to build some new skills to it. #3 talks about further seizing this opportunity as what we call a constant partner. Our concept is called Evolve. This is what we -- you also known as our care concepts. It is extremely important to us and talks about the constantly ongoing need for daily -- fine-tuning daily small projects from all of our big customers. And this business unit is basically always there. And then from time to time, these customers initiate very big projects, which then calls for one of our other service lines to take over. But this is a proven model for us now, and we will drive that further. From a revenue perspective, it is interesting because it's an annuity-based model, whereas the rest of the work we do tends to be more an effort based on -- typically on time and material. Finally, we're going to launch our EBITDA15 program, which is aimed to improve our profitability, which we can then use to secure our financial position, but of course, also to fuel further growth. So these are the 4 strategic bets. Going to the next slide, also food for thought for you. We have turned our company to strong growth in the previous period. As you can see, the numbers speak their own language. And our activity level is, therefore, quite high, as just explained in the financial review. I think what you can see here, and what I would like to take from this is that in the -- during 2020, we dropped to negative growth, which was basically what Focus23 was meant to counter, we establishing organic growth. We can then see in Q2 of 2021, we return to organic growth. But we have to say that all the way up to sort of the end of the perhaps Q3 2022, this was after the invasion of Russia, we saw increasing interest rates, inflation going up. The growth rates that you're seeing there from Q2 2021 to Q2 2022 are basically growing with the market. What you see after that and what we're currently delivering, so let's say, from Q3 2022, up until now with higher growth percentages, but also in a much more difficult market is outgrowing the market. So we're basically outperforming right now is very clear, and we can see that we are taking market share. And it's that momentum we are taking with this into the new strategy. Let's go to next one, please. This one speaks very briefly to you about our market position. And since we're going 2 strategy periods back since the Columbus 2020 strategy, we have evolved and expanded our position in the market significantly. That's what we continued in Focus2023 and this is also where we'll be going with new heights. We are continuously moving up in the market towards more advisory and more business-oriented services, but as you can see, we do not believe any of our existing space we add on to what we've built. We experienced that we bring more value to customers by spanning wider across more specialist disciplines and thus bringing our food portfolio of services into play. So this has taken us a while to master, but this is what's working increasingly better for us. This brings our industry expertise to life because we know from experience and firsthand what we talk about, and that reflects on the advice we can provide.

At the same time, we continue in the supplier space where we really deliver specific technology platforms and also assisting operations, keeping the green lights on systems. And I think this is what gives us an edge basically that we are both doers and thinkers. And it's hard to find that combination and that is our differentiator. Next slide, please. This talks about -- the way I look at this is that it talks about what drives demand for us? What are the demand generator. So in -- perhaps in a contracting market or a more difficult macroeconomic environment as we're seeing -- why is it that we can continue to grow at these growth rates, which we've just presented to you. These are 5 lenses on that, 5 angles. First of all, we take the one that's called supply chain disruptions. What this really encompasses is we're seeing a lot of shifts in global supply chains. This causes some instability and delays and subsequently also need for adjustments of all the systems that we provide. We still see the aftermath of the up to now 3 years ago, I believe, lockdowns. We see shifts driven by inflation and trade barriers. We do actually see the consequences of this whole political game of derisking not decoupling. That means customers are setting up operating entities in new geographies that drives a need for our services. And it also drives a bigger complexity in the supply chains where we have a role to play. Going to the one that's called automation pressure. It's basically continuing the drive to automate and limit manual handling of operations where possible, bringing to life underutilized data from our customers. It's still a very common thing that customers have a rich data set that they can't leverage for better decision-making. We also have a very simple, but very important thing about the 2 complex and expensive IT operations. So the cost of keeping the lights on are basically taking away from the budget to develop and progress the company. Obviously, we have a very interesting 2 years ahead of us when it comes to the role of AI and large language models.

And we have a very general factor, which is that we have a very exhaustive labor market. At the moment, there is a little bit less focus on it, but it's still there, and I think we'll return to that being a key problem in the next 3 years.

The digital one about channel requirements speaks a lot to our CXE channel and our service and digital commerce. It's about the need for many of our customers to further optimize their digital presence in terms of the commerce platforms, in terms of combining the experience of physical outlets and digital outlets and continues to be a very big driver of activity. Moving to sustainability and compliance. So we -- ourselves also having to live up to new reporting requirements as are all our customers, new CSRD requirements are being phased in. It is -- drives a different reporting, very heavy reporting set for all our clients, and there's a need to automate as much of that reporting as possible and integrate that with the company's operational KPIs. This data comes from the various systems that we are used to working on. And as such, we're developing services and we are driving services which will speak to this demand. And finally, the one about resilience and security. I think with the press coverage also in recent days about the [indiscernible] infrastructure. It's -- the need is already high and it's not going anywhere. So we're looking to that to incorporate that in our business going forward. Moving to customer segment focus, and I'm going to make this very short for the time so. We are very clear on who we are after in the market. This has worked well for us, and it's virtually unchanged going forward. What this slide shows you is that we have taken away our focus from selling to small size and local companies. But we do actually -- they're very loyal to us. We provide a good service to them. As such, we've not cut off the long tail, but we're not investing in developing new customers at all in the segment. The micro size customers, which was sort of what we saw we had in the U.S., we have exited. Where we are really strong already is the medium-sized international companies, regional companies, and also, we started in some of our businesses, we can say we've reached sort of our medium strength in even what I would call large size and truly multinational companies. It's this medium that needs to go to strong and it's the low the need to go to medium. That's where we're going in the next strategy period. And on top of that, you will see these Fortune 500 companies, global companies, big blue chips, as we call them, we don't see that as the ideal playing ground for us, yet that might come in a later strategy period. But we have really found our sweet spot in terms of customer size. We are also able to break this down further into certain characteristic at international presence and all other characteristics so we -- so when we see the companies that fit us, we instantly recognize them and makes our pitch for them very, very strong. Good. Going to the next one. And I have about 2 minutes left. What this one says is basically, we, as you've just seen, growing at about a 14% rate right now, the way we perceive our market is that it's growing by 7%. So it means taking market share. The right side of the slide shows you what we're expecting, and that is the -- also the underlying assumption for our own growth projection. What you can see, we expect a very modest growth in the coming 3 years. We don't expect the market to suddenly pop back to strong growth figures and that is the underlying assumption. Some of you might say, I don't recognize the 3%. You have seen another report, saying 10% or even lower or something else. This report is the best we can do. It's a bespoke piece of work that looks specifically at our industry, specifically at our geographies, specifically at our services. It's always a little bit uncertain with these numbers to really cut -- to cut it. But at the moment, this is how we see our market developing going forward. I think going into life sciences, I already covered to some extent how we see it and in the interest of time, I think we can move on to the next slide. I'd like to just take 1 minute to talk about how our customers develop in size. What this slide shows you is that the average annual revenue has increased by 29%, the orange line there. So 29% is a significant uptick; however, actually, if you look at the numbers, it's from a fairly modest number. So I would like to explain that in a different way. We have -- as you see there at the top right, we have 85% of our customers that are -- that stay with us year-on-year. So therefore, it takes us quite a long time to change the composition. And really what happens is that whenever we win completely new customers, they are in a very, very different size from the DKK 1.3 million of annual revenue that you see there. It's not something that we can currently report on. But it is -- I can say it like this, it's very, very common for us now to close arrangements, which are double-digit millions in Danish kroner and also not in the low end of double digits, and that's really what we need in terms of driving the engagement up. Okay. Moving on. talks about our strategic vision for the future. Again, very quickly here, but left side talks about our employees. This is very, very important to us. We are -- in all aspects, we're a people business and we need to compete for top talent. We need to develop top talent, and we need to basically have the best possible workforce. So we have some initiatives here, which are about the growth of our employees, not the growth of the company, but it's about providing personal growth for our employees. If we don't do that, they will not be happy with us. So we have a number of investments going into that area. It's about meaningful work. So all our employees are very highly skilled, and they require meaningful work. It's about leading with integrity. It's an absolute given something which according to our own analysis and questionnaires with the employees, we're very good at this. We want to stay very good at this and then it's about developing this trusted adviser mentality further where we basically -- where it's second nature to us to just take the perspective of the customer and tell them exactly what we would do if we were in their shoes. So very simple things to say, but all of them have quite thorough structures behind them to support our development further.

In terms of how we see ourselves for the customers, we do see ourselves to some degree as a digital surgeon. All the systems we do work on are highly interlinked and are very complicated to operate on. So that speaks to the next point as well about embracing the complexity. I think some companies have sort of envisioned that you can take all complexity out of the environments we operate in, we think complexity is quite inevitable and especially the size of companies. So we focus on mastering the complexity. We have a strong focus on the one that's called We Stick Around. That means that we take responsibility. We don't leave when we just provided a blueprint or a plan. We need to consider our success as when the customer sees themselves a successful. Otherwise, we will fail to have this 85% as a repeat business that I just showed before. Finally, one, we are also working on is all our consultants need to understand the bigger picture of the customer. Basically know what underlying trends and the dynamics are stake at each of our customers and not just think in terms of what the system can do and onwards from that.

Let's move on, I think I've covered it to some extent. I will just spend 1 second here on one of the growth pillars, which is the one is called Rapid Adaptation. I think you recognize the 2 first, and we will also recognize the foundation. The rapid adaptation deserves a word. So at the moment, I'm going to say we're seeing unprecedented technology advancements. That's probably not true, but certainly, things are moving very, very fast at the moment.

And what that means is that our customers are every day presented with a number of investment choices. And often it's being sold to them by an external company as being very urgent, very important, and they're all left in the same position there that they can't basically opt in on everything. So they need a partner to help establish a sequence where to place your investments, what sequence, how to prioritize, how to constantly sort of explore the options, but know when to double down on investment and know when to hold back because sometimes you do need to do that. That is a role that we are very, very happy to take. Good. Then our EBITDA15 program. We've spent a lot of time developing this program. So it's not something we've just pulled out of thin air. Currently, as Brian just said, is approximately 7% to 9% full year forecast. We see our improvements coming from these 4 buckets.

And under each of these are a number of underlying initiatives. The first one, project value, is that when we work for the right customers on the right things, we have a higher margin. We see that as an overall margin driver of 2.1%. Next one, delivery mix. When we're set up correctly and deliver the right quality, we use our operational structure correctly and thus, work is done by the right seniority levels from the right regions, then that gives us a further potential. We see that potential at about 1.8%. Efficiency, as you know, we've worked hard on for the last 3 years, but there continues to be some potential there. It's not unlimited, but we still have further potential. We see the potential in terms of margin improvement at 2.1%. And then the last one, which is called the scalable model. In simple terms, it means that the whole group functions infrastructure that we've built that basically runs the company is set up for a bigger business. So we can grow our consultant staff, we can grow our customer base further without adding to enabling functions and group functions. I've said enough about the organic growth. So aiming to maintain a 10%, aiming to cross the DKK 2 billion, aiming to add on acquisitions on top of that. And the final slide here talks about how we developed the strategy to just allow me 30 seconds on that.

As a people business, if you develop your strategy amongst the executive management team only, you run a very high risk of basically alienating your people because they don't recognize themselves. So this has been a very extensive process involving hundreds and hundreds of people getting their input, also passing them feedback where we don't actually pursue what was suggested. And as such, we have a much better base for implementing strategy now.

And I believe this is also an area we can improve over the last time is how quickly can we bring our new strategy to life, how quickly can we get all our people to get behind it and execute on it. So we put a lot of emphasis into that. I think these were the words. So it was a very tall order in 20 minutes.

I apologize, I keep rushing, but I thought it was worth giving you this glance and then we will take a few questions now, please.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions]

[Soren Knudsen, executive]

Yes. Okay. So the first question is -- really says with new strategy, you will enter life science. How are we equipped in terms of technology and also comparison to NNIT and also a question whether they could become a partner for us when it comes to Novo Nordisk? So I will not say too much about the NNIT, of course. And -- but I would say, I go back to what I said before. I don't think we are pursuing life science in the sense that's highly bespoke to the life science sector. That's perhaps for later time for us. We stick to the areas where we are very strong in terms of skills. And then we need to learn some additional adjacent skills, which are basically necessary to work in -- primarily due to the regulations and also slightly more complex upstream value chain that this industry has. And in terms of partnerships, it could happen. I have nothing against it. I don't foresee it. It's not part of the strategy to -- as an outset. And then I will just take the last one. First from [Doug], what kind of a trajection do you expect on the EBITDA margin? Linear front or back end? So I don't think we provided any guide. What we're saying is we need to reach 15% by the end of the period. And what I would also say is that -- and you can almost see this by the 4 buckets we presented. This is operational fine-tuning across the board, across many geographies. So it will not happen overnight. It's a very continuous improvement. And as such, even though we don't guide on it, I would -- if I had to choose one of your 4 options, [Marius], I would go over the 1 that's called linear. And then as a long question. I need to grasp the question -- 2 question. It is impression that Columbus can expand the EBITDA margin despite the stiff currency headwind. However, pickup in EBITDA in Q4 is indeed needed for reaching even the low end of the current 23% EBITDA guidance, whereas the revenue guidance appears more reachable. Can you please elaborate on the seasonal phasing in Columbus of revenues, cost and EBITDA in Columbus?

[Brian Iversen, executive]

And maybe I can just briefly cover that. Of course, as I mentioned, we maintained the guidance, as you also right here, [Michael] is that it is a headwind we are seeing with the currency. But of course, that -- so it's 2 end because that, of course, hit the actual revenue, but in constant currencies is a different picture as I also alluded to.

And as you can see until Q3, where we are -- we seeing a strong growth. On the bottom line, the seasonality is that Q1 and Q4 has been and normally is a strong quarter within our industry and I believe it goes total industry as such due to holiday and so on. So yes, we do foresee a strong Q4 to reach the guided level. Okay.

[Soren Knudsen, executive]

I can take the next one. It talks about the integration of ICY and to which extent you're able to harvest cross-sales synergies? Okay. So the actual integration in terms of all the practicalities has moved fully according to plan, building a neutral sales pipeline is, of course, something else. So I think what I can say is -- we're seeing really good progress. I can just deep dive into some things. It was part of the plan that we presented that they would set up business activities in Norway, which we have proceeded with. And we -- I believe we now have the first people on board. We start to have basically our Danish sales leaders go up and attend sales meetings in Norway, who will then be replaced by dedicated Norwegian staff when we get to that. To balance that statement a little bit, it is hard work. As you know, we need to establish hundreds of relations between the approximately 50 employees we've got from ICY and they need to get to know all of the Columbus employee or as many as possible in each country. So very hard work, but also very enjoyable. And I think we're doing quite well on that. All right. I think we're over time, and I apologize for that. I hope it was some benefit to just have a look into the strategy document and otherwise perhaps you can have a brief peek yourself. If there are questions we didn't have time to cover, you're more than welcome to send them through to us. All right. That concludes the call. Thank you very much.

[Operator]

Thank you. That does conclude the conference for today. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.