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Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Okay, let's start. Welcome to the presentation of Trifork's Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results 2023. My name is Frederik Svanholm. I'm Head of Investor Relations at Trifork, and today our CEO, Jorn Larsen; and our CFO, Kristian Wulf-Andersen, will be providing a presentation of approximately 35 minutes, followed by a Q&A. Before we start, I have a bit of practical information. I would like to inform you that this presentation is recorded, and it will be made available in its full length on our Investor webpage later today. I would also like to inform you that if you want to download the presentation, you'll be able to find it on our investor website on the front page. And third, we invite you to ask questions, so please don't hesitate to engage with management after their presentation. So how that works is that you raise your hand by clicking the Raise Hand button, we will then announce your name, and when you have unmuted yourself you can ask your question. And we will, of course, do our best to ensure that everyone gets the chance to ask questions. Also, we are here for you after the presentation, of course, for further questions. Before we start, we have to show this disclaimer, and I know everyone here are very bright people, so we can read fast so we can move on. So let's hand the word over to Jorn Larsen, Group CEO. Jorn, please go ahead.
Thank you so much, Frederik, and thank you very much, everyone, for coming to this session. And we have some interesting things to cover today and I hope you will have some good questions at the end of the presentation. So, first of all, the numbers themselves might not be a big surprise since we disclosed them a few days ago when we precised our guidance for '23. But here you have, of course, a lot more insights and updates and precision on the numbers and how they are coming about. So first of all, if we look at our journey on revenue, you can see here from 2007, I always enjoy to follow this, and it will be this painting we show every time. If we then look what actually happened in '23, you can see that we managed to grow 12.4%, and if we look from 2017 to '23, we had an average growth of 22%. So, of course, we are in the lower range of our expected growth and also mid-range guidance. However, despite '23 being a difficult year for companies and the world, with wars and conflicts, and companies that either had to cut cost or lay off people, we had the venture companies that pulled the funding from startups and product companies and all of these things you can say, made it harder for Trifork to grow our top line, and also we didn't onboard any major M&As, something we have a high risk to do in the years and months to come. But 12%, we are okay about that, not too heavy, but we think it is an okay result. If we look at EBITDA for the Trifork adjusted segment, then things actually looks pretty good. And if we look at, again, just from where we see from 2018, '19, '20, '21, '22, '23, we have seen this number being 12%, 12%, 17%, 18%, 17%, and now in '23, just around 17%. So despite a little slower pace on the top line in growth, we still maintain a good margin and actually have some more insights to that as we progress this presentation, because there is a lot of potential that you will see when we walk through the details of it. Let's just move on here. So the third thing in the introduction here is how do we see '24. And, of course, we are already 1 month in -- almost 2 months, but we do need to count and collect all the numbers. But we know, of course, January already, and we have a good idea of February. And with that we dare to give a guidance for '24. However, this guidance is a little bit different than what we have done in the past years because we have expanded the range a little bit, because we were probably quite bold in the beginning of '23 where we thought we could walk on water and everything. We then realized that the challenges the world sees also affect Trifork. We are not on our own planet here. So with some more caution, we are guiding EUR 230 million to EUR 240 million in revenue. And that is basically mainly organic. And with that 9.7% to 14.5% the range is actually exactly our midterm guidance that we have maintained through years. And then we will see where we can be with M&A on top of that. So also with the margin, we will be in the same range as we have seen in the past few years, so no surprises there. But we do still see a potential to improve that. And you will probably also appreciate that once we see how our business is structured and then on EBIT, a consequence of the 2 first, also in line with what we have seen in the recent years. With that we can move on. So this is just really the helicopter view of Trifork. So we are 2 segments, the Trifork segment with 72 business units, 1,212 colleagues in 15 countries, 50 nationalities, and quite stable customer base. We will have a look at that in a little bit. We have 6 business areas, all growing well, except for cyber protection, that we will talk a little bit more about later. Then we have 23 labs. And if you recall from our 6 months reporting in '23, we took a very cautious view on our lab portfolio, and we actually reduced our assessment on the valuation of the total portfolio. But we more than caught up on that in the remaining 6 months of '23. And we actually came out with a profit on adjusted valuations. And we are very close to EUR 70 million in our own assessment based on the rules and procedures of how we value our investments. We will talk a little bit about that later. So let's move on. Then we learned through '23 that in the business climate that we have today, we have to address the concerns our customers have. So this is an overview of what we pitch to our customers. So our services and our products, how we address them. And it's a lot about reducing cost, it's a lot about being more effective, it's a lot about reducing risk, stress, and also to help with companies being compliant. And just to put a few words on the last bit, the compliance, we ourselves are hit quite hard with all kind of new regulations and compliance burden you can say. And, of course, the experiences and how we go about mitigating these compliance challenges, we would like to help our customers overcome those as well, because a listed company are normally the first company that gets impacted by all these new regulations. But we will talk a little bit more about that later as well. And so I don't have time to go in depth with all of these things, but maybe just mentioning 2, maybe 3. So first of all, as you can see in our numbers, we were actually challenged on selling and taking our cyber services and products to market. So there are probably 3 reasons for this performance in cyber: 1 being that we actually changed our business model from being a licensed model into a SaaS model, which then will affect top line; but also we were not happy with the rate of how we onboarded new customers. So we have been working very hard to optimize our organization, so it's better prepared for '24 than we performed in '23; and then finally, we believe that when all these new regulations hit the world, NIS2, DORA, CRA, we believe that the customers will then realize the risk they are taking now. And the reason why you get compliance is when the public and the authorities realize that by freewill, the enterprises and the companies are not doing enough. And you see the headlines everywhere in the world with cyberattacks, hacking, and all kind of nasty stuff, wars has become more cyberwars than on the physical battlefield. And we all need to protect ourselves way better, and we are ready to help you with that. So please, if you know anyone, point them our way. More than happy to help. Then spatial computing was a new term in '23, leading up to the launch of the Apple Vision Pro just a few weeks ago here in '24. So together with Apple and our customers, we have developed some mind-blowing applications that you can only see the potential if you actually experience them in a Vision Pro. So we are bringing some demos to the market. We are already doing business with enterprises, and we're working very closely with Apple on approaching many more enterprises. And I'm very appreciative and feel very lucky and happy about this opportunity. I believe that this new platform device is something totally different. And when and if you experience it, you will likely see the same. I think we should maybe move on here. Time is flying. So spatial computing, just to say a few more words about it. One area where we see a lot of potential, and there are many areas that we work on, but one area is actually when you train people operating advanced production lines and semiautomated and fully-automated robots in production facilities, we are talking about situations where people are operating big machines and heavy equipment, robots that are very capable, and everything in a high-risk environment. If you do something wrong, these production lines are not idiot proof. Only with very skilled and capable people you can actually keep them going. And today, many times, you have to stop the production line to actually train people on operating these machines. And so what we see a potential for with spatial computing and Vision Pro is to take that into a virtual world and build simulators in a very effective way, in a very realistic way. We all probably have heard about it from flight simulators and pilots train on simulators, and it also happens in other industries. But those are very, very expensive simulators. We can build these way less expensive and very realistic. And that's just one opportunity. But you can learn about more things we're working on over the next quarters. Let's move on. Then here you see our business cockpit. Of course, we are also working on creating cockpits for financial information and Smart Building data in our Vision Pro devices. So it's a good way to overview a lot of complex data. And since we don't sit with such a device on now, we have to dumb it down and make it really simple. And therefore, we show you this simplified overview of our business. You see the numbers of Q4, where we had the revenue growth, and you see the yearly growth compared with '22, '23 here. We already talked about these numbers, and Kristian will cover them even better. Another number here that we haven't talked about is our leverage. Our leverage is now 0.9x, mainly coming from the acquisition of minorities in our consolidated businesses like Erlang Solutions and Nine. But also on the right side, you see that we keep tracking on our views on our content. So now we are almost 63 million views on Instagram and YouTube for our content. And this gives us very important intelligence into knowing what kind of stuff we should be focusing on and what kind of technologies we should pitch to our customers. And this is why we now have Vision AI, this is why we now have spatial computing, and all these new innovations, is because we have this finger on the pulse of what's going on even before it actually hits the mainstream market. And as mentioned before, I do see that in the future, we can also capitalize on that. So hopefully, over the next quarters, we can talk more to how we're also going to monetize this traction in consumption of the views of our content. Let's move on. So here it gets really interesting, because now you will see that we have our go-to-market business model that we had for many years, Inspire-Build-Run. So you actually see that Inspire is growing, but you also see from the results that it's also expensive. but let's get back to that later. But then in Build, it's the engine that keeps bringing things from Inspire into Run. But also, it's important for me to mention that in these more uncertain times, it's important that we at Trifork, we push even harder to build innovative products because when there is, you can say, more competition but a little easier access to talent, it's important that we stand out from everyone else. And we do that by building platforms and products. Where then, when we sell it to the customers, we are quite competitive compared with our competitors, because we come with a platform and then we tailor made this platform to our customers in a way that we are unique. And so is that a good business then? Yes, it is, because if you then look at the last section in Run, you see that we have had a growth of 26.4%. You also see that we have a margin in Q4 of 31%. So indeed, this is the future for Trifork, it's to push as hard on Run as possible. And you can see that is our holy grail. And of course, it requires that we are innovative because we need to come up with new products all the time, and we need to sell those products. So you can say that Run is, in a way, between Inspire and Labs, because we will put a product in Labs. If it requires venture financing to grow fast enough, we will keep it in our business in Run. If it's something we can innovate and we can create a sustainable business with, let's say, 10 customers, and then from then on, it's a good business. But let's move on. Also, we get questions about what happened with our customers in '23 and before. And here we can actually see that we have an extremely loyal customer base, and we are very, very grateful and happy for that. And it also has an impact sometimes on profitability. You have to understand, because when our customers are in trouble, we are also in trouble. And we help our customers, reducing costs and maybe scale back some of the work we are doing and postponing things. And, of course, it hurts us, but we believe that it's a winning strategy over the long run. And you see here that we have a very loyal customer group. The top 10% of our customers, but not with one contract. Our biggest customers, they have many contracts with us, and we work for many departments and areas within the customer. So it's not like one contract per customer, but it's around 35% of our total business we have with our top 10 customers, but split over many contracts. And of course, from a risk point of view, you want to make sure that you don't grow the customer concentration too much, because then you are even more in risk of having being hit by one customer changing strategy or something. And so you see, we've actually been able, '21, '22, '23, to reduce the impact of one single customer. And as mentioned, one customer is not just one contract. So that's also a good development. And I'm happy we can present these data to you. Let's move on. Then there are some main events in Q4. We were very happy to collaborate and to merge Chapter 5 into the group. It was a quite fast acquisition. And the founder, Thomas, I forced him to say something nice, just kidding here. We actually have a very good collaboration, and he's a huge asset to the group. And his team is doing amazing work with our customers, and we see a good potential for growth together. So that was a very convenient and out of the blue opportunity that came about. And we were very fast executing Thomas and Trifork on this. Then let's move on to the next. So this thing about pushing more into Run is really important, and it's something that is also in the interest of our customers. So if you ask Kamstrup, who is building meters and they are a lot into IoT, and you can say a platform for all this new ESG agenda around the world where we have to measure our consumptions in water, electricity, et cetera, they play an important role. And together with Kamstrup, we have built a new data platform. And Kamstrup has a great interest in us selling this platform to other customers, because it's a big investment to build such a data platform that can collect data from millions of devices around the world. And so when we do something like this with a customer, then it's important that we onboard a number of customers on that platform, because then it becomes more solid, more scalable, and also cheaper for the single customer, of course. And therefore, I'm very happy to share Torben's insight here and his vision for the future of this platform. And this is not the only platform we have. We have Digital Twin platforms, we have Vision AI platforms, health platforms, et cetera, and Contain for cloud. So these new platforms we have developed over the past years is the foundation to growth, and especially in Run. So let's move on. Then we see here that FinTech, Digital Health, and Smart Building are all in a good pace for growth. And I just want to say a few words about Smart Building. So Smart Building is also everything we do with protocols and IoT. So it's not just if you realize, oh, are they building buildings? It's, of course, a great focus on the technology in this. But when we talk about buildings, then we are opening our first 100% engineered, traffic engineered building next month in Denmark in Aarhus. I hope you would like to take some time to come. The teams, the people there have done an incredible job getting us to the finish line. And I'm amazed with the innovative approach we have taken. We have hundreds of ways we have done this building and built it differently from what has been built before. But more about that another day. I hope you will come to the opening. Let's move on. We have Smart Enterprise, and we have Cloud Operation that is in a very good pace for growth. We have 14% growth. And that would be a very nice result if we had 14% revenue growth in '23 as an organic part. But one thing that disrupt the picture is what I mentioned in the beginning is that we have had negative growth in cyber protection and already mentioned 3 factors: the change of business model, we have not been good enough of onboarding new customers. But then we also see that companies are taking too much risk, and we hope the pivot point will be in '24. And companies can see that they really need to invest, and we are way behind if we compare with Norway, for instance, so there is some level up to do here. Let's move on. Then it's also important to let you know that we have a lot of good things going on at Trifork and the best things we want to double down on, I already talked about the product and the Run, but there are also challenges. So already talked about cyber protection. We have done a lot to optimize this business, and then we really need to have a look at the Inspire to make it more sustainable. We don't want to see a loss of that amount again in '24, as you saw in '23. But I also do think that '23 was an extremely exceptional year with travel and hotels going up in price. You probably all felt that when you're on vacation. Also cut in budgets for training, education, which, of course, extremely shortsighted for businesses to just say, no, we don't learn anymore. That's not a good approach on the long run. But then we also saw this startup crisis, as I call it, where venture capital pulled funding from a lot of companies and startups, leading to cut in marketing and sales budgets, which directly hit our events. So like 3 missiles into our business, and I don't see that coming in '24. We already see that trending better. Let's move on. So just a few words about our labs. We believe we have a very healthy portfolio in our labs. They are extremely valuable to the underlying business of Trifork. So these are the speedboats, these are the companies that do the hardcore innovation, bringing new products to the market. Trifork is reselling these products as well as these companies have other partners. And let me just mention one where I'm at the Board. So one new one here, Compassana, which is where we are in a joint venture with hospitals and insurance companies in Switzerland. And so we sit as the technology partner, else we also do at &Money. But there it is with banks and fintech, but here is with digital health and healthcare partners. It is challenging to be in this space. There's a lot of innovation to be done, there's a lot of products to be developed and roadmaps to be developed, but I'm very happy to participate with that work. But it's a long journey. But it started well, but now we just need to double down on our effort and the impact of the resources that are put into this. Let's move on. We see here that by coincidence, actually our portfolio value, with the way we assess it, is now EUR 69 million. And that is exactly the same number as we have realized cash gains over the past 5 years or so. So that's a little bit of coincidence. And we see that in particularly that the value increase has actually come from the profitable companies -- mainly from the profitable companies of our labs that pays dividends and have overperformed over their budgets in '23. And that's, of course, very positive. And this is something you should follow closely if you are an investor and shareholder at Trifork, because I think there are some interesting things to follow. And these are all companies with websites and financial report that. There's a lot you can actually find out yourself if you look a little bit. So let's move on. ESG, I want to cover it briefly. ESG is for sure a [ burden ] for us, but I do like that we have to calculate and report on these things because I think if you have the data, you can improve the data as well. And improving data is to use less energy, less water, et cetera. And that's important for the world. I'm also happy to see that we are 50 nationalities, and we have a reasonable level of churn. We have a healthy distribution of genders. And I think we stand at way better place than we did just 5 years ago. Let's move on. So, Kristian, the word to you, and maybe a little more about the concrete numbers.
Yes. So I'll dive a little more into details in the Trifork segment here at first. So overall here, Jorn already talked into the overall numbers, growth numbers, so I'll just go one step further. And actually also, Jorn, you covered this slide with a distribution of our top 20 customers. One thing also to mention here is that in '23 we saw that 18 of the companies that were in top 20 in '21 actually were still customers in Trifork. So that just shows that we have high customer loyalty. Going into the Trifork segment performance here on adjusted EBITDA. Then just in '22, '23 that was here, we didn't have any adjustments to special items, so there's nothing to watch there. But that we in Q4 saw an increase of 20.9% in the adjusted EBITDA, meaning that we performed better in Q4 than the [ main ] part of the year in total. That said, we ended more or less on the same margins, 16.9% compared to 17.3% in '22, and overall growth of 9.7%. The Trifork Group performance where we guide on EBIT, we also saw a higher margin in Q4 based on the activities we did in Q4, and which I will go more in details to, but was primarily driven by the Run-based business. So you saw overall in Q4, it was 21% increase. Overall for the year, we on EBIT saw a 9.5% margin. That's a little lower than '23. And I think Jorn has covered the explanations to why the margins were lower overall or that were challenged overall in '23 on the margins. But that's really related to all the business development that we've been doing. So that impacts primarily in relation to Build, which I will show you a little later, whereas Run actually was able to improve in margins. So here we go, deep dive a little more into the subsegments here. And as you see the EUR 2.7 million in minus, that's the Inspire business overall for the full year '23. And this is where we have done some organizational changes. So when you look into the churn number, that also includes some changes in the organization. So actually 2.5% of the overall churn is related to adjustments that we've been doing in the organization. Looking into the Build-based performance, 18.8% overall margin. I will deep dive a little bit more into that. But also then here seeing that the Run-based business actually comes up with a 24.3% margin whereas this was somewhat lower last year. And the other business area where we usually would have and guide on minus EUR 4 million, overall, we were actually able to reduce some of the cost in '23. Despite that we have an additional compliance overhead and other things. So Inspire performance, as you see here. We already managed in Q4 to lower the minus. And as said, we believe that this would be much more under control in '24, but we will report on that continuously. The Build performance, as you see here, then the revenue increase in Q4 compared to '22 was not the highest as you see here, 2% organic and 4% in total. That has been related to some engagements where we pitch some of the new innovation ideas that Jorn talked about in relation to Vision Pro or Vision AI, et cetera. But we really believe there is a future potential. they didn't realize as fast and turning into say larger engagement so fast. So we used more energy on actually getting to show our customers what we could do than actually getting into creating revenue on those items. So that was primarily related here to Build, but also in a way that we -- some of the newer engagements we do, we do more of this IP/product offering as part of the solutions that we bring. So bespoke solution would then be created by Trifork IP combined with additions, combined with modifications, and implementation. So that's behind a higher growth ratio in the Run-based business. Overall if you see for the year, then we saw this decline in the overall margins, which was related to the things we just talked about. The Run-based performance, down here, as Jorn also explained, we saw a very positive development, and I will deep dive into where that development came from. But overall, as you see here, 32.1% in growth for the whole year and 19.2% organic. This is also because the acquisition that we did in January of IBE, a Swiss-based company providing electronic exams to students in Switzerland, was all Run-based revenue coming in and then also impacted both on revenue and EBITDA in Run. Then on the margins, we saw in '22 a decrease in the margins, which we reported a lot of investments in new operation centers, et cetera. And that was part of the reason for the decrease in revenue. Also, we invested in cyber operation centers where we didn't see we needed to get traction on those new platforms. And this is more or less the result we see now in '23 is that we have been able to increase the margins as well in the Run-based business. And this is what we're going to focus on also in the future. Deep diving a little bit, and you find these data in the notes to the Annual Report. You see that, as we've shown before, the development quarter by quarter in relation to how the Run-based business is combined. And then now here, I've just added the graph for the years, so it's easier to see year by year how this is developing. And the good thing here is that when we're looking into hosting security, the dark gray here, and the orange parts, which is license support based on our own product development, then we see the highest increase in those numbers year over year. And that's the best you could say revenue, the most stable revenue that we can have in our business model. It's not meaning that we don't have any third-party license or any hardware sales, because that will typically, whenever we enter into new engagement where we have on-prem solutions for customers, then we would also see that part of revenue still coming in on an annual basis, but that would be more or less stable year over year. But from quarter to quarter, it can change a lot. And this is why, when you look into the quarters, you see those big differences. Then in relation to Trifork Labs. Jorn already touched upon that. And reason for the accumulated realized gains to go down was those write-offs we did at half year 2023, where we wrote off just about EUR 5 million on 3 specific investments where we didn't see them being able to finance for the future. So we impaired that value and as an effect of that, we saw the decrease. Now we've gotten also some dividend payments from some of the startups, et cetera, so it was increased a little bit more end of year here '23. And the value increase that we have had is then in the unrealized gains that you see here. And we have also done some new investments, meaning that the cash cost in active investments has been decreased in '23. Cash flow and financial position, then I would just mention here that we continue to have stable operation cash flow and a good conversion rate. So we convert roughly 80% of EBITDA into cash. And we also have more details in relation to our investment activities and financing activities, which you find in the report. What you see there is that we did buy up some minorities and that is then presented in the finance activities instead of investment activities, where they will come [ once ] we consolidate in the financial report. Overall net interest bearing debt to adjusted EBITDA is 0.9x. Just one comment to that is that we have not included value of EUR 4.3 million of treasury shares. And that value was end of year 2023. Overall, if you look into the financial report, you see that we proposed dividend of EUR 2 million. That is only 13% of net profit belonging to Trifork Holding. But this is because we take out the noncash part of the value increase we have in our investments and also to be seen in relation to that we have a buyback program of EUR 2 million as well, which then would equal to the 25% dividend that we have in our dividend policy. And then this was all for the financial things. And I will just hand over to Frederik, our IR, to make some comment here to the Capital Markets Day that we are preparing.
Yes. Thank you, Kristian. So, as you all know, our IPO took place in May '21. And at that time, we set some midterm financial targets, implying continued strong and profitable growth. And so now, 3 years later, we wanted to take the temperature, so to speak, and provide more insights into our growth journey, capabilities, and strategies, and our future ambitions, of course. So, I hope I'll see you all there. We will have presentations from several leaders from the group. And we will also invite some of our labs companies that you can talk with. And we will not reveal the entire agenda just yet, but I can reveal that there will be an opportunity to engage with some of the exciting technologies we're working with. So if you join, you can try on the Apple Vision Pro and you can see what work we're doing for enterprises. So I can promise you that it won't be boring, and I hope to see you there. It's a physical-only event with no live stream, so I really encourage you to show up physically. And you can sign up via email with me.
So with that, let's start the Q&A session. So, to ask a question, please raise your hand in the Zoom call here and I will announce your name. And then you need to make sure that you are not muted, and then you should be free to ask your questions. So let's see if anyone has their hand up. Let's start with Yiwei from SEB. Yiwei Zhou, you are permitted to talk, so please unmute yourself and ask your question.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yiwei from SEB. I have several questions. I'll do one at a time. Firstly, you mentioned that you expect a tipping point for the cyber protection business in 2024. I was wondering if that only reflects your expectation for the initiatives you have done, or it also reflects the market [ tailwind ] starting to impact during '24.
There's a bit of background noise from you. Maybe you can mute yourself while Jorn is answering.
Sure.
Yes. Could you maybe just sum up the brief part of the question, because I was a little distracted with the background noise. I'm sorry.
Sorry, it's my colleague speaking aloud. Is it better now?
Yes.
Perfect. So you mentioned that you expect a tipping point for the cyber protection business in 2024. I was wondering if that reflects your expectation for your back to growth because you have done some initiatives, or it also reflect the market tailwind will start to impact during 2024.
So the best way I can answer is that we have taken a lot of measures in how we have set up the cyber protection business. So the organization has been changed around it. So that's one thing. The platform is better, the products are better, and we have reduced some cost as well. We have increased effort into sales and management. So that's what I can say. And so whether it will work, whether it would actually take off and become a positive growth in the quarters to come, I cannot tell you today. We will have to track that and report on that as '24 unfolds. I think that's the best way I can answer the question. But for sure, we have not really anticipated a dramatic positive trend into our guidance, because we are not sure.
Can I just follow up here? And you mentioned this cybersecurity compliance for enterprises, but when do you expect this can be a market tailwind for you? Do you have any sort of timeline when this could happen?
Yes. So within the next 24 months, a lot of businesses will have to change the way they look at cyber protection for sure. And as I mentioned, our assessment is that we are way behind a country like Norway, because we do have a lot of data and insights into what Norwegian enterprises and the business of cyber is in Norway. And if we look at our Danish competitors and the Danish market, we are not even close to that. So I don't understand. It's odd. It's like Danish companies, they just trust everyone and think nothing can happen to them.
Great. I agree. My next question here is, I was wondering, can you put a bit more color on Inspire revenue in 2024? I know you don't guide on the divisional level, but I'm asking because I realized that the number of FTE in Inspire was still quite high on the full year 2023. And you said you have done some cost-saving initiatives and could you put a bit more color here?
Yes. So when you adjust an organization, there is, of course, a net result in overall cost. It can be people that goes in and out of that subsegment, but also the type and the risk profile and also how we -- so the biggest cost factors are venues, it's speakers, and it's of course, logistics, it's sales and marketing, and the research into what things we should bring on our conferences. And so it's all a mix. But what you can see is that Q4 was way better than the rest of the quarters of Inspire. And, for instance, we had a few sold out conferences. So in '23, we knew it was difficult, so we also sized our events to be smaller. The problem with being smaller is that you have some costs that are less, but you also have constant cost. So it's hard to actually make a profit if your events are too small. And therefore, for instance, just to name one, our Copenhagen conference in '24 will, knock on wood, will be significantly bigger than the one we had in '23. And I don't know if you recall, but prior to COVID, we were approaching 1,700, 1,800 people at our conferences. They were highly profitable and very successful. It's where we had Steve Wozniak visiting Copenhagen, et cetera. And I'm not sure we can get back to those numbers. The world has changed for good I think. But we will approach those numbers in a more meaningful way than what happened during COVID and in '23.
And the last question here is that the delayed customer engagement, could you also maybe elaborate bit here? And if possible, could you also indicate when exactly do you expect it would be a delayed to. You're just saying it's the first half.
Yes. So you can say that all companies need to tune the business like we are doing. And some of these adjustments can be quite abrupt. And so the way we can mitigate it is not just to bet on a delayed revenue will come, because if we don't know when it will come, it's not a big help. So therefore, the statement I made that delayed revenue is -- [ as popular saying is ], delayed revenue is no revenue. And that's the approach we take. So it comes if it comes. However, then we need to overbook our capacity because that's the only way to make sure that we have a full utilization is actually to double book. And then you can ask, okay, but then what if 2 customers are promised something and they can't have it, then yes, we have another problem. You also have that in airlines where if you overbook, then you pay a premium or you pay some compensation to the passenger that cannot board the plane. We will have to take that kind of measure. To aim for a perfect utilization is a thing of the past because there is too many disruptions. So you risk having cancellations too late. And therefore, we need to turn into a more overbooking strategy and then negotiate with customers on how to make it work when that happens. Of course, it's not what will happen all the time, but it will happen occasionally.
Okay. Thank you, Yiwei. I think we can take it offline as well if you have any further on that. Let's go to the next questions from Poul Jessen, Danske Bank.
Yes, I have a few questions. Start by following up on Yiwei's. One is there's double booking. If you look at the numbers, you grew FTEs at the Build division by 12% year over year and revenue by 4%. And at the same time, you have attrition rates now moving up. I was just wondering, the way you are planning going forward is that you look on the long-term potential or would we also see that you have to take out the capacity to match the FTE growth versus the revenue growth?
Okay. There are many things you touch here, Poul. So the more you drill down into numbers and analyze them, the more complex it gets. Because one way -- so I mentioned that now we are 50 nationalities at Trifork and 20 years ago there were 3 or something like that. So that has changed quite a lot. So we do that to balance cost structures of talent in the different parts of the world. A hamburger is not the same price in all cities of the world, everyone knows that. So that's one thing. So you cannot just compare FTE with revenue. That is not the world we live in. So that's the first, I would say, thing to be mindful about. The next thing is that the higher churn is composed of 2 kinds of churns. It's where we see that we need to adjust a business or a business unit or a product area. And it has been more unpleasant to adjust the organization. It's not easy to take the discussions where you have to say goodbye to some colleagues, and, of course, some colleagues are also leaving voluntarily, they retire and, of course, all of these other things. So in the churn number is also quite complex pack of situations. And so you could then ask another 100 questions. Okay, but let's analyze each churn, what was the reason? But overall, around the 15% churn, for whatever reason it is, I'm fairly happy with it as long as we have this situation in the world that is unstable, and where we have to move people in and out as well of different strategic areas. Then, also, when we do see this more push into Run and product and platforms, they require cost before income. And although we have had a little bit of capitalization of development cost, I can assure you that that's only the tip of the iceberg, because we have some policies on when we can capitalize. We actually need to see a solid plan, revenue, things like this before we even consider that. So as long as there is some risk in building, you can say, demos, platforms, products, then it's some cost, you can say. It is, I would not even call it investment, it's just internal cost to prepare for the future. And then, of course, we work very hard for them to be successful, but that comes with another cost, because if you have a product, you also need to have marketing and sales. So that's a double cost you see. And since we report and we do disclose a lot of things, but there are also a lot of things we don't have a tradition to disclose on. Also, because it is a little bit of change from us being more a service company, doing what the customers asked us to do into being way more that we tell the customers what we believe they should do. And that is not something you can see in the numbers, because you see something a little stable. It looks stable and it looks like it's a nice curve and things like this. But under the hood, we have done some dramatic changes in changing focus because the circumstances in the market forced us to do so.
Two follow-ups on that one, one is coming on the Run. If you year over year, [ but also ] during this year, '23 has increased EBITDA margins by nearly 20 percent points. How should we look at that into the future? Is Q4 '23 an exceptional out-of-line quarter? We should more look on the trend versus the previous quarters, or how should we look at that division going forward?
Maybe I can comment into that. So as we report in '23 and as also stated is that in '22-'23 we did do more investments in operation centers, which was not capitalized, and also in the cyber operation center, et cetera. So that was part of why the decline in 2022 was so big. So now we're more back to, you could say, normal level of the earnings in relation to the Run-based revenue. And yes, of course, our ambition is to keep it at that level and potentially to increase if we get even more traction on the different products that we include in the services.
Okay, very helpful. And then also part of the other one, you started your presentation by saying that you were realizing that you were on the same planet as others. In the previous quarters, you have been very successful of changing selling into existing customers to winning a lot of new customers to compensate for the longer decision processes. What has changed here since you can't continue being as successful on new ones?
Yes, that is a good question, Poul. My view is that the conversations we have with new customers bringing our new products into play. So, for instance, in the U.S., we cannot just say we are Trifork, we can make you a new mobile bank or something. That's not going to fly, because it's a red ocean of other tech companies and software companies and service companies, and they're doing the same. So the only way we can be successful in the U.S., and what I see we are already doing is by finding things that nobody's doing, or only a few are doing. And so what we do there is we partner up with companies like Trifork because they already have customers. And so we work together with those companies, and then they enable us to have dialogs with their customers, bringing in the products that we have that they don't have. And then it's a win-win. So their customers win, and our partner, being a similar company like Trifork, wins as well, because then they look better when they bring more new things to the table. And that takes a little while. So that shift, so in some quarters in '23, we sold what we had to our European customers. But now, with a little longer sales cycle, we now sell these platforms and new ideas into our partners, customers in the U.S. and in Switzerland. And I think that's a change. So I am hopeful that it will show in the numbers over '24-'25. That's my comment. So we changed a little bit our strategic priorities on what we sell and to whom we sell and through what partners channels we sell.
Thank you, Poul. Thank you, Jorn. I'm mindful of the time here. So we're going to do one more question from Mads Quistgaard from Carnegie.
So one question from my side. So, Kristian, I guess this is to you. There's a quite significant step up in your CapEx this year. This is not only based on the increase in R&D capitalization. So what should we expect from a CapEx perspective going forward giving also a focus on building new platforms in the Run business?
Yes. So we already stated that we did investments in the operation centers, so that's also equipping the operation centers with new equipment. So that's part of it. I would say, in the future I expect that to be lower and I see that as significantly quite higher in 2023 than what it would be in a long-term basis.
Okay, thank you very much. There seems to be no further questions, and also we have run out of time. So let's conclude the session here. Thanks everyone for your interest in Trifork. We hope to see you again soon. We are going on roadshows for the next weeks' time and hope to see you there or at any of the conferences. You can see our schedule on the Investor Relations webpage, and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any more questions. Thank you, everyone, and have a great day.