Street Calls of the Week
Itera ASA reported its Q3 2025 earnings, revealing a 7% increase in revenue to NOK 160 million, alongside a significant improvement in EBIT margin to 3.8%. The company’s year-to-date revenue saw a slight decline of 1%. According to InvestingPro analysis, Itera currently appears undervalued based on its Fair Value calculations, with a strong free cash flow yield of 10%. The stock reacted positively, with a 2.24% increase in its price, reaching NOK 8.20, reflecting investor optimism following the earnings call.
Key Takeaways
- Itera’s revenue grew by 7% in Q3 2025, driven by strong performance in cloud and AI services.
- The EBIT margin improved significantly to 3.8% from 0.1% in the previous year.
- The stock price increased by 2.24% following the earnings announcement.
- Operational improvements and a focus on AI and cloud services are key strategic priorities.
Company Performance
Itera’s Q3 2025 performance highlights a strategic pivot towards AI and cloud services, which contributed to a 29% growth in these segments for the quarter. Despite a year-to-date revenue decline of 1%, the company has managed to enhance its EBIT margin significantly. The operational cash flow over the past 12 months reached NOK 54 million, indicating strong cash generation capabilities.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue: NOK 160 million, a 7% increase from Q3 2024.
- EBIT Margin: 3.8%, up from 0.1% in Q3 2024.
- Operational Cash Flow: NOK 54 million (rolling 12 months).
- Revenue per employee increased by 7%.
Earnings vs. Forecast
Itera’s actual earnings per share and revenue figures were not directly compared to specific forecasts in the provided data. However, the positive market reaction suggests that the results were in line with or exceeded investor expectations.
Market Reaction
Following the earnings release, Itera’s stock price rose by 2.24%, reflecting positive investor sentiment. The stock’s movement aligns with a broader market trend where tech companies focusing on AI and cloud services are gaining traction. Itera’s stock is currently trading closer to its 52-week high of NOK 11.2, indicating a strong market position.
Outlook & Guidance
Itera remains optimistic about future growth, with plans to enhance its cloud and AI service offerings. The company expects gradual market recovery and aims for profitable growth, particularly in the defense sector. Itera’s forward guidance reflects continued investments in key technology areas and an emphasis on improving operational efficiency.
Executive Commentary
CEO Arne emphasized the importance of AI in the company’s strategy, stating, "AI is a really key topic of Wu Cheng." He also highlighted AI’s potential as an expansionary force for Itera’s consulting services. CFO Bent Hammer expressed confidence in the market’s support for Itera’s strategic initiatives.
Risks and Challenges
- Market Saturation: The IT services market remains relatively flat, posing challenges for growth.
- Economic Uncertainty: Macroeconomic factors could impact customer spending and project timelines.
- Competition: Itera faces competition from other established players in the cloud and AI sectors.
- Dependency on Key Customers: A significant portion of revenue comes from top customers, which could pose risks if customer dynamics change.
Q&A
No questions were asked during the earnings call, indicating either a comprehensive presentation or limited analyst engagement.
Full transcript - Itera (ITERA) Q3 2025:
Arne, CEO, Itera ASA: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the interim report for the third quarter 2025. We have the same agenda as you have seen before. I will start with the highlights of the quarter, go into the business review section, and then our CFO, Bent Hammer, will walk through the financial review and some comments about the outlook. The last one is also a question and answer session. For all the guys that are online today, you might also post a question that we look at at the end of this session, or we can have a separate meeting later. Let’s start with our highlights for the third quarter. We delivered 7% revenue growth in this quarter and also 3.8% EBIT margin. The improvements year over year were primarily driven by two topics.
One is actually higher billable utilization, and the other one is actually initial effects from the operational improvement program that we also talked about in the second quarter. The operational improvement program is about implementing a more regional structure and also empowerment of the region or units or location, what we call it, via simplifying processes and also reducing overhead and support costs. I will walk into that program later in this presentation. Also, as you remember, that Itera has also been driven by very strong growth. The foundation of the growth path of Itera has been very strong. We also see that for some of the parts of Itera, especially the cloud and application services, is showing very strong revenue growth in this quarter, 29% and also 21% year to date.
That has been very successful after a multi-year of investments into our capability in the cloud, where we are increasing the management services and also empowered by AI automation. That’s the highlights. If you look at the figures in more detail, Bent will go through all figures later. If you look at the revenue growth, it was 7% as mentioned, NOK 160 million in this quarter compared to NOK 184 million the same quarter last year. That’s a growth of 7%. If I look at the first year, year to date, I will say the growth for the year to date is actually minus 1%. The EBIT margin in this quarter was 3.8%. You know, this third quarter is the summer holiday quarter. This is always the weakest quarter in the consultancy business that we are. Year to date, the margin is 5.2%.
The operational rolling 12 months operational cash flow is NOK 54 million compared to last year, NOK 86 million. That’s also because the working capital dynamics is also changing when we also started to grow again. The number of employees was 705. That’s six more people compared to the same quarter last year. That’s the figures before. Let’s have some other topics that we discuss. Sometimes we always look at the market. You know, we get a lot of questions about the market. What we observe in terms of the market is actually the market is more or less the same. It’s not an even positive or negative signal, major shift in that. All the improvement that Itera showed in this quarter is actually driven by Itera, it’s not driven by the market itself.
What we see also in the market is actually the AI is actually rapidly emerging as the defining force in digital transformation. We have in this quarter more projects in that space that also have triggered more customers and also more revenue coming into the company. Also, if you look at the defense I talked about the last quarter, we also see the importance of protection of critical infrastructure is also becoming a high growth area for utilization, not at least driven by, of course, the war in Ukraine, but not at least also in Europe, the drone attacks that you have seen the last months. There are several segments of the market that are really showing very high interest for increasing the investment in utilization. Let’s go into the business review section. As you know, we are a Nordic-based company.
We have our roots in the Nordic, but we have a strong European presence. Itera is a vibrant team of business advisors, designers, and technologists. We are very working according to one model across the border. We are very close with the customer in each of these 14 locations, as you see on the map. As you know, we have been in Ukraine for 17 years. That has also been shaping, I will say, and redefining Itera the last two or three years. As we discussed in the previous quarter, we have two main offerings. One is the core part of Itera, what we call just digitalization services in very specific industries, as you see, financial services, energy industries, public sector, and defense and aerospace. We have the other one that has been driven by the war in Ukraine.
We call it responsible business, where we provide expert advisory services for all businesses that would like to enter, rebuild, learn from, or protect Ukraine. That’s where we have the Enter Ukraine with Wu Cheng program. I will deep dive into both of these topics, but in this presentation, I will focus most on the first one. Okay, let’s look at the sector development for the first nine months. As you see, financial services has been strong and still the largest segment at Wu Cheng is down by 5%. That’s also part of the regional structure implementation that we have because financial services is not the key topic in every location, right? When we have more concentration of the customer, maybe in the central part of Norway, like the Oslo region, we have a lot of focus on the financial services.
We see also kind of changes on the other side, the other kind of customer that brings in. Some of the others will also be in the defense sector. I think if we look at the sector mix of Wu Cheng, I think it’s quite balanced. We continue to grow in each of these four segments, as you see here. I also believe that defense and critical infrastructure will grow as we go forward. As we talked about last time, there’s a lot of discussion about AI. Of course, AI is a really key topic of Wu Cheng also. The last quarter, we talked about these agents that are extending the capacity and the competence by each developer in Wu Cheng. What we see is actually that for each developer, they will also have a lot of digital agents. We talked about the human agent ratio.
That means that the developer or the consultant at Wu Cheng will have even more power to do even more work for our customer. Somebody is actually saying that, okay, what will happen with the consultancy service? We really believe AI is an expansionary, not a deflationary. What we mean by that is actually there is even more opportunity for the consultancy company with AI, without AI. When we see some kind of efficiency in areas like coding and operations, these kind of savings do not disappear. These cost savings will be reinvested into new customer priorities because the list of digital ambitions is virtually limitless, right? What we see is actually when we bring in this kind of increased efficiency for the customer, then there will be some kind of reinvestment strategy for the customer.
Our role will actually be even more strengthened by the customer because we actually deliver more value for the customer in their full and realize the full digital potential. We really believe that this is the technology that really expands our position in the market and also kind of services. We have been through a lot of tech evolution. Every time there is some new tech coming in, we really believe that’s a real new opportunity for Itera to grow. To mention one of the examples where AI is extremely important, it is actually in the cloud and application services unit that we have invested substantial money over time. We now see that these capabilities powered by AI are showing in this quarter 29% growth, revenue growth, and 21% year to date. That’s because we are leveraging automation and AI to accelerate the delivery and the customer value.
A lot of the revenue increase is actually driven by that. We do not need to increase the capacity by manpower, but we can really use the software to support the next growth and the next revenue that is coming into the company. When the revenue is growing and the cost is actually more or less at the same level, then you see the potential both in terms of growth and also profitability. What is also important is that this is also, of course, when the customers see the potential in AI in their businesses, by having this kind of cloud and application services, where all the technology, all the infrastructure is in place, that means that the customer might even be faster and have larger scalability to use AI to develop their business and also take the position in the market.
I think the timing for these investments we know really shows it’s very good and it also supports, I would call it, the new growth engine of Itera. One of the examples is actually from our Gjensidige, just to mention that, because we have been working for Gjensidige for decades, two decades actually. We have a very strong partnership with Gjensidige, and we are also selected by one of the key partners in applying AI in their organization in terms of enablement, but also using AI in the tooling part. How could we actually analyze the application? We have been working together through all kinds of shifts in their digitization journey, from digitizing manual processes through ensuring GDPR readiness, and today is also all kinds of AI-driven opportunities.
Yen Seeder is really a very interesting customer because they are always pushing the next bar, and we are really growing together in looking into AI as a real, you know, potential value creation for Yen Seeder, but also as a part strengthening the partnership of Itera. Another customer I just want to mention in this quarter is actually in Sweden, because that has also been a growing organic setup. We restarted Sweden operation, and also in this quarter we have a very strong footprint in Sweden, like Vattenfall, which is one of the largest energy companies, a part of one of the verticals that we focus on in Itera. In this case, our consultants based in Stockholm are working in different kinds of key domains like data platform, electricity trading, customer information system, and not at least also marketing automation.
This is just to show that also a part of Itera’s organic growth that we take the investment establishing a new office, that is not that you don’t do that for zero investment, but now we are really coming into a profitability position in Sweden, and we are also showing a very strong customer mix that also makes the next step growing forward, where we can look at what we call our group-wide capabilities, like the distributed model of Itera, or as I mentioned, also cloud and application services. This is how we, as an international company, take a new position in a new office, build it from scratch. There are some investments, but in this case, we have turned into profitability, and we have a very solid, you know, organization that is really integrated into one Itera strategy.
If I just want to talk about financial services, this is also one of the PRs of Itera. We had, you know, CISRO is a part of Itera, and we have recently had a very interesting thought leadership. We made a report called Think Twice, and this is the picture from an event we had in Oslo. We had also that same event in other countries, but it was really very attractive, where most of the people from the sector are coming. We were 150 people. We need to have some kind of list of who can actually have a seat because it was overcrowded. This is really showing Itera with very deep knowledge about the industry itself. In this case, the Nordic finance that are really facing the strategic crossover.
Either they need to focus on scale or specialization, because doing both is actually a risk of losing direction, innovation, and agility. It’s actually having the inflexibility is actually a key risk going forward. That is actually what we are looking at. How could we actually challenge this? How could the challenges drive with speed and relevance? That was actually going into where we have very specific domain knowledge, and we also have all the capabilities that can help this customer through the shifts. What also includes, not at least in this sector, is actually applying AI integration as a part of their position in the market. That was what I call the core business of Itera. Just also mentioned some within the responsible business.
We have been in Ukraine for 17 years, and in August, as you see on the picture on the right side, I was spending one week together with my employees there, and also I have a lot of meetings there. As you see, we had a gathering, summer party. This was the day after one of the largest attacks at that moment. I think there were about 800 missiles and drones that were attacking Kyiv. The day after we went out for a summer party. What is actually quite interesting to see is how we really adapt to any kind of new threats. It’s amazing to be together with our Ukrainian people to understand how they really, for any kind of new threats that are coming from Russia, we adapt to and make some measures according to what is happening on the ground together with the Ukrainian people.
We keep moving on and delivering our services with high quality and a really high commitment because they believe and they see that with the support that European countries have given them, they really feel that they are fighting for the values that we also are a part of as a part of Europe. It was very interesting to be there and also understand how we adapt to any kind of new threats that we read in the newspaper. When I go into and meet the people, we are quite calm and we are quite adaptive to any kind of situation and we keep on moving. That’s not only the technology part of Itera, it’s actually that we are really also contributing to, you know, all entering Ukraine businesses that would like to do something in Ukraine.
We are really ready and supporting more and more customers and businesses that really would like to go into Ukraine. I mentioned this in the previous quarter and I just want to re-mention this because you saw the First Lady, Olena Zelinsky, was in Norway yesterday. We met her and we also talked about this Bla4 Communities. That is a donation platform where Wu Cheng has built the platform together with this organization to make sure that the international donors can actually support Ukraine and we make sure that this money is really used in small towns and rural areas affected by the war. This platform is actually making sure that all businesses that would like to support Ukraine are actually, you know, that the money is really spent on what is really needed.
I think being a part of this, building the solution, also see how we can contribute to all the tragedies that you see in Ukraine by having more donations that really make a difference in Ukraine. It’s really something that we also believe is a part of the responsibility of being a company today. When I’m talking about the defense sector, I do not want to mention any kind of specific customer because I do not want to be connected into a specific situation in Ukraine. Of course, we are working in several of these areas in Ukraine and also outside Ukraine because a lot of the defense in Norway is also looking at how we can bring the knowledge from Ukraine into the defense capability in Norway or other Nordic or European countries. We really have a very interesting position.
Yesterday, there were NOKIOS, which is one of the largest public events in Norway, and our Head of Ukraine, he was attending there together with the Norwegian defense in the final debate about how to protect Norway, the total protection of Norway, civil samfund, we call it in Norwegian. In this case, he brought the view of what was happening in Ukraine. By so we see more and more the interest from other players in the Nordics that would like to piggyback on the knowledge that we bring from Ukraine. I really see there’s also a lot of opportunity, not only in Ukraine, but also outside Ukraine because of the learning path that we can bring to Europe. I also mentioned the operational improvement program, and the reason for that is, of course, to enhance the profitability, the competitiveness, and the resilience of Wu Cheng.
It’s about having a more regional structure, empowered regional units, these 14 locations that we have. We have built the one Itera, which has been very successful in order to have one model. In any case, where you’re being engaged or hired or onboarded in Itera, it’s the same patterns, the same culture that you see. We also see that leveraging AI can also increase the internal efficiency because we are moving this also closer to the regions. We also have more flexibility when we have the support function. We have more flexibility. Some of the support function can also be closer to the customer and also be some kind of billable, and we can also utilize to have more flexible cost structure. When we have more free resources available, we can also use these resources to build new products or to do some internal process improvements.
We try to make it more a flexible structure of the overhead to make sure that we optimize the resource utilization of Itera. The goal is actually to have 14 locations that have both customers and also capacity. They’re working across the regions and make sure that we can have a more resilient performance or robustness performance because when the market changes, then we have more flexibility to balance the needs. Also, when the market returns back, then we have 14 units on both customers and also supply in order to grow more than we’ve done in the past. I think this change that we’re doing in the business model also has impact when the market is changing, going down, and also when the market is really improving. That is what I told you, that we are already seeing effects on that in this quarter.
Okay, before I hand over to Bent Hammer, I just want to talk about some numbers about what we really believe is important. If I look at the customer side here, we have always a combination of existing customers and also new customers. What we have in Itera in terms of share of new customers is actually 13% of the revenue coming from new customers that we didn’t have for 12 months past, right? For some of the other competitors, I see there’s the numbers comparable, it’s maybe 4% or 5%. This I think is quite good that we extended the customer base, and that is also a part of the region structure because we are also looking for more customers than only the customer had in the past. I think that’s the key driver for it.
We also, as you might remember, we also have the book-to-bill KPI, but we see that the book-to-bill KPI is not working, it’s not efficient as a very important KPI for Itera because the revenue stream is actually coming from much more locations, and it’s not only driven by the sales guy that reports into the CRM system, it’s also driven by the people very close. We do not manage to collect all the orders that are coming in, right? That’s why we really believe that new share of new customers is important, and the other one is actually to look at the visibility, and that we’re looking at the existing customers. It’s actually 87% of the business is coming from existing customers. If you look at the visibility, 72% of the revenue is coming from the top 30 customers.
You can also look at the figures, graphs there on the right side, you see that the top 10 customers of Itera is about 50% of the revenue. We have some very large customers, but also on the graph to the left, you see also the share of new customers, which I think is even more balanced because we need to have more customers to actually have the potential to grow forward. I think this trend has been very strong that we actually managed to onboard new customers, and we also, because some of the existing customers, you know, reducing the investment for sometimes, and then we have more flexibility to move the capacity for the other customers to really have the growth platform in place. If you look at the number of employees, as I mentioned, we have six up the last 12 months.
On the graph at the bottom, you see that these are showing rolling 12 months net FTE growth. As you see, going back to 2022, we have 112 people net growth in the last 12 months. The last maybe six, seven quarters, as you see, we had a reduction, and now we are finally coming back to some kind of growth level. That is also how we adjust the business in terms of the capacity according to the market’s demand. I think that was all from me. Bent Hammer, please go into the financial review. Thank you.
Bent Hammer, CFO, Itera ASA: Thank you very much, Arne, and good morning to you all. I’m very happy to be here to say that we have finally returned to growth in Itera ASA in this third quarter and also made some improvements to our profits. The growth has generally come from more services from our own consultants. I’ll get back to that in a short while. We have improved our utilization quite significantly in this quarter. It’s quite widespread across locations, but there are still some areas where we have some work to do in terms of getting full capacity utilization and some service lines. All in all, a very good progression in that area. We’ve seen that our gross profit is also up by 7%. Our gross margin is up by 0.6%. That’s a reflection of some less third-party consultant usage and then sort of a more favorable revenue mix in that sense.
Our profit is $7.6 million in the quarter, and that gives an EBIT margin of 3.8%, which is up from the low 0.1% we had in Q3 last year. There are some elements that hamper the profits, and one is that we have some reduction in our nearshore operations, and also the development of our market rates has been more or less flat over the past 12 months. If we look at the revenue and EBIT development, we’ve been through a couple of difficult years in the marketplace. I’m very proud to say that we have been resilient in terms of maintaining our top line, where we’re just marginally down from two years ago, I think 1% or something over those two years. We managed that by expanding our customer portfolio. As Arne was mentioning, we’ve had quite strong growth in new customers over the last several quarters.
This has, of course, taken some more acquisition costs than incumbent customers. We have had to shift a bit of resources in terms of skill sets and also geographical markets, and that has taken some transition costs and time. That has been detrimental to our profits in this period. However, going forward, I see several opportunities for expanding our profitability again. As I said, utilization has come up pretty well, but there’s still some room for improvement. I feel that we have our arms around utilization now, so the next focal point will be to increase rates again. We see that our recurring revenue is on a steady increase, and that will also provide some more revenue streams and also contribute positively to profits going forward.
We also see that we have these sort of rather new markets that we have entered into in Sweden and Rogaland, or southwest of Norway. These will also provide vehicles for further expansion. Lastly, our Enter Ukraine with Wu Cheng advisory services will also contribute, I think, in the future to more revenue and also, not the least, margin growth. If we look at the revenue mix, overall, our revenue per employee is up by 7%. That shows that we have really expanded through capacity utilization rather than adding capacity as such. The revenue from our own consultants is up by 7% to NOK 158 million, whereas the subscription services increased by 6%. Related to that, cloud consumption and so forth is included in the other revenue, which increased by 43% to NOK 11 million.
That’s an area that will bring more growth in the future, as Arne also mentioned in that area. We have reduced the third-party services to NOK 5 million, which is down 33%. This might fluctuate a bit depending on what type of engagements we’re in. In general, we try to service our customers with our own consultants. We just use third party whenever we don’t have the right skill set or the right level of capacity in that given situation. The cash flow was a bit mixed in this quarter. We had cash flow from operations of minus NOK 7 million versus plus NOK 7 million in the corresponding quarter of last year. The difference there is mostly related to the growth we experienced towards the end of the quarter. That naturally gives more outstanding customer receivables and therefore takes a toll on the cash flow.
That’s embedded in any type of high growth scenarios. There will be some lag in terms of customer payments, although customer payments are generally within 30 days after delivery. For the past 12 months, we’ve delivered NOK 54 million from operations versus NOK 86 million in the previous 12 months. In investment activities, there was a little bit more spend this quarter, NOK 3.9 million versus NOK 2.5 million of last year. This is mostly related to investments into our own IP. This increase now is related to this humanitarian platform in Ukraine that Arne was talking about. The regular investments into ordinary equipment, etc., is included in here. Yet over the last 12 months, we’ve spent the same amount as the previous 12 months. Cash flow from activities in this quarter is just related to leasing obligations, NOK 4.6 million, same as last year.
Last 12 months, NOK 51.5 million versus NOK 87 million the previous 12 months. The biggest difference there is related to dividend payments. We paid less dividends these last 12 months. We have had a very strong cash conversion over the several last quarters. Now it’s down to 74.5% from 93% in the previous 12 months. As I mentioned, it’s mostly related to the negative impact on working capital that you will have from growing the business. Depending on the growth rate going forward, we still expect a higher level of cash conversion from our EBITDA. Our business is very much a cash-generating business. This, of course, as you’ve been accustomed to, is paid back to the shareholders as quickly as possible, I would say. We delivered an ordinary dividend for 2024 in June of NOK 0.20 per share.
The board has now announced that we pay another supplementary dividend of NOK 0.10 per share, which we paid on December 9th. That will bring the total payments to NOK 0.30, which is, I forget, was it like 64% or something of earnings of last year. That’s well within the range of our dividend policy, which states that we should pay out a minimum of 50% of earnings each year. Share price was only NOK 8.58 at the end of the quarter. We’ve seen the whole market for IT services going down in the last several months or even years, a couple of years. Last year, our share price was at NOK 10.95. We’re actually down 18%, including the dividend payments in the period. We hold approximately half a million owned shares, which was valued at NOK 4.1 million at the end of the quarter.
Looking ahead, I’m very confident that Itera ASA is standing on a solid platform for future growth and improved profitability. Although the market is expected to recover gradually, we will capitalize on this trend and expect to be growing in the time to come. The business improvement program that we’re running will assist in that manner. We’re well positioned in all our markets to take on this growth. The cloud and application services is a key vehicle to this future growth. It grew by 29% in Q3 and 21% year to date. That’s a vehicle that we will continue to use as we’re growing. AI integration is becoming also a key vehicle to digital transformation. At Itera ASA, we see this as a way to boost productivity and efficiency. This will enable us to shift or add priorities to customers so they can reinvest in other areas with positive ROI.
This sort of reinvestment cycle will strengthen us as a strategic partner to our customers and help them take out the full potential in the digital transformation. The defense sector is certainly an area where we see future growth, piggybacking on our strong position in Ukraine and all the valuable experience that we gained from that. We will also see that our Enter Ukraine with Wu Cheng initiative will bring some spikes in future profits as we enter into high-value contracts in efforts to assist in their recovery in Ukraine through the digital transformation. All in all, our focus will continue to be on profitable growth and generating cash. We will use the momentum in our operational improvement program to allow our regional structure to be empowered and take out the opportunities in their marketplaces.
We will continue to streamline our organization to be even more agile and more externally focused so we can take out some more efficiencies through our organization as well. We’re looking forward to getting the help from the market in general. Thanks a lot. That’s it. I don’t know if there are any questions being posted online.
Unidentified Participant: No questions today.
Bent Hammer, CFO, Itera ASA: No questions today. Okay, the message was clear and understood, I suppose.
Arne, CEO, Itera ASA: We are ready. If you would like to have some meetings, just call either him or me. We are ready to talk more in detail if you’d like to do that. The next time we meet is on the 13th of February. I checked it.
Bent Hammer, CFO, Itera ASA: You checked it. Yeah, that’s correct.
Arne, CEO, Itera ASA: That’s okay.
Bent Hammer, CFO, Itera ASA: Just before the winter holidays in Norway.
Arne, CEO, Itera ASA: Thank you for attending this session and looking forward to seeing you soon again.
Bent Hammer, CFO, Itera ASA: Thanks a lot.
Arne, CEO, Itera ASA: Thank you. Bye-bye.
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