Thank you very much, Rasmus. Good afternoon to everybody.

Thank you for joining this webcast where Brian and I will be presenting our quarterly results for the second quarter of 2026. I will start by going through a market and operational highlights section, and then Brian will dive into the financial reporting based on our business line and geography structure.

Then Brian will also cover our outlook, and then we will take questions at the end. Let's get started.

I'll just give you 10 seconds to read through this disclaimer. All right.

Revenue in Q2 increased by 2%, and as such, it marked a change following some quarters where we have had negative organic revenue growth. We achieved this despite still having some market conditions in Denmark and Sweden that are not that favorable, we have yet to return to growth for those two countries.

This growth was really driven by a very, very strong performance in Norway, but we've also seen a good performance from the US, and we've seen a good performance from the UK as well. Our EBITDA remained flat in Q2 2026 compared to same quarter last year, and we ended up at a 4% margin.

This reflects to some extent still that we had a slower start going back all the way to Q1, which we recovered partly from in Q2, and we continue to gather velocity in our organization. Also I think it's fair to recognize that there are some other dynamics at place, competition is pretty fierce and the market is still to some extent hesitant driven by various factors.

I think we've already discussed previously some of the geopolitical turmoil, which has not really improved, but perhaps has come more of a new normal for our customers so we can work through that. Also all of the technology advances that we help deliver are affecting a change in investment strategy from our customers, they need to come up with a new strategic mindset, and that is what we are now succeeding with, I would say, as we see the return to growth.

In essence, some of the activities that we've been doing for years, the configuration, the setup work, the integration work, we're now delivering at a better pace, more efficiently. That is then being offset by new services from our side, which is more advisory-focused, which is much more related to taking out efficiency gains from the AI platforms that we're delivering.

There's a change in the service mix underneath which we're currently undergoing. Another way of looking at the improved activities of course our efficiency level, which is also known, I guess in the industry, as the billability, which increased to 65%.

A pretty good improvement compared to same quarter last year. It is a development that we expect will continue as we go into Q3 and Q4.

As mentioned, it was especially Norway, and it was especially Dynamics Norway that experienced a strong growth of 52% in the quarter. That was a very strong driver of the group's overall 2% growth.

It was driven by some of the major contract wins we talked to you about in our previous quarterly sessions. Also on a more broad geographical basis, Data and AI has contributed significantly to the growth.

That was basically more spread across several geographies, but primarily in Scandinavia is where we've seen the growth come from: Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. As we go through our outlook later on and talk about what we expect for the coming quarters, I will also say that the momentum we have in Norway driven by some major contracts, we expect even further momentum gain in Norway.

Where you may expect that we've now reached the full velocity, we're still expecting more to come. Likewise, we have improved our efficiency also for Dynamics in the UK, but we're still expecting further velocity gain from those particular units.

I would like to just show the backwards-looking geographical revenue performance organically, where you will now see Q2 as we've just talked about going back to 2%. It does basically follow five quarters of negative organic growth going back to Q1 of 2024.

Obviously, we are very pleased with the return to growth, although 2% is obviously modest. If you see the way we look at this trend line, our ambition and our planning is of course to go to a higher growth percentage in the coming quarters.

As we go through a change, as I was explaining before, in terms of services delivered and also our sort of commercial pipeline building, which we've talked about before, we remain very focused on our operational efficiency and cost discipline, and something we want to improve further on in the coming quarters. We have seen improvements, obviously as I said, reaching 65% in efficiency already.

Small reduction in full-time equivalents employed, but we will continue to stay in this mode, which consists both of being very cost-conscious and even taking to some degree smaller elements of cost out in order to reinvest that in the new service areas that we're growing, which we can also see in the Data and AI growth number that we have shown. We know we need to be very adaptive to build the organization for the future.

We can clearly see the demand for delivering customer value, and it's a mirror that's held from our customers to us on a daily basis. As we increase our effectiveness, we know that this is working.

The patience from our large customers in terms of when they expect to see a return on investment is shortening, and we're managing to deliver against that and it makes it very exciting, and it's primarily enabled by some of the technology advancements that find their way into our project delivery models. We expect much more to come from that, although I will say it's already extremely significant how much some of the specific project delivery activities have been streamlined by technology.

It is something we review on a monthly, if not weekly basis, to embed that into our own delivery, and it's also what ensures that we stay relevant to our customers. From a customer perspective, the new areas of work are related to realizing real efficiency gains for our customers.

We start often with an offset in the ERP platforms, which are the core systems of many of our customers. We obviously know this domain area the best, but we can see that we're now expanding into multiple domain areas because the way we implement the AI technology doesn't really start with an ERP process or ERP domain offset, it always starts with a complete business process.

Business processes tend to touch many different technology domains, we're working very differently there, and we have also formed new partnerships to strengthen our own expertise within automation, some is specific to M3, Infor M3. We continue to adapt the ways of working and carving out new service areas, which we find the most relevant for us and for our customers for the future.

I think with that, Brian, I'll hand over to you for financials, and then we can take questions later.

Yeah. Thank you, Søren.

Let me walk you through the three slides, revenue, contribution margin, and service revenue per country, as usual. Let's start with the revenue for Q2 split into our five business lines.

Firstly, Dynamics, in line with the group, is getting, let's say, slowly back into growth, 1% plus for the quarter. As Søren already mentioned, primarily driven by Norway, but also US is a strong contributor to this growth, whereas we still see some hesitance in Norway and Sweden.

Sweden and Denmark.

Sweden and Denmark, sorry, yes. Norway is in the past, but they are back in a heavy growth.

M3, slight decrease of 3% in the quarter. They simply had a slow quarter, and a bit lower activity in some of the smaller countries.

I think Sweden is actually getting slowly back, but still roughly -3%. Digital Commerce continue to face some headwind, I think I have said that for quarters now, but after all Sweden is actually getting slowly back into growth, which is the biggest country within this business line.

Data and AI, Søren already mentioned, plus 40%, goes without saying, it's a huge demand after a lot of new strong consultants we have hired in this business line. If we look at the contribution margin, Dynamics, which again is our biggest business line, plus 60% on top line, had a small decrease of 1% percentage point, and of course that is hitting the full group as they are as big as they are.

M3, as mentioned, it had a very slow quarter, both on top, also on bottom line. They invested quite a lot in new sales there, but it is below expectation for such a big business line, and we clearly expect some return to a fairly level the coming quarters.

Digital Commerce, which is as you remember still dropping a bit on top line, is starting to get a good grip on the bottom line and they are increasing slightly with 2 percentage points. Still below where they should be, but we do see a turn and a clearly improved control of the business and a profitability within the business.

EEM, there's some seasonal fluctuations in that, but they still running a very healthy profitability level. Briefly on our market units or countries, as Søren already mentioned, Sweden and Denmark is where we still see or face headwind.

I think there is some light at the end of the tunnel, but there's still work to do. Whereas UK is flat, but adjusted for currency impact over there, we actually for the quarter see a growth or they are back in growth, first quarter they were negative.

There we also expect them to continue that path the coming quarters. Norway, as already mentioned, 52%, that is really strong, and it's great to see that we're getting a really strong foothold in that country.

US is also growing, have been for many quarters, still relatively small, one big project that is turning, or whatever, can impact that slightly, but a good path. Now we turn to H1, slightly the same story, but I have three slides here.

Dynamics for the first half year of 2026, below 3%, but as you could see from the quarter, the turning point is expecting to be here in Q2 to a positive growth. M3 also roughly flat.

They've had some major strong wins, but there have been slight postponement in project, and that do effect them. They have a lot of quite big projects, especially in Sweden going on.

Digital Commerce, yeah, I think also down for the first half, like Q2, but more importantly, with my hat on, they are getting a really good grip on bottom line, and that is the strong priority. We also expect to see growth coming in the next few quarters.

Data and AI, 31%, and do continue the growth pattern in the coming quarter as well. Of course, with that speed, 50% might not be the standard for the coming four quarters, would be nice, but let's see, but definitely growth, double-digit growth is expected.

Contribution margin for H1, again here, Dynamics is down with 4 percentage point, and a big chunk of that is linked to a weak start for the year, Q1, as you might also remember, and in some new big wins where we just need to get in the office with the customer, get the right team on, and then slowly working our way back into a fine profit, which will also help the tools in Dynamics and the total group on the bottom line the coming quarters. M3, it's mainly linked to a quite weak Q2, as you just saw, but we expect them to improve back again the coming quarters.

Digital Commerce, slightly up, 1 percentage point, a bit more in Q2. That has been hard work because it is hard to turn the bottom line when you have a decreasing top line, but they succeeded, and we start to regain momentum there.

Data and AI, we have done some heavy investments in new, very strong consultants in Denmark and Sweden, recently UK, I saw new good guy there, and it does take a few months before they really are fully out running. We still continue to invest in that, and it's seen from the top line as well.

Mhm. Market unit, my last slide for the first half, same story.

Sweden and Denmark is looking into decreases, whereas Norway and also UK, adjusted for currency, is growth or slightly growth scenario. We do expect us to get at least a improved revenue in both Denmark and Sweden the second half.

There's a really strong pipeline out there, but it still need to get into the books and in here before we see the real numbers, but we do expect positive growth at least for the group, as for the second half, yeah. Mhm.

Then I only have the outlook left, and I don't think you mentioned it, Søren, but we maintain our outlook for the year: 0% to 5% organic growth, and 8% to 10% EBITDA margin, and that we maintain as the situation are right now. Good, that brings us to the questions.

I will hand over to you, Rasmus, for managing that.

Hi, it's Yiwei from SEB. Thank you for taking my questions and a couple questions from my side, I'll do one at a time.

Firstly, Brian, you just mentioned you see a strong pipeline here in Sweden and Denmark, and you are confident to return to growth in the regions in the second half. Could you elaborate a bit here over the pipeline?

Is that something you have won a contract you have assigned, or is it still at an early stage?

I think I'll cover that one, Brian. Thank you, Yiwei.

I think when he talked about the pipeline, it was meant slightly different, let me just go into detail with that. Obviously, second quarter, you saw strong growth from Norway.

We talked about the UK also being in growth in local currency. We do expect obviously the growth rate to increase in the third and the fourth quarter.

Where I think we misunderstood is that I expect we have even more momentum in Norway, as I was saying. Even though it's a very high growth percentage that we're presenting there, we expect continued very strong growth from Norway.

Then we expect a strong growth also to return to the UK. Especially for the UK part, it's a very healthy, I would say, mix of projects that have already been landed, but where we are mobilizing, and so we're getting up to full efficiency, but essentially where the sales process is over and an interesting pipeline.

In Norway, to get further growth, we are bidding for some major contracts, which would add even further to our momentum, even if only I'm almost going to say one of them or a few of them would come through. Back to our focus on Denmark, Sweden, we have stabilized on the level where we are now.

I think as we get into Q3 and Q4, we get more favorable quarters to compare ourselves against last year, so that's one thing. Obviously we would much rather like to see a true uptick in performance.

We've been heavily focused in Denmark, particularly in Dynamics Denmark, on building a strong pipeline with bigger representation of the very big customers, which is sort of the element missing compared to our other geographies. We have a very strong medium-sized, medium to large, but we're missing some of the biggest engagements still particularly in Denmark, which we're focused on building.

Whether that hits us in Q3 and Q4 remains to be seen. Mhm.

Second question, Yiwei.

Thank you. That was very clear.

Second question is on margin. You mentioned the price pressure, fierce competition.

I was wondering is it a broad-based across your markets, or is in selected markets? On top of that, is it possible to indicate to what extent you have to cut or lower a price in order to win larger contracts?

If you could maybe also talk about what are your initiatives to mitigate the pricing pressure?

Yeah. You want to start on that one, Brian?

Yeah. The first one, I think Yiwei is that different in our geographies on the pricing?

What we can see is that we are running a very healthy margin in our UK, US markets that we know, and the Scandinavian market is a bit more, call it, under pressure, and that is something that we are working on. That's the split.

Germany is also a healthy market. We have a quite a mix here.

I don't know if you want to add to that. That's probably roughly how it is on the bigger scale.

Then you can always dig into each business line in each market and so on.

Yeah.

The second question was, what was that? That was the—

To what extent do you have to lower your price in order to win large contracts?

Yeah. I can cover that one.

We're not lowering our prices, so that's the easiest way to answer it. We have an slight increase in our hourly rates.

Of course we also have, as you would expect with inflation, a slight increase in costs. It's more of a flat development on that.

As Brian was saying, I would say that we've had real strong focus for the last 5 years on improving our project margins or direct gross margin, if you will, from each of the projects, which has been very healthy and remains very healthy. At the moment, where we are sometimes considering entering engagements on slightly lower rates is always associated with very large engagements, typically something that spans 2 or 3 years and where we see big potential for a permanent, strategic relationship with the customer.

As we win those contracts, as you would also expect in our industry, we typically see the first 3 to 6 months the margin does not reach its full potential. We travel a lot in the beginning to introduce everybody.

We invest always to get a strong start on the project, and then we typically see our project margins improve as the whole engagement stabilizes over time. As a final one, Yiwei, on your interest in hourly rates and its impact on our profitability level, I would also say that we are expecting in the coming years that a proportion of our time and material revenue will be transferred, and we're in the process for some of that, to a more fixed-pricing akin setup.

Some of them are fairly advanced outcome-based prices, some of them are more traditional fixed price for a functionality. I think it's definitely in our interest to do so as we gain the implementation efficiency, but it's also in our customers' interest to do so.

That's another change that we're expecting, and I think that will also affect our margin positively.

Yeah. Can I just follow up on this discussion?

I recall that we had same discussion late last year, and at that time you were still very firm on keeping the time and material contracts as your business. What has changed your mind here is only half a year that has passed.

I don't think we've changed our mind, and we still have, of course, the vast majority of our business on time and material. The fundamental change that is hitting is when does time cease to be a meaningful indicator of value delivered.

With all the investments we're currently making in platforms that support the individual consultants' efforts, you could compare that consultant 1 or 1 and a half year ago, how much can they get done in 1 hour and how much can they get done now, and there's just a huge difference. It varies, but can often be 10 times more productive the way they're working.

With that, time is no longer an effective way of talking value delivered when you talk to a customer. That is really what's driving our understanding that we need to move towards this platform.

Fixed price is not a perfect vehicle, of course. It has its own set of implications, which we have built systems that can manage, and which we're comfortable managing.

It's not like we suddenly just like fixed price. When you ask what's driving the change, it's the technology, and it's the technology enablement of a skilled consultant, which makes that consultant so much more efficient with the tool set than without the tool set, and that's what drives it.

Thank you, Yiwei. Mhm.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I'll jump back into the queue.

All right, Rasmus, who's the next one?

Yeah. I also have two questions.

Can you talk a little bit about the move, the bridge from 5.1 in margins to 8.10 in your guidance? Is it volume?

Is it that you now get deeper into contracts and get more margin out of that like you mentioned, Søren? We heard from some other competitors in your business that you have a token cost, you have a price to train AI, but you don't have the real contracts to move that, going to the fixed prices, that also a part of the solution.

A little bit about the moving blocks that will move you from the 5.1 to the 8.10 guidance.

Yeah. Let me start with the moving blocks, Michael.

It's not one big bang coming down from heaven, but it's a bit what you said. Growth is, of course, a much easier environment to be in when you look at bottom line in a consultancy business than a decline.

That is one of them. The second is, as you have been talking about here, margins, and margins, especially on new contracts, bigger contracts, is something that Søren and I is also heavily invested in, and probably also going a bit deeper than we normally would do to make sure we get the right focus on that.

Then the third one is efficiency. You have seen has improved, as Søren mentioned.

It's not like we are satisfied with 65%, it's something that we continue to focus on and believe there is more in. I would say that is the three big pillars.

Then you, of course, can see over what is the in general cost level, back office cost, enabling costs, as we call them. That is something that we constantly look at, and, of course, re-evaluate is it the right level, right percentage of revenue compared to the business environment we are in.

That's the three to four pillars that we are working on. I would say it's not like they are new, but we sort of play different with them depending on the situation.

Mhm. Then maybe you take the

token cost, Søren? I'll take token cost, Brian.

Great. Let's just elaborate a little bit on your question, Michael.

I think you meant to what extent is token costs now a considerable cost factor for us when we deliver projects? Very valid question.

I think the easy way to answer it is it's not yet a significant factor going into our projects, but it's certainly something that we are seeing more and more of. As it will become a substantial input cost factor into any team delivery in Columbus and anywhere else.

With fixed price, of course, we can contain some presumptions that we have, and we can keep that in the project and not having to keep track completely unbearable token consumption. That's not the interesting thing for me about tokens and basically the variable pricing that we're seeing being introduced globally right now.

The interesting thing is that all the hyperscalers of the world's CapEx investment have yet, by far, superseded, I would say, in simple terms, the revenue that they're generating. Those ends have to meet, and introducing variable credit pricing or token pricing, whatever you call it, is the start of that, and it will increase, and it has only just begun.

For Columbus, this mainly represents a huge opportunity, which has already started. Most of our customers, as we work and implement technology for them, are very concerned about both the cost picture they're looking into long term as they commit to this technology, the contractual obligations they have with the vendors and how locked-in they are, all the governance, the security aspects of it, so that could both be intellectual property and who retains title to everything.

For us, this is part of the growth that we're seeing in Data and AI. Yes, we have increasing token costs, for sure, and this will continue.

For us, it's mainly a business opportunity because it basically means that the domains that Columbus is an expert at will be much more costly for our customers because they deliver more value to the customers, but it also has to be managed very carefully. It is a very complex thing to do, so many customers opt to have somebody like us assist them in that process.

You almost jumped my second question, because that was namely, there's also a big discussion, frontier models, high token costs versus customized models, which, I guess, must be where consultants come in, their knowledge. You don't need a Ferrari to pick up post and such stuff.

The agentic, for a day, I'm not sure I mentioned it correctly, you had there. I can see your AI is starting to really pick up there, but are you seeing real momentum here, people afraid of token costs, not needing frontier model, needing customized models, and you can make that cheaper because you know how to best utilize AI, you don't run up the token costs?

Because are you really starting to see that? Is that where you can see an AI, and will that accelerate into the second half and into 2027?

To the last part question, Michael, I'm just going to be very short and say, definitely yes. On the first part of your question, can we see that customers really are occupied with this?

Absolutely. That being said, I still think it's very embryonic.

Like for all of us, we have to recognize we're at the very early stage. You're absolutely right in that we are shooting sparrows with cannons or whatever we say in Danish or using a truck to deliver a small parcel.

This has yet fully to mature. The reason I'm just not saying fully yes to the way you're expressing is that I still think the customers are more important with saying, "How much efficiency gains can I actually drive out of this?"

Then you look at the cost side of that and saying, "Okay, let me realize those benefits, and then let me marry up the extra cost with the benefits actually." I know we say everything is happening in months now, but this is not happening in months.

This is for the next 10 years. This is a completely new world that we need to realize.

There's also a technology aspects. We could perhaps cover that in more the technology part of it, which is you're talking about the LLMs now, Michael, but there's a layer which basically referred to as MCP or ontology or where you connect the LLMs in a much more structured way with the data set of the companies, and you can set up some guardrails, you can make it more cost-efficient also that way.

I think we can come back to that part

later. My last part is, are you saying, yes, you agree that consultants could be a efficient tool to get that, because they have the knowledge about the models in general, but they also have the knowledge about the business and what is actually needed?

It would bring more consultants in if it would go in that direction?

That's what's happening right now in our Data and AI, but also even in the big ERP units, as we replace the more simple implementation work. Yeah.

Perfect. Perfect.

Thank you.

Yes. I think Brian already answered that one.

Essentially Dynamics is our biggest unit, if you look at the business line spread that Brian just presented, where it's presented by geography, it will be pretty much the same picture for Dynamics. Yeah.

That question is a little bit broad. Let me try to some underperforming indicators.

I think the one for Q2, in the Q2 results going back to what we saw in our M3 business unit was one where Brian and I are are keen to see a a pickup in performance, particularly on the contribution margin side in in Q3. An underperforming indicators.

Otherwise, please type in if if I'm missing sort of an obvious where I should be commenting on. What was the utilization by practice?

We don't publish sort of the the by-practice utilization numbers on on this quarterly, but what I can say here, which is a good indicator of how our business is doing, is a year or 2 ago, we would have some of our business units as strong outliers at each end. Some were really, even though efficiency maybe at let's say 63% or 65%, as we are today, in this quarter, it would be driven by some practices being performing very strongly at 71%, and then some perhaps drawing the group's average back.

What we're seeing now is a much more uniform performance, which we think is is beneficial for us. We're having less of a a polarization between the the performance levels.

With that, I think I've also answered then that yeah, if I had this chart, there wouldn't be as much of a difference as you as you would as we as we've seen in the past between both the business lines and and geographies. There are differences, but they're it's not like there's only one business unit performing and the rest are drawing us down.

That's a big question from Ross. It's very clear that we are currently transforming the group's skill base, and as such, there is a change from our legacy skill base.

A lot of it can largely be contained. With this question, I think it's also implied is it the same people?

I think a lot of this is about the same people learning additional or training additional capabilities. There's no doubt that what we're seeing in terms of the net hiring we've had in Data and AI, they come with a completely different skill set, many of them.

Some will also be very new to us. I don't think we can fully exclude that some of the legacy skills will become obsolete, and as a consequence, there could also be some consultant profiles which are not as relevant as they have been in the past.

Then the second part of the question is whether the hiring is made easier by weak market conditions. I think definitely the attrition levels have gone down industry-wide.

In terms of keeping employees, that has been made easier. I hope it's also because we do a good job, but I think the market conditions have contributed to that.

It's speculation, but I think it may have made it slightly easier also to attract the talent. What I see more in a unit like Data and AI or if we take some of our strongest-performing geographical Dynamics units, it's also when you have the momentum, consultants also with our competitors really know that.

It's also driven a lot by momentum of our units, because consultants want to work for the company that has the most exciting projects to work on. That's also part of it.

I would actually say close to zero, but it's definitely insignificant amounts Insignificant, oh yeah. in insignificant amount or level.

Yeah.

For me, that is actually a sign of good quality that we deliver. You could even go so far and say, "Are we too kind to our customers billing all the hours?"

Short answer is it's really on a healthy, strong level, which means very, very low. Yeah.

Yes. Obviously, this is one of the points where we're always limited in terms of what we can discuss.

What I will say is that we can see a number of the smaller acquisitions that we've made last year have benefited us, and there are some there which you may seem as sort of from a financial perspective, I would at least expect some smaller acquisitions to be made because they give us either access to specific customers or they give us a capability. It's not really a capacity acquisition.

As to anything larger, there's nothing to comment on at present time.

Yeah. As we've already stated in the report, we've seen some pretty fierce competition from time to time.

We find that we have a high win rate when we stick to the program. We know which customers we are the best at, we stay within those four industry verticals we told you about before.

For the largest part, we're also obviously trying out some new things, but for the vast majority of new contracts, they are within those four. We don't go too small because we know that if they're not truly internationally present, they simply don't appreciate the way we've built our delivery mechanisms, and they don't get the full benefit from it, and they do pay a premium for it, it doesn't work.

That's I find what we use to counter the market conditions. Another thing we've seen in competitors is perhaps that I would say that our field of competitors has very wide-spread performance.

Where before in a market we would typically duke it out between three and four of us, now it's usually the same one, and then some have disappeared. It has actually limited, I find, to some extent the number of qualified competitors.

Some has simply fallen by the wayside. That's another way of looking at it.

Competition is like that. When we stick to our segments, none of the small competitors can compete because we're competing for global implementation across multiple countries.

We're up with the other big ones, typically a lot of them are bigger than we are. Some of them are obviously very large companies, but have perhapsly slightly less focus on the segment or something, we don't feel them as much as we have, I would say, or we have done in the past.

Yeah.

Thanks for listening in.

Thank you very much for listening in, and we hope to see you again as we present the Q3 numbers. That must be mid-November.

Yeah.

I don't have a specific date with me right now. We look forward to talking to you again, and as always, you are very welcome to reach out to either me or Brian for further discussions.