Atea Aktie

Welcome to all of you around the world. Welcome to sunny Oslo. And welcome to the Q1 2026 numbers for Atea. And wow, what a quarter. This was not easy. But again, Atea and all its employees showed up and made a big difference. So let's look at the main numbers. Raw sales grew by 11.5%, with a minimum of that coming from currency, giving us a revenue or gross sales of NOK 14.8 billion. Net revenue grew by 12.9% and EBIT came in at NOK 476 million, up from NOK 281 million the year before. Net profit at NOK 389 million, up from NOK 162 million. So again, the best quarter in the history of the company.

But as always, I'll leave it to Robert to take all the good news.

Thank you, tier Atea reported high profit growth in the first quarter, driven by strong sales of hardware and software. Gross sales in Q1 were NOK 14.8 billion, up 11.5% from last year. After adjusting for changes in currency rates, organic growth in constant currency was 10.7%. Hardware sales increased by 18.9% with very high shipments of PCs and data center equipment. Demand for hardware continues to be healthy. And in addition, we've seen purchase orders in expectation of supply constraints later in the year.

Some of these orders were delivered and recognized in Q1 but most of the order volume is still in the backlog and will be delivered in future quarters. Software and cloud sales increased by 9.1% with very strong growth in sales of cloud solutions. Services sales were in line with last year. Net revenue, according to IFRS, was NOK 9.7 billion, up 12.9% from last year. Gross profit increased by 6.0% to NOK 2.8 billion. Gross margin was lower than last year due to a lower proportion of services in the revenue mix. Operating expenses grew by 4.9% to NOK 2.5 billion.

The average number of full-time employees was down sequentially from last quarter, but was 2.4% higher than last year. EBIT was NOK 476 million compared with NOK 281 million last year. In February, Atea recognized a gain of NOK 152 million from the sale of shares in its epoxide subsidiary. Excluding this gain, EBIT was NOK 324 million, up 15.4% from last year. Net profit after tax was NOK 389 million. This compares with NOK 162 million last year.

We'll now take a closer look at sales and profit development across the countries in which we operate. Atea's strong sales performance and higher profits were spread across all countries in the first quarter of 2026. In Norway, gross sales increased by 17.8% to NOK 3.7 billion based on higher demand across all lines of business. EBIT grew by 24.7% in Norwegian krona.

In Sweden, gross sales grew by 8.9% to SEK 6.0 billion, with a rapid increase in hardware sales. EBIT was SEK 187 million, up 2.8% from last year. In Denmark, gross sales increased by 6.8% to DKK 2.0 billion driven by strong demand for hardware. EBIT was DKK 7 million compared with a breakeven EBIT last year.

In Finland, gross sales grew by 14.1% to EUR 110 million based on very high sales of software and cloud solutions. EBIT increased by 3.2% to EUR 2.1 million. And in the Baltics, gross sales increased by 24.7% to EUR 56 million. Sales of software more than doubled due to large public sector projects in Lithuania and Estonia. EBIT increased by 14.7% to EUR 1.7 million. Atea Group Functions, which includes shared services and group costs, was collectively a net operating expense of NOK 18 million compared with an expense of NOK 23 million last year. The difference was primarily due to higher profits in the tail Logistics.

Now we're on our cash flow and balance sheet. Atea's cash flow from operations was an outflow of NOK 447 million in the first quarter of 2026. This compares with an outflow of DKK 881 million last year. As you can see on this chart, Atea's cash outflow in Q1 2026 was in line with normal seasonal trends. Atea's cash flow has a seasonal peak in the fourth quarter of the year when shipments are highest and working capital balances decrease.

In the first quarter, cash flow is typically negative as working capital balances return to higher levels. As we look ahead, Atea's cash flow will be temporarily affected by hardware supply constraints. Due to longer lead times from vendors Atea plans to preorder inventory in order to secure hardware availability for its customer orders. Atea will then reduce its inventory balance once production lead times normalize. This will result in a significant cash outflow in Q2 2026, but then higher cash inflow in later quarters when inventory levels are reduced.

Now on to our balance sheet. Atea had a net cash balance of NOK 187 million at the end of Q1 2026 as defined by Atea's loan covenants. This corresponds to a net debt-EBITDA ratio of negative 0.1%. Atea's net debt balance at the end of Q1 2026 was NOK 6.1 billion less than the maximum allowed by loan covenants. Atea has a strong balance sheet and significant additional debt capacity before its loan covenants would be reached. That concludes the presentation of the first quarter financial results.

I'll now hand the podium back over to Steinar to discuss the overall industry environment and the outlook for Atea's business for the remainder of the year.

Thank you, Robert. I could see that you like doing that one. Let me talk to you a little bit about how we see the market and what drives growth quarter after quarter. The last 15 to 18 months, when we have talked to you either in this format or one-to-one conversations on road shows, we have talked about these 4 drivers for growth. Of course, there are more, but these have been steady growth drivers for quarter after quarter. The defense sector has actually surprised us on the upper side of the growth. I think we all can agree that driver is with us for a long time. So will, for many of the same reasons the IT security area.

And I'll get back to that in a second. But I want you to understand, when we talk about IT security, we're not talking about a best-of-breed point solution. We're talking about a holistic strategic view on how to secure your digital world. The AI wave hit us about 3 years ago but has been actually with the industry for much, much longer. And I can promise you it will change most of the things around you. It just takes a little longer than the most optimistic people are thinking.

And then, of course, we talked a lot about an operating system, which may seem a little odd to many of you. But Windows 10 has been the most used operating system in the history of our world and it goes end of life. And so a lot of our customers need to upgrade some of their infrastructure, specifically their PCs to take advantage of Windows 11.

At the beginning of this year, about 30% of the Nordic customers according to Microsoft had still not upgraded. Some of them have during Q1 and the first month of this quarter, but there are still customers who have hesitated and I can say the ones that have to upgrade their PCs now have lost big time. So looking at this going forward, A lot of people are saying, can this growth keep going on? You're just an infrastructure vendor.

Well, guys, infrastructure matters and it matters more now than maybe ever in the history of the digital world. And on this slide, you see 6 different areas that I'll discuss briefly with you and that we will talk more about in the quarters to come. First, I think it's estimated how much of the tasks and processes around this that are still manually driven or not at least digitalized in its full capacity. This is something that has been with us for decades and will be with us for decades to come.

In some parts of our society in the Nordics and Baltics, we are more advanced than others. And others maybe not so much. This will keep on driving for a long time. The geopolitical situation and AI, in general, changes the game on many of these 6 areas, specifically the 5 last ones. And it's the truth. We just do not have enough compute in the world to do everything digitally that we would like to do. And that is no more true than on AI. AI to many is a blurry thing. To us, it becomes sharper and sharper every week. So let me just give you a little glimpse of what you should be thinking about when you think about.

First of all, for Atea, it's only an upside. I hear some people say that, well, it might take away a lot of workers, you're going to sell less infrastructure or your coders will be replaced by AI or some of your consultancy. And I get all that. But you have to remember where in the ecosystem we are playing. First of all, I do not see that the Nordic countries will replace its public servants with AI anytime soon. It will be a hybrid situation.

Secondly, we really do not quote. And thirdly, our infrastructure consultants will probably not be replaced by AI even though there are some consultancy in the world that will. What we have seen over the last many or several years -- sorry, several years is that these LLM companies or companies that make large language models are investing heavily more than we have seen in any industry ever in building data centers and capacity. They are training their models. This is, of course, not something that an enterprise customer will do. We don't have to because the people that produce the malls will train them for us.

And then comes the time where enterprises will use those trained models to build vertical or company-specific solutions. Inferencing is the name of using those models. That will create a demand for infrastructure, but not even close to what it takes to trend them. Look at it to compare a car company that manufactures the cars and then you buy them to influence them or use them and own them. It's 2 very different worlds. We really haven't seen enterprise AI take off yet. And that enterprise AI should not be confused with using certain chatbots.

AI is with us. It's going to stay with us, and it's going to drive infrastructure. I mentioned the geopolitical situation. And in Europe, sovereign data center, sovereign IT is going to increase in demand and in taking space in the discussion. To us, it means more infrastructure locally. We will work with both the vendors and the customers and our own data centers that really are sovereign for the companies and customers in our region.

Workplace productivity or efficiency of your everyday work will never disappear. And IT and especially AI agents, and the mobility around your workspace will keep on being a driver for work, and so will IT security. I touched on it earlier. But the specific situation with the LLMs and AI in general becoming more or having a greater capacity will actually both be a benefit and a threat to our digital world. The time where companies can buy single solutions to stop a single problem is over. This has become a very different game if you want to be protected.

And I must say, you have to want to be protected. So IT security will grow faster than any of the other areas. And then I grew up in the industry with leaders saying that the network is the computer. That's how I, as an engineer, was trained in this industry. Well, we have kind of taken the network for granted for a long time. But over the next many years, we'll see massive investments to refresh and to secure and to make the network back to becoming the backbone of your infrastructure.

So that is how we see it. And IDC, by the way, have upgraded their growth for the next 4 to 5 years to cross into double digit. We think they are right. We think that the next many quarters will be strong. But as we said on the previous presentation, and we will work on for the next many quarters, the price increases on memory, specifically and what will we think will lead into some kind of delay on delivery will be with us. We have proven to be pretty good at those kind of challenges and complexity in many years and specifically just the last quarter. We will work with our own organization, as Robert stated with our inventory, which really is work or parts in work or products at work and with, of course, our partners, the vendors to secure delivery to our customers to keep on growing.

The next quarter looks pretty good. With that, we conclude the presentation and go to Q&A.

Thank you Stan and Robert. Let's start with our first question here. How much of the Q1 hardware revenue is actually early orders? .

Yes. So we've been very specific in the wording in our material for this presentation. As we say there is quite a bit of early orders in the booking, but not as much in the actual revenue. As those orders came in late in the quarter, it's difficult for us to know exactly how much of the actual revenue, so the bookings that have been delivered that would not have been ordered if the situation wasn't the way it was. But the way we see it, most of it was already in our pipeline when we started talking to the customers. So that's why we're saying the actual revenue, not that much, but in our backlog quite a lot .

Thank you. Product margins are holding up well in Q1. Should we be expecting this to continue? .

Yes. So let me split the answer in hardware and software margin because they have a little bit of a different dynamic. So hardware margins are where you should see pressure if it came from the memory issue and the price increases thereof. We don't see that as much. And we believe that is party or 2 reasons for that. One is that there isn't that much revenue from late price increases in there. There are some but not too much. And secondly, we've been pretty good at managing the issue. On the software side, we have actually normalize the changes that happened a year ago with the Microsoft incentive programs. And outside that, we don't see any other things than normal seasonalities on the software margin.

So the simple question is that we are working hard to not have this situation influence on our margins. So far, it looks good. That is the uncertainty over time but we believe we will be able to handle it.

Thank you. And final question here. How is the carve-out from Apixite going? And are you still positive on utilizing Apixite as a Tier 2 for your Microsoft business going forward?

Yes, pretty specific question there. So Apex side is the company we sold 52 share -- 52% of the share in Q1 on and gave us NOK 52 million benefit from One of the reason why we did that was because we thought that the company that develops software is better without having a. Is the full owner. But 1 of the other reasons is that with not controlling the company, we can use the company as a distributor to Atea for Microsoft and other software vendors. It's not really fully carve out because it was already separated in its own company.

But the process have gone really well and we are fully in line with our plan to utilize Apex it as a Tier 2 or distributor in second half of this year. So we will come back to this after the Q3 presentation and give you a little bit more insight to what's going on.

So that concludes the Q&A and the full presentation of Atea's Q1 numbers. We Hope you liked it.

Welcome to the Q4 and 2025 numbers from the Atea Group. Welcome to icy cold Oslo, a beautiful winter day. It has been a challenging year, but a very rewarding year for everybody in the ecosystem of Atea.

It's been a year of good results and we'll soon take you through all of them. But it's also been a year where we've been doing massive investments in the future of Atea and we'll touch on some of those too.

Diving into Q4 first, we had a gross sales of NOK 17.8 billion, up almost 8%. EBIT came in at NOK 488 million, up almost 24%. And net profit impressively up almost 36%. All in all, it gave us an operating cash flow of NOK 2 billion.

But as always, I'll leave it to Robert to give you all the good news.

Thank you, Steinar.

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growth in the fourth quarter of 2025, driven by higher sales, increased gross margins and relatively low growth in operating expenses.

Gross sales in Q4 were NOK 17.8 billion, up 7.8% from last year. After adjusting for changes in currency rates, organic growth in constant currency was 4.7%. Hardware sales increased by 5.4%, driven by higher sales in mobile devices.

Software and Cloud sales grew by 11% with strong growth in sales of cloud solutions. Services in last year based on higher demand for consulting and product support agreements.

Net revenue according to IFRS was NOK 11.3 billion, up 6.1% from last year. Gross profit increased by 9.0% to NOK 3.1 billion. Gross margin was higher than last year due to an improved hardware margin and a higher proportion of software in the revenue mix.

Operating expenses, excluding restructuring costs, grew by 6.6% to NOK 2.6 billion. Adjusted for currency movements, these costs grew by approximately 3.5% from last year.

EBIT before restructuring costs increased by 23.7% to NOK 488 million. Restructuring costs were NOK 8 million in Q4 2025 as Atea Denmark reduced staff in its Managed Services business.

In Q4 last year, Atea incurred restructuring costs of NOK 39 million from a cost reduction initiative in Sweden. After restructuring costs, EBIT grew by 35.1% to NOK 480 million. And net profit after tax increased by 35.7% to NOK 333 million increased by 35.7% to

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revenue and profit growth across the countries in which we operate.

Atea's strong sales and profit performance was spread across nearly all countries in the fourth quarter of 2025. In Norway, gross sales increased by 8.5% to NOK 4.6 billion, with very strong growth in sales of software and services. EBIT grew by 12.4% to NOK 156 million.

In Sweden, gross sales grew by 5.2% to SEK 6.9 billion, driven by strong demand for hardware. With higher revenue and flat operating expenses, EBIT before restructuring costs grew by 31.4% to SEK 207 million.

In Denmark, gross sales fell by 4.0% to DKK 2.4 billion due to lower sales of hardware compared with last year. Last year, Atea had a very high volume of initial hardware orders on new public sector frame agreements. Despite lower hardware sales, EBIT before restructuring costs grew by 52.6% to DKK 41 million with a higher margin revenue mix and flat operating expenses.

In Finland, gross sales grew by 11.0% to EUR 112.7 million as demand for products showed a strong recovery from last year. EBIT was EUR 2.5 million, a decline from last year due to an increase in staff and temporary factors, including start-up costs related to new contracts.

In the Baltics, gross sales increased by 55.8% to EUR 76.8 million, driven by exceptionally strong growth in product deliveries to the public sector. EBIT increased by 16.7% to EUR 4.0 million.

Atea Group Functions, which includes shared services and group costs, was a net operating expense of NOK 32 million compared with an expense of NOK 22 million last year. The difference was due to higher spending on corporate development activities.

Now a word on our cash flow and balance sheet. In Q4 2025, Atea had very strong cash flow from operations of NOK 2.0 billion. As you can see from this chart, Atea's cash flow from operations is highly seasonal with strong cash inflows in the fourth quarter as Atea's sales and collections from the public sector increase and its working capital balances fall.

Cash flow from operations was positively impacted by seasonal fluctuations in working capital in Q4 2025, although this impact was less pronounced than in Q4 last year. Based on the strong cash flow from operations, Atea had a positive net cash balance of NOK 1.0 billion at year-end as defined by Atea's loan covenants. This corresponds to a net debt-EBITDA ratio of negative 0.5.

Atea's net debt balance at the end of Q4 2025 was NOK 6.4 billion, less than the maximum allowed by its loan covenants. Atea has a strong balance sheet and significant additional debt capacity before its loan covenants would be reached.

That concludes the presentation of the fourth quarter results. I'll now hand the podium back over to Steinar to review full year results and discuss the outlook for Atea's business.

Thank you, Robert. As always, you have all the fun. If we try to summarize 2025, revenue came in at over NOK 60 billion. It's an impressive number, but it's even more impressive that growth in Norwegian kroners in 2025 came in at a little bit more than NOK 6.5 billion with the same number of people. EBIT at NOK 1.385 billion, up 15.4%. All in all, a very good year.

But this is not new. Atea has been stable both on revenue growth and EBIT growth for many years. And on this chart, you see the last 6 years. It is almost as linear as analysts' spreadsheets with gross sales growth of 9% on average and EBIT on 10% on average. In the next couple of years, we have to scale even better on this revenue.

But let me bring you in to some of the things that have happened in Atea in 2025 and that will have effect on our results in the coming years. First, of course, we are extremely happy with how we have developed in the defense sector. It's not only the national defense organizations, it's also companies delivering to defense.

But during the last couple of years, we've also strengthening our activity towards NATO all over the world. And so when we signed a new agreement in the fall of 2025 with NATO and you see Robert having the honor here on the picture in Brussels, we were extremely happy but also proud.

It's a contract that will change many of the operations that we do internationally and it will strengthen us and prepare us to do similar contracts with other companies that have similar needs.

But as you can see on the right side, it's not the only large contract we signed in 2025 that will have impact in the next couple or even more years.

We have strengthened our relationship with SKI in Denmark, but we also signed another equipment deal with NATO which is as a service which you see on the left side and so it's not one contract. It's many.

And we have contracts in Norway and in the Baltics. But we are particularly proud that we will do outsourcing together with the Health regions in Finland. This is by the way one of the contracts which have led us to take on more people in Finland even though short term that might not have looked well when revenue hasn't been growing. That will change in 2026. All in all, whole bunch of new contracts that will help us going into the new year.

In 2025 we also worked on the future of a daughter company called AppXite. And just before Christmas we signed a deal with Aries, a U.K.-based software company, that they will take over 51% of the company. In Q1 2026, we will recognize an EBIT of approximately NOK 150 million as a result of this transaction.

So I want to say thank you to everybody in AppXite. I know that you're probably looking at this for working together for the last many years and also for working with you into the future though in a different capacity.

The deal we have done with Aries and how we developed AppXite would also be something we'll talk to you about in the coming years as this will change some of the relationship we -- or possibilities that we have with Microsoft with their new incentive programs where AppXite has become a distributor that Atea and other customers of AppXite can use going forward and to maximize Microsoft's programs.

Many other things have happened more internally in Atea. I've already mentioned the growth. It's actually pretty impressive when you see that this growth is probably higher than the revenue of the biggest competitors that we have in the region.

But we also worked to strengthen Denmark and I'm very happy to welcome Nicolai Moresco as new Country Manager in Denmark starting later in this quarter. We also hired Hans Vigstad to take over and run our Managed Services division across all 7 countries.

We have strengthened and kind of moved the focal point for Atea Global Services, which we have had in Riga for a long time and from a nearshoring to more a center of excellence. And we have moved into new and fresh offices, so our 600 people have a better environment to do that center of excellence job.

Finland has been lagging a little bit on results, but we have kept on building the capacity and we have high hope for the line of opportunities in 2026.

We've built, as I've alluded to, a special sales team across the countries to work with defense and NATO specifically as it has some special demands on security clearance and also the products that we deliver.

It was a big day late in 2025 when Atea Logistics, our central supply chain organization, passed SEK 10 billion in revenue. We opened the new center late 2019. So that is some of accomplishment. At the same time, they changed their ERP system and we're now fully operating on an SAP solution that we later will also roll out in the different countries.

And we are very happy that in 2025 in total, 16% of our customers have chosen Atea to be their main cybersecurity partner, up from 10% only 12 months ago.

So a productive and very constructive and good 2025 is behind us. So what does the future look like? Well, there are challenges also that we have to face and solve in 2026.

But we expect to keep on growing. We expect to keep on consolidating the market and the vendors are helping us. They want to have fewer partners in Europe and they want the partners have to be stronger and they're pushing us to develop services and be a complete shop for the customers. This gives us a possibility to keep on growing the EBIT.

But there are also some challenges when it comes to the supply chain situation. And many of you are worried when you read that there is a shortage of memory, CPUs or other components. And we do recognize that this is a problem. Right now, the problem for us is not as much supply as it is unprecedented price increases.

We have seen price increases on certain offers of more than 100%. Now this is not new. It's happened before. We're only 2 or 3 years away from last time. This is a little bigger though. And you know it comes from all the investments in AI forms, AI PCs, but also the fact that what we do is now a part of everything, cars, refrigerators, TVs and other equipment.

It will be challenging. We feel right now we're kind of in the middle of a storm that we are dealing with hour by hour and day by day. But this will calm down.

The situation will work itself out. And we think that the price increases will keep on -- or the prices will keep on being high for the rest of this year and maybe even long into the future. In many ways, you can say that we get help from price increases in getting revenue increase.

We are doing a lot of activities internally and we have the flexibility with the breadth that we have in Atea to face these kind of problems. And if you look into our history, you can see we have dealt pretty well with them before.

As you know, you don't have to be perfect as long as you're better than competition and we are certainly equipped to be better than competition in situations like this.

We are using our balance sheet to have more inventory over a period. But we also see that this will calm down. The unpredictable will become predictable and the whole industry will deal with it. As said, we have done it before, so we're confident we can do it again.

On basis of everything Robert and I have told you today, the Board will propose for the general assembly that we will increase the dividend to NOK 7.5. And it will be as normal, a repayment of paid-in capital and in 2 installments, one in May and one in November. Solid results from the company gives shareholders a solid return in the way of dividend.

So that concludes the presentation for the Q4 and 2025 results and we'll now go to Q&A.

Thank you, Steinar and Robert. We have several questions here.

First question, I've understood there's been many changes to the vendor partner programs. How do you see this?

Absolutely it has been. And I'll [Technical Difficulty] a feel of what we see. But I want to start by saying that this is not new. This is actually very predictable.

Partner programs are programs because the partners want to challenge us and to give us some kind of direction in where they want us to go. We actually has

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to manage the beast. These are huge companies that has an opinion on how they pay us and what they want us to do to get paid.

During 2025, we've particularly faced 3 major changes that also have been talked about in press and in the market. First of all, of course, Microsoft changed their incentive program 1st of January in 2025, so a little bit more than a year ago.

It was something that was talked about in advance. And we as everybody else was challenged. When we now look back, we feel right now that we're back on even and that means that our job in 2026 is to take advantage of the upside in the changes of the program.

Another well talked about change was Broadcom buying VMware a couple of years ago and changing their partner programs. It's absolutely been challenging, more maybe for our customers than for us, with the impressive, impressive price increases that VMware and Broadcom has brought to the market.

On the [Technical Difficulty] so they let all their services people in Europe go. This creates an opportunity for us. And it's a typical way of seeing this when the partner program changes.

It will create some noise and maybe a little bit of chaos in the ecosystem at once. But over time, it actually is there for a reason and it gives the full service houses a bigger opportunity and it creates a consolidation of the channel.

The last one I want to just mention is Cisco. I personally and we as a company have worked with Cisco for many decades. This is not the first time Cisco changes their program. This time it's called the 360 Program.

And it started 1st of February this year. And so we are very fresh to it. But of course, Atea is highly certified in the new program when we start in all 7 countries. So we feel pretty confident that over time, again, we'll be able to take advantage of all the changes. So I think I'll leave it with that.

Several questions here on Finland is lagging. Can you explain, please?

Yes. And I have to say and you are who runs Finland for us knows this, we are a little disappointed at the numbers in 2025. But it's also a part of life. We can't fight gravity.

The economy in Finland has not been the strongest. On the contrary it's probably been one of the weakest in Europe. We think long term. We also won, as I said earlier in the presentation some large outsourcing contracts where we had to take on people in 2025 before revenue starts in 2026.

So in short, economy in Finland has been suffering. It looks better in 2026. We have kept on building our capacity and winning contracts that will give us an upside going into 2026. We are confident that Finland will start delivering again.

You note that memory-driven supply crunch. Can you help us understand how many months out in 2026 you have visibility or guaranteed deliveries? And furthermore, at which point does it start to get more murky?

Yes. Looking into the future have never been an exact science. But right now, it's not as if production or supply has gone down. Supply is actually increasing as we're speaking.

It's just that it isn't increasing as much as demand. So in another way, you could say that if there were no limit to how much memory and CPUs that could be produced, there is really no limit to how much the IT market could grow right now.

And so we don't see lack of demand as being the most difficult thing right now. We're getting most of what we're ordering on more or less normal supply time. It is the price increases that hurts us because it creates unpredictability.

And in a machine like Atea and for that sake, the whole IT industry, unpredictability creates opportunities, but also problems. So demand is less of a problem today than price increases. Price increases on the other side is also helping us and also giving us opportunities in the partner programs as they are massively focused on growth.

Continuation or similar question. As we enter into this uncertain territory, how bad can it get for the lower-end devices? Are they more at risk? And for higher-end devices, would you -- we have a priority and do you see better supply for the higher-end devices?

Again, so far, we don't see actually big supply constraints. It's not the supply side. What we see though is with price increases on a normal PC of more than 20%, that there will be a shift towards using those components in higher-end products.

So we do -- we predict that we will see the shortage on low-end products when and if the shortage comes.

What kind of EBIT growth would you have expected in 2026 if we assume memory and supply wasn't an issue?

So we have said several times during 2025 that we predict a growth in the high end of single digits in 2025. Well, we came in a little bit higher than that at 11%, 12%.

We have also said that we, in 2026, see a demand which will give us a mid-single digit growth, maybe 5% to 7% and that is what we have predicted. That is also still what we think, but we think we'll do it with a little lower unit delivery, but with a higher average price. So we're still in mid-single digit growth on revenue for 2026.

I have a question on hardware pricing. Any risk that you can't push forward the hardware price hikes? Also, is there any chance you might hike prices on the inventory we have to increase margin?

Yes. So that's a pretty detailed question. We don't have -- so starting with inventory. We don't normally have inventory the way that question dilutes to.

Our inventory is actually products in work. So they've been ordered and we are doing something to it or it's product that customers have ordered and store in our warehouse. It's very little what we call open stock.

So the fact that we could have had inventory where we paid less and now the price increases are giving that a higher value is unfortunately not -- or maybe fortunately, not a part of our game.

Now I said in the presentation that we will use our balance sheet to do some of that going forward. But we are not gambling with currency. We're not gambling with inventory. That's not what we do. What we do is concentrating on the needs of the customers. And so our inventory going forward will be built together with the largest customers and mostly paid for by those customers.

Atea is aiming for revenue growth and EBIT expansion in both Q1 and 2026. Can you elaborate on how we should think about the ingredients of EBIT margin? And would it be fair to assume that Atea is aiming for higher margins year-over-year for the group?

We are and have been aiming at increasing the margins and scaling on cost for years. That is what we challenge the organization for every day.

We also work hard with the vendors so that they pay us fairly for that higher value that we invest to our customers. And we're very happy to see the changes that we discussed in partner program are actually rewarding that higher value that we have for customers. [Technical Difficulty] we're looking at higher margin.

But when it comes to the product and services offerings and how that will change or develop over 2026, I think we'll get back to more details when we can actually talk about it as numbers. But we expect more high-end products, more AI PCs as more customers are still demanding or working on their Windows 11 strategy.

We see defense buying higher-end products and they will become a larger part of our revenue. And so we absolutely see that there will be a movement.

This also leads to a little bit of a pressure on the services business, which is very connected to the number of units that we sell. But that's why Managed Services is so important going into the future and especially in Europe with the sovereign discussion that are just increasing in scale.

Can you give some more color on cost development in Denmark in 2026? Do you expect to front-load any costs due to any structural changes in Denmark?

Yes. Again, a pretty detailed question. We have done some investments in the services business in Denmark that will lead to a little bit of a higher cost into Q1 and the coming quarters.

Outside that, we don't see any real cost increase as we're trying to balance where we have people and where we increase cost. But I also want to say when you do a transformation or a turnaround as we are working on in Denmark, nothing is linear.

And the quarters with the lowest revenue will be where we have the lowest improvement in the short term because the cost is a little bit higher than what it was a year ago. Specifically, this is on consultancy in Denmark, where we have recruited approximately 40 to 45 consultants so far.

Several questions here. How has Q1 been so far in 2026?

I think I'll pass on that and leave you to listen to us in April.

Another question here on pricing. How should we think about price increases from the hardware providers and impact on gross margins?

All changes give us opportunity to work on every value that we create, also gross margin on hardware. Some of it short term will be difficult to react to and some of it actually give us larger opportunity.

The way we have seen this historically, it's always difficult to see into the future, but the way we have seen this historically is that there isn't major changes. So we're not predicting a positive margin development or gross profit development and we're not predicting any major impact on the negative side.

But internally, in the machine of Atea, there will be a lot of things and that's why we're talking about the price increases as demanding to the organization as we have thousands and thousands of orders every week that we handle.

And our final question. How is the competitive situation? Any changes that you see?

With everything that's going on in the world, competition is not my worry. I focus on what we can do and we can do a hell of a lot and I hope we've proven that today. With that, we'll conclude this presentation. Thank you for joining.

Hi, and welcome to the Q3 presentation of the Atea numbers here from rainy Oslo. In this presentation, we will update you in more details on both the 2025 guiding and as promised, the development in Denmark. We will give you much more details than normally, not only to Denmark, but also more insight in our business model. In the future, we will not go as deep. So see this as an opportunity to understand more rather than a new way of reporting.

So to the numbers. Gross sales came in at NOK 12.3 billion, up almost 10%, and EBIT at NOK 348 million, up 13.3%. Net profit grew by almost 18%, another record-breaking quarter from the place to be.

But as always, I leave it to Robert to give you all the good news.

Thank you, Steinar. Atea reported strong sales and profit growth in the third quarter of 2025 with high demand across all lines of business. Gross sales in Q3 were NOK 12.3 billion, up 9.2% from last year. After adjusting for changes in currency rates, organic growth in constant currency was 7.0%.

Hardware sales increased by 5.7%, driven by higher shipments of PCs and other digital workplace solutions. Software and cloud sales increased by 17.1% with high demand across all product categories. Services sales increased by 6.0% from last year based on higher sales of consulting and product support services. Group revenue according to IFRS was NOK 8.4 billion, up 5.6% from last year. And gross profit increased by 6.7%, to NOK 2.5 billion. Gross margin increased from last year due to an improved hardware margin and a higher proportion of software in the revenue mix.

Operating expenses grew by 5.7%, to NOK 2.2 billion. After adjusting for changes in currency rates, OpEx growth in constant currency was about 3.5%. With strong demand across all lines of business, EBIT in the third quarter increased by 13.3%, to NOK 348 million. And net profit after tax increased by 17.7%, to NOK 226 million.

We'll now take a closer look at sales and profit development across the countries in which we operate. Atea's strong sales and profit performance was spread across nearly all countries in the third quarter of 2025. In Norway, gross sales increased by 11.2%, to NOK 3.1 billion based on very high growth within hardware and services. EBIT grew by 8.1%, to NOK 123 million. In Sweden, gross sales increased by 7.7% to SEK 4.6 billion with high growth in sales of software and cloud and services. EBIT grew by 18.3%, to SEK 154 million based on higher sales and relatively low growth in operating expenses.

In Denmark, gross sales increased by 13.7%, to DKK 1.8 billion, with rapid growth in sales of digital workplace and networking products. EBIT grew by 25.8% to DKK 15 million. In Finland, gross sales fell by 9.5%, to EUR 95.8 million. EBIT was EUR 1.7 million compared with EUR 1.8 million last year. The Finnish market environment remained challenging in the third quarter with weaker demand from the public sector.

In the Baltics, gross sales increased by 9.6%, to EUR 46.2 million, with very strong growth in sales of software and services. EBIT increased by 27.8%, to EUR 2.2 million. Atea Group functions, which includes shared services and group costs, was a net operating expense of NOK 8 million compared with an expense of NOK 2 million last year. The difference was mainly due to higher corporate SG&A costs.

Now a word on our cash flow and balance sheet. Atea's cash flow from operations was an inflow of NOK 220 million in Q3 2025 compared with an inflow of NOK 112 million last year. This cash flow improvement was driven by solid growth in earnings and by a reduction in inventory during the quarter. This offset lower sales of receivables into the securitization program and a seasonal increase in other working capital balances during Q3. Looking ahead, Atea expects a very strong cash flow from operations in the fourth quarter with seasonal working capital reductions in line with historic trends.

At the end of Q3 2025, Atea had a net debt of NOK 438 million as defined by Atea's loan covenants. This corresponds to a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 0.2. Atea's net debt balance at the end of Q3 2025 was NOK 4.6 billion, less than the maximum allowed by its loan covenants. Atea has a strong balance sheet and significant additional debt capacity before its loan covenants would be reached.

With Q3 now behind us, we want to provide an update on our financial guidance, which we gave earlier this year. Atea has guided for gross sales of between NOK 57 billion to NOK 60 billion for the full year 2025. We now expect to deliver gross sales in the top end of this guidance range. Atea guided for EBIT of between NOK 1.33 billion and NOK 1.45 billion in 2025. We now expect to deliver EBIT in the middle of this interval.

Our guidance is based on a solid order backlog and a healthy market and competitive trends as we enter Q4. We expect that our businesses in Norway, Sweden and the Baltics will continue their solid earnings momentum. Furthermore, we expect that our business in Denmark will progress in its turnaround and that our business in Finland will return to sales growth in Q4.

And that concludes the presentation of our third quarter financial results. I now hand the podium back over to Steinar to provide additional information on the Danish business and to summarize Atea's position as we exit Q3.

Thank you, Robert. So as promised earlier this year, we would deep dive a little bit in Denmark after Q3. I have now spent a little bit more than 6 months in my new home. And I will, as I said in the beginning, dive a little deeper than we normally do. And I will first provide you with some of the issues and then talk about what we are doing about it.

Denmark has, for years now, underperformed, and we have not been able to really make a turnaround. In this presentation, I'm comparing Denmark to Norway and Sweden as that makes the most sense compared to size and where we want to go. So first, if we look at hardware, Denmark has had a falling margin curve for the last 5 years. The last 12 months rolling LTM gives us a margin in Denmark at 9.1%. And you see Norway and Sweden on the slide coming in much higher at 12.8% and 12.6%.

The margins in Norway and Sweden have been constant for more than 10 years, and the margin in Denmark is falling. So you might think this is because the Danish market is different, pressure on price is harder, but that is really not the case. Because if you dig a little deeper, as normally with Atea's business model, and this is not only for Denmark, it is all about mix. And in this case, it's all about customer mix. If you look at the slide, you see that hardware from SKI contracts. And I just want to say that not all public business in Denmark are done through the SKI contracts.

But through the SKI contracts have been growing fast over the last couple of years, and the margin on some of those contracts are low, we have that type of frame agreements in all countries. There is nothing wrong with having large frame agreements. They will have lower margin. The thing is you have to balance the mix. And if you look at this slide, you see that non-SKI business had been falling in revenue. The balance becomes unhealthy. We will keep on serving SKI and the customers that want to buy on the SKI contracts. Of course, it's a big part of our business, but we need to focus on non-SKI also and make that grow.

If we look at software and cloud, the margins are slightly falling. And you could think that has to happen because of the Microsoft EA incentives being lowered. But you can see on this slide again that Norway and Sweden are higher. And again, the answer is not really in lower margin in general or price pressure overall. It's, again, a case of mix. So you see total software here, which are the numbers we report. And then you see the EA, which is growing fantastically in Denmark and at hardly any margin.

The CSP business is also growing but not as fast and from a much smaller base. That should have been turned around much earlier in the last couple of years. And then other software, so all other software and cloud than Microsoft is hardly growing. Both CSP and other software has very healthy margins. It is the balance of in hardware -- in the case of hardware, customer mix and here, in the case of software and cloud, product and services mix.

One way of balancing the revenue and the margin is services, but services is much more important than that. Services is a very, very tough part of our strategy. If we don't build services and added value for the customer and our partners, the margins will be low. That is how the business model for some in the industry are, very high volume, very low margin and very, very low cost. We don't think that is a sustainable business model. Therefore, services is important.

In this case, on the slide, you see consulting. So first, the number of system engineers. Norway and Denmark has about the same total revenue, but not so on the number of system engineers. Norway have about 530, Denmark, back when I came, about 130 system engineers. And some of those system engineers have to spend time helping sales, taking certifications, give keynotes or work on customer events and vendor events. So our target for their invoicing rate is around 75%. But when you are below critical mass, it's very difficult to get there. So we need to address the issue.

It's the same thing on managed services, one of the more important parts of our strategy -- because we want to be our customers' partner no matter how they want to consume IT infrastructure. Some want to buy and build themselves. Some want to buy and have us build. And some want us to run it all for them. So when Denmark is not growing on managed services, it becomes a strategic as much as a financial issue.

So what we have done over the last 6 months? First, we have reorganized sales so that we have a strong account management that can carry the whole breadth and width of our service and product portfolio. We come from a two-siloed sales organization within certain areas. We have now changed. It was done before the summer, and it starts to give effect. It also gives us a much better tool to be able to put new services or products into the sales machine. It's a change that was supposed to have happened a long time ago. We've now done it, and I'm very proud and happy about how smooth this has worked out.

And you can see from the numbers in Q3 that we are making progress financially as we are doing the change. Six months ago, we introduced a program, an improvement program called Act as ONE. We need all the force behind one arrowhead, as Scott McNealy once said. The program has five projects, and they all have leads, they all have activities, and we follow up on these weekly.

We need to, as you've seen, address the hardware margin. We have gone out and said we'll increase the price, but mostly we'll have resources put on private customers. It's starting to yield, and you will see that already in Q4 as you have in Q2 and Q3. On the software margin, it's important that we put resources and pressure on selling CSP and all the other software vendors that we are carrying like Cisco, IBM, VMware and others.

On the AMS side, we have done some changes to the organization and the players that play in AMS. We have increased the pipe, and we need to increase the hit rate, the win rate, which we see are going up. This is a slower part of our business to turn around because there are longer sales cycles and longer implementation processes. But we are moving in the right direction.

And then consulting. As some of you might have seen, I have gone out in Danish newspaper saying that we will hire within the next 12 months. This was back in July, 100 system engineers. We are now at about 25 more than what we were at that time. Many of them come with customers, and we are looking forward to, during the rest of this year, to address them with our account management to upsell from consultancy to products and managed services.

The culture is something that I have addressed to get turnover down and efficiency up. And I'm happy to say that Atea Denmark today seems like a different company. All in all, I'm very happy with what we have addressed and the results. And the forecast for Denmark in Q4 is an EBIT of DKK 40 million. When that is in the bank, EBIT in 2025 will have grown by 50% as we are doing as much investments into the business and into the company and the people as we see fit. It's a good journey.

Within Q1 or the end of Q1, I would have been in Denmark approximately a year. And I will start recruiting a new country manager in November and hopefully spend the spring to get the person into the organization and to take over before summer. So that gives you more details on how we see business, how we see Denmark, and we are very optimistic on what's going to happen in Denmark, but also in the company as a whole going forward.

So far this year, we have had a gross sale of NOK 42.3 billion and an EBIT of almost NOK 900 million. We are very satisfied.

With that, I'll leave it to you, Chris, to see if we have any questions.

Thank you, Steinar and Robert for the presentation. I do have some questions here. First question: Thank you, solid quarter, but can you give some more -- what is happening in Finland?

Yes. So Finland has been a little bit of a surprise to us this year. We saw some signals to this already in the fall of 2024 that business in Finland was slowing down a little bit. And so we have followed this very closely.

It is not Atea that are slowing down. It's Finland that are slowing down. And you can see this looking at a lot of data. And we are, of course, also speaking to all the American partners that we have that have the same development. At the same time, we are winning a lot of contracts. And you've seen that we've publicly talked about some of them, some of the larger ones. And so we expect this to turn around. And our internal forecast say that, that will happen somewhere later this year or beginning of next year. That is difficult to predict. And that's why we are keeping the workforce because we will be ready to go with all the contracts and with a better market soon to happen.

Thank you. New question, you seem firm on your guidance with Q4 in Denmark. How can you be so precise?

First of all, I want to give you two insights. As many of you know, I'm a person that looks at the bright side of life. That gives you a better life in 9 out of 10 chances, and you get surprised negatively once. This is not going to be one of them.

And then secondly, we are having a better forecast internally than what we're saying here. But we want to invest as much as possible to grow rapidly in 2026 and 2027 also on EBIT. And so we are balancing -- performing with investments, and that's why we feel pretty confident. But again, predicting the future is not an exact science.

Thank you. A new question here. Please, could you help explain how the business has performed outside the public sector, and how are your conversations with your enterprise customers going given the macro backdrop?

Yes. So the mix between public and private have over many years, grown a little bit in favor of public, especially through corona. But what we see right now is that the investments from enterprises, so private -- larger private companies are super good. Their confidence in what they're doing seems to be high. And I'm now excluding Finland a little bit from that discussion.

There are two other factors that are important to weigh in here. First of all, you will see that not all IT companies are growing as fast as Atea. So we are definitely -- our strategy are definitely helping us to take market share. But you also understand that there is nothing a company can do today to improve their business, take market share or develop better products and services than investing in digital services. So we're in the right spot with the right strategy, with the right people. And so we are confident from that part.

The discussions are very much centered around finding that edge in investing in technology, security to protect and AI to develop. But you need a broader investment in infrastructure and applications to be able to use those tools. So it's a very cool and interesting time to be in our industry, and we don't see that going away anytime soon.

Thank you. The new question, what needs to happen for Atea to achieve a top end of the EBIT range for 2025? Or is that something that's just not in the cards?

Well, I think we've been pretty precise with what we think will happen. We're still -- we have still given an interval, and it's still possible to have both outcomes. But I think we'll leave it with our guiding.

Thank you. A furthermore detailed question on Denmark. What are the plans for ramping up the system engineers in Denmark? And what will be the increased cost? And how much will that happen?

So first of all, the investment in the 100 new system engineers in Denmark is supposed to give a payout after 1 to 3 months per person. So it takes 1 to 3 months to get people to be profitable. The ramp-up is pretty linear over the 12 months from July to July. And by the way, we are ready to further ramp that up after we've got to the 230-240, which is the target as we've set it right now.

But there are two reasons why this is important. So the financial impact of each system engineers by itself is a positive contribution, as I said, after 1 to 3 months. But it's also important in our margins on product, but also how the stickiness between us and the customers will become as we have consultants or system engineers in -- or with the customers. So there is an investment. Of course, the cost per head is what it is, and you can do the average math, and we see a positive contribution pretty rapidly on this. And that is also what we've seen in Q3.

Thank you. New question. You've previously stated that reaching the upper end of guidance will require a rebound in Finland and Denmark in H2. Now you say you expect to reach the midpoint despite Finland being weak. Does this mean something else has developed better than you expected?

Well, that statement is the person putting the question to us. We have not seen any weaker development than what we thought outside Finland. Denmark is exactly where we thought it would be or hoped it would be actually, but we do see a stronger momentum in Norway and Sweden. The Baltics is also performing really, really well, but it's a smaller part of the business. So I would say Finland, surprising a little bit on the negative side. The other countries all in line or a little stronger.

Thank you. And the final question. In previous presentations, you've been talking about the four big growth drivers. Can you briefly give us an update on those, please?

Yes. So very briefly here since we are at the end. AI, starting with that. I think everybody understands that the hype curve was high and very early in the cycle of AI as a technology. We see a lot of interest. We see a lot of people taking advantage of Copilot and some, and not very many, but some who are investing deeper and building solutions based on their set of data. This is a long process. It's going to -- AI is going to be a growth driver for us for years and years and years to come. 5 years from now, we'll look at it and people will say, wow, everybody is using it everywhere. And then we'll start talking about quantum computing or something new, which will accelerate AI even more.

Security is right now growing faster than what we thought. We've always thought that customers should invest in security and cyber threats are not going away anytime soon. But it hasn't really happened in the history. People have invested more, but not as much as we thought. Right now, we see an increased interest in investing in security.

Defense is strong. And I think it's true to say all over Europe that investments in defense is ramping up. The countries are lacking people, and they have the money. And so we see a very strong demand for investments in defense and NATO going forward. And we will launch some new contracts in the months to come that will prove that.

And then Windows 10 end of life. As some of you have seen, there's been a huge push over the last 2 years to go from Windows 10 to Windows 11 operating system. That change by itself is not a huge growth driver, but the fact that you can't run Windows 11 on all the PCs that you were running Windows 10 on at the same time as customers are changing to AI or Copilot plus PCs, so stronger, more expensive PCs, is something that have been driving our revenue on the client side for the last 12 to 18 months. Absolutely a driver that we'll see also into the future, even though Microsoft have prolonged service for some customers for 12 months.

There are still about 1 million PCs in the Nordics that need to be upgraded. If they're upgraded because of the operating system or because they're end of life or because you want to run AI central -- locally, sorry, locally, doesn't really matter to us. We're going to sell you the PC anyway.

With that, we wrap up the Q3 presentation here from Oslo, and we thank all of you and hope that you have a very, very nice day.

Good morning, good afternoon around the world, and welcome to the Q2 presentation for the Atea numbers. It's been an eventful quarter to say the least with record high revenue and a good development all around. Many of our competitors are struggling, but we feel well positioned. I also want to remind you that we'll take a Q&A in the end of the presentation, so get your questions in digitally.

So to the numbers. Gross sales came in at NOK 16.8 billion, up 14.4%. And I'll challenge you to find any IT company in our industry growing faster. EBIT came in at NOK 268 million, up 10.4%. And net profit at NOK 157 million, up 13.3% from same quarter last year. As always, I will leave it to Robert to give you all the good news.

Thank you, Steinar. Driven by strong growth in sales across all lines of business, gross sales in Q2 were NOK 16.8 billion, up 14.4% from last year. After adjusting for changes in currency rates, organic growth in constant currency was 10.0%. Hardware sales increased by 11%, driven by higher shipments of PCs and data center equipment.

Software sales grew by 19.6% with high growth in sales of office productivity applications, public cloud and IT security solutions. Services sales increased by 8.9% from last year, with higher sales of consulting and product support services. Group revenue according to IFRS was NOK 9.1 billion, up 9.1% from last year. Gross profit increased by 5.1% to NOK 2.8 billion. Gross margin was lower than last year due to lower vendor incentives on software and a lower proportion of Atea's services in the revenue mix.

Personnel costs and other operating expenses grew by 4.5% to NOK 2.5 billion. Adjusted for currency movements, these costs were flat from last year. With higher sales across all lines of business and lower growth in operating expenses, EBIT in the second quarter grew by 10.4% to NOK 268 million. Net profit after tax increased by 13.3% to NOK 157 million.

We'll now take a closer look at sales and profit performance across the countries in which we operate. Q2 was another strong quarter of sales and profit growth for Atea, driven by double-digit EBIT growth across all countries, except Finland. In Norway, gross sales grew by 1.4% to NOK 3.2 billion. EBIT grew by 11.1% to NOK 108 million. Profit improvement was driven by sales growth, higher margins and a flat development in operating expenses. In Sweden, gross sales grew by 9.4% to SEK 6.6 billion, with strong sales across all lines of business, EBIT increased by 17.8% to SEK 125 million.

In Denmark, gross sales increased by 27.1% with very high growth in product sales under new public sector frame agreements. EBIT grew by 19.7% to DKK 11 million based on higher sales and a decline in operating costs. In Finland, gross sales fell by 6.0% to EUR 107 million due to lower sales to the public sector. EBIT was EUR 2.6 million compared with EUR 3.4 million last year. The Finnish economy is emerging from a recession, but market demand remained soft in the second quarter.

In the Baltics, gross sales grew by 20.2% to EUR 51.3 million, with very strong growth across all lines of business. EBIT increased by 17.4% to EUR 1.8 million. Atea Group Functions, which includes shared services and group costs, was a net operating expense of NOK 40 million compared with a net operating expense of NOK 31 million last year. The difference was mostly due to changes in internal transfer pricing from group functions towards countries.

Now a word on our cash flow and balance sheet. Atea's cash flow from operations was an outflow of NOK 111 million in the second quarter of 2025. As you can see from this chart, Atea's cash flow from operations is highly seasonal with very high cash inflow at the end of the year. In the second quarter, Atea typically has a moderate cash inflow due to a flat or declining level of net working capital.

In Q2 2025, cash flow from operations was somewhat below the typical trend. Working capital levels this year were temporarily impacted by a higher-than-normal level of school PC orders which were purchased and paid for in the second quarter, but scheduled for delivery and collection in the third quarter. This impact is temporary and expected to normalize in the coming months.

At the end of Q2 2025, Atea had a net debt of NOK 440 million as defined by Atea's loan. This corresponds to a net debt-EBITDA ratio of 0.2. Atea's net debt balance at the end of Q2 2025 was NOK 4.5 billion, less than the maximum allowed by its loan covenants. Atea has a strong balance sheet and significant additional debt capacity before its loan covenants would be reached.

That concludes the presentation of the second quarter financial results. I now hand the podium back over to Steinar to discuss the outlook for Atea's business for the remainder of the year.

Thank you, Robert. As we all know and have experiences, the last many months and quarters have been influenced and dominated by uncertainty. This is the reason why we guided for a full year for the first time in a long time after Q1. And so to be predictable, we'll keep our guiding. This is based on solid profitability and growth through the whole year as we see it. It's also based on the contract we have won during this year. But it's also based on changes in the industry and the region that favors Atea.

So our expectations, given after Q1 will stay the same, gross sales in the interval between NOK 57 billion and NOK 60 billion, actually in the higher part of that interval. And EBIT between NOK 1,330 million and NOK 1,450 million, up between 10% and 20%. I want to remind you when we compare to last year that Sweden had a tough second half in 2024. And so it makes for a little bit of an easier comparison on the EBIT.

When you look at the business and the outlook, we see a healthy business in the customer mix that we are favored by. We see Norway, Sweden and the Baltics delivering solid numbers, having a solid backlog into second half and a forecast that gives optimistic views. We see that we have work to do in Denmark and Finland. And let me comment briefly on both of them. So Finland is the area of the country where we absolutely have seen the weakest economy, as Robert alluded to. At the same time, we have won, over the last 12 months, several large and some smaller contracts. And we understand the information between economy being weaker than we had hoped and Finland had hoped, and we winning some contracts can be contradictory.

But you have to understand the contracts are still there, people are buying on the contracts just not as much as we had hoped. But many of these contracts is more capped by euro than by time. That means that we expect sharp rise over the next 3 to 4 years in spending on these contracts in Finland. When it comes to Denmark, I am, as many of you know, spending quite a bit of time in Denmark, and we will update you more in detail after Q3 on findings and actions. And we absolutely expect to turn both these countries into growth, both on revenue and EBIT, in the quarters to come.

If we go further into business outlook and look at the 4 growth drivers that we have spoken about over the last 4, 5 quarters, I'll briefly update you on all 4 of them: Defense/NATO. First of all, for the first time, we have started to actually work with NATO in Central Europe. This is something we haven't done before. I said we have worked with NATO in our region, which have been expanded, as you know, by Sweden and Finland. But we are now having sales towards Brussel and other parts of EU in Europe. Defense is the biggest single sector for us these days. It grew by 28% in Q2. But at the same time, you have to remember, defense always spend more money in second half than first half, actually more money last 4 months of the year than the rest of the year. So we have expectations for the rest of the year, as you can understand.

IT security is a hot topic, but I must say I'm a little disappointed on how little or how little growth we have in IT security compared to the threat picture that we see out there. We are growing double digits, so the growth is absolutely there. But I'm afraid that we have to see some real damaging episodes before the real spending goes into IT or cyber security.

On the other hand, AI is picking up. We are massively working with Microsoft and with IBM. On the Microsoft side, Copilot, of course, is central. It's not the only thing Microsoft does on AI, but it's well known to people around the world. Copilot sales in Q2 grew by 38,000 licenses. Some of that is renewals since we're now into more than 1 year old licenses. But over 38,000 licenses either recommitted or committed, which is sharply up from 21,000 in Q1.

We have also developed some really cool and useful solutions together with IBM based on what's next, especially against the municipality sector with health, with education and also with welfare. We'll talk more about these solutions as we are rolling them out to the more than 1,000 municipalities in our region.

And then Windows 10. We are getting closer and closer to end of life in October 2025, only a couple of months away. And there are still 2.5 million PCs in the Nordics, which are in use but are not ready to run Windows 11. There is a massive job to do still, and end of life is actually coming. We don't believe that all these PCs will be upgraded before October or during October 2025. We believe this will happen over the next 12 months and are happy to see that PCs over the last 12 months is by far the fastest-growing individual product group with more than 20% quarter after quarter. And that 70% of the PCs we sell is what we would call AI-ready, Copilot plus AI PC, or whatever you want to call them. That increases the average spending per PC, and there are 2.5 million that has to be upgraded the next somewhat 12 months.

I also want to upgrade the information that you have on the Microsoft incentives or the change of the programs that Microsoft started from 1st of January 2025. It's been massively talked about globally and also with some of the Norwegian publicly traded companies. Let me be very clear, the changes that has been put in front of us by Microsoft about a year ago, has a negative impact for everybody that our partners of Microsoft short term. Microsoft want us to change behavior. Changing behavior takes a little bit of time.

We and I guess everybody else who work with Microsoft has a plan on how to recover, recoup those dollars, but you are not able to do that from day one. It has to do with length of contract. It has to do with renewal dates and it has to do with how fast you are able to change your own and the customers' behavior. In Q1, we did not recover everything. In Q2, which is the toughest quarter of the whole year, every year with Microsoft because it's end of year in the fiscal year for Microsoft, where most people renew their EA agreements, and so also this year.

And as you know, EA agreements are the ones where the most incentives have been taken away. So we have just delivered that 1 single quarter in the first most difficult year where this will influence the most. When we look at the plan we have with Microsoft, we've actually recovered 50% when we look at actions. 50% of this year's loss, we're 50% into the year. It's just that it's not all in our numbers as EA agreements are lost that 1 month when you sign them, while CSP is month by month by month. And that's why recovery takes longer than the actual decline.

In summary, the changes have come. They have influenced the whole industry. Short term, for the bigger partners, it has a negative impact. Long term, it has a good impact. So with that, we delivered the Q2 numbers.

Let us look at the summary for first half. Gross sales up to NOK 30 billion, a growth of 15.3%. I am really, really proud of what we've done in first half. EBIT at NOK 549 million, up 10.1%. We are well in line with our guidance, and there are no reason to be scared about our future numbers.

With that, we'll go to Q&A.

Thank you Robert, for that presentation. We have several questions here. The first one here is for Steinar. As I understand, you're now the country manager in Denmark also, can you give some initial observations and some actions.

Yes. So I've been the country manager and the group CEO now for about 4 months. And as many of you know, we have not been able, over the last several or I should say, many years, to improve our business in Denmark. And so stepping in, I, first of all, wanted to understand, what is the deep down reason for this? And I certainly understand the reasons today. And as I said, we will get more into details with this after Q3.

But in short, we are selling at a too low margin, too low price, and we are big enough to influence the whole market. Secondly, we're not cross-selling. So we're not selling servers to customers that buy PCs and network to customers that buy server in the extent that our strategy outlines. All of this lowers the margin, as you can see in the numbers. So we are changing the sales approach and hiring more engineers. That is the short-term actions. I will get back to more details, but I'm confident that we will turn the situation in Denmark around.

Thank you. weaker cash flow in Q2. You are normally world-class in this category, what's happened?

Yes. We have a long track record of very strong cash flow through a tight control of working capital. But still, from time to time, we'll have fluctuations in working capital, which are above or below the normal or expected levels. As long as these fluctuations are temporary, it's really no big deal. It has no impact on the longer term.

In Q2 2025, we had a temporary impact on working capital by a higher-than-normal level of school PC orders, which were ordered and paid for in the second quarter, but to be delivered and collected in the third quarter. This is a high volume of PCs that we do every year to the schools, but this is just simply the timing of the payments versus the collection dates on a very large project volume that we do with school PCs.

This impact is temporary, so the impact is expected to normalize in the coming months. And I just want to emphasize, there is no structural change in either our inventory management, collection or payment terms that should impact our business over the longer term.

Thank you. New question here. It's a bit surprising to see the local currency decline in revenues in Finland during the quarter, given that we understand you have frame agreements in place that are double the size than the previous frame agreement. Can you help us understand the weakness in Finland and how the frame agreement is performing?

Yes. So as I touched on in the presentation, the Finnish economy, overall, the economy in Finland has been the weakest. And this is not our prediction or our numbers, of all the 7 countries we do business in, so we are influenced by a general low spending in Finland. When it comes to the frame agreements, the frame agreements are absolutely there. They're long term. They're buying on them, but not the volumes that we expected and that we talked to the public about when they were signed. We expect that volume to pick up already in second half of this year. And the contracts are valid. The euro numbers that we have given are valid. So let's see what we can do over the next 3 to 4 years, which is the duration of the contract that we have launched.

You've grown your EBIT 10% year-over-year in the first half. Is there anything pointing towards an acceleration in the second half?

We believe that there is, but more to the later part of the year than Q3 when it comes to accelerating the growth. Sweden was, as you can see, when you look at last year, not as strong as they normally are and as we see first half of this year. So we expect Sweden to outperform. We expect Finland to start growing, and we expect Denmark to accelerate its growth. Overall, we believe we are well within the guided interval.

Another question on Finland here. Why are you growing OpEx materially in Finland in both Q1 and Q2, despite top line and gross profit losing some momentum and slightly declining?

So we are investing in value add to our customers in Finland. It's not a short-term thing. It's a long-term thing. It's something we have talked about over the last 3 to 4, 5 years. And it's both on managed services and on consultancy. It's not a huge initiative. And of course, we are trying to balance it, but we expect Finland to start growing in the coming quarters. So we are very confident on the strategy in Finland.

A further question on Denmark. If you can give us more of an update on Steinar's work in Denmark, what actual activities are prioritized and what margins do you expect the region could reach in a 12- to 18-month period?

So when it comes to margins and expectations, I'll save those to after -- or on the Q3 presentation. But when it comes to actions, what we need to do is to represent the whole of Atea in Denmark to every customer in a better way. And so we are changing the sales approach by strengthening account management and the very deep knowledge that those salespeople will be helped with in the sales process. In that way, we hope to utilize each one customer touch in a better way, and we can sell more on the actual value of Atea, which we do in all the other 6 countries than just on price. This is the most important part of it.

But we're also strengthening the system engineer/consultant work that we do in Denmark which will increase the margin -- the total margin, of course. But again, we'll get back to more details after Q3.

Thank you. You mentioned Microsoft. Do you expect further headwinds in '25 or '26 for the year from legacy enterprise software contracts?

First of all, I just want to say we're focusing on Microsoft because Microsoft is way the biggest one. Most, if not all, software vendors have or will change their approach. And long term or midterm, this will strengthen the Atea relationship with the vendor, but also with the customer. We are forced to build more knowledge and more services that we can invoice to the customers. It's just that it takes a little bit of time to get over that hump. We are well on our way to neutralize and that is the first stage, to neutralize the negative effect of those changes. We've seen them with VMware or Broadcom. We've seen them with others. We now see them with Microsoft.

We don't see the same type of headwind in 2026 as we see first half 2025. And we see that we'll get a little better at neutralizing or closer to neutralizing the numbers as further out we get month by month in the coming quarters.

Gross margin was soft, especially in software and services. What are your expectations on gross margin development going forward?

So if you look at gross margin in total, it's down by a little bit more than 1 percentage point from last year. There are 2 main reasons for it. One is the software margins that we now have spoken about several times today. And secondly, it's because product revenue grows faster than services revenue, which is obvious when you look at the numbers and as expected as services revenue will not -- we're not able to grow services revenue double digit in a single quarter. So it's the mix, and it's the software topics around incentives with Microsoft.

We expect both of them to normalize. Just as you have seen over the last couple of quarters that hardware margins have normalized. They were a little weak in Q4, and we talked about that after Q4 when we said it's going to be in the interval between 13% and 13.3%, which it has been for 10 years, and that is exactly where we land in Q2. So we are working on normalizing both hardware, which is kind of check that, software and services. And there is no structural change other than the incentives with Microsoft that we talked about.

Certainly, some interest in Microsoft. How much of a headwind in terms of EBIT margin whereas the EA agreements this quarter?

It's difficult to do this without a chart and so on, but I'll try. So if you look at Q2 last year and Q2 this year and think that the volume and the contract types would have been exactly the same, which, of course, is not true. The volume is higher and the contract types have changed a little bit. But if they were the same, we would have lost approximately $4 million of profit in this quarter. It isn't as much, but is in the interval between $0 million and $4 million in Q2 by itself.

Thank you. The final question. You choose to keep the guiding somewhat large intervals. Can you elaborate somewhat more on this, please?

Yes. So I guess if we hadn't guided, we would have been criticized, we guide and some people think the guiding is not what they like. We believe that we have a sound guiding interval and a sound guiding, especially when you look at the uncertainty around in the world and all the changes that happen even in our industry. We are firm on our guiding, and we hope it gives a little bit of predictability. As I said, the revenue will be in the high end of the interval, and we will update the guiding after Q3.

I guess that's the last question. And that concludes the presentation from us here in beautiful Oslo. I hope everybody have a fantastic summer. Mine will be spent on my Urke. I'm so much looking forward to it. Thank you.