Vincit

The IT service sector's Q3 earnings season began with cautious optimism, as the market looked for signs of a gradual turnaround in the IT service market. Unfortunately, the sentiment remained mostly cautious.

In the rest of the Nordic countries, organic revenue development turned downward and profitability weakened in Q2. Thus, even applying the Rule of 20, the situation in the IT services market remains distinctly challenging, with only one company achieving good performance and two achieving satisfactory performance.

The IT service sector entered the Q2 earnings season in a cautious mood, albeit with expectations of a turnaround. In reality, however, the situation deteriorated even further, with revenue falling more than before and beyond our expectations and profitability remaining at a very low level.

The IT services sector's Q1 earnings season was still approached with a cautious mood, but this time the reason was Trump's tariff threats. Possible tariffs would not directly hit the IT services sector, but they would certainly have an indirect impact through customer caution.

We expect the performance of the IT service sector to improve as a whole in 2025. This year, as the market decline presumably stabilizes/turns back to growth, we should be able to see which companies have adapted to the changing market situation and whose strategy is working.

We examined Nordic, listed IT service companies with the 'Rule of 20' metric we launched, measured with which a few companies achieved excellent performance in 2024. On average, Finnish IT service companies fared worse last year than other Nordic companies. Overall, however, it can be said that 2024 was still challenging throughout the Nordics.

Looking at the year as a whole, the difficult market situation is illustrated by the fact that none of the listed companies in the IT service sector achieved excellent or even good performance according to the Rule of 20 we have introduced.

We are launching our own Rule of 20 for the IT services sector, which we believe works well, if not best, as a single parameter to measure the operational performance of the sector and especially of the companies.