Note: Not financial advice. I have shares in Trifork AG.
Macro headwinds
Trifork is facing massive structural headwinds. Tech layoffs have flooded the market with programmers, and AI now lets anyone produce good enough code – lowering barriers to entry, increasing competition, and compressing margins across the consultancy sector. Vibe coding further commoditizes “easy to make” applications. However, this risk doesn’t fully apply to “must absolutely function” sectors like security, aviation and healthcare.
The pivot challenge
The unpredictable nature of a sector in disruption is the biggest risk for Trifork. The second biggest is the pivot from selling hours to products.
This pivot is fundamentally harder than it looks. Trifork’s organisational DNA is agile consultancy – scrum teams, sprints, client-driven backlogs. A product-first organisation is a completely different animal. It demands roadmap discipline, saying no to custom requests, investing heavily before a single customer pays, and building sales and marketing functions that consultancies typically don’t have. Being agile does not make you a product company – it makes you good at iterating quickly, which is necessary but not sufficient. The question is whether Trifork can rewire its culture and incentives from “deliver what the client asks this sprint” to “build what the market needs this year.”
The success of Trifork’s future earnings is highly dependent on their ability to make this change – it is still unclear whether Trifork has the competencies needed.
A few questions remain unanswered – Can Trifork sell big software solutions? Will potential customers pay? And how much?
2025 Annual Report – Early proof
Estimating market share and future earnings in such an environment is incredibly difficult. Historic growth cannot be a benchmark in a disruptive environment. The 2025 annual report, is an indication that he pivot is working.
| In million EUR | 2025 revenue | YOY Revenue Growth | 2025 Adj EBITDA % | 2025 EBITDA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Products | 77.7 | 37.6% | 20.9% | 16.2 |
| Services | 143.1 | -4.1% | 13.7% | 19.6 |
The product segment grew 38% year-over-year with significantly higher margins than services. This is what the bull case needs – recurring, high-margin revenue replacing lower-margin billable hours.
understanding the business
Triforks organisation is a bit complex – The labs consists of minority owned (less than 50% stake) companies. While Triforks main business also consists of different business units. Both labs and the main business might sell products (SAAS) or hourly rates.
Finally, this has some implications for the income statement – if Trifork sells a labs company this will affect the income statement – but if they buy a company it wont – also, income from labs does not go to the income statement – but any increase or decrease in book value will.
trifork labs
Arkyn Studios (44% ownership) is a “digital enterprise”. They help SAP customers organise maintenance and planning through the APPs: FastWork & FastPlan. Customers include Vestas, Arla, Porsche & Royal Unibrew.
No data: ROA, Solvency & Income.
*put formula used*
AxonIQ (20% ownership) is the most adopted event sourcing framework in the Java ecosystem. Used in banking, retail, insurance, and government systems worldwide. he technology provides total operational control by literally “storing every decision” an IT system makes. While the basic framework is open-source, AxonIQ is the commercial extension that sells the high-margin central management servers required to run it at an enterprise scale.
No data: ROA, Solvency & Income.
Dawn Health (27% ownership) – Digital Therapeutics (DTx) and “Software as a Medical Device” (SaMD). Dawn Health’s value is its ISO 13485 certification and its ability to navigate clinical trials for software. They build FDA-approved and CE-marked software that is prescribed alongside traditional drugs (e.g., companion apps for insulin dosing or chronic disease management). Customers include massive players like Novo Nordisk and Novartis.
ROA -77%. Solvency 80%. Income -52.217.000 DKK
Solvency = (Equity*100)/Assets
ROA = (Income*100)/Assets
Frameo APS (6,1% ownership) – Is a software for those simple tablet looking devices, that can display pictures. Frameo is one of europes fastest growing companies (increased 10 fold over the last two years) – and it is very profitable. Frameo APS is almost the same size as Trifork.
ROA 60%. Solvency 80%. Income 106.868.000 DKK
XCI Holding (5% ownership) – Is a cyber intelligence firm – they help government agencies track down cyber criminals – using their extended platform/product. Income has grown steadily since 2021 and has increased five fold since then.
ROA 50%. Solvency 98%. Income 52.171.000 DKK
trifork trifork
Trifork group consists of Trifork and Trifork majority owned companies.
Ownerships on p147 & p151 annual report.
Nine AS (ownership 90%) – Almost entirely public sector. Triforks biggest unit – with a Fairly big market share among Danish Government Agencies. The april 9 – Nine won a contract to deliver Danish Digital Wallet for the Danish Agency (Digital Government) worth 29.000.000 DKK. Nine has had a pretty big retraction in ROI which is down from the 40’ties in 2021-2023 – with income only slightly down.
ROI 27,5%. Solvency 76,5%. 38.112.000 DKK
Netic (ownership 88%) has developed the platform Contain – a cloud platform designed to develop and run big applications – with Netics own datacentres.
ROI 11%. Solvency 28%. Income 12.795.000 DKK.
Erlang Solutions (ownership 100%) – Erlang & Elixir programming language. Designed for zero downtime. Mostly consultancy/ programming services . *no numbers?*
Trifork products solely under the Trifork brand includes:
iFly4A – Modular application used by the crew to “duty schedules and flight info to checklists, documents, and peer-to-peer messaging – (…) customizable tools”. Customers includes …
See more: https://trifork.com/aviation-app/
Corax AI a workflow ai assistent – summarizes meetings, writes drafts for customer supports and chat bots. See more: https://trifork.com/boost-your-customer-service-with-ai-superpowers/
Alon is a response to The EU Pay Transparency Directive. Its is an application that contributes with – Automate pay audits, Transparent pay ranges, Custom reporting & Fair pay recommendations.
Tiris messenger is messaging platform for companies with strict GDPR regulation. It uses encrypted messages with sovereign datacentres.
Sovereign AI as a service – is a another product being offered by Trifork. It is essentially a combination of Corax AI, Corax Data and Netic datacentres.
A deeper dive into growth drivers & hinderes
The pivot away from US tech conglomerates is a potential growth catalyst. In Trifork’s own words – “Danish public authorities are increasingly facing challenges related to dependency on a small number of large foreign technology providers and limited control over data and critical digital infrastructure” (annual report, 2025). It is the segment Netic that is most likely to take advantage of this. Note Netic earnings is about 2 million EUR (about 8% of Trifork earnings).
While 8% of total earnings is minor – the addressable market for Netic is huge; managing the data within the European public sector. Crucially, the regulatory barrier to entry is valid. Though, resolving the issue surrounding the US CLOUD Act and European GDPR might completely strip away Netic’s potential – as their market disappears.
Netic’s platform is being levered through most of Trifork Groups products – highlighting Triforks strategy of leveraging capabilities and synergies across business units. In some scale – making Trifork as an investment – a sovereign data play – as a wide range of Triforks products, differentiate on NIS2 and GDPR regulation.
Valuation
Traditional valuation methods struggle in a disrupted sector with a changing business model. Historic growth rates are unreliable as a benchmark. Analyst forward estimates are stale and might not account for AI disruption or the uncertainty of a mid-pivot business model – if it matters – they are projecting a PE under 10 by 2028. In short – assigning growth rates to Trifork is incredibly difficult.
Trifork currently trades at a TTM PE in the low 20s – cheap in historical terms. This suggests the market has already discounted significant disruption risk. Note – this excludes about 10% of Triforks earnings, which is accounted on the balance sheet!.
The product growth in 2025, is a key – as this is an early indicator that the pivot towards the software as a service is working. Though not conclusive. If the services-to-products pivot continues at anything close to the 2025 pace, earnings could grow substantially within three years – compressing the PE into single digits at today’s price.
Relative PE & analyst estimates
2025 -> 2028
Trifork 22.9x 13.1x 9.89x 8x
Netcompany 66.1x 20.5x 15.6x 13.4x
Cbrain 52.1x 23.4x 15.3x 11.3x
NNIT -51.3x 13x 8.31x 6.52x
Triforks own guidance indicates severe mispricing – at a 2026 PE around 12,5 and 11. Assumed 50% income to EBITDA ratio. Guidance 35 to 40.000.000 EBITDA.
Conclusion
Can Trifork move away from what made it successful – agile, customer-first consultancy – toward a product-first mindset? The 2025 annual report suggests it can – while the market seems to not think so (no trust in that EBITDA guidance!). If the pivot holds, the upside across healthcare, data sovereignty, and aviation is substantial. The Trifork Investment case is essentially a bet on #1 a normalization in software consultancy #2 data sovereignty in EU as a catalyst towards high margin recurring revenue.
Trifork since ipo
2021-2022: Zero interest rate policy environment. High valuations, particularly in the LABS segment.
2022-2023: Rising interest rates drove multiple compression and resulted in write-downs within LABS.
2023-2024: Oversupply of developers (driven by Big Tech layoffs) and delayed IT investments due to higher interest rates and macroeconomic uncertainty. This triggered a collapse in operating income. When consultants aren’t billing hours, the bottom line takes a severe hit.
2024-2025: The Service segment continues to face headwinds (declining 4%). A new product-oriented strategy is driving higher margins. Operating income is recovering to 2022 levels.