CHAPTERS Group AG (CHG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everybody. This is a very new format for us. We have twice as many people here in the room as last year. It's the first time we're doing a webcast. So this means that a few of the aspects here a bit of a hybrid format. The way the day will roll is we're going to do a few rounds of presentations. And then we're going to host an event format that we've done internally a lot, which we call the AI marketplace. There's one other questions and one of the feedbacks we've got. We've got a lot of questions around the impact of AI and software businesses. And we felt the best way to explain to you kind of align your thinking with our thinking is to just actually show you what we do. So this is going to happen after the event. On the webcast participants, so you can participate, we will do a brief kind of round of fire introductions to the projects that we are presenting right at the very end. So you will get a glimpse of it. The downside of that format or an upside if you're here, is that it gives us a lot of room for Q&A with a lot of people from chapters here in person. So any question you have possibly have about our business, you can ask here today. Now that's obviously not really possible if you're dialing in. So what we suggest to everybody who's dialing in, if you have any questions and you want any deep dive, get in touch with Andreas after the Capital Markets Day, we will put you in touch with whoever you want to talk to in person and we can do one-on-one sessions again. You're probably wondering why do I have an orange dot. The reason is that I forgot the CHAPTERS lanyards. So a way like an impromptu way to identify everybody who's working for CHAPTERS, everybody who has a dot on their collar in different colors from the presentation kit next door is working for CHAPTERS group and you have all the liberty to approach these people. And the two of you are getting dots as well, sorry. And we ask all the questions. This is going to be open end. We will only leave is the last of you leave can ask all the questions that you want. So let's start with where we are. This is a really, really interesting inflection point of the business. What you see on the left is the cut of the business in 2023. The business was about half software. We had a small investment in a business called Fintiba and a pretty big chunk of the group was still in what we call other today. So businesses that are not software or financial services. Now in 2023, as you know and as we talked about the last couple of years, we made some hard decisions on how we want to transform the buses around how we want to look like, and more importantly, what we don't want to do. And the result you see here. So our software groups of public sector and enterprise have grown substantially, both in relative share and also in the absolute size of the business. And also our Financial Technologies segment, which is not only the Fintiba business, but to other business, Expatrio and Coracle that we acquired are now a very substantial part of the group. And importantly, because it seems so minor, what we have left in other is actually one of the more exciting businesses that we have seen and one of the more AI forward businesses that we have in the group with Stefan presenting today. So I think we've truly transformed the group. Now this is continuing. And I want to point out one specific example in my presentation that will work as a proxy to explain how we think about building a business. And that's our financial technology segment. And I will use that an explanation, and you will derive a lot of conclusions for our software group from that. So this is our indicative split of revenues between financial technologies and the public sector and enterprise VMS. So you see the piece of the pie of the Financial Technologies segment increasing in '26 over '25. But what might not be so intuitive or which might not be well understood that if we look at profitability, this is actually a very, very big part of our profitability at this point. And at least for us, Marlene and I and the Board, like this happened very quickly, like it was clearly intended, and this is why we did the moves that I will walk you through in a second. But still, it's important to reflect on how the group is changing and where the gravitas of the group is today. When I personally got started in building chapters, I'm an investor at heart, right? So the natural tendency is to get started with an investment holding mindset. They were influenced by Warren Buffet, very decentralized, thinking like an investor only. And that's how we really got started at the beginning. I always say we want to build an operating system build in autonomy, really, at the beginning, it was built on anarchy, well functioning anarchy, well-performing anarchy, but really now just to lose collection of business. And the real insight we had, and that really started in 2023 with one of our largest shareholders who brought us that idea was to say there is actually something more you can do, which is not to be just a capital allocator of businesses, but you can actually build a group that is worth more than the sum of the parts because you're actually improving the businesses that you're running. And if they join part of the group, they become worth more. And today, we want to explain to you how that works. One phrase we use internally is we're trying to build industry standards. So historically, we have acquired businesses, particularly in the software space. As long as the recurring revenue is good and the churn is low, and it's a very well-defined niche in a vertical, we would acquire that business. And I think over time, we've -- both because we have built almost by exit in certain industry clusters, but also because we've seen the benefits of building these little platforms in specific industries, we have some good traction of building industry standards and a high conviction that, that's what we want to do in the future. And I want to walk you through one example where this played out particularly well. So you see the split from us. It's a bit of a more sleek design now, but the numbers are the same from the annual report, the three segments. I want to touch on the financial technology, which you know as the segment with the 3 brands from Fintiba, Coracle and Expatrio. That's how we presented this in the past. Now you also know me that in all of my slides and all of my presentation with the team or investors, I always talk about the three values that I will spare you with that right now. But I will talk about new value, which I have almost dear in my heart, which is we grow together. And I always talk about the story of like you see a pie on the table. And there are two different types of people. One person sees it and says, oh, listen, like how can I optimize my largest, like, slice of the pie? And how can I eat most of the pie. The other type of person that says, okay, listen, how can I optimize from this? Now at the beginning of the year, I thought about hiring a Chief of Staff. Now we don't really have any office space left. So there was no -- I decided not to hire a Chief of Staff. So I trained Claude, [indiscernible] agent and uploaded all of my thinking and how I communicate in my presentations. And for this presentation, I ask Claude to the point I'm not going to make to put that into a graphic, incorporating these values I think the result is absolutely terrible, but I want to share it with you because that's what AI does. So this is what AI came up with. The situation we found in the blocked account space was a zero-sum opportunity, right? You had three companies competing for one piece of pizza, three dogs, it's mine, no mine, back off, it's mine, both losing dogs, leave hungry. I think what we achieved and how the magic of AI happens is this. So the dogs are now a lot more proactive. They're wearing hats, more pizza, more fun, more wins every door leaves full and happy. What does it mean? It means if you essentially analyze the energy that you had on what is there, it very much limits your thinking. And when you catalyze the idea of growing the pie, this is where the real magic starts and I want to be specific on that opportunity in financial technology. Now what's our business doing? As a ChatGPT, if you type and ChatGPT, I need a blocked account in Germany. That's the product we are providing. So it's a special requirement for the VISA process. You need a blocked account, and you need insurances around that, and the three businesses provide that. ChatGPT gives you this result. You can go to those 4 players expectant and oracle or you can go to Deutsche Bank. In 2025, we had enough capital to consolidate 3 of the 4, which we did. So brace for impact. And really, what this created is that historically, the entire market structure always focused on essentially two products. It was the blocked account and insurance. And there was a lot of competition. There was a lot of marketing spend. There was a lot of fighting and was really fighting around that 1 pizza piece. And I think what got lost in that process is that misses the entire point because 50% of international students coming into Germany, stay for longer than 5 years, 50% stay for longer than 5 years. because they find love or work or both. Those are usually people that come to Germany to study and then find good jobs here, and they have no prior relation in any financial services in Germany, and they the first entry point with financial services in Germany is us. And it's kind of obvious that the big opportunity and the big price at the end of the rainbow is to change perspective and essentially become the partner for all financial products for internationals in Germany for the duration of their stay, which case is forever. Now what we achieved with that market consolidation is that -- I mean, you got to imagine the developer teams that were building the same product to be competitive 3x over. So everybody needed a certain product and you build it 3x because everybody needs to offer the product. Now you can use the same development resources and you can build 3 different products that you can monetize, which sounds very trivial, but it's just how this works. And we are now essentially resetting the focus of this business away from -- this is a block account insurance business to -- this can actually become a really end-to-end financial partner. And in the future, that business that you see at the top of the water to essentially become the funnel to something much, much larger. Now this probably as an investor sounds all super sensible and makes a lot of sense. But I want to share some of the operational pickups and decisions you've got to make and also some of the opportunities that we found in doing it. So when we combine the businesses in -- about a year ago in May of '25, the thesis we had at the time was to essentially keep the 3 businesses separate, migrate one quicker than the two others, and then over time, figure out what the platform strategy should be. The idea was also to approach a mindset to kind of learn like the best strength from all businesses and from all platforms and like make a best of all worlds approach and kind of go slowly and with a measured approach and take our time to figure out what the target operating model is. Now the philosopher, Mike Tyson, that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face because operations happened. So what we found out the teams did not get along at all, not to blame like that's something that you see, what we saw is we had very different standards of compliance, IT processes, efficiency across the business is like very, very different. We found out that in one of the businesses, which we ended up shutting the brand off, there were some really serious compliance issues of how they run the business. And this is a -- this is a product where you must absolutely not right? So those are people from Pakistan, borrowing money from their family. So why are [indiscernible] to Germany to us in the hope of a new future in Germany? And in that process, we got to make sure that we don't channel any people into Germany that don't belong here. We don't lose any money along the way. We don't lose any data along the way. All these things got to be not here. They've got to be absolutely top-notch and the mistake tolerance is 0. It's a regulated business, mistake tolerance is absolutely 0. Now some of the founders, some of the businesses saw this differently, and we had to make changes. Now what we also saw, and you saw that with the announcement, the idea was for Bastion, who many of you know, to become [indiscernible] a CHAPTERS group and essentially run this group, which she did at the beginning. Now Bastian also became a father at the time. and his wife got really ill, like very quickly with a newborn at home. And I made the decision I said, listen, you're out immediately, I take over. Like you do your thing, like this is more important. They are fine now, by the way, but they were -- they could look differently at the time. So last September, I was in a situation where I said, okay, I got various compliance problems. I got an incoherent IT strategy. I get teams that don't really work together, and we got to find a way. So come in manuscript method and the way we run things. So what I did, I essentially everything starts with a strategic plan. So you come up with an idea of how should the business look like in 3 years? What are the big drivers? Like what are the really big value drivers of how the business can move to the next level. And we use a tool that is called policy deployment to track progress at that. that's not something that gets adopted overnight like you need to teach policy deployment and you like put the processes in place and need to convince the team and you need to like find the right level of engagement, that needed to happen. While at the same time, like figuring out like how team structure before. Now I got really, really positively surprised because some of the talent that naturally, I didn't know before, in particular, Expatrio in particular, Toby, who some of you know Toby Fisher, the now CEO of the group, really impressed me, not only by their personality, but also with the approach they have because the mindset they had and which we now adopted and I've grown a lot of confidence that this is how you can run situations like this now and AI plays a role to say, listen, let's get to target operating model just way quicker. We had a lot of -- I mean, maybe we're a little shy, maybe a little cautious. We haven't done it before, but we were just giving this time and I think we were just delaying a decision. And at that point, and a really big driver was the CTO of that business, a guy called Pablo, who's amazing, who came up with a strategy to say, listen, we're going to streamline the IT mainly through AI drill development, and this is going to happen within months, not within years. And that's what we ended up doing. So I appointed new leadership. We changed the plan. new leadership in place, put new incentives in place. We have a strategic plan, we implemented policy deployment, and we started executing much, much quicker than we initially thought. And this is what we ended up doing. So it used to be our 3-brand strategy is now a 2-brand strategy. What used to be 2.5 platforms over time, migrating became one platform quickly. And this just creates so many efficiencies. I mean, in theory, nobody would disagree, right? So in theory, nobody would disagree that, that's the right strategy. But in practice, this is really hard to execute because you have a lot of like people care about the world that they have created in the businesses, and they want to treasure that which is very human, right? But you got to change the mindset to this is what we have done. And in the past, he [indiscernible] patrio, Coracle, but there is now a new way. It's not about whether you are better or worse, but it's all about how is the target operating model and how can we get there? And this did work out. And I think it's an amazing inspiration for how we think about industry standards A logical consequence of that is also that in future presentation, we will not say this is the financial technology segment with three brands called Fintiba, Expatrio, and Coracle, but there's a group name, which is Lumera, which we implemented in December. So going forward, you will have to get used to this graphic. Financial Technologies segment was the big part is the Lumera Group. Why do I tell you this story? I tell you the story because this is a big part of our chapters identity. And the genesis is really, really interesting. This started as a minority investment, 20% stake, May 2021 in Fintiba, tiny business. And this has now become an industry standard the best compliance standard, the students into Germany and a huge driver of organic growth. And I think that's the inspiration we want to have. So this business is going to do fine, right? It's going to be -- it's going to grow. The efficiencies are not nearly like we will have another period of significant efficiencies in front of us. But this is really much more. This is an inspiration of what we can do in so many parts also in the software group. And we've already started this. So there are already some of those early clusters simmering. We have already a couple of companies that are doing something similar. And the idea is now for us to scale this and replicate what we've done here. And the big reason -- that's one of the big reasons why we had to adjust our guidance is because the execution versus the initial plan is just happening a lot quicker than we originally thought. And this is also the reason why we're doing this because this is driving organic growth. And usually, people think when they think about consolidation, they think about pricing, but -- and they think about like the platform synergies and that's true. But also what's even more true and what's even more relevant is you can just serve the customers so much better. You can just use your development resources and you can use all the resources you have to really redefine an industry and become a true industry standard. And we've done this once. I think the financial results probably not super obvious last year are now becoming increasingly clear. And the vision I have or what gets me really, really excited is that 1 day we stand here, and we reflect on how the Financial Technologies segment is in absolute numbers dramatically larger than it is today. But hopefully, in relative terms, something else is much bigger. And I think that's the story of CHAPTERS over the last couple of years. I want to give you another example. So it's usually very hard for people to make decisions around how something may look like in a year and people focus mainly on what is here today. And what we do to the team and what we do within our Board communication is always reset focus where are we going towards and not where are we coming from? Because what really matters last year is the decision that the pie chart that you saw around profitability is just a lot larger -- lot larger share in one segment. That's the messaging here. And what gets me really excited is to stand here next -- maybe next year is a bit ambitious. But maybe in 2 years, stand here and show you a much larger pie chart with larger actual numbers and financial technologies and hopefully, a nice large who knows what's going to be software. So thank you very much. Now you have all the good story, and I'm handing over to Marlene for the heart numbers.

Thank you. Thanks, Jan. I'm going to try to keep it interest. So what I want to talk a little bit is what are we having an industry standard actually means in terms of numbers? Where do we see the impact? Where does it come from? What does it mean for our EPS growth. And I'm also going to talk a little bit about the kind of early days of industry clusters in our VMS group. So starting with Lumera, obviously, that is the industry cluster we have built. what we see for Lumera is organic revenue growth in 2025 was strong with 9%. We expect 20% plus for 2026. And some of that is volume growth, which is great, kind of people still love to come to Germany, which is great. So that obviously adds to revenue growth. But more importantly, it's a review of a positioning of the 3 brands. It's a review of the pricing of the 3 brands. You are in a fundamentally stronger negotiation position towards all your partners if you double the size. And we also see an increase in the conversion rates, as Jan pointed out, the key products still are blocked account and insurance and the conversion rate of how many blocked accounts students actually also take an insurance product that is increasing over time because we are applying the best-in-breed approach we see in 1 of the 3 brands for all of the company. So that is kind of the key drivers between organic revenue growth for Lumera in 2026 and more -- almost more importantly, this is what we expect in terms of EBITDA growth. So as Jan pointed out, we are putting this into 1 platform. And that means that organic EBITDA growth for that segment we are expecting to jump from roughly 14% to 40%. A lot of this is reduced and focused marketing spend. immediately, I think, 3 days, essentially after signing while the team did shut down is Google ads. All of them were spending a lot of money on winning market share from each other. We stopped that, and that is like hundreds of thousands savings per year just by not spending that money anymore. Paying commissions to partners, kind of all these kind of things where they just compete with each other, we can stop it now, and that adds a lot of margin. Then also, we had to streamline the organization. There were some positions that were just doubled across the group. This is not easy decisions. This is not fund decisions, but it's necessary decisions. The team took them quickly executed on them quickly and also that as to margin. And then in terms of suppliers, what we realized after closing other than the accounting system, every third-party supplier solution out there if there were two options. Fintiba went for a ex-patent for every single thing they needed. So also there, we are obviously consolidating. We can renegotiate contracts. So you just have typical merger synergies that add to an organic EBITDA growth in 2026 of more than 40%. Now what we want to do is to achieve strong organic growth in the long run, not only with the merger synergies, but kind of really over time. And that is where the not the tip of the iceberg, the bottom of the iceberg comes into play. If you can focus all of your resources and all of your thinking on how do I build the next product for my clients. What you can actually achieve is long-term volume growth and you can actually achieve long-term revenue growth. And I think we've built a cluster now with Lumera and we've built at Lumera that can actually do this. So creating industry standards is the ambition. And I think for Lumera, we are absolutely there. for our vertical market software segments, it's still really early days. I still want to kind of give you a bit of an idea what are we doing there? How we're thinking about it? What is the effect on the numbers. So many roads lead to Rome, obviously. First one is PSE Transcom and Power B. both of them in the mobility sector, software solutions for public transport for bus for trains, et cetera. What they also both had in common that they were a little bit of the ugly duckling in their previous corporate setting a little bit unlocked maybe by the previous management. So we acquired both of them in 2025, merged them into what today is peak mobility and Peak mobility is becoming the shiny beautiful spread. Are we there yet? No. I think most of you have seen it in our numbers, peak mobility, the combined businesses, they didn't have a good year 2025. we found a lot of things in terms of processes, in terms of culture, in terms of cost efficiencies that needed to be fixed. And the team on the ground did a fantastic job in doing this. And I want to point out a few examples and give some numbers in order to kind of give you an idea of what the extent of this can actually be. So the first one is a super easy one. We did a corporate merger. The moved into one-off as we pay a lot, we save a lot of rent. This is a really easy decision. Everyone loves it. The new office is nicer. It's more modern, if you want to have a love ask Jan about his first experience in the old per office. So that's the easy one. The not so easy one is the pricing review and the value-based pricing project we are currently executing on. This investor actually is headquartered this sounds so easy because they haven't raised prices for ages, just kind of you're adding value, and you just have these talks with the clients and you tell them how great they are and you go and then there are clients. and they hate it if you raise prices. And they have lawyers that actually say that the contract doesn't really allow for that and they push back, and then they start complaining about what you didn't deliver in the last year and how the hell are you willing to raise prices? So this one is really, really hard to execute for the team on the ground because they are having these uncomfortable conversations. I'm seeing the numbers. They are having the uncomfortable conversations and there for 2026 alone, and this is not kind of the end of it, we will probably see an impact on EBITDA of almost 1 million. And then the most difficult one, obviously is the part on team size. So as I said, both companies came from a corporate setting from a -- and there's a certain way of working in these old corporate settings that I wouldn't call efficient necessarily. And that also means that you have a team that is bigger than needed. And that also the people on the team are not always the one that you actually need for the new era. So the team took the very tough decision on really downsizing the team. And again, this makes perfect sense that are uncomfortable creations, not just with the people, but with everyone, a lot of lawyers involved. So this is really hard to execute on. And kind of this is what the team did over the past 6 to 9 months, and this is kind of tangible EBITDA effect in 2026 alone of EUR 3.5 million with additional kind of measures adding to that. So we are expecting peak actually to become EBITDA profitable in 2026. Now you might ask, isn't that what's industry standard about this? Isn't that just kind of your good old manuscript method playbook you should do with every company, Yes, it is. It is the groundwork that we need in order to actually build an industry standard. If you can't start adding businesses or products to something that isn't running like a well-oiled machine. So this was needed in order to move to the next phase, which is strategic M&A in the mobility sector. This is for deals in the mobility segment, all of them are in due diligence, all of them were the closing date expected for 2026 and all of them have some linked to peak mobility. They provide the same product but in a different geography. They provide -- they provide an additional feature that would actually help. So all of this is really not just -- it's great deals on a stand-alone basis, but it actually really adds to the value of the industry cluster in mobility. And then the second thing that we are going to do is become a innovative player in the sector, kind of, again, your competition is they've all been around for a very long time. They all are doing things the way they used to do. And we now can do things differently. And we now can actually think about what products are missing for our client. So what the team is currently working on and Leonard is here today and will give you a bit more detail on that as well is a software solution for essentially kind of fleet AI-powered fleet management. which is particularly important when you have electric vehicles, like actually Hamburger Roan has driving around Hamburg. So this is something that can put us -- bring us into a position where we become the product leader, the innovative leader in a very specific vertical. Many words are leading to -- the other example I want to give is our ecosystem in the emergency response solutions. So in 2023, we did two acquisitions in Austria. Both of them were providing -- or still are providing software solutions for fire departments. SIBOS is an ERP solution for fire departments and [indiscernible] is an alarming solution. So essentially, instead of having your -- that good old thing in your belt, you can get an alarm on your iPhone and that is an additional solution with [ Blau list ] having a super strong position in the Austrian market. So we acquired both of them in 2023, did a corporate merger. They are now called Solarys. Again, this is not that much of an industry standard. Now because interesting with the acquisition of Divera in 2024, Divera is alarming solution for fire departments and other emergency response providers that has a very strong position in Germany. So now we have a very strong position in Austria in the alarming solution. We have a very strong position in Germany with Learning Solutions, and we have an ERP software for firefighter departments. Three products all in the same industry. So it's a little bit because we're in Hamburg, we figured we take Hamburg examples. [indiscernible] Hamburg is now a client. This is a project that started by both companies in 2022. That's 4 years ago. But [indiscernible] was essentially a combined product combining cyber as their ERP solution with Diver as their alarming solution. Now you need an API and other connections you need a kind of real product. It's very difficult to work on something like that. If you're still competing for alarming clients with the rest of your business. So took ages. Now they are our client, and that is what we really like. They have a prototype. They presented at [indiscernible] 2026 as one team, one product and now we have something to sell to new clients. And the cherry on top, we saved probably 35,000 or so in expenses for the fare because we only paid at once. Now what we are thinking here is building out an ecosystem, adding solutions for industrial alarming, adding solutions for dispatch centers. So anything that is emergency response related that could add to that industry cluster, and we are looking for targets in that specific niche. So very short back to the jungle of numbers. I think -- and that has always been our complication. Two things are difficult for us is -- we know that M&A will happen. We don't know when M&A will happen. We just the other day, we signed a deal. It's a fantastic deal actually. It signed -- we were ready for closing -- and now the EU Commission has to approve the deal because it's so mission critical that the European use as to confirm that we can be the buyer. That's 3 to 4 months until closing. I think it's great because not only the software is mission-critical, but the end market is so much critical that the European Union has confirmed, but 3 to 4 months adding to the time line. So when M&A will happen is super difficult for us to predict. And it's also -- and that leads to it being a bit difficult to predict what will happen in 2026, '27, '28, I think kind of on the long-term effects we have a very good view on how the model can actually work. Now this is the M&A pipeline. This EUR 11.4 million will stay on signing for a little bit longer than we expected. And we currently have EUR 110 million in diesel volume under due diligence that the teams are working on. Now not only is that a lot, but we also really like the quality of these deals. We are looking at bigger deals than we used to look at. We are looking at deals that are adding to an existing industry cluster. We are doing very focused M&A in fantastic niches with really, really nice companies that we are looking at that also meet our criteria on kind of revenue, recurring revenue that are ready for an AI featured world. So it's really, really good quality of the yield. So that makes us really exciting, but make this 1 a little bit harder. So everything I'm going to tell you now is before M&A because, frankly, I just don't know what is going to happen. But a few effects of building an industry cluster on our numbers. So what you probably have noticed is that our entry multiple or the multiple of capital invested compared to EBITDA jumped quite a bit from 2023 to 2025 from [ 6 to 11.5. ] That is -- a lot of that is driven by Lumera, kind of that is a transaction where we paid more than our average 6.5% to 7.5%. But while we do see kind of looking at the long-term plan that we will very quickly go back to a multiple below 6 because we essentially operate that. What you've also probably noted is that the share of adjustments in our EBITDA was fundamentally higher than it used to be this year. Again, a lot of this is driven by transactions like peak by transactions like Lumera have been dear bone to the people working at Lumera because this is a huge change for them. You need to make sure that the team on the ground is actually satisfied. There have been a lot of adjustments in relation to peak because we need to turn that gliding into was one, so it has been a lot. It has been unusually high this year. We do expect this to normalize back to normal levels in 2026, again. And I'm going to make the big claimer of and whatever happens in terms of M&A because that might change things. Now we also had negative earnings per share in 2025. This is essentially down to the fact that while we adjust for all these one-off effects in EBITDA, they are in the operating results. We don't adjust for that. This is really -- this is a number where we adjust for or the accounting stuff like goodwill depreciation, et cetera, but this is really a number that is net income of all the companies belonging to the group, multiplied with our with our share in it and then we added up. So 2025 has been an exceptional year. What I presented last year that for 2027, we expect a range of EUR 0.80 to EUR 1.10 per share in 2027, and that expectation has not changed. Now what has changed is our view on organic growth. You saw we updated our guidance. And last year, I presented this sensitivity table. And I've put 10% organic growth in there, and I felt really bold. I felt really daring I felt like Okay. And we saw then that obviously, organic growth is the oxygen for our earnings per share. And that hasn't changed. What has changed that I actually dare to do a sensitivity analysis with organic EBITDA growth above 10%. And what you can see here in this is 5-year AG 2027 to 2032, what you can see here is -- the organic growth we can achieve is so fundamental important to our organic growth to our growth of earnings per share. Much more important than the entry multiple we pay, Much more important than the entry multiple we pay. If we can find great businesses with fantastic growth profiles, we can pay a higher multiple because that operates down very quickly. Now you don't have to get worried that we'll get crazy, and we buy -- we start buying at 13x all the time. Mark will never allow that. But I think , it goes to show on how important organic growth and hence, how important building industry standards is to the entire model. Now young get the fun part of telling the story, I get the hard part of telling the numbers, I always say. Now the really hard part is to get to the 20%. You've got all of this makes sense in excel,and it's a complex excel model. But it's Excellent. Someone actually has to get organic growth on the street. And that is not us. That is our platform teams, and that is, in particular, Marc and the COO team and the CTO team that are supporting our platform teams where they can actually get to those numbers. So over to Marc, who is hopefully going to tell us how we get to 20% per year.

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Marlene. I have 3 topics. One topic is transformability. One topic we already mentioned is industry standards. And of course, no VMS presentation without the topic of AI. So we heard from Marlene, and that's the top part of this slide that, obviously, the manuscript method seems to deliver with the improved guidance. We also heard that we have also in the VMS space, first indications that building industry standard does make sense. Now how can we actually do that in practice with a little bit more detail around a French example, I know they're now also out of the World Cup, but I still missed them, and so we will still have them on the slide. And obviously, what is playing the role of AI in that regards? So before I introduce a concrete example, I'd like to take a step back and look at why we are in this room like vertical market software from a first principles perspective. You can see on the left-hand side, why we like investing in vertical market software, obviously, the well-known notion of high switching costs. So customers are locked in these be software solution. It's a lot of effort to move from one vendor to the next vendor, you have to train your people. You have to buy new software. You have to do a lot of customization. It takes a lot of time and you're operationally depending on that. People typically don't do that, even if I tell people to hijack the prices and move the prices up, they still remain clients. Another thing that we really like is although those vertical market software markets are sometimes really, really small. Remember, we still have the market leader of our case management software doing revenues of EUR 1.5 million, and we are the market leader. So sometimes these niches are really, really small, but what it makes attractive that in those very small niches, you only have a few players and you don't have a lot of competitive intensity. And all the big guys like Oracle, like SAP, they don't find it economically useful to develop software for such a small niche. So the supply scarcity is protecting our companies from a lot of competition. And lastly, but not least, most of the clients of our software business have what I would call a good enough inertia, they don't need the best UI, they don't need crazy additional functionality year-over-year. And frankly speaking, they sometimes also pretty happy with okay service. And all of that creates a low churn profile, very predictable revenue streams, and we end up in buying those assets at pretty okay multiples. So it's a good business to be in. And if we combine what we can offer to these companies, we can offer much cheaper capital compared to those sellers of those businesses or buy and hold forever approach of being a public company, not a private equity not being required to exit those businesses is a very good fit what those owners of those software business actually want that is stability for the legacy they built over decades. Now the special thing that we bring in, and I think -- we even more bring this in since the last 2 years is we collected a lot of best practices, how to improve those businesses. So it's the improvability that we bring to the table. We call it the manuscript method, it is policy deployment. It is pricing. It is a lot of additional things that we collect and share in the group to improve the businesses, and that eventually makes up the 22-plus percent guidance. So the classic power move is by a durable asset, improve it and everybody is happy. The key thing here on the slide is the defensibility of those assets is not something that we add the [ fansbility ] of these assets comes when we acquire the businesses, I think we will see later in the presentation why this is maybe changing with AI. Now a concrete example. I always appear here trying to come back to last year's session last year session. I already talked about the French business that had some problems. It was this business somewhere in Southern France that we acquired. It's a public sector VMS business, small business, EUR 3 million revenues a bit more than EUR 1 million in EBITDA, 30 people, and they provide software nurseries and after-school care of kids. So imagine your parents in France, you have to work and you want to have your kids being taken care of. Our software is managing this from a customer's perspective. We acquired the business. And then after the acquisition, we realized, oh, the business is not collecting any new professional services bookings, what's going on. We use policy deployment come up with some countermeasure plants. We assigned some additional people to the sales side of the house, nothing worked. And we use what we call the diagnostic manuscript ratios to figure out where is the issue this situation. issue was sales and marketing ratios of professional services ratio was of the long story is either we bring in new professional services bookings or we need to conclude that this business overstaffed in terms of professional services, and we have to let people go. So that was where I was at the same time last year. And after this workshop, I was like traveling to France to sit together with the team somewhere in France, Middle of Nowhere, like 50 kilometers outside of Marseille, and that was like a very cosy meeting room with a lot of people with a very small window, and it was really, really hot, but we had a lot of coffee. So what we did is we discussed what is the situation of the professional services. Is this business really not having enough professional services? Do we need to cut the team? And what we figured out is that it's not a problem of the business not delivering professional services. The problem was that there was no charging of this professional services delivery in an appropriate way. What they did quite often is they had some health check, so customers wanted to improve the usage of the software. And then they charge like EUR 5,000 for a workshop or a 1- or 2-day workshop, which is kind of okay. But the problem was all the change requested coming out of this workshop were actually included in this EUR 5,000. And sometimes they spent like work for like EUR 20,000 and didn't charge a time for that. which is suboptimal. And the other thing is they had a couple of larger cities as customers, and these larger cities, they were just having kind of dedicated support people call them like all the time, and we figured that some individual employees worked like 3 days out of the week for a particular client, and they didn't charge anything for that person. So what we did decide we concluded we wanted to introduce 2 modules. One was a tool called Red Space. And other was a value-based pricing normalization. And the Red Space tool is a really nice tool, it basically gives you an axle sheet, just visualize it a little bit. We have a column with the days of the week then you have columns for each employee that should deliver professional services. And at the beginning of the week, everything is like red and the name Red space, and the people, the individual contributors then have to fill each day with professional services work. If they achieve a day full of work, they can turn it green. If they have no clear confirmation from the customer, but maybe we can do some work for a customer is yellow. If they have some vacation, it's gray. And if they cannot bring in enough work, it remains red and meeting every week, and everybody in the team is looking at that sheet and everybody is obviously kind of a little bit embarrassed if all is read, right? So people are really calling customers. Can I do this work? Can I do that work? And after a couple of weeks, the situation typically looks at. So some people have it all green. Some people have some red and some people have still a [ route ] of red. And what then the team does is to understand what is actually this person doing all the day, although it's not billable work, but then they figure out situations, like I just mentioned that the customer is constantly calling that poor employee and the poor employee can defend themselves not to deliver services. So then the leader needs to step in and change that customer relationship that we either stop this or have the customer pay for that. And the business also did come up with a functionality in the software. They call it the green button. So whenever a customer called, they could press the green button and the green button was recording the time they spend for that particular customer. As a flanking strategy, they also did a pricing normalization, so they introduced a new service level with the customer. And as you can see, there is a gold level that's plus maintenance revenue charged if a customer was on growth level. And of course, those nasty cities always overusing those professional services didn't had a choice not to take gold. And we did also some communication for the team because the team needed to understand why we are now treating the customers in a different way the team first time ever realized how much revenue and how much profitability the business actually is making because the former owner never tell that to the -- and all those initiatives led to a lot of individual accountability, taking. And you can see here, these are the monthly professional services bookings that we did achieve when we started introducing this somewhere here to this and we increased that by -- and all of those things is probably a combination of certain tools we share within the teams and the people on the ground that take those tools and execute those tools, and these are people that are different than me. And I'm very grateful that we have a lot of such nowadays in the business, no matter in France or in Germany, and that's how this whole management massive, call it, 1.0 actually is working. Now what happens with AI? And what happens if you would just continue with implementing I think what happens with AI is that AI is not attacking directly the different modes, I mentioned on the first principle side, but it basically attacks the underlying factors that lead to those modes. So why are there high switching costs. So one big answer to this question is that it's just body painful from a migration effort perspective move from solution A to solution. Now with all the automation that AI is offering that migration effort, ladies and gentlemen, is decreasing that will erode will high switching costs ever go down to 0, probably not, but they will erode. The supply scarcity. So having a small niche and nobody coming to this nice because it costs so much to develop for that small market, Castro example, I think that will break because with every frontier model will see. The build costs just go down and down and down. And we can see that and you'll see that later with some examples that Toby is sharing, it's actually amazing how quickly you can come up with a fully fledged ERP solution, and we did that internally as well. Now the good enough inertia, so the satisfaction with the status quo, that will also, depending on the particular businesses, holds back for a while. But when you have a situation where the AI start-ups or the existing providers of competitive solutions or providing more value using AI in the product. At some point, the delta between our solutions, if we don't do anything, and the competitive solution will be so high that this delta kind of making sense, if you combine it with a low migration effort. And what we also should not forget is that oftentimes, our solution has been in the customer organizations, maybe 10, 15 years ago, the guy that has been introducing the software from a customer side is getting older and old -- and at some point, that guy will retire and then a new guy comes in without all that history with all that relationship and the new guy will maybe say, oh, I want to have a cloud solution. Oh, I want to have -- oh yes, and I should have a microphone on my lips exactly. So these are kind of breaking points. And if we are not the one that delivering top AI-enabled services and solutions at that point, then we're losing out. And that is, if you all become like a lazy incumbent. There is another option. We have the same possibilities as the AI start-ups using the different tool sets, the identic tools that are at our disposal -- so if we can bring our existing companies to now move quickly because we have several advantages, we do have the distribution to the customers. We have these customer relationships, we are basically created from a procurement perspective. It's much easier for us to deploy new software versus a new player. So we have a lot of advantages, but we really need to move quickly. And that's why we did come up with this road you might have heard of. This stands for Red load for opportunities kind of our AI strategy that should help our existing companies to move quicker and to AI transform those businesses. Now if I go back to my first principle side, you might say, "Oh, this is red, switching costs go down. The niche is no longer unattackable and you have a yellow on the good enough inertia. Am I in the wrong movie here and my answer is, no, you're not. And why is that? Because these red situations also create something that I told Greg, one of our investors from a [indiscernible] just before the session started. Oftentimes in these little niches. You do have just a couple of players, as I mentioned, it's like the 4 tiles here on the corporate, and that market structure is very hardly ever changing because of this low customer churn profiles. Now AI is changing that. And those players that don't move will basically being washed away. And there's also like a possibility and opportunity for our companies to actually expand their market share, not only against these AI start-ups but also against the existing players. So there's a great opportunity for us if we can bring our existing companies to move quicker than the existing players. And I think what we also should take away from this slide is that the AI through these red areas is actually breaking the division of labor by these companies no longer can protect themselves because those things break. So there's actually a responsibility and the opportunity for the or the platform in our situation that we help those companies to transform, and that implies that the Manuscript Method needs to transform itself to just improve businesses like as I just have explained by the example of the French business, but to actually transform the companies. Now what does that mean? If we are talking about transformation, I think it's good to remember that most of our companies actually have quite some time until this red situations come in. And why is that? Because they're mission-critical. Now mission-critical is a very high-level term. So if you go down 1 level and you ask yourself, what actually makes mission criticality of these software businesses I would like to introduce a concept that I call operational anchors. What are operational anchors operational anchors are data and functionality in the software that if you remove that, the customer really has operational problems to deliver. So oftentimes, there are critical part in the main workflow of the customer, they accumulate a lot of valuable data Oftentimes, these operational anchors are also connected with each other. But the example of this French business, all of them are example of that French business. For instance, our software is collecting the attendance data of the children in these nurseries and this information gets sent to the city and then these nurseries, they get subsidies. They don't get paid if the software doesn't sense information. They use it for the contained forecasting to know which child has which dietary preference. And either you have enough meat or not enough vegetables. I mean, this is an operational issue for those customers. And the major of that particular city has a legal obligation that every child is enrolled in school. Guess who is actually managing that source of truth. It's the software of our business. And if they don't provide that regularly. The major of this business will violate below. So these are basically networks of operational anchors. And that's one of the reasons why customers shy away to replace those businesses. Now what happens if we acquire and collect businesses in the similar industry and in this situation, we actually have that. already was talking about this business or early childhood carrying. We do have -- when we are taking the vertical as citizen in France, social need, being it parents that need to take care of their kids, while they're working or a little bit older children that might be disabled or they might unfortunately have lost their parents the software to manage that. We have two businesses. We call them HEART 1 and HEART 2. And we do have two businesses that take care for elderly people. So some elderly people in France, they cannot pay their taxes because they have a little bit dementia. And there are guardians that take care for these type of people. They use software, and that's King 1 and King 2. All of these businesses have operational anchors. Hence, they have low churn profiles. But all of these businesses will, at some point, being disrupted if we don't move and AI transform those businesses. And we're doing that with the Rave strategy. Toby will talk about this in a second or in a minute. And I think that's great. We can create additional AI modes if we AI transform these businesses. But what we also can do, and this is something that we actually did today. So I learned from Torsten Arnd, who is heading up the group in France that we acquired and closed and signed a deal today to, we call it the full house. Now the full house is a so-called as software, which is managing the registration process of when there's a citizen in France and social need have to register themselves that, hello, I have a problem. And the hello,I have a problem software is full house has about 20% market share across France. And the beautiful thing, a part of, yes, they also have some operational anchors. They are in the process of replatforming their solution. And why is this relevant? It's a great opportunity for us not only to help them to replatform their solution with what we learned over the last 12 months around Agentic coding and also thanks to Toby and team. but we can actually now coordinate similar replatforming in some of the other businesses. And while doing that, we can synchronize the data model, and we basically can allow that a person coming into via the full house is then basically assigned to an appropriate order of our businesses, and we can do that an automated way. We can also, when we since the data model basically have a platform that always knows where the individual our stock in the process, and that allows us to provide a lot of automation that allows us to provide a lot of analytics and that allows us to provide a lot of cross-selling into this space and essentially will allow us to create an industry standard in this particular niche. And therefore, the acquisition of this full house will make the whole system much more stickier and therefore, essentially make the whole companies more valuable in the think we acquired this business for like 5x EBITDA. I would argue we could have paid probably a bit of a higher multiple for that, and it would still have making sense. The key ingredient that we need here is that we can actually only do that if we can replatform some of those businesses. That requires that we opt up or level up our R&D departments to really apply Agentic coding and to become much more quicker in developing software. And that's something that Toby will speak to in a minute. And I think the probably last slide here is finishing off where I say where we should underwrite going forward. On the left-hand side, I think we should underwrite or continue to underwrite to acquire networks of operational anchors. We should do that in the verticals we're already present in to become a more dominant player in those verticals. This will obviously give us much more pricing power, as you can have seen that house for me. I mean, this is like pricing like this is paradise pricing. And I think that should be something that we really should do. And on the other hand, when we're doing M&A, we should have open eyes for transformability. Now transform ability transcends to -- we need to understand for each acquisition, what is the headroom, meaning what is the current situation? And how can we move this business into a transformed version of themselves. What does it mean in terms of team size, what does it mean in terms of processes? What does it mean in terms of pricing, and we're currently developing check is to better assess that. It also is important to understand what's the tractability. So tractability means is how easy we can do this transformation or how hard is this transformation. For instance, we found that in some of the business where we have leaders that really leaning in into the AI transformation. Everything is much more easier done as opposed to you have someone that just doesn't believe that AI is meaningfully impacting his business. And that will also instruct what we are doing with this business, respectively, with the leadership team, but also the flexibility is concerned when it comes to customers. So we have some customers that basically tell us go away with AI. We don't want to do anything with AI. And such a business is, for me, less attractive as opposed to you have a sector that is really appreciating AI and tractability goes kind of both ways. And I think going forward, we really need to invest in the repeatability of all those transformation because the more often we're doing that, the more proficient we are becoming. And I think if we develop muscles in that regard, that will become a key differentiator in the future. And we're already seeing it right now that some of the companies we're talking to in the M&A process, when we're talking about with what we are currently doing in our companies in terms of AI. It already becomes an attractive feature of us because they can see that we can help them to manage the AI transformation. So the new power is keeping the focus on making this transformation happening quickly, more quickly than the potential decay. And by compounding this across 8 platforms were basically leveling up the Manuscript Method from just improved stuff to transform staff. And the key ingredient that I currently see is that we need to double down on making our R&D teams to agent going factories. That's the groundwork we already started doing and Toby will show a couple of examples. And the next area that we take collection in parallel is to do the area transformation in other departments as well. Okay. That's it.

Yes. Hello, everybody. I am Toby, a new addition to the team compared to last year. So Marc already gave me two questions to answer in this talk. So about -- let me start with some general remarks about software and AI. So every company today is an AI company. And everybody comes with a cheap narrative, and that's not what I want to do today. I don't want to show you a vision slide with some agents on it, but actually show you what we are doing in the portfolio, how we track it and what we do in the broad sense of the portfolio to really move the companies towards the AI transformation we are aiming for. Let us take a step back and look at what has happened over the last 18 months. So in Q1 of '25, we started the first AI working group, got people together from all the opcos that were interested in found the enthusiasts, started something that later turned out to be our AI Champions League. Then later in the year, in the manuscript days, we already discussed how we can identify in our companies, the right positions where we can apply to add value for our customers. Eventually, we noticed, okay, we need central capacity central know-how and Marc started to hire the first part of the core AI team. Then in Q4, I joined as the CTO, and we decided two things that we first need to do is formalize our view on AI and the way we see AI in our portfolio, and that's the maturity framework we developed in Q4. I will talk about this in more detail in the later slides. And we also came to the conclusion, okay, we have to change something in M&A. And the first level of adjustments to our M&A guard rates was done already in the fourth quarter of last year, and there was another refinement in March of this year. Also, in the fourth quarter of 25 was the OPUS moment. So when CloudOps came out, we quickly noticed, okay, something has changed. And the way we have to look at software development really change and what is possible previously in years is now possible in weeks, months or sometimes even days. And we took a step back and decided to really accelerate our efforts, put up the velocity, and that was the birth of the RAFO framework and our RAFO initiatives. That were already and already starting to be rolled out and then eventually the market also understood that there is something happening and the stock prices reacted. But at this point, we were already ready and rolling out RAFO, which we will see in the rest of my talk. In quick succession, we started all this initiative. We started momentum competition, AI hubs. We started Agentic coding training. And now today, we already see results in the company where we see more and more opcos where identic coating work has taken over human work. We see greenfield projects that were really out of scope for chapters companies before I yes. And I want to explain you in the next couple of minutes how we got there. All right. AI maturity framework. If you have 60 companies, all of them are really individual. They have their individual markets, different sites. And so how do you assess if your portfolio is moving and if it is moving in the right direction. What we did there is the AI maturity framework. We separated our companies into two distinct capabilities. And for each of these capabilities, we developed a transformation lane as we call it. Here on this slide, you see as an example, one capability from the support area where the company moves from beginner to assist it, enable interior. That's the same for each of the capabilities. So as a beginner in support, you maybe have a first chatbot pilot, it captures some ticket information, gives a little help. On the assisted level, DII already drafts answers to common questions roots requests to the right employees still with a human in the loop. On the neighbored label, that's where we think the company all SDD has a knowledge layer and has a clear knowledge base in the company that is led by different sources. And it's the basis for [ Agenticap ] that already end-to-end cares about the most common cases gives direct answers to customers. And then in the end, there is a transformed level, where agents really have responsibility in the support flow and take care end-to-end of majority of the support request. So this is one example how such a transformation lane in one area of a company can look like, and we did the same for 27 our capabilities. We developed one lane that we call foundational lane and the rest of this, the areas are related to the standard operations and functions of a company. What is the national line, those are the basics. So this is -- do you have a policy? Do you have a representative in your company? Do you have basic AI training for all of the employees they know the UAI Act regulatory requirements to work with AI. All of this is the foundational lane, and that's more or less done in most of the companies by now. So what you see here on the slide, overall is a result of the self-assessment of all of these companies, which was then challenged by the platform representatives. We are closely aligned with our platforms. They have the same view on AI and this levels as we have in the iCore team. So this overall gives us a clear and comparable assessment of the portfolio over all of these capabilities. And as you can see, foundational changes are the clear winner. And after that, R&D and support are the areas where our companies invested most and reach the most steps in terms of this maturity. However, this does not mean that our accounting departments don't care about AI, but that our opcos took a deliberate decision to focus support in R&D because they see the most immediate advantage there now. And that's a decision that is taken at the edge, and that should be taken in the edge because the opcos know this better. What we can do as a holdco is to enable them and provide them the tools like the maturity framework like the training and so on to take smart strategic decisions to date and to give them the tech and yes, the training that they need to actually decide is it rather support, professional services or whatever that brings us forward most. Last point about the maturity framework. You can use it to build your strategy because you have development lanes and can plan how do we want to go along this path? You can use it to measure the portfolio. And the last point is you can use it to set goals, and that's what we did. We plan that until end of the year, all of our opcos have reached assisted level for everything foundational. They have to reach the assisted level in R&D because we are software vendors, and that's certainly the biggest point for us in and then apart from that, each OpCo needs to choose at least 3 development lanes where they see the most advantage for the company, but we demand that they moved at least 3 points. So this is how we track. This is our result. You heard our goals, and that's also something you can track me again for the next year. Let's come back to RAFO. So you have seen where we are. You have seen how we measure this. And now let's come to the details of what we are actually doing to drive the progress. On the left side, you see what protects us today. So we have systems of record, regulatory mode. We are embedded in the transaction of our customers. which are rather slow moving. All of these are part of the iceberg that is melting. And now RAFO comes in and helps us transform these companies to harden these modes and turn the iceberg into stone again. What is often the starting point of this AI journey or has been in several OpCos is Marc coming to the OpCos doing something we call the future back workshop, where we take a larger part of the company and discuss with them a scenario where as the year 2030, and they have been disrupted by AI. Going from this point back, we see what happened on this wave, so you are disrupted. And from the starting point, we build up again a positive vision how you can be part of the AI winners in 2030. This format has proven to be really good to drive adoption and to get the people started. But it's not just talking. AI is also know-how intact. And that's why we have developed the AIHA, an open source-based AI solution that gives you software, but also compliant infrastructure, something most companies would maybe struggle to set this up. We found one solution that we apply in all of the companies, we roll it out. So there's no central AI Hub from chapters, but every OpCo has their own individual AI hub can shape it to their needs. But they don't have to reinvent and the Hub gives us the opportunity to take use cases that work in certain opcos, take it up to a central repository and then ship it into the whole group, and that really speed up because we are not just sharing ideas on the level of blueprints but actual implementation. Then there's Agentic coding training. We set up a bench of trainers. We went to AI event. We searched for people that are AI and Agentic coding maniacs have done nothing else in the last 2 or 3 years, then finding out how can I create my code with agents. We convince those people to come into our companies and tell our people, how can you do it? Because what we learned is both people in our R&D department understand that AI is great. They understand that there's a huge opportunity, but there is some uncertainty if it really works in their 20-year old stack. And that's what the gap that the trainers can fill because they come into the companies, they say they or 3 days. And after that, everybody has seen it works also in our 20-year old stack. And yes, that's when will happen. Then there's chapters momentum. At some point, we thought, okay, our companies have long-term plans, they have migration plans. They have a road map with their customers, and we don't want to disrupt that. We want to keep them moving along their strategic path. However, we don't want to be left out with all the cool new AI features. So we set up the momentum process where companies can combine a really great business case together with hard customer commitments to get funding from the holdco structure to make sure that external forces can help them to have AI features in their product now and today, why is still keeping their strategic plan and been quite successful, hear more of something that came out of this later at peak. Then there are people so we said we the change needs to happen on the opco level. So we signed a champion -- a champion in each company, and we also decided every needs to be an AI leader. So we take every MD into training sessions where we not only learn how they can transform their company, but how they can be more effective leader using AI every day in their work as an MD. And that's something that we also found really useful and beneficial because once the MD has seen in his everyday life, what difference AI can make, they are ready to push it into the OpCo and then not so much as we have to do. Okay. Let's go on and come back to the second topic, the Agentic coding factory. So what you have seen before was mostly related to how can we transform the rest of the company. My first example I will show you a total of 3 Agentic Coding factories we have built is software 24. So this is maybe in some sense, the least glamorous place where you can try to use Agentic coding because software 24 offers in CASA, this is a more than 20-year old defy based solution for property management. And yes, as I said, it is the legacy stack, legacy technology. So it was not clear from the beginning if AI would work here too. But what Software 24 did, they built this impressive coding factory that really produces code end-to-end. So what do I mean with it? It is easier to understand if you compared to what most developers do now. They sit in front of an agent and they use prompts to steer the agent to produce the code they want. What software 24 does is they have a set of distinct agents that work together across different systems to have an end-to-end development workflow that starts from creating great specification, taking in everything from customer other stakeholders, then taking this to the next agent that builds a technical specification plan and really a detailed implementation plan for the implementation agents that still work together with humans in the moment to steer them in the right direction. But this is then automatically reviewed by a review agent. There are end-to-end test agents that in the end, make sure that this does not only work in unit tests but really works on a running and build machine. And then to really make an end-to-end process, the agents also create the release notes. They update the customer documentation. They update the internal documentation and all of that and Software 24 has shown us that this is possible today with the legacy stack and old software. And in the lower part, you can see the impact of that because in the first years of the month, the we're still building that. and June was the first month where the factory was really full in action, and you see this step change in Agentic Coding. So even in a Delphi environment we can produce more than half of our code now already with agents. Now to Peak, we have seen it work with legacy. Now does it also work in big organizations. Peak is 160 employees. We heard about this. It's a huge development organization distributed over Berlin and Poland, so several sites. And so the case of Peak is interesting because in March, they were still at the beginner level basically not really started with Agentic coding. Then the Agentic coding training came in. There was a lot of effort within peak to really now pick up this topic. And we saw that the Argenti coating rose from 13% in January to now 49%, and this is in June. So June is again the first month also in peak where the agent took over the humans in terms of produced code. Now what do we see on this slide here. We did an analysis of what the people are actually doing with the agents? Are they doing the simple boiler plate stuff that is just running down code? And the answer is no. Actually, the agents do the hard part. What you see here on the X axis, it's more difficult. So this is really more cognitively challenging and the Y-axis is more complex. So these are changes that require code changes in large parts of the code base, different places and so on. And what is, of course, obvious if you have to change at a lot of places, hard stuff, you let it -- that's what people do. But what I find really fascinating are those 2 points here because these are bugs and problems that haven't been touched by anybody before. It's a new category. Let me give you one really fascinating example, Peak builds control screens for the control room of public transport companies. They are often double digit of control monitors there. and the software had back that led this 12 money to layout crash from time to time. And this bag was there for 20 years. Nobody was there to solve it or able to solve it. And finally, with these new options, one program are sat down and said, hey, I have Claude now. Maybe he can figure it out. It took 2 hours. In the end, it was twp lines of code Glad was able to find this obscure back in the Windows main window loop and solve it. So after 2 hours, Claude was able to solve things that were bothering us for 20 years. So AI is not just solving things that took more time in the past, but it's actually solving problems that nobody was able to solve before. Now let me come to the last example of the Agent coating factory. So we've now seen it works in legacy. We have seen it works in big engineering organization. And the last question is, does it also work on the greenfield and should we do it? And this is the example of Parity. Parity is one of the oldest companies in the portfolio for all years, we have been building ERP systems. Their current products are really legacy really end of life, and they took the step back and thought, should we really use AI to modernize this old software? Or should we just go greenfield. And that's what they did. They put on -- put together a small team, put together coating factories very similar to what Software4 has built and just started and the results are quite impressive. They planned with 3 sprints that should be 3 weeks each. They finished each sprint within 1 month -- within 1 week. So just a third of the time. And yes, after 3 months and just 8 person months invested, we have a ready product shipped to 6 pilot customers, 91% of the code is generated by agents the whole development velocity is possible because the agents are kept in place by 2,000 AI written automated test that really guard the harness to keep the agent on the task. And yes, it's really impressive to see what 4 people can do now in the first presentations with the customers, they said, we expected this not before 1 or 1.5 years in the future, and they were really flash that possible now in 3 months. We have a lot of other companies in the portfolio that are now thinking about greenfield rebuilds because the economics of this has completely changed. Software 24, for example, they are now accelerating their legacy product, but they are also working on building a new nice non-dep greenfield thing. And yes, I'm really excited about this opportunity to be honest, a lot of the companies were in a situation before AI where there was no way out of the 30-year old stack. It was just not economically feasible, and we are living in a new cool world now. From my point of view. That brings me to my last topic before we can finally get to the marketplace, some outlook for the next year and something that I see as our big challenge. As Mark has told us in his talk, our companies were at some point, founded with real customer intimacy because the founder noticed there is a need in this niche and he can fill this gap with technology. The companies grew, they matured. They focused on shifting it and came from the founder mindset eventually to operator mindset that is focused on incremental improvements, monetization and so on because growth was limited and then that's what you do. Also the founder somehow leaves and often leaves when we buy the business, and now I see it as our challenge to, in many cases, revert the mines back to a founder's mindset because the environment has fundamentally changed the opportunities for growth, the opportunities to build new solutions in the market for our customers has drastically changed in the businesses we have. And that's a great situation, but we have to make sure that our companies actually take it. So we will work with them, but I also think it will require to take in new talent at some point. And yes, that's something where we, as the holdco can also really support our companies along the way to get the right people in now to build this bright new future. So yes, listening, seeing beats listening. So now it's time for the marketplace. I give the mic to Jan.

Before we start, I want to tell you a story. So we -- my family, we spent January and February in Cape Town most of the time, and I go back for business if I have to. It's the same this year. So I've had something to do in Europe. I did what I had to do and then flow back and Capetown. So I always have my phone shot on long-distance flights. So open my phone, February, the SaaS Kalypso. And there was an investor. They're not here today. They remain unnamed. They wrote me an e-mail said, Jan, we've got to talk to you. So I wrote them back, I said, well, short, but I'm like on vacation. And we're in close period. And you know Andreas. So those are 3 really good reasons why we should not talk today, but as it maybe have time. They're like, no, no, no, like we have to talk as soon as we can. Okay, small investor. As soon as we can immediately, I'm pleased. Okay. They go to a hotel, kids come up, daddy, daddy. My wife she's like, no, no, like no pool. I have this important investor call. So dial in, 3 partners, they look at me and say, well, how can I possibly help you on your mind, like something is wrong. And the lead guy looks and said, Jan, what about AI. That's funny, right? Because this man which is he was scared, like you just hear like all the news and you hear the -- like what's happening and you see the rumors and you see the -- like everybody talks about like some vision, what might potentially happen? And the learning we took away is that when we communicate both with clients, internally, some of the people in the organization that are also skeptical, you have people who are like not 100% convinced we're like, I got objectives or investors like you, we've made the choice to be super specific and tell people very specifically what we do, what the limits are what the resources are to get there and as easy and also how the future could look like, but we want to make that very, very, very specific. So what we're doing now is a bit of an experiment, which is going to be a bit wild, so the idea of this is that I'm going to call on people from the team who will make a brief role of thunder, 2-minute pitched on who they are and what they want to present. I'm going to say something that will make them uncomfortable and hopefully funny to set the stage. And we will rush through them. Everybody on the webcast, if you find someone particularly interesting, right, Andreas, we're going to set up a one-on-one, possibly group them into one-on-ones, but one-on-ones. Everybody who's here both here in the room and also at the end of the hall, there are several rooms where we have screens, and we have time and later the beer. And if I was you I would spend a lot of time with these operating folks and just quiz them, ask them about the business, ask them other projects, ask them about the limits of implementation. I still have to identify a few more dots because, of course, although I'm not presenting a product, obviously, everybody else on the chapters team is hanging out as well, and we are here to -- for all your questions. and make use of that. Again, we will only leave if the last one of you leaves. And usually, we have some good staying power. But until the last question is answered, we will be here. So let's start this little experiment. And I'm going to start with by safe bet. Andreas, I think you're first. And you're going to give us an exciting example about AI in the public sector space.

Thanks, Jan. So I'm Andreas Philippi of Altamount and we actually started Altamount 2 years ago, in this room, we introduced it. I think some of you folks have been here at that .2 years ago in July '24. And I think today, our ambition, ALtamount is really to become the leading public sector software company in Europe. That's what we work for every day. I think AI is a big part of that. In the last year, we acquired 6 companies. This year, in 2026, we expect EUR 45 million to EUR 50 million revenues, plus 5, 6, 7 more acquisitions this year, which will obviously increase the revenue number for this year. When we started, we had some hypothesis. To be honest, AI back in '24, but one of them, to be very honest. But we believe AI, it's a super important and we're all super bumped of the power of AI. And I want to show you that in a second. So I said in the last 2 years, we built a platform. We built a great team, we had a lot of hypotheses that we mostly have been validating, added some of them like AI, and we're really ready to accelerate the growth. And I think one important part to just show you how important AI is for Altamount. We set up a dedicated entity. We called it Altamount Ignite with the objective to ignite AI in our portfolio companies. And this unit Altamount Ignite is run by Leonard. We're not where are you here? And Leonard will be showcasing next door, 1 of the use cases that he deployed together with Peak mobility. So we had it a couple of times here before peak Mobility public transport provider in Germany. It's the market leader I don't want to say a world market leader, but one of the global market leaders for depot management. And it's a mysterious word depot management. You go out on the street, you see all the buses, the red buses driving passengers from here to anywhere else in Hamburg. In Hamburg, that 1,200 buses driving around during the day. And at night, all these buses have to park somewhere, they come to depots. And then these depots, they are being maintained, cleaned, wheels are changed and everything that needs to be done. And this is a pretty traditional process. In Hamburg, is software-based, but globally, we're below 15% digitization in these steps, and this is a global phenomenon. Phenomenon. So this is something where Peak is really, really strong. And now if you have a diesel bus, it's pretty easy. You fuel bus within 7 minutes, and it's ready for the next day. with the e-buses that are coming more on to the -- it's much more difficult. It takes 6 hours, 7 hours to fully charge a bus. And sometimes, this is happening during the day. So if he's doing a right he cannot just easily get recharged. So he needs to go to a depot. And this needs to be integrated in the schedule and the planning of the buses. And this is what peak is offering. And we're the first in the global market, who are currently developing a solution where we have a dynamic route planning, the next day where this whole charging maintenance of these buses is fully integrated for the depot. So it really becomes a dynamic depot and Leonard will be showcasing that in the room next door, Pretty exciting case. A second use case that we have. It's a company, it's also a portfolio company of Altamount called Ecomedias run by Christian, Christian Eckert. Very nice company. secure workflow automation for critical infrastructure, but it's mainly for the police in Germany. So what comedies is doing, they provide the so-called online Varin Germany. This is where the EUR 80 million or EUR 60 million adult citizens in Germany can file a police report. My handbacks got stolen, my car has been crashed, somebody killed somebody or whatever, just do like the filing of a police report. You have two options, you go to the police stations, so you do it online. That's the two options you have in Germany. And we are providing the online channel. So there are a lot of police coming into the system 24/7 and somebody at the police station has to read all the reports and prioritize on what to do first. So -- and this is a very manual process. And then at night, if there's a police report coming in must also be somebody at a police station who reads that report, which is quite expensive to have people sitting there 24/7. And what Christian and the team of [indiscernible], what they now have developed and are just about to deploy is a fully automated prioritization engine. So it reads all the different police reports and if there's like murder or a bomb threat or whatever, it's getting fully prioritized. And some of the others, they are just hold back until 7:00 a.m. in the morning, that Knightship doesn't have to deal with that. So it's a very powerful solution that also decreasing the cost for the police, which the police, I think, is very happy about and Christian will also showcase you on the live portal later on. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Next up is Yasha, a long story. So the very first software company ever bought by the energy then called Medicon as a business called parity. And it was amazing because it was the first deal and everything that could potentially ever go wrong in acquiring a software company, went wrong within the first couple of weeks. Now it was amazing. Like everything you could potentially creatively imagine will happened. Now not only that, that business recover in remarkable ways. But that experience also brought us you. And you're not only running parity, but you're running one of our largest platforms now and which has grown tremendously over the years, and you've been with us for since 2019. and which is an amazing journey. And I'm handing over to you to present what you're doing in the bicycle motorcycle market.

Yes. Thank you very much, Jan. And indeed, parity was a great school for me to learn everything that could -- might happen in a software company. But this is not the topic today. What I'm going to show you today is an example of an ongoing chapters momentum initiative at our OpCo CSB. So CSB offer often called dealer management systems, specifically for motorcycle dealers. And we are a market leader in this market. We have about 900 dealers online, which means that about 1 million of service appointments are going through our system each year while booking quite manual like most likely the dealer has a customer at the phone and types everything manually into the system. So there is quite a huge amount of digitalization potential, and this is why we decided to set up with the chapter initiative project, and we are now building an AI-based digital services system for CSP, and the idea is that the service assistant can be implemented into the customer's website. and then end customers, so our customers a dealer and then the end customer books an appointment directly into the system by using natural language. And what did momentum specifically enable about it? I mean I will keep it short, just from a top level perspective. First of all, we, of course, gained a lot of speed as the idea of momentum is that we take external capacities into the projects, those were recommended by the buyers and financed by chapters. And those external guys were able to ship the feature very fast. So there was no disruption of our existing road map. And secondly, we have a way more capable product now through the use of AI, which from our level perspective, means that found a solution that the AI is directly connected to the on-premise ERP system, so it can talk in real time to the dealer and was up to date, and this makes it possible to set up an appointment whenever a service assistant and mechanic is available and the customer wants to have it. Finally, about the time line and some economics, we started with that in May 2026, and it took us only 3 months and about 20 days of internal capacity to build the first MVP that is fully tested running internally at CSP now. And yes, we are planning to deploy this to the first batch of customers. We have about 5 customers that committed already to pay for the solutions. They are waiting for it. And once they are satisfied with the solution, we, of course, plan to further push it into the overall customer base. And based on some estimates we made before, we assume that we are able to create an additional revenue stream for CSB of EUR 350,000 per year for subscription fees for only that small add-on. Yes, that's it so far. And if you are interested in more details, feel free to stop by later. I'm somewhere over there in the back and one of the rooms, and I'm glad to be there for your questions. Now I'm handing over to Matthias of Vatakant. Our literal neighbors because the water can office in Hamburg is very close to the headquarter of CHAPTERS group. And whenever I talk to some of you, you know I'm on the phone walking outside and usually means that they are watching me what might be going on in front of their screen. You're presenting something that is kind of interesting, not operationally related, but around how we source companies. Thank you very much.