Exasol AG ($EXL)

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call of Exasol AG regarding the financial year figures 2025 and the first quarter results of 2026. And therefore, I'm delighted to welcome CEO, Joerg Tewes; and CFO, Jan-Dirk Henrich. So, the gentlemen will guide us through the presentation and the results shortly, followed by a Q&A session. And having said this, Mr. Tewes, the stage is yours.

Yes. Thank you, Sarah, very much. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining and finding time to dial into our quarterly investor call, where we are going to speak and comment on our audited financials for the fiscal year 2025 and the results of the first quarter of 2026. So today, as usual, you have our CFO, Jan-Dirk Henrich and myself, Joerg Tewes in the call. We'll walk you through the presentation. And then at the end of the call, we're also happy to take any questions that you might have. So again, thanks for joining us. We will start with a business update. So, I will share the high-level numbers, as well as some key business development in the first quarter of this year. And then JD is going to take you through the detailed financials before we then get to the Q&A at the end of the call. As usual, our disclaimer, so please read it and also in the aftermath, please take a look on what's written in here. So, without further ado, let's get to the business update for Q1 2026. Let's start with the key numbers that we have. And as most of you know, we're predominantly looking at ARR, but we also have revenue as a key metric. So, let's start with our ARR. So, our ARR slightly declined year-over-year to EUR 37.8 million. So, that's a decline of minus 3.5% year-over-year. So, comparing Q1 2025 to this quarter in this year. We do have an improvement over the decline that we saw in Q4 2025, so previous quarter. So that's good. It basically, I think we have 2 effects that, to a certain degree, net itself out. So, first of all, we had a significantly better-than-expected reduction in our overall churn. So, this goes back into the territory where we think a software company like ours usually sits around in the 10% range. So, this is substantially lower than what we had in 2025, where we showed some major churn and downsell. So, that's good. And we're also above our expectation. So, we were able actually to maintain a few larger customers. So that's, I think, very positive news. Our new business performance, the actuals that we brought in, in Q1 are still lagging behind our expectation, but we're going to comment on the pipeline and our pipeline development in a second. So overall, we think we're on the right track with our ARR plan for this year. And as you see on the bottom of the slide here, we are confirming the guidance for this year for all our financial metrics, but I think specifically on the ARR side, we're actually seeing traction on the pipeline development. So, on the revenue side, you see a larger decline in Q1 versus 2025. What we shared in the past, we had a onetime effect last year in Q1 where we had a very large onetime deal with one of our banking customers where we sold in an appliance product for EUR 3 million. So, this basically is the delta. So, the revenue that's generated by recurring business is stable, but we didn't have that onetime effect this year in Q1 that we had last year. That was expected, anticipated, and we had also already shared that in our previous investor commentation. So, EBITDA is on track towards our guidance. So remember, we guided in the range of EUR 3 million to EUR 4 million for the full year. It is less than it was last year, but that's roughly EUR 1 million or EUR 900,000 [ pay ] that you see here is due to 2 effects that are just temporary or seasonal. It's partially that onetime deal that I just mentioned that we didn't have, which had some EBITDA contribution, as well as some higher marketing spends compared year-over-year. So we had our customer event in Berlin, the Exasol experience. Last year, we actually had that in Q2. This year, we had it earlier in March. So, it basically impacted our EBITDA. So that's just a temporary effect and you are going to see in our Q2 EBITDA numbers that we're basically going to compensate for that. So very positive development on the liquid front. So we're EUR 24.7 million at the end of the quarter versus the EUR 18.7 million year-over-year. So that's a significant increase in cash that we've been building up over the last 12 months, and JD is also going to cover that in a bit more detail. So overall, we are in line with what we were planning to do in Q1. So let me go to some key business development activities that we went through this quarter. So first of all, pipeline, I think we have actually done a really robust, good job on getting pipeline coverage robust. We're currently working on several larger deals. We have a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical and life science company in the U.S. that is doing a large AI use case on Exasol. So we were able to sign or get a signed POC proof of concept with that customer. That's currently undergoing, and we're also expecting that we get a license deal signed this quarter in the quarter that we're actually in. So, this is part of our pipeline. And we're also talking to a large German industrial player where we think we have a good chance on building a significant deal replacing a legacy data warehouse technology. Beyond that, as I said, we had our customer event in Berlin, the Exasol experience with high-profile attendees. Our key partners were there, as you see at the bottom, the CEOs of all the 3 companies listed there, Adesso, MariaDB and StackIT where there they were presenting keynotes and talking about the partnership that we have with those companies Adesso, MariaDB and StackIT. And we got over 250 attendees existing customers. We have a lot of prospects there. So our commercial team actually get a really good momentum coming out of this event. So we focused the communication on basically 2 key topics, data sovereignty and AI and where and how Exasol matters in that space. So, I want to talk about this a bit more on my next slide. But that's really the sweet spot that we're currently in and where we also get a lot of inbound interest. So the upsell pipeline is a bit slower than in previous years. Remember last year, we had some significant upsell with one of our largest customer. But we have some -- I think we've seen some investment restraints. However, I think the good news for us and for the company and our investors is that our new logo pipeline is actually shaping up really nicely. So, we're seeing a bit of a shift from upsell into new logo momentum that we have. And we hope that in Q2, Q3, this new logo momentum that we see will also then translate into actually signed deals that we're going to be able to also share with our investor community. A few words on the partnerships. So, Adesso, we are working with and intensifying our partnership. So we have now the first joint opportunities that we're speaking to. So working on finding new customers, helping each other and getting new business going. MariaDB as shared in several calls, we have that partnership where MariaDB basically uses our product to gain analytic capabilities in their overall offering. And they are basically driving the go-to-market motion for that joint offering. They've been starting the first POCs with their existing customers. We're ramping up the collaboration. So it's going in the direction, but it's slightly delayed versus what we originally planned. So we have POCs. We haven't really gotten to a signed customer yet that is actively deploying a joint solution. And then, StackIT, for those of you who don't know StackIT is, is a very large. I think it's the largest regional cloud provider here in Germany and Central Europe. We have established the commercial partnership and deepen that and we're now also listed on their marketplace. So where do we go? What are we doing in terms of our products and where do we see traction? AI is, I think, the area where most customers are currently thinking on how they are evolving what they're doing, how they're combining data analytics with AI. I already shared in last quarter's call that we have between 10 to 15 active customers using Exasol for a whole variety of AI use cases. And we now have the first larger significant new logo opportunities as well on key AI use cases. So we believe that this is a -- the way to go for us forward to really become an AI platform where end users, customers will run their AI use cases, their agents on a truly scalable enterprise database solution. So, Lakehouse Turbo that we've shared with the audience, we now have 2 large German customers in pilot customer trials with our solution. So there is the large retail customer where we continue to work with them. And there's also a larger German bank where we are basically providing the acceleration there for the existing data Lakeshouse. I think the whole -- specifically now here also in Central Europe, we probably have seen or heard about the intended acquisition that SAP announced of Dremio. Dremio is also a Lakeshouse company. I think this validate our investment in Lakehouses, Iceberg as the key interface. So we're actually excited about that development, and we see a further potential for our Lakehouse Turbo, the way how we complement Lakehouses like Databricks or Snowflake, but also potentially in the future for everyone. So this next slide, we shared on our last call as well. Let me maybe start on the right. We decided that we will do a much deeper dive for our investors on our overall strategy in a Capital Markets Day. We're planning to have that day in October. In our calendar, you're going to see that we -- I think we have a date already. So, we'd be delighted to have all investors come to that day where we're going to go through the details of our strategy. We will have customers on that Capital Market Day. And of course, we will speak about where we are, where the market is and how we're going to develop on a going forward basis. So in the -- on the left side, in the, let's say, ecosystem or where we're playing, we're actually seeing the Sovereign AI as the next logical evaluation of our products. So it's helping customers helping data analysts to actually build agentic systems, agents that are being created to perform data analytics tasks in a sovereign environment. That's, I would say, in a nutshell is what we're driving. And that's the -- where we're also going to put more emphasis in terms of our product development, but also our marketing and go-to-market activities. We continue, of course, to pursue growth with core offering to our customers in focus industries. So, we are seeing the demand as explained that customers want performance and cost-effective solutions to replace existing legacy data warehouses. And as I just shared, the Lakehouse Turbo is a use case we also continue to drive with selected key customers. So with that, I'll hand over to JD, who's going to walk you through the detailed financials. And then at the end, I'm happy to take more questions. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Joerg. So, before I go into the more detailed numbers for the past quarter, I'd like to do a brief recap on the full year 2025 numbers. Obviously, we've completed our audit. I just wanted to very briefly share the results with you and I say very briefly because there's been no changes. So I'm happy to confirm the P&L numbers that we communicated as part of our webcast in February as preliminary numbers now as final numbers. So we left the year with EUR 4.1 million in EBITDA and EUR 3 million of net income, unchanged to what we communicated in February. Also, I'd like to briefly recap just for everybody's reference to make sure we all look at the ARR numbers of this year in the correct fashion. This was our ARR performance in 2025. And as usual, we report ARR during the year on a constant FX basis. And all of you know that last year was a very moved year with respect to particularly U.S. dollar FX rates. And we, as in previous years, adjust our ARR reporting to the beginning of year FX rates which in this case means the EUR 39.1 million that we finished last year with on a like-for-like basis are equivalent to a beginning of year value of EUR 38.4 million, and this is kind of what we build our growth guidance on and also our ARR reporting this year. Obviously, but that doesn't change anything with respect to the upsell and churn and growth dynamics that we're reporting since it's all like-for-like. So moving on to the first quarter and as usual, dipping into ARR territory. As Joerg has already mentioned, in terms of net ARR development, we had another slight decline in the first quarter this year, which was basically what we expected. It came about structurally a little bit different than we planned. We had a significantly lower-than-expected churn, which is good, and I'll talk about the development of the rolling 12-month churn dynamic in a moment. But we also had a little bit of a sluggish new development in new business on the upsell side, although we made good progress on the new logo side, as I will show you in a moment. So these 2 effects largely canceled each other out, ending -- leading to a quarter that kind of evolved as expected in our planning. The first quarter is typically our weakest quarter. Also in previous years, last year, we had a decline of EUR 2.5 million because typically, a lot of the churn is happening at the beginning of the year. But overall, it was in line with what we expected. Diving a little bit deeper into this quarterly performance. So this is the kind of ARR bridge from year-end to end of quarter for this year on the left side and for last year on the right side. And it illustrates a little bit on what's going on. You can see actually in terms of total new business ARR generated, it was pretty much exactly the same as last year, but we had a little bit of a slower upsell dynamic, and we were expecting or hoping for more. But on the new logo side, we had actually 0 new logos gained in last year. This quarter, we won 6 new customers, although at lower value, but still very it's important to generate new customers as a platform for future upsells. 4 of those were in focus verticals, yes? And if you look at the upsell that has taken place, it was also dominantly in the focus verticals. What you can also see is that the lost business has gone down significantly, and this illustrates what I said earlier. So we had a decline of EUR 1.1 million in lost business last year, it was more than EUR 3 million. And that is also what materially affects the churn rates that I'm going to be talking about in a moment, yes? So if we look then at the 12-month development, as Joerg has already pointed out, we've seen an improvement in the year-over-year growth dynamic. We ended last year with a year-over-year growth dynamic of minus 8.5%. Now in Q1, we're at minus 3.5%. So, we are progressing in terms of developing back into positive growth territory on a 12-month basis. What you can also see at the underlying fundamental statistics here is that recovery has been driven by a significant improvement in the churn rate, yes? So plus new logo growth that we didn't have much last year in Q1, yes? So the churn rate has gone down. If you look at over the last 12 months, the new customer performance in total over the last 12 months, we've gained 15 new customers, 9 of which were in the focus verticals. If you remember from the previous page, actually, of those 15 customers, 6 were gained in Q1, which is good. So -- and this is kind of shows you the early indications of what Joerg was referring earlier that we see good progression of building a new logo pipeline and then hopefully also converting larger deals in the rest of the year that Joerg was starting to refer to. Looking at -- and this is going to be my final comment on overall ARR development. We talked about churn a lot. I just wanted to put that a little bit into a broader perspective for you. What you see here is the development of the 12-month rolling churn rate in ARR. So that always measures the lost business of the past 12 months in relation to the total ARR at the beginning of those 12 months. And what you can see here is that we saw a steady increase in churn dynamic over the past 2 years, which peaked out in the second quarter last year. And what we've seen since the second quarter is kind of a gradual recovery. Now taking the first bigger step in Q1, actually, in next quarter, we expect a further significant drop into the 10% to 15% region. And then for the rest of the year, a further normalization towards what Joerg indicated kind of what we are aiming for as a software company around 10% or lower, yes? So -- but we're on good track there. So that's going to obviously help us to further recover the 12 month -- the year-over-year growth dynamic. So how does that translate into the status of focus and non-focus verticals? That has remained largely unchanged compared to last quarter. We're still roughly at 70%, that's mostly that's driven by 2 factors. Again, there was an upsell, which were -- or upsell dynamic, which we were hoping to convert, which did not yet convert, which would have helped us on the further shift into focus verticals. And then there was a preventive churn, which obviously helped preserve some of the business in the non-focus verticals as well. But still, it's kind of the shift that we're expecting. Going into the P&L, several things that are to be pointed out, and Joerg had already started hinting at. First of all, obviously, you can see revenue declining by EUR 3 million. If you look at the breakdown, you can see clearly that is driven 100% out of nonrecurring revenue items that were exceptionally high in Q1 last year. Recurring revenues are actually pretty much on the same level than -- exactly on the same level as compared to last year. And that also translates into a pretty solid gross margin, although that obviously was also impacted by the onetime effects. On the other operating income side, we're slightly better. That is related to our ongoing or continuing efforts to get research grants for our R&D activities. So that's slightly higher compared to last year and partly compensating the gross margin impact. On the cost side, if you look at the marketing line, you can see notably higher marketing expenses compared to same quarter last year. This is the phasing effect that Joerg had already talked about. This year, we've conducted our experience event in Q1. Last year, we did it in Q2. So this year, our marketing efforts are a bit more front-loaded in the year also to generate pipeline for conversion later in the year. So you will see this delta in marketing costs somewhat normalizing in the next quarter on a year-to-date basis. On the personnel side, we are slightly leaner than last year. But otherwise, there is no notable differences in the cost base, yes? So if you would like to -- I would say, if you were to look at the marketing cost on a like-for-like phasing basis to last year, our EBITDA this quarter would have come in rather at a, let's say, EUR 700,000 level rather than the EUR 400,000. Overall, though, both on EBITDA, net income and also revenue side, this is pretty much exactly on our planning for this year and what we saw in terms of quarterly dynamic for the year. And as you will see later, that's also why we maintain our guidance and confident in the guidance. If we look at liquid funds, you can see that on a quarter-to-quarter basis, we are at EUR 1.5 million higher compared to Q1 last year. Now you might wonder why the year-on-year dynamic from '24 to '25 was in the EUR 3 million region, why has this gone down to a EUR 1.5 million dynamic. One of the big factors here aside from typical end of month volatilities is that with the major upsell of our largest customer last year, which basically doubled our business with them, but part of that agreement was that we moved from annual upfront to quarterly installments. So the payments that we're now getting from customers, particularly from our biggest customers are slightly more evenly distributed across the year. So that's a structural change in cash flow seasonality, which loses us a little bit on the interest rate side, but it also smoothens out our cash curve over the year quite a bit. So we see a -- we're going to see a bit more steadiness there compared to last year where we had a very big front-loading effect in Q1. So that's what I wanted to share with you on the numbers in Q1. Again, overall, what we expected, structurally slightly different in terms of better-than-expected churn dynamic, slightly worse-than-expected upsell dynamic on the established customers, although those deals remain in play. So in sum, that leads me to confirm the guidance that we issued. So we continue to aim for a return to single-digit growth in the mid-single-digit range on the ARR side. The revenue growth will remain negative for the full year, quite simply because we do not expect to close such a large mega one-off deal again this year. On the recurring revenue side, you will see more stability there. And on EBITDA, we continue to aim EUR 3 million to EUR 4 million on a full year basis. As Joerg pointed out, we've made some additions to our corporate calendar. One important thing is that we have decided to organize a Capital Market Day for interested investors. So invitations and details will follow soon. The target date is the 15th of October. And the goal here is to do that as a hybrid meeting where we have the opportunity to participate in person in Frankfurt or via a dial-in. In addition, we've also decided to at the BARDA Investment Conference to our annual agenda. So we're happy to talk to you there. The next opportunity to talk to us, obviously, is next week during the spring conference in Frankfurt, where I will be present and look forward to meet as many of you as possible. And so finally, so key takeaways. I think I kind of said that already. Q1 pretty much overall on spot with what we planned for the year, structurally slightly different. The materially improving churn rate compensating for the more kind of sluggisher-than-expected upsell performance, but overall, the year-on-year growth dynamics starting to recover after the 8.5% year-end. We're very happy with how the new logo pipeline is progressing, which is very important to us, given that this has been kind of our weak spot in the last couple of years and something we really wanted to improve on. And I think we're seeing early signs and good progress there that this is working, and this kind of compensate for the kind of sluggish -- more sluggish than compared to previous year's pipeline that we're currently seeing on the upsell side. So in total, we remain on track. And obviously, the liquidity level that we've achieved gives us a lot of operational flexibility and continuing on pursuing the opportunities on growth fields in AI and otherwise that Joerg has talked to you about. So that concludes what we wanted to share with you. Thank you very much for listening so far, and we look forward to your questions.

Thank you so much for the presentation Mr. Jan-Dirk and Mr. Tewes. So ladies and gentlemen, we're now happy to take your questions. [Operator Instructions]

In the last earnings call, you mentioned specific upsell opportunities you expect to materialize in Q1 and Q2. Do you still expect them to be in the first half of the year will be delayed in the second half?

Should I?

Yes. Go ahead.

Yes. Obviously, we're pushing to close them as fast as possible, yes? So I think the discussions with the customers are continuously ongoing. And our aim is to try to close them in the first half of the year, it's -- but it's not ultimately in our hands, yes? So again, I think what we're seeing on the upsell side, a lot of the upsell opportunities that we're discussing with customers are also then typically connected to investments in hardware on their side. And I don't know if you follow the market a little bit, but if you look at server prices and chip prices since the beginning of the year, prices have essentially doubled in the space of 4 months, which is related to the fact that all the major AI infrastructure players are basically buying the market empty on the chip side, yes? So -- and that leads to more rigorous investment discussions and internal CapEx discussions. And this is in many instances, what are causing these delays. So we stay very close to customers. And obviously, our aim is to close them as soon as possible.

Understand. Do you see any risk that these price increases and [ across the broader ] will persist also in the second year that probably there's a risk that it can push these deals in 2027, also or?

I mean, ultimately, you can't change the fact that data volumes are growing, yes? So many of those upsell opportunities are related to volume expansions, yes? And ultimately, I think what we're seeing is that customers are trying to kind of dampen the data volume growth, but it's very hard, especially if simultaneously, you start getting into AI applications, yes? So, my answer is twofold. First of all, I do not see the increased price levels in the hardware market go away anytime soon, yes? If you look at the projections, they're basically projecting this situation or this chip tightness in the market to persist until 2027. Is that going to push all the upsell opportunities into 2027? I don't think so, yes? But it leads to tougher discussions on customer side, yes? For the new logo opportunities, it's a little bit of a different story because typically, we replace existing use cases or we go into use cases that have already been approved.

Then you have now 2 customers in the pilot phase. Maybe you can share some light how these pilots are developing and also if there's a specific time line when the pilot is going to end.

Yes. Maybe I can comment on that. So the U.S. customer actually, as I said, has signed the paid POC with us. So we would -- so, we are expecting to get at least an initial license deal in the books in Q2. So we think that has a good probability that this happens in Q2. The other large deal that I talked about is in earlier stages. So that's developing. So that would not have a direct impact in Q2 that would probably come more towards the end of the year.

Thank you so much for the questions. But now we have no further questions. So, if you would like to ask anything or if there's other topic you would like to discuss, just let us know. But it seems -- so far, there are no further questions. So with that, we would come to the end of today's investors call. So thank you, everyone, for joining and the shown interest in Exasol. And also a big thank you to you, Mr. Henrich and Mr. Tewes. So should further questions arise, maybe a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations or as Mr. Henrich mentioned, you can meet him next week on the spring conference. And with this, I say thank you and hand back again to Mr. Henrich for some final remarks.

Well, I can't find nicer and kinder words than you to close this. Thank you very much for listening. As I said, if you are next week in Frankfurt, feel free to approach me. I look forward to our exchanges. And if you're not in Frankfurt and have further questions, don't hesitate to get in touch with Susan and her team or myself.

Okay. Thank you. Have a nice afternoon. Bye.