F-Secure Oyj (FSECURE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

A warm welcome to everybody to F-Secure's Quarter 4 and 2025 Results Session. Good to have you with us. I will, this time around, start by introducing a couple of our very recent leadership team nominations. I will start with our new Chief Strategy Officer, please. He is Jyrki Tulokas, who rejoined F-Secure on Monday this week. So he has started work now. He joins us from Verkkokauppa. And as said, in terms of being responsible for strategy, he will be driving our internal strategy process naturally. He's got our IT, our Chief Information Security Officer. He has our transformation programs and also M&A activities. So that's, in short, that's Jyrki. And then we have an upcoming nomination. So you may have seen that our current Chief Financial Officer, Sari Somerkallio, will be focusing on Board assignments in the future. And we have a new Chief Financial Officer, Robin Pulkkinen, joining us. At this time, we expect it to be around beginning of May. As our new Chief Financial Officer, he's currently with Revenio, which is a Finnish stock-listed company, and he's a very seasoned CFO, knows the ropes of how to work within a stock-listed company and has also been active in international business operations, in M&A, financing and so forth. So we're looking forward to having you, Robin, in the team in roughly 3 months. Thank you. So now into our regular programming. So the header for our financial statements review this time around is that, strategic partners and AI innovations are accelerating our growth prospects. We've been working for a few years now since our demerger with our sister company or brothers and sisters at WithSecure on to growth. And it has been an investment that we've been systematically carrying out in the past years. And now we see that we're starting to make good progress on that front. But more about that a bit later. So if we look at quarter 4, it was a disappointment from a financial point of view. There is no 2 ways about it. We were looking for growth, but instead, we were roughly stable, slightly negative, both in currency neutral as well as reported revenue. Our adjusted EBITA was EUR 12 million, slightly up from last year, 33.6% of revenue, which was a reasonable feat. We have set our target in terms of revenue higher for quarter 4. And even though we didn't miss our own internal target, we were still able to run good cost control, and we were able to come up with a good adjusted EBITA. Sari will be talking more about that in a moment. I would say that the most important thing in our quarter 4 was that we were making good progress towards our strategic journey to be the trusted service provider and the provider of choice of consumer cybersecurity to the biggest communication service providers in the world. So we announced deals on this front. I will get back to those also in a moment. So that was good. These were a long time coming, in some cases, 3 to 5 quarters later than what these partners had been indicating to us. But here we go. In terms of consumer sentiment, it's not a wave to ride on. It's -- I would say that it's not outright pessimistic, but people are careful. The financial environment and personal economics right now for people are a bit unpredictable. So people are trading with care that doesn't necessarily help us. Then as said, business execution faced delays, particularly with Tier 1 partners. So deals and service launches were suffering from postponements and slower progress than indicated or expected. Then we've been very, very busy last year setting up relatively small guerrilla teams, I would say, of cross-functional capabilities into teams that have been building completely new propositions for us. I will talk a bit more about this later. We call those Horizon and Halo, Horizon being our scalable business partner platform ecosystem and Halo being our new mobile-centric, mobile-first Scam Protection product with a completely new kind of user experience. And naturally, we were proud to receive for the second year in a row, an award at the Finnish AI Gala for the best AI Growth Initiative of the Year with our Scam Image Scanner. So that's a high-level update. 2025 in brief. So first of all, we were stable. We were looking for growth. We were stable in revenue. So that was not what we had planned for. We started seeing certain softening of the outlook in the second quarter of the year, which made us also trade carefully with regards to costs. So that allowed us to still come with an adjusted EBITA that was relatively good. I mean, if you look at any other company, this would be very, very good. If you look at F-Secure, we could have done slightly better. But still, thanks to good cost control, we were able to come with EUR 50.2 million of adjusted EBITA. So we continued laser-like focus in driving all the capabilities, maturity, offering and commercial activities that are related to winning and serving Tier 1 partners. We did major developments, clear market developments in our operational excellence, for instance, which have to do with delivery capabilities, service maturity, having an excellent cyber risk management in place and so on and so forth. So we took strides forward on that front. That work is still ongoing. As we're naturally signing new deals, there are all the time some new requirements from these partners. And then with regards to our product portfolio, especially our Embedded Security portfolio, which was already very strong at the end of '24 is now, I can say without a moment's hesitation is by far the most extensive in the market, which serves as a good, good bedrock for us to win business with Tier 1 partners and expand our footprint in that market. The same thing applies to our operational excellence, the kind of activities we've been carrying out in '25 and which we will carry out in '26 to a certain degree will definitely serve all the upcoming business opportunities that we will be targeting in the future. So if we come back to some of these deals that we've been signing in quarter 4. So on December 9, we announced that we've signed a contract with a Tier 1 who is serving over 100 million customers as consumer customers. This is an Embedded Security deal once again. And we have already started the service delivery project, and we expect the service to be going live around end of quarter 2, beginning of quarter 3. It's a 3-year contract with automatic renewal unless terminated. A very, very exciting partner who sees that they want to up their game in security in a meaningful way, and turn that into part of their core proposition and brand proposition, a very exciting partnership. This starts from having 0 customers for the service to begin with, and it will stack over time as it has traction amongst customers. Then on the left, we are describing who are we going after. So that is our target market in a way. So we're looking for top 20 service providers in the world who have typically a very, very large base of customers, tens and tens of millions, if not over 100 million and relatively high average revenue per user. And we are naturally prioritizing those who are looking to, not only sell security as a value-added service, but bundle it and form part of their core proposition with security. These kind of partners are typically looking for something which is unique to them, their branding, their customer experience, their language to describe the value proposition. And then naturally, they can generate high margin and definitely, as we all know, CSP markets are relatively mature. So everybody wants to work on churn reduction and have the kind of services that, not only provide high margin, but also improve retention. And then these players typically, when they are serious about something, they also invest more heavily, and they have, not only maintenance power, but go-to-market power. Naturally, we need to mobilize that power of that massive partner so that they actually, not only create a product that is looking for customers, but they mobilize fully their product marketing, marketing and sales organizations to promote these services. Now with regards to deals, the first one, which is listed on the right, we have not made a press release on that. So this, I would say, is news-news from us. So we made a significant expansion agreement with an existing Tier 1 partner this time around for what we call financial monitoring service. So these are capabilities that we have never before provided to anyone else. It is Embedded Security powered. And this is a very interesting domain. I mean, it depends very much country by country where these kind of services are popular, but this is another cornerstone in the proposition for this partner. And we expect the service to go live by the end of quarter 1, and this deal does include a minimum guaranteed revenue. So from day 1, we will start generating revenue from this service. The second one that I'm listing on the right there is a deal which we announced on the 20th of November as a stock exchange release, which gives you a hint that this is of significant value and includes a minimum guaranteed revenue. We were expecting the deal to be closed by the end of the year. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. The agreement negotiations are ongoing on a positive note, but it has just drawn out longer in time than what our partner was indicating and what we were expecting. But no changes in the expectation that the service launch should happen in quarter 2 as before. And that's also an Embedded Security deal that we're working on here. So good progress with these 3 -- 2 already signed deals and the final one, which is now under final stage negotiations. These are the kinds of steps and leaps that we have really wanted to see for a long time. I've mentioned several times in our quarterly sessions that we have a strong pipeline. These are the kinds of deals that we've had in the pipeline and then some. So this is definitely not the end of it. There's more that we're working on. So on this one, we have our strategic priorities that we listed for '25 when we started the year to continue to transform the company to accelerate growth with the primary growth driver being these kinds of targets that we have there around the globe. I just talked about those to a certain extent. Then the second one, to establish our position as the market leader in Scam Protection, which is undoubtedly the biggest theme that was out there on everybody's lips in 2025. And then finally, to innovate and utilize data and AI for the betterment of our services, our protection and care for customers as well as our own operations. So if we go point by point. So in terms of the Tier 1 partner segment and growth, we've signed an extension to the Total service even in the major partner sector in the U.S. to include Scam Protection. We have a new major partner in Asia Pacific region, very sizable player. Average revenue per user in the Asia Pacific region is below what we can see in Europe and North America. But being a very sizable partner, we have high hopes that this will be a good revenue generator for us in the future. And then we extended an agreement that we already had in place with a Nordic banking partner to also include Scam Protection. This has been a typical trend for us in the past 1.5 years, that partners that we've had have been expanding their offering with Scam Protection, which naturally improves our average revenue per user. So we've been deepening relationships with key partners and very much on the back of Scam Protection. Now why do we say that Scam Protection is a relevant thing? [indiscernible] before their most recent survey from last year covering 42 countries, not all of the world, but 42 countries within those $442 billion were reported lost in scams. So last year, there was a number which was $1 trillion. That was the whole world. Now they have narrowed it down to 42 countries. Scams is a massive problem. And on the right side, we have always talked about how we want to lead in providing an excellent experience to security services. Complexity, 77% of people worry about their online security and 71% find security too complex. That's a good indication for us that we're on the right track when we're focusing on better experience with -- not only with Total, but also with new kind of services like Halo. Now, the scam threat landscape has really leaped in '25 in this dawn of the age of AI. Agentic browsers are coming out. AI Agentic Lethal trifecta is what we call the combination or the perfect storm or imperfect storm of agents having access to private data, being able to communicate externally and then even potentially trust content that it shouldn't trust. So the agentic AI environment is going to be actually potentially a massive exposure risk for individuals as well as businesses, of course, to cyber threats. And then the rise of scams in social media, it seems that the social media behemoth, they don't care that much, how deeply rooted different kinds of scam methods and channels have been embedded into their platforms because they make tons of money from all of these services. And for instance, Meta reportedly makes roughly 10% of its revenue from fraudulent ads and scams, pretty creepy, I would say. But just another data point, which is interesting right there in the middle bottom is that search volume forecast to drop 25% by 2026. We see this everywhere. So people making searches, there is the AI summary in the beginning, people don't care to go and look at the search results anymore. They don't click those search engine optimization in its known form out of date. And now we need to go into AI-powered search optimization, which is a new kind of genre. And how do we build security into that ecosystem is yet another opportunity for us to embark on. In terms of awards and recognition, if our financials don't look precisely as we wanted it to look like, we never saw this amount of success come our way. We've won practically anything and everything that is out there in terms of AV test, AV comparatives, AV labs and other recognitions in different kinds of [ fora ]. I'd say that maybe the one that I'm most proud of on behalf of F-Secure is what we have in the lower right-hand corner is that, we are recognized as the leader in the telco or ISP or communication service provider market segment by multiple different players who are really having a vast understanding and insights in this space. Now if we look at our vision, where are we going towards? What's our, in a way, North Star in terms of what kind of services we want to develop? So instead of just, I was almost going to say old-fashioned protection, but I won't. I will say that the value proposition that we want to have is about helping prevent, protect and recover from cyber risks and threats. So not only setting up walls and saying that this is good or that's bad, we want to be much more of a feeling like care to people and go for trust. Trust is the business where we want to be in, and that is provided with more contextual relevance depending on what people are doing, having emotional resonance that it talks to me in a language I can understand, and it is proactively helpful. So from protection to resilience. So the longer you use our services, we hope that people are becoming more resilient to cyber threats and from security to trust. And that is a big -- that is a step change. And you will see that in our upcoming product releases for sure. Now we had a party over here. You won't see it online, but we had a party over here in this very space yesterday, where we were cheering the success of Horizon, which is our done-for-you security business platform to F-Secure partners. So this is a new kind of business environment that we've built to ensure that we can actually serve -- onboard and serve thousands of partners across the world who are able to promote our services to their customers, activate them, drive growth and support them all within the service. And this is all built with AI and agentic AI capabilities, and it runs fully on AI and agentic technology. So this is a new kind of an environment. And I've often used as a way, metaphor that if you want to do business with AWS that has certainly tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of customers across the world, you do not pick up the phone and call AWS to do business with them. You go on the web and you sign up, there's tutorials. There's a way to improve your operations. There's all kinds of tutorials. There's everything practically that you need to be an AWS partner is over there. With Horizon, we will go even further naturally because we are wanting Horizon to act as a platform to sell Total. We start the Horizon business by fully promoting Total. So our partners will be able to -- in very easy steps, start providing the services to their customers. And while we've been focusing heavily on the Tier 1s, major partners and then the next level of commercial partners, now we go any size of partner. So this is definitely a growth opportunity for us. We started our Early Access program in December. That was successful. We have onboarded our first partners. And yesterday, we made our public launch. And now the ramp-up of our marketing efforts to recruit new resellers and partners for F-Secure is getting started. Then I promise to say a few words about Halo. So in terms of how it looks like, we will be starting to demo it from April onwards. We've done demos inside the company already naturally. But from April onwards, hopefully, we'll be able to start showing demos latest May, and its user-centric experience that we have really wanted to exercise. It looks completely different. It feels completely different to whatever you're used to in consumer cybersecurity. It truly engages. This is consumer-first. So we're looking at this initially as a direct-to-consumer business product, where we are testing, learning, incorporating insights quickly into the Halo product and naturally then as a next step into the wider portfolio. And our public launch of Halo is planned for the brief but beautiful finish summer. And everything that we've done precisely like with Horizon, the whole building process, the skills, the methods, the tools that we've used or are using to build Halo, it's all AI, agentic AI-powered. And this product is aimed to provide the best Scam Protection experience out of any product out there in the market. And then I won't be dwelling on this too much, but we are working on many different levels in the way of working and becoming an AI-powered company. The key things are to increase the agility and speed of our business, and we want to reimagine how we're doing our business and processes, not just move from ways of working today into AI-supported, we want to rethink how would we do this better, more agile, more innovatively in an AI-powered world. So this is ongoing, and we have our lead programs ongoing and have been ongoing for quite some time already. And I would just say that as an example, we have every single person in our technology organization Claude Code, the very process of having all of our leadership and managers also Claude Code capable so that we understand how to apply agentic AI and also implement personal and team and function-based capabilities powered by agents. So we're serious about this in turning this from individual exercises and team-specific exercises into a company-wide effect. Wrong way. So that's all from me. Now I'd like to hand over to Sari Somerkallio, our Chief Financial Officer. Here we go.

Thank you, Timo. Yes. So you've heard the news about me leaving F-Secure, but this is not yet the last time. So you will hear me talking still in Q1. And also after that, I will not disappear anywhere overnight as I'm not going into a new operative job. So I will be supporting Robin as we see necessary, but I'm sure that he is also very, very capable of jumping on board very soon with his background. And now let's go into the financials of Q4. Timo already mentioned some of the key numbers, but let's dig a little bit deeper into those. And I'll be focusing on when we talk about the revenue on the currency-neutral numbers. We had both yen and dollar were against us. So the reported numbers are weaker. But I continue to feel that it's a currency-neutral numbers that tell about the development of the actual business. So when we look at the partner business first, it was basically flat during Q4, but again, a very mixed bag. Security Suite is, of course, the biggest of our businesses. And there, it was clearly negative, minus 1.7% was a decline of the business. We continue to see very good development in Sweden and Finland. DACH as a region does well, but the Germany problem that we have talked about for such a long time. So it continues being weak, and it will also continue burden during this year. So nothing has changed there. We have a connection with the customer, but nothing will change within short-term. Then on the Embedded side, which is, of course, the area where we see the biggest growth potential. So there, it's nice that we are able to report good growth. So 8% is a nice growth. And yes, by the way, this is the area where we didn't have the currency-neutral numbers last time. So we made an effort and ensure that we can report all numbers in the same way because it tells more about the business. And here, within Embedded, so growth in Japan has continued and in the U.S., also there is positive development. Then when we look at the Direct business, so story is very similar to what we have seen previously. We have not been doing paid acquisition. So this is the end result you would expect. Actually, you can say that this minus 7.5% is better than we internally expected. So we are doing things to work on higher retention levels and higher ARPU, and that's working well, but it's clear that we don't get new customers when we don't do marketing. And a new data point that we provided is that, in the U.S., the decline has been bigger than in other areas. So our U.S. business in Direct is mostly based on the Lookout Life legacy. And there, it is like a legacy product that we have not been focusing on with Halo that Timo talked about. So there are expectations to turn the situation, but that's burdening the decline more than the European markets. When we look at the geographies, similar picture to what we've seen before, but all numbers are slightly lower as the quarter was so low in terms of revenue. So Nordic countries continue to grow well, driven by Finland and Sweden. Rest of Europe is burdened by Germany. There are also other areas. So we can say that we have good total conversion. We have ARPU growing, thanks to that in most places, but then there are some exceptions where we have made some changes to the pricing with the customer and that's -- so it's not maybe as clear picture as previously. North America, now positive numbers, but this is like really a mixed bag there. We have the Direct business, which is declining. The Security Suite business in the U.S. is also negative and then the Embedded part is growing in the U.S. So 3 totally different components in North America. And rest of the world, which is mainly Japan continues to grow, not quite as fast as previously, but still continues to grow. Now, of course, it is getting a bit bigger, and we face bigger comparison values. So -- but it's a good market where we have a lot of activity continuously. Then turning to the cost side. So the costs were clearly lower in our P&L, declining by more than 10% by more than EUR 2 million. But here also, there are many things happening. You see that admin costs are higher than previously and especially as a percentage of revenue. And there is -- there are some one-off items in this quarter that burdened that, that we should not see going forward. And in R&D, the number is really significantly lower. But there, the activity level is even higher than previously, but now we have done more CapEx work related to projects and also developing our architecture and basically the -- yes, our platform. So more CapEx, and that's why you see less in the P&L. Then the profitability as a sum of the revenues and costs. On gross margin side, nothing special to report this quarter. Actually, happy to see that gross margin is slightly higher than in Q3 as still the Embedded business has been growing. There are some timing issues, but also some efficiency that we have managed to do. But the rule of thumb that we have said that Embedded has a lower gross margin than Security Suite. So that still applies and is also included in the guidance for '26. Then in terms of the EBITA margin, so I think in these circumstances, 33.6% is a good achievement. So as we are a scalable business and we need growth. So this was a good result even as we've been focusing on investing in our capabilities, and we have like collected a lot of costs during the past couple of years. So this was a good result in these circumstances, the EUR 12 million. Very briefly about the full year, just our guidance was low single-digit growth, currency-neutral growth, and we see 0.6%. So that just rounds up to 1% and which was our interpretation of the lower end. So, of course, we are not happy with that. And this was also after the profit warning in the summer. So we openly admit that this is far from what we wanted to achieve. And like Timo said, the full year results, so it is lower than last year, both in terms of percentages and euros. And it's -- we've done the investments for the growth. So the cost is there. And when the top line is not there, this is the outcome and definitely not what we want to see, and we are fully aware of this being a disappointment. It's likewise for us. About cash flow, nothing special to report about the fourth quarter. In general, we can say that this year, the cash conversion was more stable than in '24. But there can always be differences between the quarters, so I could not say that this is a trend. It's always a combination of a lot of things. What we can say is that, if we -- even if -- on average, this is now a similar level to '24, if we look at years before that when CapEx was on a lower level. So, of course, using more CapEx has had an impact on the cash conversion. For '26, we expect CapEx to be a bit higher than in '25. But as a proportion from revenue, it is a smaller percent. So can expect something similar or maybe better for next year. Dividend, we -- our -- the basic policy says that we want to have like around or above 50% as a dividend. But in this situation where our leverage is higher, so also based on the policy. So here, we want to focus on getting the leverage down. So we go with the same EUR 0.04 per share as last year. And it is about 31% of the earnings per share. Then the outlook for '26. We expect a mid- to high single-digit currency-neutral growth. It is a very broad range. We are aware of that, but I'm sure that you have learned like we have learned that there are a lot of things where the timing is very difficult to estimate. So that's why the range is also broad. The outcome depends totally on when big things go live and how they ramp up and so on. So then during the year, when we are confident enough, we can narrow that into something less broad, but this is how we now start. I want to tell that we see that there is a lot of potential, but all the things are not in our own hands, and we are doing everything to get things done the earlier, the better. And the EBITA, of course, there also a big range from EUR 44 million to EUR 50 million, which is yes, maximum is at the same level as '25. And also this outcome will depend a lot on what kind of growth we then at the end achieve. But the fact is that, we have collected certain cost base, and we need the growth to get into the profitability that we want to see. And about the assumptions here, a lot of text on the right-hand side, very similar items that we have talked about also during '25, where the first bullet says that we expect the market to grow, and we see that we can grow faster than the market. Second bullet is about this Embedded Security, which is really the growth driver. And here, it's important to see that this -- even if the guidance is given for the full year, so we don't expect the quarters to be all the same. But as we have -- Timo talked about, especially 3 more important Tier 1 deals. So how they -- when they go live and how they develop. So that's a huge impact. So we could say that H2 will be more growth and better -- and profitability follows, so more profit than in H1. But actually, it's possible that Q2 is already much better. So that's why we didn't include language of the half years. But it is gradually during the year when these new services are launched because they are so big that they actually have an impact. Direct business, similar strategy as before, no changes there. Gross margin also a very similar comment to what we've said before. So with bigger embedded, so it's expected to come down. But there also, there are differences between the different agreements with the customers. So it depends a little bit on how -- on the final outcome of that mix. And of course, we are working also on efficiency on those. And even in the gross margin level, so the growth has an impact. So there is pricing that is volume dependent. So with bigger volumes, so also we get more efficiency into the gross margin. And on cost side, so we made investments. We continue to make investments. And partly, they are about new products, partly they are about these actual deliveries to the customers. And then there are things also on our own infrastructure, which we are developing. And some of this is CapEx. So CapEx is also dependent on some of these customer deliveries, but also other things. So we will, of course, go into the details during the year, but expectation is that things will improve throughout the year. Then, of course, you will ask that what's included in the guidance. And Timo went through the details of these 2 releases, a stock exchange release in November and the press release in December. And these are exactly the kind of deals that we refer to when -- also in our growth target where we talk about additional significant upside. So it's these kind of deals that we talk about. And the press release one, of course, already the head of press release says that it's not so big in short-term, but that has also potential to become much bigger like Timo explained that we have there a user base of more than EUR 100 million. So if we can expand there, so it will definitely become bigger. But at this point, it was just a press release. And we continue to be in a scalable business. So profitability will follow from this. You have seen this picture. I think we introduced this in the Investor Day some time ago. I have seen that you are also using this. So it makes it easier to explain the different business models and just wanted to also explain how these 2 cases where we had the releases, how they go on this map. So the November stock exchange release case, so when we sign it and launch it, so there is this minimum guarantee, which means that it will immediately start generating from the day when it's introduced. And that the contract has still like per user pricing. So when the user number is higher than a certain number when it goes above the minimum commitment, so it can grow. So it will not stay on that level, but our expectations are definitely to go bigger. And then this press release case, so that has an NRE fee component. There was -- it was mentioned in the report that deferred revenue number has increased during the quarter. So this is one of the reasons which is explaining that. From a revenue point of view, not significant for a single month as it's accrued over 3 years. So it will take time before that's reported as revenue. And this is like new service ramp-up case. It will start from 0. So the success will then -- we will see over time. Of course, we have a business case with certain numbers. But here as there is no minimum commitment or anything like that. So time will show how it goes. And of course, we will then report in general how this go, and you will see this in the Embedded business numbers. And about the values, so also repeating a little bit, we -- last summer, we issued a new disclosure policy. So maybe just repeating some of this. So this is where you can see the difference, whether it is a stock exchange release or press release. So these are the threshold values. So either 7% of F-Secure revenue or then 15% of 3 years revenue, which are the threshold values. And it is like discounted value. So if something in the third year is 7% of this year, so it will be discounted into something smaller. And of course, how we discount? So if it's a minimum commitment, then we just look at the time value of the money. But if it's a ramp-up case based on just business estimates and business cases, so then we discount more because as we have also said that you then never know how things go. But this is how we go. And then with this case where we've had the stock exchange release, when it's signed, we will tell more about the amount and with the press release case. So time will tell how it goes. But this, I hope, helps you in making your assumptions. And this was the financials, and now we are with Timo, happy to answer any questions that you have.

It's Matti Riikonen, DNB Carnegie. A couple of questions. I'll take them one by one. Some years ago, when the split was made, I think your communication that the next couple of years, looking from the history were kind of being investment years and then normal operating leverage would take place when you have basically made those and then Tier 1 and Embedded services would be kind of growing and you would get the kind of profitability increasing from that. Now when you communicated that this was not done yet, so you continue to make those investments. How long should we expect that they are running? Is it for this year only? Or should we expect that they just continue to be burdening on your operating leverage also in '27 and perhaps onwards?

Maybe I start with a little bit technical comment. When we said that when we started as an independent company, we were building our independence and what was needed for that. What we are building now on is what happened after the Lookout Life acquisition and the Tier 1 capabilities. So this is a different building and different infrastructure because that Tier 1 strategy, we didn't have the day 1, then we were more in the Tier 2s. So I think this is a clear change what happened.

And live and learn. I mean, we have to admit that the range of development that we've had to do in terms of maturity goes slightly further than we foresaw. But to precisely respond to your question is that, we are seeing clear like peak investments this year, that will go away once done in the next years. Maintenance remains, but we naturally expect those to taper off as years go by. So we are making now investments that are made as long-term investments that will pay out in the coming years.

And some of the investments are related to these customer cases.

Yes, deployment projects.

And just to clarify, are these investments only for the Embedded Security capabilities and they have nothing to do with the Security Suite as such? Or are you basically adding your investments in both?

There are elements that touch both. I would say that the primary driver is Embedded Security and the Tier 1 partnerships, but that's not the only one. So we are naturally also working on things that have to do with the platform architecture that we have for Security Suite services, but will also serve Halo product when that is launched. So yes, heavily tilted. The need is heavily tilted towards Embedded and Tier 1, but it's not the only thing we're working on.

Then a technical question related to the deferred revenue that you described. How big was it in the context of this deferred revenue increasing quarter-over-quarter? So are we talking about fairly many millions or smaller sums?

It is in millions and not in hundreds, but not many millions, but it was clearly something that was explaining the change. It's not the only thing, but that was significant in Q4.

So excluding that, was the deferred revenue roughly the same as previous year?

Roughly normal.

It's Atte Riikola from Inderes. First, about the Security Suite outlook. Are you -- what kind of growth you're expecting for this year? Or are you expecting growth at least the Germany is still going down and how the other parts?

Sari used the term mixed bag earlier when she was going through some of our business, and that's what Security Suite is. There are unfortunately some partners which are on a downward trend. There are a number of partners who are doing absolutely phenomenally well. The balance is positive, and we're talking percent points of growth that we're expecting in that area.

So we can say that what we saw in Q4 is not satisfactory. So we definitely want to be -- it to be on positive side. But it is -- if we have Direct business declining and Embedded expected to show big growth. So it is there in between with the mixed bag of different customers, different areas doing in different ways.

Yes. And now if you think about this low growth, then the Embedded, it has to be like really high growth numbers in H2 if you want to at least get, let's say, mid-single-digit growth on group level. So what kind of visibility you have for the guidance at this time?

Good.

All right.

But of course, things will depend on in -- for example, it's clear that this one case, which we announced with that stock exchange release as it has a minimum commitment that starts from first month. So we have now said that we expect it to happen in Q2. So already, it makes a difference, whether it is in April or June. So the numbers are so big that even 1 month makes a difference.

Okay. And if you go back to the early 2025, I think then there was the AT&T product launch and something with the SoftBank in the Tier 1 scene. So how are those developing at the moment? Are they impacting the growth for this year more than last year?

Okay. So I can't actually speak on behalf of our partners. I will just say that both have enjoyed very nice subscriber growth. So the things that AT&T and -- have done with us with ActiveArmor as well as SoftBank with the identity monitoring service have been widely adopted by users. I can only say that. They've been good moves.

Felix Henriksson from Nordea. A few questions. When you look at your pipeline, does that allow for mid- to high single-digit growth also beyond 2026? Or will this be sort of a one-off revenue acceleration year off the back of these new deals that you have signed?

This is not guidance. We see that growth continues.

Of course, we have -- some of these cases which are declining. At some point, they will stop declining because you cannot decline forever. And then, for example, this -- one of these cases was shown as this ramp-up case. So, of course, that provides a lot of possibilities, and we have not like preempted our pipeline yet.

And within these Tier 1 partners that we're doing business with and that we've signed or are in the process of signing, it's not one thing that they do with us. There are potential add-on businesses, which may be even way more sizable than the ones that we have entered now. So within these same accounts, there are multiple opportunities to build growth on.

Good. So if you take a look at the 2026 EBITA guidance, so this will be the second consecutive year of declining trends. Clearly, investment needs ahead of you. But when will these ease? And is there anything that has changed in your thinking in regards to the operating leverage of the business when you compare to, for example, the 2024 Investor Day?

Yes. The financial targets that we have, where we have said that when revenue approaches EUR 200 million, we should approach the 40% EBITA. So that completely remains. So we still believe in that. But now the fact is that, we've been building these capabilities. So we have built the costs. Costs are on schedule, but as top line is not on schedule. So this is the outcome at this moment. But it's clear that -- and also already during the year, we should see quarters that look very different starting from the day when we launched the big case.

All right. Then finally, on AI. I think for a couple of quarters now, you've spoken about the high AI adoption among your employees, which is good to see. Do you think this will also generate some cost savings for you at some point when you're able to do more with less, for example? Or is it more about faster time to market, et cetera?

It is about both. How quickly and to what extent will we see, for instance, that we can do more with less, remains to be seen. I mean, we've all read articles on LinkedIn and media about how the case for AI within enterprise adoption is not straightforward nor is it for us. So we -- once again, I use the term live and learn. We will see how much effect it will have, but we will definitely be going for it. One of the things we want to do naturally is that, through smart use of AI and agentic AI and redesigning our processes and ways of working, we'll relieve more bandwidth of our existing people towards innovation, new product building and so forth. So that's -- so more bang for the buck is what we would be looking for. But time will tell. Nor Sari nor me can build it into the budget right now, but we're definitely working towards what you're asking.

And of course, taking AI into use also takes some investment. There is costs related to that. And maybe we are at the stage that not more with less, but more with the same. So I think we are already able to do more than previously.

Waltteri Rossi from Danske Bank. Actually, only 1 or 2 questions. How does the competitive landscape in the embedded market look today? Are you seeing your competitors offer similar embedded solutions? Or are they using their own brands mostly?

The latter. They're mostly using their own brands within a direct-to-consumer product. With regards to Embedded, we have competitors. It would be nice to say that there is no competition. Whenever there is a market, there is competition. So we do face competition, but I think it's safe to say that we are the only one in the market who is actually looking at this partner-centric approach. And we see that the Embedded approach, especially towards the bigger players is a core in our strategy. I think it is a rounding error in some of our competitors' offering. I mean they may be great in Direct business. But on this side, if you're not focusing on it, it's not quite the same.

Yes. Okay. And have you seen any changes in the competitors' behavior in that sense?

I'm sure they don't necessarily like us. I can't think of a case we would have lost in a while, seriously in the last 1.5 years on that front. They are trying to look for ways. I do know, they are trying to look for ways how to make their way into the Embedded cases that are run by these bigger players. But so far, things have worked well, but you never know. Each case is different. And we are in competitive situations currently in several cases and remains to be seen who stands as the victor at the end.

Matti Riikonen, Carnegie. A couple of more questions. The Direct channel sales have been declining last year. And was there anything unusual in the pace of decline? I understand that you haven't paid anything for the marketing. So that's the reason. But was there anything unusual in Q4? Because otherwise, I think we should be assuming that the similar decline pace would continue at least for '26 and until you perhaps make another decision whether to market it or not?

Nothing unusual is the short answer. And then with regards to something that I spoke about, Sari spoke about, Halo to begin with, is a Direct business product for us, and we're looking for that finished summer launch. And we will then be very keen to see what kind of response that gets in the market. We will be going for, you could call it, a test marketing approach. So it's not all out. We will naturally go and learn what kind of response it gets and develop the service and offering in accordance to that quickly. And then we may be pivoting the product also towards the partner segment or we will potentially expand it to wider and bigger markets that we operate in. So that is an upcoming change.

All right. And then to the Security Suite demand, which has also been kind of flattish or slightly declining last year, if you look at the FX adjusted numbers, there continues to be these leaks, which basically prevent you from growing that part of the business. Do you think that the new Tier 1 deals when they kind of flow to the Security Suite part would be able to change that so that also the Security Suite would be in growth this year, perhaps accelerating towards the year-end? But nevertheless, because if we don't -- or you don't get the support from this Security Suite revenue, which is also very profitable, it becomes a kind of gross margin question that if you -- only your kind of low gross margin businesses, i.e., Embedded services are growing, then, of course, you would have more pressure on your gross margin, which, again, then reduces your profitability and prevents the operating leverage from working. So what do you see in terms of Security Suite?

I understand. This is the first time I hear somebody making 84% gross margin as a low gross margin business. But anyways, I'll give you that. It's lower than what we're used to, but it's very, very high compared to pretty much any company. On the point about Security Suite, so we've been developing Embedded Security portfolio very actively in the past couple of years, 1.5 years. And it's now extensive. Part of what we're doing fundamentally developing our platforms is that, we are making it more smooth or we're smoothening the leveraging of Embedded Security capabilities in the total product. And that kind of benefit we will start seeing from quarter 2, quarter 3, quarter 4 onwards. We've had slightly different kinds of ways to package the functions that we've developed into different kind of outcomes. But naturally, we want to be Embedded Security everywhere and then the same leverage platform in Halo, Total, whatever might come in the future. So I would say that, that improves our capability to bring more innovation and more new value into Total. That's what we're looking for.

Maybe building on that. So yes, also the Tier 1 customers can take Total into like certain pockets. So it's not like excluded. And we have, as you've seen, the good development in the Nordics. So there are also markets where Security Suite is growing. That's fully possible. And with adding the Scam Protection even better on Total side, that will improve it.

One topic I want to raise, Sari made a really good point. Our Embedded Security products are for mobile only. That's Android and iOS-based applications. And if a partner of ours wants to extend security services with us also on to desktops, Windows and Mac, then Total is the way. We haven't got there with our -- the ones we've signed up, up until now, but there are speculations among some of them that they might also expand into usage of Total as the desktop solution.

And yes, one more point about Embedded. So we've made the big point about the gross margin there being lower than on Security Suite side. But when we look at the EBITA level in terms of percentages, so the contribution is definitely positive. So it's just that the cost structure is different, higher cost of revenue, but a small impact on our OpEx. So it will also drive our profitability in terms of EBITA. So it's just a different split.

Waltteri Rossi, Danske Bank. One more question. Could you again elaborate on the previous Tier 1 partnerships that you signed like 2 to 4, if I remember correctly, during '24 to '25? They were supposed to be major growth drivers last year. But clearly, that didn't materialize. So why is it that you don't really seem to highlight those partnerships for '26 as you highlight the latest ones? Or did I just miss it?

You didn't miss it, and it's a fair question. The partnership that we have signed in the past, these Tier 1 partners, as the name suggests, are massive. And the deal that we signed with them maybe for a fraction of what they're doing in the security arena. Like SoftBank publicly announces that they are working with F-Secure only on the identity monitoring side. So that's a subsegment which is still only a smaller part of the total business that SoftBank does. So the potential for growth is more limited in that one. Then we've had some service launches where we have seen that the partner has not lived up to the expectations of how actively they have been taking the product to market. So go-to-market naturally is absolutely crucial. Strategies change, priorities change and so forth. So I'm sure that there is no mala fide in any of that, but things have changed and they have potentially put way less focus on something that we've taken out to market together with them to do something else and focus on something else. And in some cases, it has nothing to do with security. In some cases, it's a much bigger thing that they want to do with us and combine the initial foothold towards that bigger case. So -- and then I can say this openly is that, we signed up Orange, Europe as a new partner in April, and they had plans to launch their first countries in September and December due to changes within their plans. They have not done so yet. They are intending to do so now in '26. But as once burned twice shy, we will talk about those once they have happened.

And this is very much explaining the outcome for year '25. We were expecting H2 to be much stronger than H1. And as these things have not happened as per our plan, so that's why H2 didn't turn out to be good. And many of those are related to those ramp-up cases where either it starts later or just the curve doesn't go up as deeply as expected. And this is also now the nature of our business when we are working with the partners, and we are doing our best, and we are supporting them, but the time line and there are many things that -- it's a risk of being in the business where we are. And that's why the guidance range is also very broad.

It's a risk, but it's also a massive opportunity.

Yes. There are also cases which have gone better than we expect. And I think the Nordics development during the past year has been an example of where things have gone really well.

We thought that our penetration rate was almost pretty much where how high it can go, not so. We did even better.

Just a quick follow-up on that. So why should we think that the risk related to these Tier 1 ramp-ups would be lower in '26 than it was...

Because of guaranteed revenues.

In one of those deals?

Not only one. I mentioned the one that we have not made a press release on, which was a significant extension. There is a guaranteed revenue as well as the one which was a stock exchange release. Those already changed the game in a way that we don't have to start from 0. And gives us confidence that these partners are in it for real because they are willing to put money on the table from the get-go. [ Ina ], any questions from online?

Yes. We have 2 questions from the chat. Let's start with Neil Steer asking, can you please explain what specifically drove the increase in CapEx, R&D? And will this trend continue over the course of 2026?

Yes. So some of the CapEx increase is related to the delivery projects. And some of it is related to building new features and some of it is about our infrastructure and just fixing our platform, so to say. And I think in all those areas, there have been increases.

And it does change from quarter-to-quarter and quarter 4 just happened to be higher.

Yes and very much related to the upcoming deliveries and new features that have been developed for delivery to customer.

Yes.

And then the second question is from Jaakko Tyrvainen about AI disrupting the software businesses. How do you see the risk of new AI-native solutions appearing in consumer cybersecurity field? Or do you see any risk of partners developing their own security, so it's using efficient AI code creation? And what are the key factors defending your position?

So if I start from the middle, I don't see any risk in our partners starting to develop their own cybersecurity capabilities. It does take tons of research, data understanding of behaviors and so on and so forth, what constitutes risks and so forth to be able to build these services. Those are not abundantly available and easily. But do we see risk that there are new AI-native, for instance, competitors and offerings coming? Absolutely, there is. So we have to be at the forefront. Halo is an example that we're not sitting on our hands and waiting for somebody to go and develop a new kind of a product based on AI, leverage the capabilities to, not only build using agentic AI capabilities and processes, but also have the product built in a new kind of way that there is AI visible in its experience and in the way that it is protecting and caring and providing trust to people. What was the last one, please?

The last one, what are the key factors defending your position?

Soon 38 years of experience operating in cybersecurity field, more partners than anybody else in the business. We have feelers into practically all the major markets in the world to see how threats are evolving and so forth. I would say that, that is a very strong strength for us. And we have endeavored into AI, I dare say, quickly in terms of both operating model within the team to build product as well as how do you protect people from AI-related threats. And I think that one proof of that is our Scam Image Scanner that won the Growth Innovation of the Year award at the AI Gala. So we are at the forefront with this, but the pace is not going to be easing up. So we need to keep pace. That's absolutely clear.

Thank you, Timo. And those were all the questions today.

Okay. It seems like the room has also made all of its questions. So thank you, everybody, for joining. Good questions, good discussion. I hope to see you all, if not elsewhere, we'll be at Mobile World Congress. If any of you will be over there, please let us know. Otherwise, we'll see you in the quarter 1 results session towards the end of April. See you then. Have a good day.

Thank you. Bye.