GFT Technologies SE (GFT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Yes. Hello, and welcome to today's call for GFT Technologies 2025 Preliminary Results. My name is Philip, and I will be your host today. On the company side, we have presenting Mr. Santos, who is the Global CEO; and Mr. Ruetz, who is CFO and Deputy CEO at GFT. Following the presentation, there will be a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] And with that, I hand over the word to Head of Investor Relations, Andreas Herzog. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Philip. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today's conference call and our preliminary results for 2025 financial year. My name is Andreas Herzog and I'm Head of Investor Relations and CSR Compliance at GFT. Joining me on the call today is our Global CEO, Marco Santos; and our CFO and Deputy CEO, Dr. Jochen Ruetz. Marco will begin with an overview of our key developments and highlights of the year, sharing also some light on our successful path in AI followed by Jochen, who will walk you through the 2025 financials in more detail. Marco will then conclude with our outlook for 2026 and some key strategic takeaways. The full presentation materials are available as usual on our website. And with that, I will hand over to you, Marco.

Thank you, Andreas. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Let me start with a clear and simple statement. In 2025, we delivered and exceeded our current guidance. This performance is particularly significant when we consider the broader market environment. The technology industry is going through an accelerated and continuous process of funding shifts. Artificial intelligence is accelerating software development, change in productivity dynamics and reshaping how clients approach technology modernization. Given my academic background in computer science, I could not be more excited to say the resulting opportunities as Global CEO of GFT Technologies. We anticipated the fundamental change early on and crafted our AI-centric 5-year strategy to be a driver of this transformation. Therefore, we are not changing direction. We are accelerating execution. Next slide, please. 2025 was defined by disciplined execution and tangible progress following the adjustment of our outlook earlier in the year. In an environment marked by currency volatility, accelerated technology change and structural shifts in our industry. Our priority was clear to stabilize performance, strengthen the quality of our earnings and close the year with improved momentum. We are proud to announce that we exceeded our guidance for 2025 with improved profitability in the second half. Let's take a closer look at our 2025 results. Revenue reached EUR 888 million, representing 2% growth in euros and 5% growth in constant currencies. Our EBT adjusted reached EUR 67 million, corresponding to a 7.6% margin which demonstrated positive improvements compared to the first 9-month margin of 7%. The EBT also improved in Q4, reaching EUR 46 million with a 52% (sic) [ 5.2%] margin, reflecting both better operating performance and cost management compared to the first 9 months margin of 4.9%. Excluding our portfolio optimization case of U.K. and software solutions, our core operations delivered 12% of growth in constant currencies with a 9% EBIT adjusted margin and a 7.5% EBT margin. Our main growth markets in 2025 showed strong momentum with Brazil growing 28%, Colombia, 19%; the USA 17% and APAC 17% year-over-year. Colombia delivered particularly strong performance, reflecting the successful integration and accelerated growth of our Software Solutions acquisition. In the United States, we achieved a solid 17% of growth, reinforcing our positioning in the most competitive and strategic technology environment worldwide. In terms of sectors, insurance and industry recorded strong double-digit growth. Overall, the second half of the year demonstrated that our strategic decisions and operational focus are translating into improved margins and stronger quality of earnings. This performance reinforces that our transformation towards an AI-centric operating model is not only strategically sound, it is financially sustainable. Based on this performance and our solid financial position, we will propose a dividend of EUR 0.50 per share, unchanged from 2025. Let me reinforce what I said in the beginning. We are leading the IT industry transformation. We do so because we didn't simply echo the hike of the markets. But because we identified the underlying potential of generative AI and its profound relevance for our industry as early as 2023. To be precise, in June 2023, we kicked off the strategic initiative to bring generative AI into the core business of GFT, our engineering services. We knew that we must have an IP to orchestrate AI and launched the development of the GFT AI impact products. Only 6 months after the launch of ChatGPT, well before I became the dominant topic across the enterprise markets and the IT industry. Throughout 2024, we moved from experimentation to deployments strongly integrating GenAI into our engineering services, software development life cycle and delivering first client and project implementations. While other people were building chatbots, we teach the hard work, validated use case in real and mission-critical environments and build up internal know-how and capabilities. As a result, we published our AI-centric 5-year strategy to the market in March 2025. We doubled down on the profound positive impact of artificial intelligence, and we positioned GFT to become a true responsible AI-centric technology powerhouse. From there, we accelerated execution. We rebranded Wynxx based on an architectural evolution of GFT impact towards an agentic AI platform. We expanded globally across clients, countries and users and in our Capital Markets Day of October 2025, we launched our AI modernization offering powered by Wynxx legacy transformer and continued expanding the platform into new domains. We've built AI native capabilities early formalized the AI-centric strategy, and we are now scaling it. The GFT AI-centric 5-year strategy is more relevant than ever. It is perfectly aligned with all the major market shifts we have seen over the last 12 to 18 months. When we defined our strategy, we positioned GFT to become the best responsible AI-centric digital transformation company in the world. Our mission is to bring the best responsible AI-centric digital solutions, software development and technology service to every company in the world, not as a marketing message but as an operating model. We embedded AI into our DNA, our delivery platforms in the core process of our software development life cycle in the implementation of our partner platforms into modernization methodology and into the way we scale globally. Again, I could not be more excited to say that our strategy is more relevant and validated today than ever. The major AI market shifts we are witnessing are not challenging our direction. They are reinforcing it. We developed a comprehensive transformation road map builds around clear strategic goals, defined objectives and measurable KPIs. Our execution is structured across 4 core dimensions, brand, client service and talent, supported by strong group-wide governance organization leadership and performance management. All strategic initiatives are fully in motion. Today, I will touch on some of the key ones, our AI-centric transformation, our rebranding positioning, the expansion of global accounts, Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients, and high value-added services and offerings. And what I will show you today is how this strategy is being executed constantly and with measurable impact. Thank you. Let me now turn to our execution of the 5-year strategy. Our strategic initiatives and the tangible impacts we are creating with key clients and through our brand positioning. Firstly, and driven by our proven AI capabilities, we continue to expand and deepen relationships with large strategic accounts. During the fourth quarter, we expanded 2 additional group Tier 1 clients, each now exceeding EUR 25 million annual revenue. This reflects both client trust and our ability to scale long-term partnerships. In Colombia, our largest clients accelerated strongly with 35% revenue growth and has now become a top group Tier 2 clients. This demonstrated our ability of successful integrated company acquisitions and to unlock growth through offering cross-selling. In the United States, we achieved a 10% revenue growth with a key major retail banking clients, which moved into our top Tier 2 client category. This is particularly important in a highly competitive and mature markets, where expansion is driven by differentiation and delivery quality. Beyond client growth, we also strengthened our global position. In 2025, we completed our global rebranding across 20 countries, built around unified responsible AI centric positioning. This is not just a visual update. It reflects our strategic evolution and how we want to be perceived in the market. And finally, I am proud to highlight that GFT has been named as the #1 global leader in the IDC market space for worldwide cloud-native core banking implementation services. This recognition, one of the most important in our history confirms our engineering depth, our domain expertise in financial service and our ability to deliver complex transformation programs at scale. Let me now turn to the execution of our AI-centric transformation strategic initiative and the tangible progress and impacts we are creating with AI. First, we significantly scaled our Wynxx AI agentic platform focused on software development life cycle and legacy modernization in 2025. It is active in 8 countries serving 92 clients representing more than 250% of growth in clients year-over-year with a total influence direct contract value of EUR 70 million representing more than 700% revenue growth year-over-year. This reflects not only AI adoption but real commercial impact. A key enabler of this strong acceleration has been Wynxx multi-model architecture, which allows our platform to leverage over OpenAI GPT, Gemini and especially Anthropic Claude Sonnet and Anthropic Claude Opus models, which are delivering the highest efficiency and code quality results across our legacy modernization, software development use case. These models are now at the core of our most advanced enterprise AI deployments. A strong proof of this impact is Bradesco Seguros, the largest insurance company in Latin America. There, the adoption of Wynxx has expanded in 22% quarter-over-quarter, increasing our AI native team from 180 to 220 engineers while delivering a 40% productivity improvements across software development legacy modernization. This clearly demonstrates that AI is not reducing demands. It is driving revenue growth and value creation. Beyond software development, we are also developing an agentic AI platform for credit risk management as a top Tier 1 bank in Europe. In the large-scale agentic platform for orchestration of manufacturing, engineering and field services for the major automotive clients in the United States. These initiatives show how GFT leveraging agentic AI expertise into mission-critical business process at our clients. We also strengthened OUR ecosystem, we are leading the deployment of Anthropic Claude codes and GitHub Copilots across large teams of 50 and 130 engineers, respectively, had 2 Tier 1 clients in the U.S. These are also concrete examples of the implementation of AI native engineering teams whose objective is not hand coding software anymore, Rather, they develop software orchestrating AI code assistance, agents and large language models. We also launched GFT's Global AI native software development Center of Excellence to scale multi-model and agentic engineering across our organization and client engagements. It's designed to be tool and module agnostic, allowing us to integrate and orchestrate leading solutions focusing currently on the AI coding tools, Anthropic Claude codes and GitHub Copilots as well as OpenAI Codex and Gemini code assist based on client requirements. This structured approach ensures focus on the most capable tools on the market as well as governance best practice and scalable adoption while maintaining flexibility and independence in an evolving AI ecosystem. At the same time, we launched our AI modernization offering powered by Wynxx legacy transformer. This formalized our approach to accelerating legacy modernization through AI and established a clear commercial framework for capturing this massive growing market opportunity. I will come back to this topic later. Finally, we expanded our Wynxx agentic AI platform into some fronts, its foundation, business process, data intelligence, studio and marketplace, position it as a comprehensive platform rather than a single-product solution. I will give you more details in the following slides. Taken together, this milestone show consistent execution in scaling the platform proving impacted clients, expanding into mission-critical domains building ecosystem capabilities and productizing AI modernization. This is how we are operationalizing our AI-centric strategy not as a concept, but as measurable progress across markets and clients. As I mentioned, we significantly scaled our Wynxx agentic AI platform in 2025. This reflects real commercial impacts, not experimentation. Wynxx covers the full software development life cycle from store creation and estimation to testing code-fixing, architecture support and legacy transformation. It's deeply embedded into delivery. Importantly, the platform leverage leading foundation models from Anthropic Claude, OpenAI and Google, combining the strongest capabilities of each in a true multi-model architecture. This ensures performance, flexibility, cost efficient, consumption of tokens and independence in a rapidly evolving AI ecosystem. But scaling the software development life cycle, legacy modernization was only the first step. Let me now show you how we are expanding beyond soft engineering into the broad enterprise landscape. Through our foundation layer builds on this MCP service governance, orchestration, FinOps and integration across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, we can deploy agentic capabilities into complex enterprise environments. At the same time, our architecture remains multi-module and cloud agnostic, including sovereign clouds and open source model capabilities when and where they are required. The next layer of evolution and expansion of Wynxx is into business processes. We are moving beyond software development into functional, operational and business domains, such as HR operations, resource staffing, project portfolio management, financial risk assessment, compliance, financial transaction monitoring, manufacturing maintenance among others in pipeline. Earlier, I shared examples of our agentic credit risk solution and our large-scale automotive orchestration program in the United States. They are all becoming new elements on Wynxx business processes. But these are not isolated use case. We have developed 3 agents for our own global HR function at GFT automating workflows and decision support for talent acquisition, which we are bringing into Wynxx to offer to clients as a scalable AI value proposition. In addition, we feel our Smaragd platform, we are developing Agentic AI anti-money laundering capabilities, bringing AI-driven orchestration into financial transaction monitoring and compliance environment. This is a natural extension of our deep regulated sector expertise and reflects the fundamental shift. AI is no longer limited to software code productivity. It's an orchestrator and decision-maker of business workflows. This position Wynxx not just as a software engineering tool but as an enterprise enabling platform. And we did not stop there. The third layer of expansion focused on data and intelligence. We are combining data intelligence product and assets and extending Wynxx into industry-specific data domains from banking, insurance, to manufacturing, robotics, oil and gas and retail. This is where domain expertise becomes critical. Agentic systems must operate within regulated frameworks, industry data models and mission critical architectures. Our approach combines AI orchestration with deep knowledge and sector-specific intelligence, enabling intelligent advisory systems, all built on a scalable foundation. So what we are seeing is a strategic progression from software development to business process to data intelligence. And now the final step, the next layer of evolution is the democratization of Wynxx. At its core, Wynxx integrates software development life cycle capabilities with business process orchestration and data intelligence from software development, operational workflows to industry-specific data and intelligence. This platform sits on a strong foundation of governance orchestration and multi-model flexibility supporting Anthropic Claude models, including Sonnet and Opus as well as other leading foundation models in sovereign and enterprise-grade architecture. Now Wynxx is no longer a single-layer tool with the launch of the Wynxx Agentic Studio and marketplace. We are opening the platform for structured extensibility and ecosystem participation. The Wynxx Agentic Studio allows all GFT teams more than 12,000 engineers, employees and our clients should build, customize and integrate agentic capabilities into their own environment in a governance way. The Wynxx marketplace enables reusable agents, assets and accelerators to be available, shared and consumed at scale across all GFT. We are not building isolated AI features. We are building an AI-native operating layer, this progression reflects our strategic ambition to move from AI adoption to AI orchestration and from isolated use cases to enterprise-scale AI-centric transformation. Let me now connect our AI-centric platform evolution to a concrete commercial opportunity, AI legacy modernization. First, independent industry researchers forecast that the modernization market is expected to grow through approximately USD 25 billion in 2025 to around USD 57 billion by 2030 representing around 18% of CAGR, growing multiple times faster than traditional IT services. At the same time, 62% of U.S. organizations still rely heavily on legacy systems and 75% of banks globally run on legacy core platforms. These systems struggle with regulatory change, product time to market and increasing total cost of ownership. And the most striking number, an estimated 250 billion lines of COBOL remain active use globally. AI modernization is not a short-term IT initiative. It's a multi-decade structural cycle. The magnitude of accumulated technical debts is unprecedented. Forbes Global 2,000 companies are estimated to hold between $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in technical debt. This is not a technological constraint, structural bottleneck that hampers innovation, agility and growth across enterprise. AI can compress legacy modernization time lines from years to quarters that's what Anthropic recently announced to the market. This is fully in line with what we presented during our Capital Markets Day in October last year. AI is making large-scale modernization more feasible, more affordable and less risky, unlocking productivity and cost advantage that were previously out of reach. This combination massive technical debt, structural demand in AI-enabled acceleration defines a significant brand new growth opportunity for GFT today and in the years to come, something that simply did not exist about 2 years ago. We have already delivered more than 8 AI-native modernization project case studies using our Wynxx legacy transformer. achieving productivity improvements between 42% and 70% and up to 95% accuracy in business rule handling among many other efficiency KPIs. These are not pilots, POCs and experiments, they are large production grade modernization programs, delivering manageable outcomes. We began with the modernization strategy itself using generative AI combined with more than 35 years of GFT's domain expertise. We defined a structural transformational road map aligned with business objectives, regulatory constraints and long-term architectural goals. From there, we designed the cloud-native target model, it's not simply about linking systems to the cloud. It's about rearchitecturing them using the best market practices, resilient, scalable and ready for continuous innovation. But the strategy on target design alone are not enough, execution must be embedded into the full life cycle. That's why we integrate AI across development, security and testing to continuous integration and deployment, ensuring modernization delivers not just change, but performance and operational control. Now what makes large-scale modernization particularly complex is that business logic often exists in 2 places. First, in documented process and operating models and second and more critically, feed them deep within decades of legacy lines of code. That's why our approach combines 2 perspectives: a top-down AI approach where we preserve and modernize these rules within the new architecture, reimagining process while maintaining regulatory and operational integrity and a bottom-up AI approach where we extract hidden logic and documented dependences and deeply layered functionality directly from legacy systems. Many of these rules exist nowhere else but in the code itself. That is where our Wynxx legacy transformer becomes crucial. Wynxx suites understand and structures legacy codes, enabling us to restructure complete applications in a modern architecture while preserving and evolving core business rules. This combination, strategic redesign, cloud native architecture, life cycle embedded AI and agentic core transformation allows us to move from manual migration to industrialize AI modernization. And that's the key difference. We are not just migrating systems. We are transforming business platforms in a governed, secured, responsible, scalable and repeatable way. Now to conclude this part of the presentation, let's take some steps back and gain strategic perspective. All the examples and tangible results presented here underscore our leadership in driving our industry transformation. This is not only because we apply Wynxx to become an AI centric but because we genuinely believe and understand the major shift of AI. We started our AI-centric journey way back in early 2023 ahead of the competition, and we are leveraging on more than 35 years of domain knowledge, engineering experience, a clear asset in these transformative times and a claim that not many can take. Jochen, over to you.

Thank you, Marco. After this really important deep dive on our technological changes in the GFT business landscape. Let's move to the 2025 financials and directly jump to Slide 17 where we see the overall KPIs at a glance. Revenue, Marco already pointed it out, grew by 2 percentage points in constant currencies, that's 5%. Now allow me to be very precise, 5.3% is the exact number in constant currencies. The order backlog is down by 2% in constant currencies, up by 1 percentage point and this is a bit weaker than a year ago. When we moved into 2025, maybe you remember, a year ago, we talked about a couple of long-term contracts in the U.S. which was supporting the order book, but they are still there, but they are one year younger now. Therefore, we are still okay with the order backlog as we see it today. And looking at the profitability, EBIT adjusted is down 14%, mostly due to the strategic realignment in U.K. and software solutions that we talked about in the quarters before. I mean the bullet points on the right, you see that U.K. and Software Solutions burdened the EBIT adjusted with EUR 14.8 million, while all other units improved the EBIT adjusted by EUR 4.2 million, and this even includes the EUR 1 million negative FX effect. When we look at the EBT, the earnings before tax, we, of course, see the development impacted by the already mentioned operational challenges. But on top, on the EBT level, we had a one-off in 2024 in line with the fiscal court proceedings in Brazil, a one-off of EUR 9.8 million positive, which could, of course, not be repeated in 2025. We saw higher capacity adjustments than in the year before. They stood at minus EUR 13 million in 2025. It was EUR 10 million a year ago. But the other way around, M&A effects smaller. We had less costs from M&A effects, EUR 8.6 million negative in '25 that was nearly EUR 14 million the year before. And then there were some minor virtual share effects. We had a stable tax rate of roughly 29%. Moving forward, Slide #18. Let's look at the growth by sector and changes in our client portfolio. And I start on the left, and here, we see that in the sector, industry and others, we saw a growth of 14% in the year 2025. This client group now representing 12% of GFT's overall revenue. Insurance clients grew by 15% of the revenue in 2025. Now this category represents 17% of the GFT revenue. And last but not least, the big block of our banking business decreased by 2 points to 71% on the overall revenue. Main driver here was the U.K. business, which was shrinking in '25 and exclusively with banking clients. On the right side of the slide, we see our client portfolio. We categorize the clients in bigger than EUR 10 million to EUR 25 million. Marco used the terms Tier 1 and Tier 2 which is the same meaning. So our clients above EUR 25 million or Tier 1 clients grew by 2 new clients. It's now representing 29% of the overall GFT business. So we were able to expand 2 Latin American clients into this group. At the same time, the clients between EUR 10 million and EUR 25 million are internally called Tier 2 clients, went down slightly to 28% because we lost 2 big ones to the Tier 1s. And then between the smaller clients above EUR 2.5 million, below EUR 2.5 million, it's quite stable compared to previous years. Moving forward, Slide #19, let's look at the fourth quarter in detail. On the left side, we see the revenue, and first, comparing it year-over-year Q4 '25 versus Q4 '24. We had a solid revenue growth 3% or 7% in constant FX, mainly driven by our business in Brazil, Spain and Colombia. And we saw a pickup versus the last quarter, Q4 of last year versus Q3 of last year of 9%, mainly due to positive business development, again, in Brazil, Spain, Poland and Italy. Megawork contributed roughly EUR 4 million in the fourth quarter. On the right side, the EBIT adjusted, again, comparing to last year's fourth quarter shows a 9% reduction, which is mainly due to the U.K. realignment that we have been working on. Margin reached 9.4% in the fourth quarter. Comparing to quarter-over-quarter, Q3 versus Q4 2025, we saw a significant improvement of 40%, primarily driven by high margins, good business profitability in Brazil, Spain and U.S. margin stood at 7.2% in Q3 and 9.4% in Q4. Moving forward, Slide #20. Here, we look at our performance per business segment. On the left side, the revenue evolution, let's start with Continental Europe, where we are down 3%, mostly due to macro headwinds particularly in Germany, Italy and Spain. And of course, software solutions is in these numbers, too. Minus 3% this year '25 compares to plus 9% in the year '24. So we had a good growth in Europe in '24, but the minus 3% was a bit disappointing from our European market in the year 2025. Looking at Americas, U.K. and APAC, we see revenue grew by 6% which was 12% in constant currencies as this is obviously all non-euro countries. And by that, offsetting the reduction in the U.K. So we showed 6% growth despite the decline on the revenue side in the U.K. On the right, the EBIT adjusted by business segment, I usually mentioned at this moment in time, the end of the year that this is probably not the best KPI for GFT as our 2 business segments are very interwoven with internal delivery nearshore, offshore. But still, let's look at the numbers. Europe is stable on EBIT adjusted, more or less the same number, no change to previous year. Americas, U.K. and APAC is 12% down primarily to the business decline in the U.K. The U.K. was minus EUR 12 million versus last year. So that was heavily impacting this part of our business. Moving forward, Slide #21, showing the revenue growth rates of our different markets. And as usual, I start at the bottom, APAC and others, our smallest region grew by 17% in 2025, but it only stands for 3% of the GFT business, but 17% growth is a good result, mainly coming from Singapore, the Emirates, Dubai, Vietnam and Thailand. U.K. often talked about this year already, minus 29% versus previous year. Of course, most of this coming from U.K. Now you might ask yourself, what's the others in U.K. Yes, we separate Gibraltar from U.K., and that's the only additional effect that we have. So U.K. and our clients in Gibraltar are both down. But our transformation process is strongly progressing. And our new and very experienced managing director in the U.K. started February 1 and is already with clients today. North America, growth 2025 is 8%, fueled by our U.S. evolution, 17% there, Canada growth was 3%, leading to an average 8% growth from North America. Latin America growth, 22%, strongest contribution coming from Brazil and Colombia. In Colombia, we have a month of M&A. Inside, we acquired Sophos in February '24. Organic growth in Colombia was 10%. And so overall, good growth on the Latin American side. And last but not least, Europe, minus 4%, driven by a more or less flat Spanish evolution, but a decline in Germany, Italy, and let me mention again, although we don't put it on the slide is software solutions. Bringing me to Slide #22, our income statement. I think we can do this quite fast. Revenue is, of course, unchanged 2 percentage points. Second bullet point is highlighting the one-off we booked in '24 from the Brazilian fiscal proceedings worth EUR 10.58 million, and when looking at personnel costs, this is the challenge to be improved, which then will improve the margin side of the personnel cost versus overall revenue ratio we're showing in bullet point #4, we have to be back to 83% for what we want to achieve in our guidance. And last but not least, let me mention the tax rate. It is exactly 28.5% as in the year before. And that's what we foresee it for '26. The tax rate will be between 28.5% and 29%. This brings me to Slide 23. Cash flow statement. We started the year with a net cash of minus EUR 42 million, we saw operating cash flow at plus EUR 43 million, which is significantly lower than in the year '24 for 2 main reasons. First, we had a lower profitability in '25 Q4. And second, we already mentioned that a year ago, we had very, very positive favorable working capital effect at the end of 2024 which immediately means it burdens the year after. And a lot of our big clients either pay before new year or after the year. And in '24, that was very positive. In '25 working capital was okay to slightly unfavorable. And that was, in the end, pushing the operating cash flow to EUR 43 million. We had hoped for getting closer to EUR 50 million in the end. But believe me, the money came in, in January. Cash flow from investing activities was mostly Megawork acquisition, which burdened us with EUR 6.8 million. Cash flow from financing activities, we had the acquisition of treasury shares worth EUR 15 million and the shareholder dividend. And then we mentioned the free cash flow adjusted, which is at roughly EUR 28 million. The main drivers why it is below '24 is the lower profitability. The already mentioned favorable working capital at the end of '24, burdening '25 and the not so favorable working capital at the end of '25, which could benefit '26, which we will talk about in the coming quarters. So let's move forward to Slide #24. Very quick on balance sheet, really nothing to write home about. The overall total of the balance sheet is down by 2 percentage points. Equity is mostly stable. Equity ratio is down a bit to 41.1%. Conscious of time, let's move forward to Slide 25. Let's look at the left first, employee number was up 2% throughout the year, comparing year-end to year-end, 11,772 full-time equivalents. On the external contractor side, we see an increase to 1,445. But please be reminded that the company we acquired in Brazil in September of last year, Megawork works in the SAP field of Brazil, which is a pure freelancer market. The whole SAP market in Brazil is freelancers only, and we added 300 freelancers via Megawork. So obviously, the rest of GFT slightly reduced the usage of freelancers in 2025. Utilization in the middle came in at 92.6%. And let me mention on top that inside this utilization, we had less nonbillable hours than in the previous quarters which we immediately saw on the profitability side. And to the very right, attrition, slightly down to 12.2%, of course, overall up compared to a year ago. This little decline, I look back at '23 and '24 reporting. We always have that in the last quarter. It seems like in Latin America, once spring is coming, summer is coming attrition is reducing somewhat. That's why this explains the reduction to 12.2% from 12.7% at the end of Q3. It's mostly linked to our Latin American markets. And my last 2 slides, we always have an additional milestone slide and on our achievements. And this is Slide #26, when we look at how did we do in our free cash flow milestone, we wanted to achieve EUR 35 million of free cash flow. We achieved EUR 28 million. I already mentioned on the cash flow side that working capital was not favorable. That was a missing EUR 7 million at the end of the year. Money came in, in January, and that will help the 2026 free cash flow. Net debt was spot on 0.8x EBITDA at the end of the year, and utilization was also in line with the milestone we gave, 93% -- 92.2% to be precise. Now let's look at '26 for these milestones. I look at free cash flow. First, we believe free cash flow, reflecting higher profitability and more or less stable working capital should be at EUR 40 million, maybe with everything I've said on the slides before, that's even a bit conservative, could exceed those EUR 40 million in free cash flow in 2026. Net debt is expected to be at 0.2x EBITDA, if we do not spend on potential further acquisitions. This is assumed in this number right now. And utilization is expected to be on a similar level as in 2025. With that, Marco, over to you.

Thank you, Jochen. Let me now turn to our outlook for 2026. For 2026, we are guiding revenue growth of more than 5%, representing approximately EUR 930 million, an adjusted EBT margin of 7.6% corresponding to around EUR 71 million and a strong improvement in the EBT margin to 6%, representing approximately EUR 56 million, all figures in constant currencies. In summary, we expect a strong improvement in EBT margin alongside continued revenue growth driven by a deliberate substitution from traditional labor-based delivery towards an AI-native engineering service combined with assets, IPs and the Wynxx agentic AI platform. Our commercial focus remains clear on expanding global accounts, Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients as financial service institutions are increasingly moving towards AI-powered legacy modernization creating structural long-term demand. We see this translating into sustainable opportunity across our core markets. We will continue the disciplined execution of our AI-centric 5-year strategy and its global strategic initiatives with Wynxx serving as a key differentiator in our offering delivery, client engagements and modernization progress. This includes investments in the modernization of Smaragd into an AI cloud-based anti-money laundering solution to capture new opportunities, which will be generated by upcoming regulatory requirements in the DACH region, Europe and globally. In parallel, we will continue investments in AI-native assets and IP built on the Wynxx agentic AI platform, expand our AI native centers of excellence, continue workforce AI risk scaling and strengthen the AI infrastructure and platform capabilities across our globe delivery model. 2026 is a year of accelerating execution advancing our transformational AI tool and AI-centric business model while expanding margin, invest in our strategy and sustaining revenue growth. Let me briefly reaffirm our midterm ambitions for 2029. Our targets remain unchanged. We continue to aim for revenue of approximately EUR 1.5 billion, and adjusted EBT margin of around 9.5% and a service mix based on at least 50% in high value-added sets in AI-native delivery. At the same time, we plan to further expand our Smart Shop delivery model towards 40% ratio including AI. These ambitions are fully aligned with the strategic direction we have outlined today. Continued revenue growth will be driven by key Tier 1 Tier 2 clients and global accounts. Cross-selling of our high value-added services and offerings supported by organic growth through our AI modernization and AI native engineering service, combined with IP assets bundled into our Wynxx agentic AI platform. Our M&A ambitions are focused on selective acquisitions on high-value added service companies in existing GFT markets. Profitability improvements will benefit from a continued shift towards high value-added services and native engineering service, which bring higher margins by design. Further expansion of smartshore incorporating AI centric module and a disciplined focus on scale within our existing geographies, especially our key Tier 1 growth markets. At the same time, profitability engineering measures and the normalization of Smaragd and GFT U.K. performance are expected to contribute to continuous operational margin improvement across 2027 through 2029. In short, our midterm trajectory remains intact and the progress we made in 2025 reinforce our confidence in achieving these ambitions. Ladies and gentlemen, to conclude, let me emphasize a few key messages. First, we have demonstrated our strategy delivers, we slightly exceeded our current 2025 guidance. We strengthened the quality of our earnings and improving profitability in the second half, demonstrating operational discipline and focus on execution. Second, we continue to make tangible progress on our AI-centric 5-year strategy, expanding 2 additional group Tier 1 clients beyond the EUR 25 million annual revenue mark. This is a strong proof point of our offering and service differentiation and our ability to scale long-term client partnerships. Based on our successful scale-up of Wynxx in the global markets, it's moving beyond software development life cycle towards a broader agentic AI platform, expanding into modernization, business process, data intelligence, agentic studio, marketplace becoming a responsible and secure enterprise AI orchestration platform. With our AI modernization offering powered by the Wynxx legacy transformer, we are translating the strategic direction into a structured commercial framework to capture a multiyear modernization opportunity at scale. This is a sign that artificial intelligence is expanding opportunities, not reducing them. AI is lowering technical barriers and software development in legacy transformation, making modernization faster, more feasible and less risky. However, large-scale transformation has never been simple, it requires more than technology. It requires deep engineering strength and domain expertise, which requires an understanding of regulatory environments, legacy architectures, industry-specific processes, transmission critical systems and the ability to stay in control to govern and to orchestrate change across complex systems. This is where we see our role. We entered 2026 with clarity, confidence and positive momentum grounded in our AI-centric strategy, differentiated platform and IP and a strong engineering foundation and our ambition to lead the AI native era. Thank you very much, and let's go beyond together. Now Jochen and I will be happy to answer your questions.

Yes. Thank you very much, guys, for the presentation. [Operator Instructions] And we see the first question comes from Wolfgang Specht.

Yes. Thanks for the presentation. Three questions to start with from my end. At first, influenced contract value, can you give us some more information why you placed influenced in front of that? So it's only a part of these contracts, let's say, Wynxx related and then on restructuring, can you give us, let's say, some insight where you are currently standing regarding timing for both U.K. and for systems solutions and what we should expect in further structuring steps during 2026. And finally, on your order backlog, which is slightly down year-on-year while you're guiding revenues up mid-single digits. Does this mean you're looking at a very rich pipeline and expect more short-term deals to come on the table? That's it from my end.

Okay. So thank you very much for the question. So what does it mean? Influenced total revenue, it's a quite simple KPI for us. It is the total value of the project of the service that we sold that we brought that we embedded Wynxx as an AI agentic platform. And so that's the whole services, the whole value of the activity.

And it's never just 1 thing that wins a contract, right? It's usually many factors. Restructuring costs, U.K. software solutions, both done, finished. We believe we have the right size since the end of year 2025 in the U.K. and in Software Solutions so the EUR 13 million we spent last year on restructuring, we believe, will be far lower in 2026, roughly half of that EUR 6 million to EUR 6.5 million. Order backlog, yes, we do believe the pipeline is rich enough exactly, as you said, to cover for the revenues that we've foreseen. The 1% downturn, honestly, this is more statistical and delta that it really is a drive force. Therefore, order backlog is okay for this guidance. More questions.

Hello, everyone. Awesome. No, we're not in Q4. First on Wynxx. Firstly, how easy is it to implement Wynxx and what type of projects do not utilize Wynxx, is there any category that's clearly not able to utilize Wynxx, for example, or the type of customer. Then I have a question on the market. Clearly, your business ex U.K. is doing good. What's driving the normalization in your view also in the discussions that you have with your customers? Is it a normalization or is the pickup really driven by AI technology, for example, due to the lower project costs or pressure to stay competitive or something similar. And then lastly, can you specify the sales outlook for GFT U.K. in '26. I'm asking to get a better understanding of the different dynamics within the group.

Thank you for the question. So regarding the implementation of Wynxx and how easy it is, it's a super interesting question. As we started the journey way back, as I mentioned, 2023, started GFT Impact. It was the seat of Wynxx. In 2024, we were able to deploy it, We faced lots of challenge of implementation of GFT Impact. It was later on Wynxx into the clients in order to customize it for their environment, okay, for the clients. And in the last year, we invested strongly on the infrastructure of Wynxx in order to make it straightforward. So that was a very good decision and a very strategic decision that we did. So we invested on the foundation of Wynxx that I mentioned here. And then we made it much more straightforward. So the implementation now for clients is really fast deployment. So we evolved a lot on that front. So that's your first question. The second question, which is the U.K. normalization, what is the driver, right, of the U.K. normalization. We are very, very happy with the new MD that we hired for GFT U.K. So he is already on board. He's already with clients, already with the teams now. We understand that we are now in the second phase so the first phase was the major change of the organization last year. But now we are in the second phase of this transformation. We are now on the, let's say, stabilization and preparing the ground in order to accelerate. And I must say that we are very happy with the results of U.K. in January actually that also came possibly as we were planning, which is very good news for us.

And let me attach the numbers to it because you asked for it on Slide 36, we anyway show our turnaround situations in a dedicated way in the deck. And for '26 -- while in '25, we had revenues of roughly EUR 80 million in the U.K., we believe we will see the turnaround happen somewhere mid '26. But overall, for '26, we expect revenues to be at EUR 70 million. That would be another EUR 10 million reduction coming from the U.K., and that is baked into this guidance. Hope we covered your questions.

That's clear. One follow-up question, if I may. And that's regarding the projects that do not utilize Wynxx. Is there any type? Or should we assume that long term or midterm, yes, all your projects will utilize Wynxx to some degree, at least.

Thank you for reminding for that. We are pushing Wynxx as our core differentiation of GFT and we have a very strong and good adoption, as you saw in the numbers. However, we have clients, and we have global clients that they say, "I have my Wynxx." I have already made a global agreement with Microsoft with GitHub Copilot. I developed my X layer here of governance, and I have my Wynxx. And that's fine, and that's fine for us. And we want to be the best AI native engineering partner of that client and be the best using the GitHub Copilot. And then we are bringing our center of excellence and knowledge of that in order to differentiate ourselves from the competition and leverage over this new AI adoption. And as a second step, we want to bring Wynxx later on as an add-on because Wynxx is connected -- is already connected with Anthropic Claude, with GitHub Copilot, Gemini so we can bring that as a second step. So that's our strategy. But if the clients at the very end does not get Wynxx, we are -- we want to be the best AI native engineering service for them.

Thank you very much for your question, Simon. Next up is Felix Ellmann.

Okay. Thank you. Nice to hear these results from you. Congratulations to these. I have 1 question. With regards to the software segment, many clients in some sectors are awaiting the development of AI and they are waiting for signing new orders looking at the AI field, and some of them even stopped their new orders because they said, "Hey, let look, how far the AI development will go." And do you see any difference in the behavior of clients? Do they sign shorter projects? Do they sign later? Do they even sign earlier? Or how do they behave within the fast development we see in the sector?

We see today clients moving forward. We saw last year that several clients for some projects or initiatives, they were kind of in the waiting time, right, in order to understand how technology will evolve and move in direction. But we sense now that clients are already, let's say, agreed that AI is part of a future, and they are moving forward with implementation of projects with development of projects, bringing AI and even with the implementation of ISPs and definite software vendors and software as a service. And naturally, we see also more discussions towards build instead of buying. So there are several clients that are moving to us and say, let's review these and maybe build leveraging over AI, which, by the way, is music to our ears, it's very good because we are positioning be that AI native leader to build, but also implement core banking, thought machines, sales force and implement other technology, SAP and bring the best to the clients.

Well, on the long term, you could even cut some software revenues from the software vendors of the field by building new software.

Look, I know that is one of the key discussions on the IT market this year. What I can tell you is as the barriers of creating builds reducing and if you deploy AI and you can create more so there is a natural discussion about, let's build, right? Let's build and let's evaluate these functionality ABCD, instead of I pay recurrent license for a platform, right, vendor. I can build that. So that's clear. However, I think that course, that's my perspective, okay? That's my perspective. I think that the core services, they are going to be heavily based on SAPs or sales force. And by the way, if you look at the site of one of the largest AI in the market, one of the ones that I mentioned today. If you look at their sites, they are hiring people for sales force, for example, right? So they are really moving towards the core. They are implementing SaaS, but the satellite functions from SaaS, those ones are under discussion in terms of to be built. Again, I think at GFT, we are very well positioned because it can build AI and again implement that with my SEV partners, and not naturally accelerate AI for the ISV partners that I have, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, and others.

Thank you for your questions, Felix, and we have 1 more question, which comes from Lukas Spang.

Yes. I would like to start with the cash flow topic. I thought you already mentioned that, that could be kind of conservative. If I take a progressive calculation and take the EUR 35 million you initially planned for last year, take the EUR 10 million EBT on top and then the EUR 7 million, which slipped from Q4 to Q1, I would even come up at EUR 52 million. So just from understanding in the EUR 40 million that I used behind this EUR 40 million why just from EUR 40 million for 2026.

We were indeed torn between EUR 40 million and EUR 45 million. There's still 1 challenge. We still have to pay taxes. So the EBT has 1 cost position, not mentioned. And on the working capital, we simply took a more cautious stance than you have now done in your calculation.

Okay. And then on the adjusted margin level if I compare 2025 to your guidance, 2026. It's both 7.6%. So regarding -- or looking forward, you have this 9.5% for 2029. So why is there no progression in terms of margin in this year versus last year?

Yes. Two main reasons. The software solutions, part of GFT is still an investment mode as we have described. So we will have kind of the same result in software solutions as we had in 2025 on EBIT adjusted level. Again, I'm referring to Slide 36 to see the details. And the U.K. is back to black in terms of positive EBIT adjusted contribution, but still far off the 9%, 9.5%, even the 7.6% that we guide for the year 2026. So these are the 2 challenges we have. And last but not least, we have added roughly EUR 5 million of additional costs for the transformation of the whole company to move ourselves into AI centric. It's now the time to do this. And there, we have added investments internally. And when we say investments, it's cost, it's people cost, it's training costs, it's business development costs, salespeople to drive GFT exactly towards that evolution to generate higher margins in the years after. This is the goal of the year 2026, built the foundation.

And these costs are rather onetime? Or will these costs stay in 2027 and beyond?

They will stay, but relative to revenue reduce.

Thank you very much, Mr. Spang for your question. So far, we don't have any further questions in the queue. And with that, I am handing over back the word to you, Andreas, for some final remarks.

Well, thank you, Philip. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your time and all your questions. It seems that there are no questions left at the moment. If there are any further questions following this call, please do not hesitate to contact the IR team. We remain for your disposal. And with that, we conclude today's conference call. Have a good day. Goodbye.