Nepa AB (publ) ($NEPA)

Welcome to Nepa's Q1 2026 Report Presentation.[Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to CEO, Anders Dahl. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning to Nepa's Q1 2026 Report Presentation. I'm Anders Dahl, and I'm the CEO of Nepa. And with me today, I have Edvard Hagman, who is the VP of Finance for Nepa. The agenda today, I'm going to make a short introduction to Nepa and then highlight the high points of the first quarter and some words about our sales development. And we're going to run through a financial summary of the quarter. And then since we have been in kind of transformation mode for the last 12 to 14 months, we're also going to talk a little bit about acceleration and what's ahead of us. And then some final words about outlook and priorities. And then as always, questions and answers towards the end. Short introduction to Nepa. We are a leading marketing intelligence and insights company, driving brand growth by insightful market analysis. We track brand health to more than 7,500 brands across the globe daily and measure thousands of advertising campaigns annually across more than 50-plus markets. We deliver insights to CMOs, marketing teams and insight departments of global consumer brands. And we also now with our Trinity suite moving into C-level executives and helping them as well to make insightful decisions around their marketing spend. Our core offerings includes brand tracking, campaign evaluation and marketing mix modeling, supported by brand advisory services. We combine the market survey data from people around the world with cutting-edge technology on our own platforms and strong consultancy to deliver both recurring and ad hoc insights. We have a strong presence in Northern Europe, sales offices in the U.K. and the U.S. and an operations center in Mumbai, India. As you have seen from other presentations, we have 2 parts of our revenue streams. One is from subscriptions and the other one is from ad hoc projects. On the subscription side, we have brand tracking as our kind of our core product. We have continuous marketing mix modeling that we launched a little bit more than a year ago. We also have ad tracking on an ongoing basis and consumer experience is tracking. And in some cases, we also deliver recurring data to our clients for them to use internally in their organizations. Ad hoc projects normally tends to be more active and more intense towards the end of the year because that normally follows our clients' activities on their side. Campaign evaluation is one of the biggest one with campaign pulse. We have marketing mix modeling as a stand-alone Ad hoc project. And we also do Brand Touch, which is an extension of our brand tracking activities, and we also measure the assets or the brand assets for our clients. We do category in for clients as well across the globe that normally leads to a brand tracking or an ARR subscription product, and that is a good complement to our subscription products. And that stands for about 40% of our revenue in the project. Looking into the first quarter of 2026, that is normally and it's the cycle of our business that the first quarter of the year is normally our weakest quarter, and that is mainly driven by, like I said before, our clients' activities. We have a lot of consumer brands that are spending most of the campaign money and media investments in Q3 and Q4 and also have their revenues mostly allocated towards the end of the year. And our ad hoc business is very dependent on that activity level from our clients. Strong quarter with continued growth in our recurring business. ARR bookings are up 86.3% year-over-year to SEK 8.6 million. ARR towards the end of the quarter is SEK 135.8 million with an underlying growth of 13.9% year-over-year. We do see a softer ad hoc market and especially in the month of March when we saw some macroeconomic impact, especially with the war in the Middle East. And we have, what we had at that point, a couple of contracts that were on the way to sign from travel and international tourism clients. And of course, they were a little bit hesitant to go into these types of activities due to the war. So none of those contracts are mixed, but they're actually still in the works. And hopefully, we can close them towards the end of the year or later on during this year. Total sales bookings were, therefore, down by 15.6%, and that is mainly or that is driven solely by the lower ad hoc bookings. We saw an increased caution from our client base for that, of course, like I said before, and that is driven by geopolitical events and increased economic uncertainty, mainly towards the month of March, towards the end of the month of March. Preliminary April trading shows a strong rebound in Ad hoc bookings, which is great to see and driven by hard work, but also, of course, a little bit more of a stable market. So January to April are now in line with the same period as last year, which is a very good sign. We do see significantly improved results year-over-year. We adjusted EBITDA less CapEx is SEK 7.2 million better from last quarter or from the quarter, the first quarter of 2025. That gives us a SEK 0.5 million in positive margin for the first quarter of this year. OpEx is down by 21.1% year-over-year, and that is more, we now have a cost situation that is more in line with the business that we run at the moment. AI or AI first is definitely a thing that is moving across our business and have done, have been doing that for the last years. We are now launching a lot of, we have launched during 2025, a lot of internal initiatives to increase efficiency with the help of AI, but also client-facing products that are AI supported. So integrated marketing intelligence platform is on track on brand tracking movement, and I will talk a little bit more about that later on. And we also deployed AI in data collection, quality reporting. A lot of those efforts are driving down cost and increase efficiency. But we also see that in client deliveries that it helps us to create better products than before with the help of AI. During the quarter, we also announced that our CTO, Jakob, will step down and depart, and we are now in the middle of searching for a successor and that is initiated. But it has absolutely no impact on our road map when it comes to moving our brand tracker or tracking platform into new technology and also pushing a lot of the old technology development into client-facing tech products and solutions. This picture shows our strong underlying ARR growth, which is 13.9% year-over-year in Q1 of 2026, quarter-by-quarter. And it also shows this on a yearly ARR bookings and a quarterly, on the quarterly ARR bookings. And as you have seen from our previous presentations, even if we sign an ARR deal in 1 quarter, it normally takes some time before this shows up in our revenue. And this is a good statement to show that it now also pays out in our revenue that you see a growth in our revenues quarter-over-quarter based on our 3 last year's, last quarters of profitability. So with that said, I would hand over to Edvard to go a little bit deeper into our financial results for the first quarter of 2026.

Thank you, Anders. I will start by highlighting a bit of the operational transformation that we have undergone during the past 1 or 2 years, which we can now call completed with 3 profitable quarters in a row and that we are back in positive territory on a rolling 12-month basis as well. So that's something that we are really happy about in the work that we've done over the past 2 years. And we have taken several decisive steps to get here. First, we reset the revenue base. We phased out low-margin ARR contracts and absorbed some extraordinary churn in 2024 and 2025. And this effect will flow through our reported growth figures until Q2 2026. And that is why we also present underlying metrics alongside our reported numbers to give you a clearer picture of how the business is actually performing. Second, we also rightsized the cost base and have simplified the operating model quite a lot over the past year. The cost saving programs we initiated in 2025 and also completed during the year are fully reflected in the results with operating expenses down 21% year-over-year. And this impacted both personnel and other external costs. We see that gross margins remained stable at 76.3%, and we have a significantly improved project margins as well. It's both thanks to the work of AI, but also that we have increased the role of our Mumbai operations center in the value chain. And of course, this allows our client-facing teams in the Nordics and elsewhere to spend more of their time with client-facing work, the thing that matters the most. And lastly, we have also revised our go-to-market strategy and defined the clear ideal customer profile, something that we see now are translating into our actual bookings and the deal pipeline. But we've also rebuilt our marketing approach from the ground up. And the result now is that we're seeing underlying recurring revenue growth, which actually takes me to the next slide, where we will dig down a bit deeper into the Q1 numbers. So underlying net sales was plus 2.3% in the quarter, while reported net sales declined by 9.8%. And this is, of course, the effect then from the extraordinary churn and phased out low-margin ARR contracts. But the key revenue segments are driving the underlying growth, subscription revenue and ad revenue from subscribers. And these are also the segments where we see the highest long-term value creation. We did, however, as Anders said, see softer ad activity during the quarter with some geopolitical uncertainty that led to more cautious client spending. Several project launches were postponed, impacting revenue and delivered work, but also deal conversations paused, therefore, less deals and less work to actually recognize. And because ad hoc work has a much shorter cycle from order to revenue recognition compared to our subscription revenue, we saw this impact quite immediately in the quarter. And as Anders said as well, we have seen a good rebound in the sales numbers in April with total sales booking for January to April being back to the same level we were in last year in the same period. On the profitability side, we improved the gross margin by 0.2 percentage points. And operating expenses adjusted for some items affecting comparability in 2025, referring to the cost restructuring program we did back then. So OpEx is down 21% when adjusting for this. And we now see that we delivered significantly higher product margins, which is both showing in the numbers, but also really showing the increased internal efficiency that we have worked so hard for in the past year. Then depreciation and amortization impact operating profit this quarter by SEK 3.2 million. And I just want to highlight that this is a noncash expense. It relates to the historical investments we've made in product development. We now treat current similar expenses as an expense -- direct expense on the P&L. So comparability over time is easier to look at when you measure adjusted EBITDA less CapEx. And coming to that metric, adjusted EBITDA less CapEx improved by SEK 7.2 million in the quarter to SEK 0.5 million at a 1% margin. So a quite big improvement from the first quarter in 2025. Operating cash flow was plus SEK 1.6 million and our net cash position at the end of the quarter stood at SEK 16.1 million. That was all for the financial numbers. So handing back to you, Anders.

Great. Thanks a lot, Edvard. As I said before, the tech transformation is going on according to plan. So the launch of the new brand tracking platform is underway, and that is definitely one of our major steps for our business model to be more competitive and scalable and also being able to focus much more on client tech than just developing for internal efficiency. Continued shift from separate products to an integrated marketing intelligence platform, but that is also a move from just being a one-trick pony and only having the brand tracking platform. Now we have the continuous marketing mix modeling and campaign evaluation as a Trinity offer as we call it, which is a very, it's a totally different holistic view that the marketer can look at his or her entire kind of marketing activities across the different channels. AI, as I said before, is definitely kind of an AI-first approach, and it definitely increases and is now embedded in all parts of our operations with automated data collection, quality management and reporting and definitely frees up a lot of capacity and also gives us a different speed to market that will help us to launch POCs, but also full-blown kind of platforms to our clients much faster than we could do before with Vibe coding and full out-of-the-box AI solutions. Development of AI-powered insights is also products that we have launched part of the existing product, but also new AI insight tools for our clients to use. And that will definitely move the needle from just being a reporting nice to have to a need to have insight recommendation company. And also to advancing the marketing mix modeling with machine learning and automation and AI to meet demand for measurable marketing ROIs. We all know that several brands and marketers around the world struggle to use data, especially for strategic decisions, but also for tactical decision to see the combination of tactic and strategic short and long-term investments. We know that 70% of marketers around the world struggle to prove the ROI on the marketing efforts externally and internally. And of course, that is always if we can help marketers around the world to bridge between their side of the business to the C-suite and make sure that they can invest accordingly or appropriately to what they need in order to keep market shares or to grow the market shares in the market. 68% of marketers struggle to balance performance marketing and creative branding. that is also where we think that with our Trinity offer with the marketing mix modeling, brand tracking and campaign evaluation can give the marketers a really holistic view of their activities. We also know that 55% of the market to struggle to make sense of their data and use it to inform their marketing decisions and also inform other parts of the organization. And this is a way of working that really makes me excited, and we have already seen that in client interactions that with our core, this is our kind of platform and machine to turn complex marketing into clear business decisions across brand, creatives and media investments. With our core products, brand tracking, campaign evaluation and marketing mix modeling that in many cases, are fueled by survey data from real people. And if we add sales data and media investments and also clients' internal information and external information, we will have this holistic view where you can see how your brand, your campaigns and how your media is performing. That will give a good insight in the brand strength, position and also when you work with the targeting of your brand, both in the short and the long term. You can evaluate your campaigns, not only in the short term, but also in the long term, but you can also evaluate your campaigns, the content of your campaigns, the creatives and the assets in your campaign, how it fits with your audience and how it fits in with your brand platform. And also very exciting to be able to participate on an ongoing basis with our clients when it comes to media allocating, pacing and channel optimization. And we have seen several examples of this, especially when our new marketing acceleration team is working very closely, more or less like in-house with our clients. So this is really a big step forward to kind of really have this full holistic view of what we call the Trinity platform to our clients. Traditionally, we have talked to CMOs and marketing leaders and insight leaders in the organization. So that is a natural if you look at the right side of this slide. But now we can also help agencies and we can help with media planning about the line planning for media, but we can also talk to the performance marketing team and understand their needs, the short-term needs, but also to kind of balance that with the long-term needs of brand building. And I think the most exciting part is we can talk and we have a language and a currency to really talk to P&L owners to talk to the C-suite, to engage the CFO and the CEO in the marketing decisions and have a currency and the language and numbers and KPIs that jives with the overall discussion of the company's financial health. So this is a really big step to be able to kind of take a much broader approach into our clients' marketing world. And it also helps us create stickiness. It helps us to create kind of a much broader engagement within the clients' organization. So this is a big step, and we see, like I said before, good results from this during the fall and also now going into 2026. We have had seminars and we have had activities for clients to show this holistic view of the Trinity platform. So final words about the outlook and our priorities is, of course, like I've mentioned before, that the large portion of our revenue, 40% comes from ad hoc projects. They are more sensitive to short-term changes, macroeconomic changes like we have seen in the war in the Middle East. But also, as I said before, that Q1 is normally, and it is the weakest season because our clients are normally spending less money on marketing activities in Q1. Most of them are very heavily dependent on Q3 and Q4. And some of our clients have 60%, 70% of their revenue, marketing activities and profit happening in the fourth quarter. Good sign, like both Edvard and I have stated, is that preliminary April trading shows a strong rebound in ad hoc booking, which is a good sign. I think it's partly driven by a little bit more stable macroeconomic situation, but of course, also all the hard work that put in all hands on deck in our organization and all the employees and the client success sales organization and our insights consultants. And we see a continued growth in our ARR bookings. So total sales booking for January to April are now in line with the same period last year. And with a strong ARR base, that will, of course, make the business much more sustainable, much more stable and much more predictable. And it will also help out to even out some of the seasonal fluctuations and in some cases, macroeconomic fluctuations in our Ad hoc business. Our focus is like before for 2026 and have been that for the last 1.5, 2 years to sustain the positive ARR momentum and of course, to drive further margin improvement with smart people we have in the organization, with new technology, with AI to make sure that, that is an AI-first mindset that goes across the entire organization. And of course, accelerate the development of our integrated marketing intelligence offering and our AI capabilities. So with that said, I will hand over to the questions-and-answer section, and thank you all for listening into this first part of the presentation.

[Operator Instructions] There are no phone questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions or closing comments.

Thank you, operator. So we'll read some of the questions that we have received in the chat. So the first one is, can you talk a little about your ARR bookings? Was it primarily brand tracking contracts? Or did it include new CMM contracts as well?

It's a combination of both. I think the basis of our business has always been the brand tracking. So that is normally the grand foundation, but we have seen a good and healthy mix of new CMM deals as well. So that is a good sign.

And the next question, with Jakob done restructuring, restructuring your existing tech infrastructure, what do you expect to be the main focus of your next CTO?

The next focus of the next CTO, and I would say the entire tech organization and also combined with the client success organization is to develop more client-facing, more client technology solutions and embedded tech into our client offerings. I think this is probably -- and this is a very exciting time to be in this data, a very data-intense business because we have access to AI tools and AI platforms that makes it much quicker to go from a good idea. We have the data, and we have especially this very strong domain knowledge to develop AI tools and client-facing solutions and tools with the help of AI. So the focus is going forward is, of course, moving more into the client layer and client-facing activities and continue to do what we have done successfully now for the last 12 to 18 months to also use technology to improve our own operations in an efficient way.

I think this leads into the next question as well. And will the close down of your legacy brand tracking platform lead to cost reductions?

It has already led to cost reductions, but we have moved, some of them we have taken as cost reductions, and we have also moved talent and investments into Centech already. So we have done that for the last 6 to 8 months. So that is, we can't really see that there is any projected cost reductions that we have planned in our P&L, but there is definitely more room to do more on the client side that we can develop, again, both to reduce efficiency and cost on the client side, but also to drive new revenues with new products on the client side.

Turning to the sales side. Your churn was around 3.3%. Was it driven by a single large customer or multiple smaller ones?

Since we changed and started working with a more balanced ICP and ideal client profile, customer profile base, we have been able to kind of gain a much broader customer base. And that also reflects now in -- when we do see churn, it's normally a good and healthy mix and mostly kind of variations of smaller ones. That is mainly driven by that we have now been able to kind of even that out and have a much better mix of small and big ones. So it's a smaller, multiple smaller ones.

And is it correct that Q1 is the period with the highest ARR contract renewals and that the quarter due to that has higher churn risk?

Historically, it's been like that, and it's still like that. But I think with the very successful bookings and sales activities and marketing activities that we have done over the last 12 to 18 months, we do sign more contracts alongside the entire part of the year. So that will change over time. But right now, yes, that is the most intense season.

And have you found a new VP of Sales?

Yes, we have found a new VP of Sales, and we will make that public in a couple of weeks.

Your other external costs were lower than expected and, your personnel cost was higher than expected. Are the Q1 levels representative for your current cost base?

Yes.

OpEx is at a far better level now than it was a year ago. We have made a lot of cost reductions and are now with a satisfactory cost base for the current revenue levels and growth trajectories that we see. And with Liberation Day in last year's numbers in April 2025, is it fair to think that the macro environment impact on in Q2 2026 will be around the same level as last year?

I don't really know what Liberation Day is, but I think it is probably some, if it could be Easter or some of those big holidays that are happening in March and April, and I don't see that some of those especially in Q1 and Q2, we don't really have that big of an impact on a special kind of holidays. I think it's more about what we saw now in March, for example, is definitely more of a macroeconomic not so much of a holiday season, more about liberation Day. I think they mean the Middle East war, of course, yes. I don't think the macroeconomic, okay, I see the question now. I understand. So the macroeconomic impact in Q2 might be at the same level as last year, yes, if nothing else happens in the macroeconomic environment. It's very hard for me to say if there will be any new impact on tariffs or any new wars or anything else that might impact our clients because most of our clients are fairly sensitive to macroeconomic changes. So it's hard for me to speculate on that, honestly.

Next question then. With 3 great NRR or net revenue retention quarters in a row, is it, or is it reasonable to think that the organization's aim in 2026 now is above 100% in net revenue retention?

Yes, of course, that is always the aim to be even better on that. And I think with the new client success organization and the way that we work with our clients and truly connect in many different parts of the clients' organization, that will definitely help us to maintain a healthy level on NRR. It is also kind of a good testament to, and I think that will show even more further in our numbers that with the Trinity offer, that will make increase the stickiness and we will have much more connection points. Traditionally, as I said before, it was normally the CMOs and the marketing of the inside directors. Now we have broadened our kind of presence in the clients' organization. We talk to the CMOs and the marketing people and the inside people, of course, but we also talk to performance and above-the-line media investors, but also the performance team and in some cases, also the Board of Directors and CEOs and CFOs. And of course, that helps us to really understand if there are things that will impact churn and other things within the client organization that we can help to mitigate early on. So yes, our aim is and our goal is, of course, to be above 100%.

The next question is your ARR bookings of SEK 60 million in Q4, are all of those revenues in your ARR number by the end of Q1 Yes, it should be 99% of it at least. There might be something that has been postponed on the start date, but the vast majority of it is. Can you provide some color on your CMM offering and sales? Has it gained traction? And is it starting to match your expectations in terms of sales?

It's definitely matching our expectations in terms of sales, and it's also matching our expectations in terms of share of voice, I can call it, because that normally gets so much attention when we talk about and with our new marketing acceleration team and the way that they approach a client to talk about CMM to talk about the holistic view on the clients' data sources and what we can add on with our survey data and what we can add on with our insights. So it's a very important tool to use in order to kind of lead to the Trinity offer with the brand tracking and the campaign evaluation platform. In some cases, it might be, there might be an already -- they might have a CMM or an MMM within the clients or within the prospects organization. But for us being able to show the CMM at that point, in many cases, leads to that we can do an ad hoc deal to start with maybe a category insight, for example, and hopefully -- and that with the aim to lead it into brand tracker and then to the campaign evaluation and then CMM and then we have the full Trinity setup within the clients' organization. So yes, it leads into -- it leads to great discussion. It leads to sales, and it's definitely a good move to take a little bit of a different position in the market than we have had before.

Then we have 2 questions on the headcount. The first one is that headcount has dropped from 194 in Q4 to 186 in Q1. What is driving this? We have had some turnover in our Mumbai office and did not replace as many as we had to in Q1 and also some maternity and paternity leaves in Q1 as well. So nothing out of the ordinary, I would say.

We can also comment on that to say that with our kind of AI-first approach, every time we see that there is vacancy in our organization that there's always a question of can we do something with AI in order to replace some of those processes. So of course, it's a new way of thinking with an AI-first approach. And it's not the aim to kind of over time, reduce staff if that staff is needed. But of course, the aim is to be able to grow significantly with the business, but keep the same headcount, but then replace some of those manual processes with AI and be able to serve the clients in the same way, more efficient, but with a lower headcount or relatively lower headcount in combination with revenue. So our goal is with this headcount to be able to grow the business significantly without having to add more headcount.

And then to the headcount question #2, how many salespeople did you have going into 2026? And how many do you expect to have going out of 2026? -- we have around, let's say, 20, around 20 salespeople mix between new sales, maybe 25% of those and 75% in account management. And Anders, do you want to cover the expectation for going out of 2026?

We take it step by step. I think we have talked before about profitable growth. And I think we are looking carefully at our own KPIs and ROIs. So of course, we are growing sales headcount when we see that the lead flow and efficiency is also increasing. We have actually pushed now in Q1 already and now going into Q2 with our marketing spend in order to push in times like this. And that will, of course, lead to, hopefully, and we already see some signs of that to higher lead flow. And a higher lead flow will also lead to that we need more salespeople. So the goal is, of course, to continue to grow the business and especially the ARR business. And if that leads to that, we will hire more people to be able to take care of those leads. Yes, of course, we would love to end the year with more salespeople because that will have a pretty short-term payoff, again, based on the lead flow.

Do you expect a stronger 2026 in the campaign Evaluation segment because of the Swedish elections?

I think that normally -- I don't have the pure data to compare the last election section, but it normally drives other marketing activities, not during the specific election period, but before and after because most companies don't want to go in too actively when there are so many political marketing activities or campaigns. But again, Q3 and Q4 are our strongest quarters. So we haven't really counted in any election effect in Q3 and Q4 due to the Swedish election.

Can you give a short update on the sales efforts in the U.S.?

The sales efforts in the U.S. are selective and normally driven by existing clients that we do have and trying to expand within their networks. And so they've been done from the people we have in the U.S., but also from people in Europe. So normally, clients that do have some connection to Europe, some connections to already existing clients. So still on a fairly low level and with the same idea as I said before, that we try to scale it in a way that we can see some ROI early on before taking investment that we can't really count into profitability in the short term. So, the goal is to continue to grow with existing clients. And of course, there are a lot of, we have a lot of clients in Europe that are expanding into and they already are in the U.S., but if they expand, of course, we follow them into the U.S. market as well and add our products if that is campaign evaluation or CMM also for the U.S. market.

I think that was the final question. Thank you all in the chat for inputting your questions. Really, really good to see. And thank you all, and back to you, Anders.

Yes. So the final words is that I'm really proud of the organization that we did such a strong Q1. We continue to see ARR growth. We continue to keep our eyes on the cost side to deliver profitability, which I think is great even in a seasonally normally fairly weak first quarter of the year. A comment to the international expansion, of course, U.S. is always an interesting market, but we also see possibilities in other European markets. We have strong client presence in Germany and Central Europe, and that is, of course, always a possibility and opportunity to see how we can kind of piggyback on those clients and ride into other markets in Europe. And again, without having to open up a lot of new offices, but actually do that from Stockholm or together with the clients in these markets. So thank you all for listening into this presentation and always have questions, and thanks a lot for the good questions in the chat. And see you in a couple of months again for the next quarterly update. Thanks a lot. Have a great day. Bye-bye.