Planisware SAS ($PLNW)

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Planisware Q1 2026 Revenue Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Loic Sautour, Planisware's CEO. Sir, please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for attending our call on Planisware's Q1 2026 revenue. This is Loic Sautour speaking. Exceptionally, I will share this presentation with Benoit d'Amecourt, our Head of Investor Relations because -- before we begin, I'd like to share a piece of wonderful news with you all. Stephanie Pardo, Planisware's CFO, who I usually share this presentation with recently welcomed a new born baby, and she is taking some very well-deserved time to be with her family during this precious moment. On behalf of the entire Planisware team we send her, her baby and her family, our warmest congratulations and we definitely look forward to welcoming her back when the time is right. Following our presentation, we will open the floor for your questions. So starting now with the key highlights of this publication. I am pleased to report a strong start to the year with revenue up 13.6% year-on-year in constant currency, leading to a EUR 51 million reported figure. This performance is in line with our planned trajectory to achieve low double-digit revenue growth in constant currencies for the full year. This is also in line with the planned acceleration toward historical growth level and initiated mid-2025 after having been heavily impacted by the U.S. tariff and the related high uncertainty that affected our customers and prospects. Revenue growth in Q1 has been particularly driven by new implementation, which grew very strongly, even at an even higher level than in Q4 last year, which already benefited from the onboarding of many new customers. The current new implementation workload that we have to deliver is nothing like anything we've ever experienced before reflecting an unprecedented level of new logo signatures, which we achieved at the end of 2025 and at the start of this year. To deliver this as fast as possible and to be in a position to start upselling these new accounts and to fully benefit from the full SaaS & Hosting revenue, we postponed when possible our Evolutive support task to free up resources to this implementation. While it mechanically impacts the Evolutive support revenue evolution, our ability to catch this up later and the benefit to have these new customers happily moving to [indiscernible] clearly a net positive. Third, we continue to shape the future of strategic portfolio management with our latest AI-powered capabilities. It's now available to our customers across our unified platform. This is generating strong client interest and reinforcing our competitive differentiation. We keep investing to ensure our platform remains at the forefront of what organization needs to make better and faster decisions in complex environment. The introduction of our latest AI-powered capabilities keeps driving a strong demand from both existing and new clients for advanced PPM and SPM solution that provide visibility and agility in a volatile environment. This translates in a still growing pipeline even after the high level of signature that we recently achieved. At this time of the year and given the current global environment, which still has some uncertainties, we remain confident yet cautious in confirming our low double-digit revenue growth objectives for the year, along with our profitability and cash conversion targets. On this slide, I'd like to illustrate the continuation of our geographic expansion. In Q1, we opened 2 new offices in key markets to get closer to our clients and to accelerate local growth. In Italy, the opening of a direct local presence in Roma is making a significant step in reinforcing our commitment to one of the region's most dynamic industrial markets where we already have active clients in life sciences and energy, 2 of Planisware [indiscernible] vertical. Italy represents a high potential market for Planisware, driven by a strong industrial base, internationally active groups and increasing demand for more structured government of investment and transformation program. The new local presence will enable Planisware to work more closely with Italian clients, supporting both private and public sector organization in aligning strategy, execution and financial performance. In Vienna, the opening of our Austrian office marks a strategic step in deepening our presence across the DACH region and building a gateway into Central European market. Austria is on to a strong base of internationally active industrial group in energy, automotive supply chain, engineering and life sciences. That's where demand for structured portfolio governance is accelerating. With several major clients already at quarter or regionally managed from Vienna, this local presence will allow us to serve them with greater proximity and to capture new opportunities in a market that represents significant potential for Planisware. Now let me talk about what we call exchange. Every year, we gather the key project portfolio stakeholders from our clients to foster a collaborative environment. This is not just an opportunity for us to connect with our customers. It's also for our customers to connect with each other. This event is very well named and it truly embodies the spirit of exchange, the platform for sharing knowledge, experiences and innovation. Our clients are our best ambassadors, spreading the word of mouth and sharing their exceptional success stories with Planisware. This year, we held our North American Exchange in Denver, gathering about 200 customers from across our global community. It's a testament to the strength of our relationship and the relevance of our platform. It was a tremendous success with an incredible attendance. The energy and enthusiasm was so high as we came together to share best practices, to celebrate successes and to discuss emerging market trends. The team of this discussion was maximizing value and velocity with SPM, AI and power metrics. Once again, this session provided hands-on experience, allowing our clients to see firsthand the innovative solutions we are developing to meet their needs. And one of the highlights of the conference was the live demos showcasing our latest features and in particular, our AI-powered unified platform, coupled with incredible customer success testimonial. Several of our top customers such as PepsiCo or Pfizer shared their ROI stories showcasing their use of Planisware AI's capabilities. We will hold the European 2026 [indiscernible] in Paris mid-June. Now these events consistently accelerate the expansion conversation that drives our net retention rate and that I would like to develop on the next slide. At Planisware, landing new customers is only the very beginning of the story. Indeed, more than just getting new customers, we are able to systematically expand usage of our SaaS platform and thus, our revenue beyond the initial purchase, emphasized by a strong retention rate on our recurring revenue. Now this slide illustrates the success of our land-and-expand strategy. When new clients come with an initial software purchase, we use our Evolutive support offering to help those clients to better leverage the Planisware capabilities to leverage new modules, upselling, fostering adoption and expansion across their organization. Thus we are able to drive a much more significant SaaS revenue expansion, thanks to this Evolutive support. Dollars spent by clients in Evolutive support services translate into further spend in SaaS. This creates a virtual circle of increased SaaS usage and recurring revenue far beyond the initial purchase. Now this phase can last from 1 to 5 years depending on client needs and sometimes it lasts for decades. But expanding is not the end of the story either. At Planisware, we have proven our ability to retain our customers over a very long period of time, maximizing the lifetime value of our relationship with them as they standardize the workflow on our platform, fueling the cross-sell to other departments or other pillars. Now this slide clearly illustrates the fundamental quality of our business model, the sustained and consistent expansion of revenue across our customer base over time. Looking at revenue contribution by customer cohort. You can see that our most established cohort continues to grow at a healthy CAGR. This reflects the stickiness of our platform as shown by the particularly of churn rate, the depth of value we deliver to clients and the long-term nature of our relationship with an average tenure of 11 years for our top 20 customers. Importantly, our most recent cohorts are already demonstrating strong growth trajectory. This gives us confidence in the long-term revenue expansion potential of the contracts signed in recent quarters, including the significant volume of new contracts signed last year and that are currently being implemented. I will now leave the floor to Benoit to detail the Q1 revenue evolution by [ activities trends ].

Thank you, Loic, and good morning to all. As usual, in order to effect the underlying performance of the company independently from exchange rate fluctuations, I will focus my comments on revenue evolution in constant currencies, which means applying Q1 '25 exchange rate to Q1 2026 revenue figures. FX effect was almost fully led to the U.S. dollar, 10% year-on-year depreciation versus the euro, which accounted for EUR 2.6 million out of the EUR 3 million of total FX effect. The rest came mostly from the Japanese yen, 13% year-on-year depreciation versus the euro. Q1 2026 marked a further step in our growth acceleration, significantly fueled by the new logos signed over the last month. Together, they contributed to circa 60% of Q1 recurring revenue growth. As a comparison, they contributed to only circa 30% of recurring revenue growth in the entire year 2025. In the meantime, expansion of historical customers continued to be a strong contributor to growth, representing circa 40% of recurring revenue growth in Q1 2026. All in all, recurring revenue reached EUR 46.3 million in Q1 2026, up by 11.5%. As usual, the key driver of revenue performance is our SaaS model, which represented 82% of total revenue and grew by EUR 5 million or 13.2% fueled by new customer wins as well as continued expansion within our large installed. The standout was SaaS & Hosting, which posted a solid 20.5% increase reaccelerating towards historical growth levels. This reflects the flow-through of recent contract signings into live SaaS deployment. North America was clearly the main contributor to that growth with the onboarding of new customers such as General Motors, Regeneron, [ Desjardins ] coupled with upsells to existing customers such as TE Connectivity, Eli Lilly or Ford. Europe also grew nicely with new customers such as GE Vernova in France, Aumovio in Germany as well as the migration to SaaS of an important customer in Switzerland. Support activities also in recurring revenue grew by 3%, including 4.8% growth in Evolutive support. As explained by Loic, this lower performance than usual is intentional as we prioritize initial implementation for new logos and reallocated support resources accordingly. We expect support growth to normalize once these implementations are completed as it remains particularly necessary in these times where our clients further rely on Planisware to adapt fast to the upturn context and to embrace the new AI capabilities of our platform. The second growth driver in this past quarter was clearly implementation. We surged 64.8% as we ramp up the deployment of the large volumes of contracts signed at the end of 2025 and early 2026. To provide some color on these volumes, we noted that we worked in Q1 on 29 implementations generating at least EUR 50,000 each versus 17 in Q1 2025. It represents a 70% increase in number of meaningful deployments. This implementation momentum is a strong leading indicator of future recurring SaaS and Evolutive support revenue as customers complete deployment and enter production. We expect this pattern to persist at least in Q2 and part of H2, depending on the level of additional new logos signed in the coming months and our ability to deliver fast Implementation. On the other hand, perpetual licenses, which represented less than 1% of our total revenue in Q1 declined by 49.1% or minus EUR 0.4 million in the quarter. This is fully consistent with the end of our SaaS transition as already reflected in 2025 figures with perpetual licenses down by 21%. Fewer perpetual licenses sold drives mechanically less revenue in maintenance. As a result, maintenance revenue was down by 1.5% in Q1 or minus EUR 0.1 million. On the next slide, let's see how these evolutions are shaping our revenue. The outstanding Q1 performance in implementation prioritized Evolutive support, slightly reduced the weight of the recurring revenue, even if it remains at a strong 91% level. Going forward, we expect to continue to drive revenue mix towards more and more recurring and profitability led by the faster growth of our highly profitable SaaS operations. Indeed, the SaaS model represented 82% of total Q1 revenue, while it was 81% for the entire year 2025. Within the SaaS model of Planisware, the SaaS & Hosting revenue line itself represented 51% of total revenue in Q1. This is the first quarter ever it exceeds half of the total revenue. On the opposite, the nonrecurring revenue represented only 9% of total revenue with the very strong growth of implementation compensated by the declining weight of perpetual licenses lower than 1% of total revenue in Q1. I now give the mic back to Loic for closing remarks and reminder of the guidance.

Thank you, Benoit. Now let me turn to our outlook for 2026. Considering the strong start of the year, our continued commercial momentum and a solid pipeline on one hand. And a global environment that remains particularly volatile and uncertain, especially with U.S. dynamics that are very difficult to anticipate. On the other hand, Planisware confirms all its 2026 objectives. We are targeting a low double-digit revenue growth in constant currency. We remain committed to an adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 37% of revenue and a cash conversion rate of approximately 80%. We will continue to invest for long-term growth while maintaining the strong profitability profile and best-in-class cash-conversion that defines our business model. We are confident in the resilience of our recurring revenue model, and we continue to execute with discipline across our 3 strategic priorities: geographical expansion, continuous innovation, and financial rigor. In summary, Q1 2026 showed that Planisware can do growing SaaS revenue, onboarding an unprecedented cohort of new clients and doing so while maintaining the operational and financial discipline that define the group. It also confirms that the growth acceleration we initiated after the low point of Q2 2025, is on track proven by strong implementation momentum and the reacceleration of SaaS & Hosting. Our commercial teams remain highly active. AI capabilities are reinforcing our competitive positioning, and we confirm all our 2026 objectives. Now thank you for your attention. Benoit and I are now happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] We will now take the first question from the line of Jarrod Chisholm from UBS.

Please forward my congratulations to Stephanie. That's great news. My first question is just around the commercial momentum. Did you see any elongation of the sales cycles in the first quarter as you saw this time last year during spikes of geopolitical uncertainty. And if you didn't, could you explain why you think that, that might be the case this time around? My second question is just on what you have baked in for the remainder of the year in your guidance ambitions based on what you've reported in the first quarter and then your current pipeline and expected wins. And then any detail around revenue performance by pillar and geography would also be interesting.

Okay. So to -- for the first part of your question about the commercial elongation, I mean, clearly, there is an uncertain world at the moment that we see but it's nothing like what we've seen in the first quarter and last year -- first quarter and beginning of second quarter last year. Why -- I think it has to go back to what we are doing. The need to properly manage projects and portfolios of projects that are absolutely necessary to reposition an organization, to adopt changing world to adapt to the need of AI in digital transformation. So there are projects everywhere. And so some companies, what was interesting last year is that our customers were very well positioned to address the challenging time that was ahead of them. The one that were not customers that couldn't have an eye on their project and on their portfolio was the one that got caught last year not having the type of solution that we do. And so I think this year that the impact is not as much because of that. In terms of our -- what we've baked into our guidance, we remain optimistic, yet cautious because it's hard to read the current geopolitical environment and its evolution and the impact on the year. Now in terms of revenue by geographies and industries. Clearly, we've seen a very strong reacceleration in North America stronger than what we've seen in the rest of the world followed by Europe which has been strong as well, but not as much. And Europe is a bit diverse, depending on the country. And maybe it's -- we've had some -- in terms of growth, we've had some impact in Japan last year, which is still growing, but not at the same rate. And in terms of industries, we've got a very good traction in everything that is digital transformation and industries like banking and insurance and financial services have been growing very strongly. And after our core market continues to have very strong support in life science, automotive and energy. Energy was particularly strong at the beginning of the year.

We will now take the next question from the line of Frederic Boulan from Bank of America.

If I can maybe follow up on the first question around anything in particular you want to point out from a phasing standpoint after Q1 from -- as you mentioned, a strong start from a revenue standpoint. Secondly, you mentioned in February that some IT budgets have been consumed by AI initiatives at some of your clients and that impacted deal flow. Is it still a factor? Or you see clients increasingly moving ahead with Planisware? And then thirdly, any comments around your margin? I know it's not a margin quarter, but guidance of 37%. Last year, you were a bit higher than that. Any specific moving parts to call out that limit operating leverage in 2026.

Fred, I'm very sorry. Can you repeat the first part of your question?

Yes. Yes, my question was after Q1 revenue growth, any specific phasing items you want to call out for the rest of the year. So when we look at the next few quarters, considering your full year guidance.

Yes. I mean, clearly we had a very, very strong start of Q1, particularly strong due to the high level of signature that we commented at the tail end of 2025. And what has been very interesting is that the level of signature did continue at the beginning of the year. So in terms of profile, we do expect that it's a high profile in this Q1. And the normal cadence that we have in normal yields mean that it's usually a strong start and a strong finish. So that's what we have baked into our guidance. About the comment that we've made in February about the -- some of the IT budget being consumed by AI was for the earlier part of 2025, where we noticed that our customers had some budgets consumed towards what we called anything AI. They wanted to do anything AI, which was not necessarily tied to some business objective, business goal, business value that were identified. What we are noticing today is that we are back to having customers wanting to leverage AI, but demonstrating value, showcasing values, which is much more aligned with what we are bringing to them. As I commented earlier, we have had some real customer use cases where they showed the outstanding value that they were getting from Planisware using Planisware AI capabilities. And that is exactly what people want now is to see how does that translate into their operation, how can they benefit from it? How can they get the value? And how can they ensure that everything is adopted properly so that they can maximize this value. So now what we are seeing, especially with our Evolutive support is like more and more customers want to benefit from those AI capabilities that we have. So we have enough outstanding level of demand at the moment around those AI capabilities.

Yes. And maybe, Fred, on your question on margin and the margin guidance. So it implies more or less stability of our profitability in 2026 compared to 2025. You know that the main driver of our growth improvement is coming from the revenue mix implementation, which is clearly driving the growth this year is not the most profitable lines of our revenue, clearly not. So it compensates -- I mean the profitability improvement that we plan for 2026 is not at the level of what we delivered in 2025 and 2024 due to the weight of implementation, but the revenue mix is still working on, and there is no reason to improve our profitability. So this guidance may be considered as a bit cautious.

[Operator Instructions] Make sense. Thank you. We will now take the next question from the line of Hugo Paternoster from Kepler Cheuvreux.

Gentlemen, can you hear me well?

Hear very well.

I will limit myself to 3 questions. And the first one is trying to have a bit of color on the mix between your products, between Enterprise and Orchestra. How is it evolving in terms of momentum by customer? What are you seeing at the moment? The second question would be on the market. Where are you seeing your competition now in terms of market share, do you think you take market share versus Planview, ServiceNow, and [ Atlassian ]. Just wonder how are you seeing that? And the last question is mainly on the implementation and the implementation work. You basically showed a strong start in Q1. If I understood well, you expected to last at least until Q3. How will you manage the potential bottleneck? And will it imply, I don't know, more recruitment for this year? That would be my 3 questions.

Yes. Thank you for the question. In terms of our mix of product, as we previously shared, the enterprise in terms of revenue is much larger than Orchestra. Orchestra had mid-market relation solution in terms of revenue is much lesser. The rule of thumb that we have, it's more like the average customer size when they are on a single product is 1 to 10 of rule of thumb. And that mix is staying in that level. In terms of market share, what's very interesting at the moment is that if you look at the different solution out there, AI is really helping us to push into early retirement some of the legacy providers that were still used out there. So the type of solution that we provide are extremely sticky and there are some variable solutions that are still out there that now are being forced to be replaced. So we have a momentum coming from there. And in terms of positioning with our competition, not necessarily going into detail with the name you mentioned. But clearly, our platform approach, our unified platform approach in which we have deeply embedded AI algorithm is a competitive advantage that we constantly showcase and that is being seen by our -- during our sales cycle by our customers, but by our prospects as well. And finally, in terms of implementation, you're right that we had a very, very strong start, which is great because those new logos that we are getting now are really gasoline for the future. And you're right that it does put some constraints in our -- in how we deliver that. That's why we prioritize some of our delivery [indiscernible] from Evolutive support to implementation. In order to address the bottleneck, we have 2 actions that we are currently undertaking. The first one is, yes, to hire more and to continue to hire for the long term. And the second one is to further leverage our network of short parties, companies that we work with that we are that we are -- on which we are expanding as well.

We will now take the next question from the line of Clement Bassat from BNP.

Basically, the first one was already addressed about the bottleneck between implementation and abilities to growth. However, I have a question about AI, some SaaS editor are deploying AI agents to perform some easy task like [ cloud cohort ]. And I guess AI today is mostly predictive and generative to help your clients. So I'm wondering if you intend to invest in AI agents, which are, from my view, the main risk for SaaS editor.

Yes, thank you for the question because it does allow me to clarify that actually Planisware has deployed and rolled out AI all purpose agent. As a matter of fact, what we have seen at our exchange is not only that it's a capability that we have brought to our customers for quite some time already. But what we've given in exchange is the return of experience of our customers leveraging Planisware AI agent. And it's not capabilities that we are planning to deliver. It's capabilities that we have delivered on which we have a real customer, real use case that have rolled out those capabilities and that are using those capabilities every day across the organization.

We will now take the next question from the line of Gustav Froberg from Berenberg.

I just have 2, please. The first is on your pipeline. I know you mentioned that pipeline still remains full despite all the signings at the beginning of the year. But do you have any more color for us in terms of how that pipeline has progressed into Q2 and what visibility you have on new leads, et cetera, on the top of the funnel. And then a second question around implementation and bottlenecks there. Do you see any room for or potential for the company to use your own AI solutions or any other kind of AI capabilities to really enhance your implementation and to speed up some of the processes there? That's it.

Yes. Thank you. You're right. So the pipeline did and see itself a little bit at the tail end of 2025 positively, very positively when opportunities turn into those new customers that we've commented. And at the beginning of the year, this year, the pipeline did replenish itself with some new opportunities that are moving across the pipeline similarly as what we've commented previously, the smaller opportunities have a tendency to move faster, and we do have some large opportunities that are currently worked in this pipeline and that are progressing at a normal pace. In terms of implementation, you're absolutely right that we leverage our AI more and more. It's changing so rapidly in the capability of what we can do. And we have -- in terms of implementation, what we constantly want to do is shorten the time to value for our customers. And you're absolutely right that we do already leverage our own AI capabilities to accelerate implementation time to make them faster, and this trend will absolutely continue in the future.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Nicolas Thorez from ODDO BHF.

Just only one quick question. Sorry if I missed some part of the presentation. But on recurring revenue expectation for 2026, given the strong order intake over the last months and the growth in professional services, should we mechanically expect a further acceleration in SaaS & Hosting revenue as implementation progress and projects go live? Or do you see growth remaining broadly in line with the Q1 2026 growth rate? Maybe to put it another way, do you think the growth in SaaS in Q1 already fully reflect the strong level of signings at the end of 2025? Or should we expect a gradual buildup over the year?

No, I think overall, when we sign new logos, then they -- and we start seeing revenue soon after. And so the revenue growth that we see comes from some new logos, but also a lot about upsell and cross-sell. So the level that you see in Q1 is a level that we should expect to remain in the coming quarters as well coming from additional new logos but primarily coming from upsell and cross-sell of the previous implementation that we've seen historically. And as we demonstrated earlier from the core presentation that we've done that is coming from all of our historical customers, given the extremely low churn rate that we have less than 2% that continues to fuel this growth.

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back to Loic Sautour and Benoit d'Amecourt for closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you for your attendance. Very happy to see you later on the road. And as usual, I am available for any follow-up questions, do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you, and have a good day.

Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.