SNP Schneider-Neureither & Partner SE ($SHF)

Welcome to the earnings call of SNP Schneider-Neureither & Partner SE following the figures of the financial year of 2025. I would like to welcome the company's CEO, Dr. Jens Amail; and the CFO, Andreas Röderer, who will guide you through the figures in a moment, followed by a Q&A session via audio line and chat. And with that, I hand over to you, Mr. Wiskow.

Thank you, Mara. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to our earnings call for the financial results 2025. We are pleased to have you with us today as we walk you through SNP's performance in the last year and highlight the key developments shaping our business. Before we move into the agenda, please allow me to share a brief note. Today's call marks our final analyst and investor call on SNP's financial results. Following the termination of the profit and loss transfer agreement and the introduction of the guaranteed dividend, capital market dynamics around SNP have changed, leading to a noticeable decline in investor participation. Against this backdrop, we will streamline our Investor Relations activities. At the same time, SNP remains, of course, committed to transparent and reliable communication. We will continue to inform the market regularly through our financial reporting and remain available for direct dialogue. With that said, let me introduce today's speakers: Mr. Jens Amail, our CEO, who will outline our strategic progress and key achievements of the year and share his perspective on the months ahead; and Andreas Röderer, our CFO, who will then guide you through the financial results in more detail. Following the presentations, we will open the call for your questions. And with that said, I will hand over to Jens. Jens, the floor is yours.

Thanks, Marcel, and hello, everybody, also from my side. Thank you for joining us on this, at least for now, last earnings call. As Marcel said, we have seen less and less participation here. Hence, it is particularly important for me to thank those of you who are actually here today and who accompanied us and supported us through the last years. And as Marcel also said, we are here for you on request as you need us also going forward. Most of you have seen our announcement with the preliminary figures on January 21. 2025 has been another good year, another good year for our customers, for our partners, for our shareholders and for all of us at SNP. This is not a matter of course, and it would have not been possible without the relentless focus of our team on the success of our customers and partners. And also here publicly, again, a massive thank you to all my colleagues, to all our clients and to our ecosystem for their continued trust. So let's have a look at the numbers. So first, there are no surprises versus the preliminary numbers we published on January 21. Order entry, revenue and EBIT are actually slightly better than what we indicated at the beginning of the year. Revenue went up 16%. Order entry is up 11%. The book-to-bill ratio is significantly bigger than 1, i.e., we continue to build up our backlog. EBIT is up by 66%. The EBIT margin is now at 16%, and the EBITA margin is actually around 20%, i.e., we are almost already now a Rule of 40 company. So overall, we are very pleased with the progress we have made over the last 3 years. The one aspect which, visually at least, doesn't look good on this chart is the cash flow. But we are actually okay with it. We had a significant one-off payment in 2024, and also our receivables went up significantly. Andreas will share further details later on this call. So when we look at the 2025 headlines, we are happy with the top line. We are very happy with the profitability. And we are pleased that our company is in a very stable financial position. We are also very pleased that there is no strategy to execution gap. All strategic growth levers continue to contribute to our success. And finally, we remain optimistic about our future. So here, you see the summary of our key financial figures in the format you are familiar with. You see a strong overproportional growth in our partner and in our software business, leading to a software revenue of around EUR 111 million. And this is pretty much exactly twice as much as we had 3 years ago. And here's the familiar slide with the details of our partner business development. And for the very first time ever, our ecosystem drives more than half of our business. No surprises with regard to deal sizes. We see a strong growth particularly in the bigger deal bands, which, of course, also drives sales productivity. We could report growth in all regions with a particularly strong performance in EMEA with 36% year-over-year growth. We remain very solid in our home market, Central Europe, and we continue to see a strong S/4 business. And the 9% growth we see here are bigger than the 8% we always aim to achieve as a baseline for our top line. But the growth in S/4 is underproportional, which shows that we are, as a company, not a one-trick pony, we have significant business development in other transformation areas as well, for example, in M&A. Looking at the EBIT bridge. Our profitability could have been even better without the EUR 5.5 million currency hit. One-offs are a wash basically versus 2024, and we are very happy how we managed external costs. And our OpEx are developing in line with the growth of the company, so no surprises here either. Last but not least, the outlook. In line with the overall direction we are taking as a company, we decided to simplify our guidance, while at the same time, staying consistent with our previous midterm outlook. So for 2026, we see a book-to-bill ratio bigger than 1, which means we continue to build up our backlog also this year. We see a revenue growth in the mid- to high single-digit percentage range, and we see an EBIT increase in the low double-digit percentage range. So that's it from my side for now. Thanks again for joining the call. I'm looking forward to our discussion at the end of this meeting. And with that, I hand it over to our CFO, Andreas Röderer.

Thank you very much, Jens. I think Jens already elaborated on a few aspects. I just want to pick some things up. If we look at the income statement on a high level, the story is that revenue grows faster than cost, and with that we had a pretty decent EBIT development, as Jens has already outlined. Jens touched on that, the FX effects. They had been negative for us, primarily coming out of dollar developments over the last years. Another thing I want to highlight is the operating gains did go down, the other operating gains. I think you might remember that we, last year, had this settlement approach with the community of heirs. So this is the result why these gains did go down. But everything developed as we had expected it, and so we can say that we are very pleased with the margin development, as Jens has already elaborated. If you go to the next slide, please, Marcel. We see a growth in all segments. As Jens has elaborated already, we are especially happy about the software segment increase, which is well above our average growth rates on the revenue side. Also EXA had, after a very strong year 2024, another very good development on the revenue side. So this is also a very good development, also making progress in North American market. If we look at the segment margins here, I think on a 12-month basis, we see a margin improvement in all segments. If you look at the services segment margin, Q4 stands a bit out. But please keep in mind, this is rather a cost allocation topic as we allocate the overhead costs based on a revenue metric. And as we have seen, software was growing overproportionally. So actually, the software segment can also absorb more costs due to a higher revenue than they had in the past. EXA, also here, Q4 stands a bit out. It's lower than the last year. But please keep in mind, this is due to big ticket deal linearity. And overall, the 12-month trends also with EXA goes in the very right direction. So we are also happy with this development. If we go to the backlog. There is not much more to mention than Jens has already outlined. I think we are building up our backlog. But as we will see, Marcel, if you immediately go to the next slide, we are building up the backlog, and we bring the backlog continuously into revenue. And I'm pretty proud to say that we are able to do that without a lot of noise. Now this means we help our customers to get their projects done on a very successful way, and we are very happy and very proud on that. If you look at the project measurements, you see roughly EUR 14 million. I think I have elaborated in the other quarterly calls already that at the very beginning of this year, we did a contract transfer to a partner, which was in the best interest of the partner and the end customer. So nearly 50% of those remeasurement is to a contract transfer of noncore business. So the key message here is we have hardly any losses out of our backlog. Our backlog book is very stable. If you go to the balance sheet structure. The most obvious development here is the reduction in cash. I think keep in mind that we have actually paid back all our external financing last year. Jens has already elaborated on the topic. We will also see it later when we look at the operating cash flow that our AR, accounts receivables, did go up. I think this is also due to the fact that our linearity, usually Q4 is a very strong, yes, so revenues did go up in Q4. And the increase in accounts receivable, this will come into the cash then actually in this year. There is no concern with this development. We see also on the liability side, we took a shareholder loan here. This is a change here on the liability side. But overall, the most obvious thing is that equity did go up and our equity ratio has improved as well. If we go to the next slide. Just to reiterate what Jens already touched at the very beginning of the presentation, and I also did indicate that already at the beginning of this year that last year we had a significant one-off payment from an agreement we reached with a partner. And the receivable topic, I have already touched it. So overall, our operating cash flow has developed as we planned, and it clearly shows that the company can produce a decent operating cash flow. The investing cash flow, just to reiterate once again, we are now the owner of 100% of our EXA subsidiary. And this is where we have purchased the last outstanding 15%, but also this has been explained in previous earnings calls already. With that, Marcel, we can go to the last slide. The headcount, no surprises here. We are still investing in our service delivery capabilities to really have 100% go-live success rate. We are very proud on that, as already mentioned. One thing I want to highlight here. Also thanks a lot to our supporting functions, I think we have managed to grow the company when I started from roughly EUR 170 million to nearly EUR 300 million without really making significant additions on the admin side. And I think this is a great achievement and it shows that we really strive for operational process here. With that, that's it. But before I hand over to Marcel, as Jens said, let me take a second to really say thank you to everyone in the call for your continued interest in the company. And with that, Marcel, I hand over to you.

Thank you, Andreas. Thank you, Jens. Yes. Mara, if you could be so kind and open the line for potential questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Mr. Spang, you may unmute yourself now to ask your questions.

I already wrote it in the chat, but if you want to have it on the call, I repeat in this way as well. Let's start with the first question. It's regarding your expectation in the service business for 2026. You expected low single-digit growth. So why is the expectation for the segment so low? Do you take out revenues maybe to focus more on software? Or what is behind this expectation? Then let's do it one by one.

So we want to, of course, improve our software-to-services ratio. And a key element here next to, of course, technological advancements is that we ramp up our partner business. So every serviceman day or person day delivered by a partner is something very positive for us. We invest a lot in our partner strategy. So it's not the aim to grow services business just for the sake of a services business, but just to enable our software platform strategy. And we make a good progress in terms of the usability of our technology, and the strategic target continues to be to scale our company through partners, which means that partners also deliver data migration services.

Okay. And then on topic of one-offs you showed in the bridge for 2025. After 9 months, we saw a negative effect of EUR 5.1 million in this slide. Now it's just minus EUR 0.1 million. So what happened in Q4?

Yes. Let me pick that up this question because it's a good one, and this is related to when certain effects have happened last year and this year. So the settlement with the community of heirs that I have mentioned has already happened last year in half year 1. And this year in half year 1, we had actually those one-offs that we have elaborated on investments in certain process efficiency excellences, investments in replacing IT infrastructure and things like that, as mentioned in Q2. And this is actually the bigger one-off bridge effects we have seen. And then last year, towards the end of the year, we had some receivables impairments as we have elaborated in the earlier calls. And then more or less, those effects have been netted off. And this is why there is, from a full year perspective, no real difference in one-off effects from this year to last year. So it's a complicated story, but it's a matter of timing and when the effect has happened. And the main reason is actually that things more or less net off a bit is the community of heirs settlement gains that I have elaborated on some minutes ago.

Okay. So in the previous time or it's always a 12-month view.

No, it was in the... [Technical Difficulty]

Unfortunately, we cannot hear you anymore.

My last question would be, sorry for that background noise, in terms of AI. So it's, let's say, the big elephant for all the software companies. What is your opinion in terms of chances and risks from AI for you?

I think we will be huge beneficiaries of the AI wave. We will have massive announcement in a few areas at Transformation World. AI will help us to even more improve time to value for our customers. It will help us to accelerate the strategy, what I already mentioned in my answer to your first question, Lukas, that we can enable our partners even more faster to work with our technology. And at the end of the day, this will also improve our software-to-services ratio. So we are excited about what's possible these days, and we will have some very exciting announcements at Transformation World.

Yes. Okay. And maybe a small follow-up on the first question again. I think when you have started as CEO of SNP, you had a target of 50% software revenue share. Is this still valid?

Yes.

We have not received any other risen hands or questions elsewhere, as Mr. Spang put his messages in the chat before. [Operator Instructions]. But I guess if there are no further questions anymore, we would come to the end of today's earnings call. I thank you very much for your interest in SNP Schneider-Neureither & Partner SE. A big thank you also to you, Mr. Amail and Mr. Roderer and, of course, also Mr. Wiskow, for your presentation and your time. Should you have any further questions at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. I wish you all a successful day, and I'm going to hand over to you, Mr. Wiskow, once again for your closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you very much, Mara, for your participation. I guess these few questions underlines the decision that we will terminate these kind of calls. This concludes today's earnings call. We appreciate your continued interest in SNP and remain available for further dialogues. Have a pleasant day, and goodbye. Bye-bye.