SSH Communications Security Oyj (SSH1V) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to SSH Communications Security's Q4 and full year 2025 review and update on where we are and where we are heading. I am Rami Raulas, the CEO of SSH Communications Security. And today, with me, I have Michael Kommonen, CFO at SSH Communications Security. This session is facilitated and will be recorded using our own SalaX Secure Messaging platform, and the recording will be available later today on our website under the Investor pages. All right. Let's get going. So I wanted to share a bit of the summary of last year and Q4. So there were challenges and there were positive signs overall. So overall, our revenue was pretty flat, didn't grow. We didn't have license sales much last year. This is fully in line with our strategy, by the way. We are aiming for full recurring revenue and subscription sales, which annual recurring revenue is now indeed 97% of our revenue. At the end of 2024, we had a major license deal for file encryption solution. And we didn't have any major license deals because of that focus on subscription and ARR last year, so hence, the dip in sales. Sales was also impacted by a weakened dollar, both, of course, in the U.S.A. market or Americas market, but also in Asia, APAC market, where we invoice predominantly in U.S. dollars as well. We had some growth, double-digit growth overall for the subscription sales, but it was kind of low double digit. Anticipating, of course, much higher growth going forward. So those were the things hampering our growth last year. But the things where we made a lot of progress, last year was a year of investment and develop areas of tools and methods for improving opportunities to grow faster. Of course, the big thing was -- actually, the turnaround point for the company in decades is the strategic partnership and financial investment agreement with Leonardo, a EUR 20 billion space, aerospace, defense and cyber and security company, whereby we integrate as part of the Cyber & Security division in Leonardo. That partnership was closed, finalized in October. And we started working already earlier on that one, and that has created now new pipeline, new opportunities for us. I will say a few more examples of what we've been achieving and where we are going with that partnership. Subscription sales grew 11%. Indeed, our main growth product is PrivX. That is the biggest market opportunity for us in the so-called PAM, privileged access market. Asia Pacific grew 21%, a bit more in local currency. PrivX grew in the fourth quarter just shy of 20%, overall in the year, a little bit less than that. So that certainly is our growth product, and we want to propel it for much higher growth rates moving forward. We also started to plan and executed then in the first days of January an organizational change, also just for getting more focus on marketing, product management, product marketing, go-to-market, creating awareness, creating demand for our solutions and unifying even more our product development efforts to be able to cross-utilize resourcing for all of the product areas. And I will come back to the portfolio solution a bit later. So we announced the new leadership structure now first days of January, moving away from separate business units. If you remember, 2 years ago -- well, under 2 years ago, I announced an organizational change into 3 regions, EMEA, APAC and Americas, and then 3 business units. And now we kind of moved from business unit structure or divisional structure to functional structure, so that we have a new role called CPO, Chief Product Officer. Harri Pendolin joined us now. And our product management, product marketing and go-to-market activities are centralized in that way. We also centralized engineering under our CTO, Miikka Sainio. Then our CFO, Michael Kommonen, is part of the leadership team. And then I also appointed David Wishart, who's leading the EMEA region, as part of the leadership team to drive the sales excellence across the different regions as well. One thing we've been suffering a bit is that some customers trust a lot of big analysts, Forrester, Gartner Group, IDC type of many kinds of analysts. We haven't been that visible in there. Now last year, we put a lot of effort in gaining visibility with analysts. And indeed, we achieved 6 -- well, actually 7, but 6 different analyst validations or reviews on us, all very positive. On PrivX, by the way, a couple of interesting customer cases that happened right towards the end of the year is: the world's fifth largest really tech-driven, AI-driven data center, an AI data center hedge fund with nearly EUR 40 billion in assets under management; an Indonesian fintech pioneer, SPE Solution, became a customer; and then we were able to introduce -- we have quite a bit of so-called key manager customers, which has been kind of a bread-and-butter solution for us for a decade. We have lots of financial institutions that are using that solution. We were able to introduce a PrivX as a kind of a modern next step to get rid of having to manage those keys to automate it. And we were able to introduce that to a major American financial services company right at the end of the year as well. Then we had progress on many of our solution acceptances as well. So for instance, for the network encryption, NQX, post-quantum, quantum-safe. We were able to achieve export licenses. And that product is a dual-use product. So we need to export licenses outside of Europe. We were able to, with the Foreign Ministry, get those now for Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia, where we have partners excited to move forward with us on moving to the next level of network protection and network encryption with that solution. We also got the initial customers for the SalaX Secure Messaging and file encryption solution as well. So some challenges that didn't help us grow as expected last year, but then a lot of positive things, a lot of development. And I'll cover a bit more of that later on. But Michael, maybe you want to say a few words about the numbers themselves.

Thank you, Rami. And good morning also on my behalf. So moving into the fourth quarter financials. In the fourth quarter, net sales declined by 21% and EBITDA was EUR 0.1 million. So as Rami mentioned, we had in the comparison period, in the last quarter of 2024, we had a large license deal on our FQX, file encryptor product, that was delivered which did not renew in this quarter, which largely explains the decline in overall net sales. Subscription ARR grew 12.5%. And PrivX sales growth in the fourth quarter, overall sales growth of PrivX was 17.7%. On the profitability side, of course, most of the decline in the sales came through to the EBITDA, which was EUR 0.1 million. We also had continued headwinds from the U.S. dollar weakening. This impacted the net sales negatively. For the full year, the total sales would have been nearly flat, slightly less than 1% negative at comparable currency rates. In the fourth quarter, in October, we announced the closure of the Leonardo deal. The financial investment agreement and the strategic partnership came into force in the end of October. And through this partnership, we have been able to generate a significant pipeline increase through the partnership with Leonardo. A bit more on the numbers. So the overall subscription sales continued to grow, reaching 12.2% in the fourth quarter. Deferred revenues were also up from a year ago. At the end of 2025, we invoiced several multiyear deals, partly renewals, partly expansions, which then increased the deferred revenues, reaching EUR 14.6 million at the end of the year. EBITDA, as mentioned, EUR 0.1 million. EBIT, negative EUR 0.7 million. Cash flow from operations was EUR 1.9 million in the fourth quarter and positive also for the full year. Finally, a look on the global situation. Globally, our fastest-growing region was APAC, followed by EMEA and, after that, the Americas. Combined with the U.S. dollar, that meant that EMEA's share of our overall sales increased slightly, reaching 55% of sales last year, the Americas at 33% and APAC at 12%. We also now have in the EMEA region, where we have basically on the privileged access market one significant European competitor, as a Central European company, we have also now established our presence in Italy with the Leonardo partnership. So we, in a way, consider that part of our home market also now. So with that, back to you, Rami.

Thank you, Michael. And there we go. Okay. So I talked about investments. So we did invest a lot in people. What are our assets? You could say that our asset is the IPR, the code, which, of course, we protect extremely well and safely, sure. Customers typically are a big asset we've been talking about over the past years. But really, what makes this happen are people and competent people who make the code and who take care of customers. So we made a lot of investments in resourcing. So we built a new team in the U.S. I think we had 11 new hires in the U.S. Some are replacements, many new hires. You can see the U.S. team with myself there from December. Overall, we introduced 16 new persons into the organization in '25, toward the end of the year mainly, and now, already 6 more in the beginning of this year. And we do spend a lot also in R&D. About over 40% of our spend in resourcing is in R&D. So we are a tech and innovation company. But now we are strengthening as we move forward the sales and especially marketing and product marketing efforts. So let's have a quick look on the focuses for this coming year or going year. For sure, I mean, we did more feet on the ground. We've been talking about the importance of partners. Now we have a mega partner, strategic partner with Leonardo, and then other partners complementing that offering. We've organized now under CPO both product management and product marketing and have started to put new means of demand and lead development activities in place, events, digital marketing, social media marketing and many more. And like I said, we've been gaining some positive feedback from industry analysts. I see an opportunity now. Maybe we've been a bit ahead of our time with some of our solutions, not really pioneering but, say, early adoption of the new technologies like modern access management technologies, quantum-safe or post-quantum technologies. There's a real market opportunity now for a modern PAM. The legacy PAMs have been there for 20 years and customers are getting a bit fed up with them, and there is still a big opportunity in that market. There's a clear migration to key-less and password-less, so kind of modernizing, reducing the risk surface in companies. I just had a discussion with a major Canadian bank. Canada is on the news now. And they have already moved to password-less, and they now have a 2-year journey to move to something that they call zero standing access, meaning that nothing is permanent. Everything is granted on the fly only for the job that needs to be done, whether it's a man or a machine that does it because there's 50x more machine identities than human identities, and to get rid of standing privileges. And our product is designed for that from day 1. There's another trend that is giving us, I think, a good tailwind, which is the geopolitical tensions in the world now. And there's a lot of talk in Europe especially about sovereignty. Maybe you saw that the French government decided to change from Microsoft Teams to Visio and open source Matrix technology, which is what we are basing our SalaX on as well. And other sovereignty actions in terms of data management. One of the biggest data sovereignty programs in Europe is the Italian government and healthcare migration to PSN, Polo Strategico Nazionale, which means that there's a combination of private data centers, private cloud and public cloud usage governing the data and the sovereignty of the data, for instance, healthcare patient data, identity data not getting into American clouds without control by the government itself. We also introduced NQX, our network encryption, to Leonardo. And we have now cases that we are working on at the moment. And we are seeking and we'll be getting also NATO R and EU R certifications for our network encryption towards the middle of the year. It's a bit slow. These approval processes can take some time. So a lot of good opportunities to move forward. But let's have a quick look at those industry analysts because I think they are indeed important. I mean, when I think about it, modern customers don't really care about what analysts say. They seek for the modern solution vendors. They seek them out, they try them out, and then we enter negotiations. So they look at it from a technology advantage point of view, not from a market analyst point of view. But then again, we have lots of customers, maybe more traditional customers or opportunities that indeed do rely on these analyst reviews. So last year, we succeeded to get into something called Magic Quadrant for Gartner for Privileged Access Management. We are there as an Honorable Mention. The only reason why we are not quite right there in the middle of it is that we just don't have enough revenue yet for that. There are 17 vendors that have been approved for that, that qualify all the technical and functional requirements. We are one of them, all the way to the market leader, which is CyberArk. And then you have 5 vendors who don't fulfill the technical and functional requirements for a modern Privileged Access Management solution, companies like IBM, HashiCorp, Okta, Microsoft or Teleport, which are mentioned there but do not fulfill those. Very high recommendation from customers and peers as well. So those customers that we've been able to acquire are indeed very satisfied with that. Then there's another one. For the secrets management part, a European organization called KuppingerCole, they rated us quite much to the right, so quite much at the top of secrets management because we have built secrets management as part of our solution as well. And then there's yet another one, Info-Tech, that has studied and investigated our solution and thinks that it demonstrates significant merit as a PAM to enhance security without sacrificing efficiency. So modern architecture brings efficiencies and less costs and better return of investment than kind of traditional legacy solutions. But back to partners. So with Leonardo, as I said, the partnership was anchored and solidified. We started to work already in July but the closing took place in October. And then we've been training people. We've been putting our solution offering into the common offering. By the way, today, we have 9 people from Leonardo here with us, together with Axiomatics from Sweden, which is another acquired company by Leonardo for modern attribute-based access controls, to discuss marketing, sales and technical partnership, how we move forward on that. And it is all about embedding -- and that has already now taken place to the largest extent, embed our solutions as part of Leonardo Made in Europe cybersecurity offering altogether. And that has been released and documented actually. You can find more information about that on our webpage on how that integration has taken place. Our focus there is on critical infrastructure, public safety, aerospace, space and then, of course, defense. So that's kind of, I don't know, let's put it, at least half of our effort is in that huge opportunity now moving forward. I'll come back to that in a minute. And then, of course, to complement that, there are markets where Leonardo does not play, financial markets, some technology, IT service companies, some regions, for instance, a bit in North America, parts of Asia, Central Europe. That's why we continue to develop and enhance our partner network and activate our partner network more. So you can see a few more partners there from last year, Deloitte, Accenture, Chyunyao and COMIT from Taiwan and Vietnam as well. So this is a focus. It's a balanced focus. But overall, really the role of partnership is crucial for us. We don't have the means, and it wouldn't make sense either, to do direct sales. We really want to move through partnerships because customers use those partners for their systems integration and services management altogether. So here's a summary of that Zero Trust offering together with Leonardo. It's a bit complicated picture maybe, actually not. And I'm not going to explain it in detail. But it's about authentication, how do you make sure you authenticate; that the device to access or the application or service to access is safe; that the identity of the user is validated, verified, whether it's MFA or biometrics or other means; then that is authorized so that only the right actors, whether they are people or machines, can access the right targets at the right time only for the duration of the session; and then that the communication and the connection is secured, properly encrypted and secured in between. So our solutions fit in there. Then what Leonardo offers on top of that and underneath that, of course, is the whole cybersecurity portfolio, especially for visibility and analytics, automation and orchestration, governance, global cybersecurity center operations, where we have now been integrating our solutions in the past months, and then data protection and AI implementations as well. And here, we are now also in partnership with Axiomatics, who complements the offering, working as we speak here now for further integration of a wider portfolio to the market. So I mentioned public safety and critical infrastructure. These are the areas where Leonardo is strong outside of the space, aerospace and defense markets. Quite a lot of -- as you can see, it's pretty kind of infrastructure or operational technology driven, and there are very many exciting implementations by Leonardo in those areas. Maybe I can pick a few key focus areas from there. One is ports and logistics and maritime, really important for supply chain security. The other one is transportation. And the third one is energy production and energy distribution. So those are the kind of maybe more focus areas in that. So where are we actually now on the journey to grow together with Leonardo? Since the start of the collaboration, we've been creating about 40 new opportunities together with different markets in Europe and outside of Europe altogether. So I think that's quite a lot in quite a short period of time. I mentioned already that one of the critical target market where we are already now entering is this Italian sovereign cloud and migration of public sector and healthcare solutions and services into the digital age and cloud environments, but protected by Telecom Italia and Leonardo and a couple of other companies in Italy. So the central governance for PSN will be handled with our PrivX, and we're already in the catalog for those more than 500 public sector entities in Italy to be able to acquire our technology in there to protect access and secure the data in the public sector in Italy. The other part is that Leonardo is one of the leading high-performance computing manufacturers. They released that strategy a few years back. I think they are top 7, top 8 of the 500 high-performance computing companies. It's based on supercomputer technology and then, of course, CPU and GPU, so AI chips from NVIDIA. It's a huge, huge infrastructure. I think I can say that it's nearly 300 petaflops of performance, whatever that means. It's huge, right? You can see that. And the access control to that high-performance computing platform will be governed by PrivX. Then global cybersecurity center, which is a really important services business for identifying, protecting, defending and then restoring and reporting on cybersecurity incidents, that's also an AI-driven service. We've now been integrating our solutions in there for access management, for secure access to customer environments and communication. And that is going well. We also were part of the new launch of a new global cybersecurity center. The main ones at the moment are in Italy, in Brussels, in the U.K. and in Riyadh in Saudi. But we were part of the launch of the new cybersecurity center in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur as well. The observant ones may have noticed that in our Capital Markets Day towards the end of the year, Mr. Simone Ungaro, the other Co-General Manager of Leonardo, made a mention in his speech that the Italian manufacturing sites, which are about 35, will be protected with PrivX as an OT security solution. So that's a project that will be moving forward. Then energy and transportation is a focus where we are working on together. And then finally, for the sovereignty topic, Made in Europe for Europeans. We are already a supplier for many European entities. But now Leonardo was able to achieve a major contract, so-called FREIA contract, a EUR 3 million (sic) [ EUR 3 billion ] contract with more than 70 European organizations, European Commission and related organizations, which I'm sure getting into that scope as well will give us some opportunities. So I think very positive development there. The business will follow. We haven't seen that many orders and deliveries yet. I mean, some of these projects take some time. There's a technical part. There may be a procurement part. But these are all ongoing projects, and I have very much confidence in them going through in a very positive manner in the next 9 to 12 months. Now what I've been saying earlier already is that we talked about OT, operational technology security. Well, the ultimate operational technology security is with defense, right? That is just so important. And also the requirements and approvals and certifications are the toughest in that. So if we can deliver, which we do, all of our solutions for the defense market, then we certainly can serve less critical markets as well. And now the opportunity, of course, together with Leonardo is to extend our defense market opportunity in other main markets in Europe and outside, and NATO included, obviously. But this is a bit more long term opportunity. There's GCAP, which is the sixth-generation fighter jet project between Leonardo, British Aerospace, Tempest and Mitsubishi in Japan, but certainly an important strategic investment from our point of view. And there was actually a very cool -- I posted that also on my social media, a very cool introduction of European security architecture by Leonardo called Michelangelo Dome. I mean, in Israel, there's an Iron Dome. In the U.S., they have a Golden Dome. So this is now the proposed and underworks European protection to detect, track and neutralize complex and simultaneous attacks, whether they are drone swarms or missiles or hypersonic weapons, air, land, sea, space, cyber, a big part of it as well. But it's an open platform, interoperable platform between different European and other vendors. So it's not a closed one-vendor solution but an open architecture. And you can see my Linkedin post on that and then see an interview of Mr. Cingolani, the CEO of Leonardo. Interesting to watch. This will start to take place 2028 onwards, and we certainly hope and plan to be part of that one way or the other. But I wanted to come back at the end here very briefly just on a couple of notes on where our focus is. So from a portfolio point of view, we still continue with 3 businesses and a few solution areas there involved, so communication security for and between network systems and humans. But I'm going to talk a little bit more about -- a few words on the PrivX opportunity and the NQX opportunity moving forward. So the Privileged Access Management market is big and it's growing nicely, but it's also in movement. There's a transition to different kinds of technologies, which gives us an opportunity to play and have a bigger market share in that market. Here's a picture from the earlier mentioned Gartner Group about the kind of transition or development or modernity of Privileged Access Management solutions from bottom-left, kind of legacy, to the top-right for modern infrastructures. Now we are right up there. We're right up there on the top-right corner already, but covering the whole journey. So we can transition customers to modern environment, but we designed our product initially from the modern point of view. Well, actually, there's another way, maybe a better way to describe the same topic by saying there are -- maybe you can say that there are 4 generations of PAMs, of Privilege Access Management solutions. Starting from CyberArk, who came to the market 20 years ago, 22 years ago, kind of legacy PAMs, which do mainly the vaulting of secrets and static passwords. Companies like HashiCorp, which is now part of IBM, would be there. Then kind of the traditional PAM where you vault and rotate passwords, even millions and millions of them, which is kind of a very burdening process. And there, you have market leaders like CyberArk or BeyondTrust or our European competitor, Wallix or Delinea, and a few more. And then you have modern PAMs, which really help customers to move to automated, you spin up resources when needed, you spin them down and don't have cost when not needed. You automate, you get rid of any need to rotate passwords or renew keys because they are risky and they are high-cost and whether it's on-premise, in private clouds or in public clouds, just like the Italian PSN architecture is designed for those 3 environments. And then the introduction of machine identities, so humans play a lesser role especially with the introduction of AI in many processes. We also then, of course, protect agentic AI access and AI service access. And then there will be a fourth generation that we are already building, and I'm sure there will be some new venture investments in that, which is more continuous, risk-adaptive, even more automated, driven more and more with AI technology overall. And our solution started from the blue #3 box. We've built enough of the legacy support so we can transition customers there. And here we are now today designing and developing the next step of functionality and features on this modern platform. The other growth -- so that is our main growth as I started the whole presentation today about, and we will continue to put most of our effort in that space. The other growth opportunity I clearly see is on network encryption and quantum-safe transition. We've been talking about that a lot. Finland has been actually a leader not only in other technologies like space technologies with companies like ICEYE or ReOrbit, or with quantum technology with companies like IQM, but also in post-quantum. So we have been part of that consortium here. We've validated solutions. We are one of the few Europeans in part of the American NIST, which is the American standardization organization for the migration consortium. And the whole thing has been designed from start to really have high performance and functionality for helping customers transition to post-quantum technologies. And now there's a European road map that was announced toward the end of the year. There's legislation in the U.S. and Singapore to mandate this migration. And in Finland, both the National Emergency Service Agency and Cybersecurity Center are pushing organizations now, especially this year now, to do the crypto inventory and then migrate critical assets and critical communications for next level of protection with quantum-safe. And that's where we can definitely help. So those are our efforts last year, results last year, focus in moving forward and how we make efforts and improve our ability to grow faster in the main product areas. With that, Michael, maybe you can join me back and say a few words on guidance. And then we can have a discussion about questions and answers from the audience.

Okay. So our guidance for this year, for 2026, is that we expect net sales to grow compared to the previous year. We estimate EBITDA and cash flow from operating activities to be positive in 2026.

With that, I think there may be some questions from the audience as well.

Yes. First question. Do you expect Leonardo to impact the business growth significantly in 2026?

Do we expect the partnership with Leonardo to impact the business significantly in 2026? Yes, that is our biggest growth opportunity. That's the biggest investment we've been making already for a number of months. And you saw some of the ongoing activities and those new opportunities that we have started to work on. So certainly, that is the most important investment for this year.

Okay. Second question. Have the radical political changes in the U.S. impacted or do you expect them to impact your U.S. and NATO business?

So have the political changes from U.S. impacted our business opportunity in NATO? Not really. I mean, the industries are very different in this trade war or trade policy changes. Some industries are very dependent on that and supply chains. The software industry, where we are, is not really impacted. I don't see any change when I speak with customers and prospects and colleagues and peers in the U.S. I don't see any change. They don't even talk about politics. It's the business that drives forward. And the fact that within NATO, now European countries and organizations will have to assume more responsibility is actually very good for the European investments in defense technologies as well, which will certainly favor us as well.

Has PrivX deal size increased or decreased?

Has PrivX deal size increased? Slightly. Of course, our aim is to find bigger deals, but it's always a mix. So I would say no significant change last year in that.

Are there signs of SalaX business growing significantly this year? And what are SalaX's competitive advantages for success in international markets?

Yes. So do we expect the SalaX business to grow significantly, and what are the competitive advantages for that solution? Yes, we grew a little bit last year with SalaX. We got the first customers last year for the SalaX Secure Messaging. We explained earlier that the way that we built the secure messaging, which is kind of the next generation of the secure mail or, [Foreign Language], it's called here in Finland, we chose a European open source platform Matrix technology and partnership with Element, a U.K. company, to bring our SalaX product more quickly to the market. I think that was a really clever choice because now there's a lot of activity in European sovereignty. Countries and public sectors are looking for European solution. They are looking for open source-based technology, not to be vendor locked in. And I mentioned already the French government moving to Visio and Matrix. Both healthcare systems in Germany and Austria are moving into this Matrix technology. Bundeswehr, the military in Germany, is moving to that. There's activity in Switzerland. And in Sweden, the public sector market has given guidance on how to reduce dependency on centralized services and look for more national and more sovereign solutions from Europe.

NQX growth has happened slower than expected. When is the significant breakthrough expected? And what is the key success factor in that happening?

So question was NQX has grown less or more slowly than anticipated, and when can we expect the breakthrough in that. Yes, it's a fairly kind of limited market product. We're not fighting against the main SD-WAN or firewall vendors. We're working in spaces where customers need secure network encryption, which would be like energy companies, data center to data center connections, connecting sites in the defense organization, cases like that. I would say so that it would have been difficult to get into the large markets and NATO, even if we have the approval as a NATO vendor, and we'll now soon have the NATO product approval as well. It would be difficult for a small company representative to conquer an Italian market, Spanish market and get interest into NATO. But now we have the partnership with Leonardo, which gives a new opportunity, a totally different opportunity to get into those markets. Sure, it will require some validations and certifications. They are already ongoing. So I trust that this year, we will see a very positive movement in opening new market opportunities for NQX. And I already mentioned earlier today as well the new opportunities and export license grants for some Asian countries as well.

There was recently signed a cooperation between Japan and Finland, and SSH was one of the parties mentioned in the agreement. Is this a significant agreement for SSH? And when are concrete results expected?

Yes. There was a delegation from Japan here with Business Finland and Foreign Ministry and kind of an overall partnership agreement between Japan and Finland on a political level. We've already been in Japan for a decade or 2. We have strong partners like Fujitsu and NTT in there. We have customers like Murata Machinery globally from there. So for us, it's not a new market. But I was part of that a couple of weeks back as well. Of course, I felt it's important to get more connected and see what are the other opportunities. And indeed, there were some other Finnish companies like KNL and ICEYE that announced new partnerships in Japan. So I think, overall, the market opportunity for Finnish companies, us included, into the Japanese market is a growth opportunity as well. Do we have more questions online? Or...

Yes, we have. We have some more questions in the chat. But we have our analyst, Jacob Benon, with us now.

Okay. Jacob, if you wanted to ask some questions.

Rami, Michael, can you hear me? Hello, Rami, Michael, can you hear me?

Now we can hear you.

Hello? [Technical Difficulty]

Yes, we can hear you, Jacob. Hello? Jacob, I think you are muted. Well, if there's an issue with the audio, maybe you can type your questions in the chat, and we can read them out loud from here, if that is okay for you. We have a discussion tomorrow again as well. I can't see, it's too far. Can you read it out loud, please?

Yes. First question, guidance. Do you have internally different levels for the growth guidance, "growth", "grows clearly", et cetera? Is there some factors causing headwinds for growth? That was the question.

Well, question was about do we have some internal guidance for growth and are there some headwinds for growth. Now for growth, I think, as I said, two of the main we have -- of course, we have targets and goals for personnel internally. But for the challenges, I think, our focus is now to get the partner network really rolling, starting from Leonardo, where we spend most of our effort and time. And as you saw, I see clear progress in there, but also with other partners. The other area where we need to step up is creating more demand, creating more awareness for our solutions on the market. And I mentioned a few activities in that area as well. So we've been building -- last year was, I would say, eventually then more of an investment year for building blocks for growth. And now we've invested a lot in new personnel as well.

Revenue in America came down significantly. Outlook in the U.S. market at the moment?

Yes. The U.S. market in U.S. dollars was close to flat, but measured in euro, came down. We've been on the turnaround program in the U.S. now for 1.5 years. And the first part was building the team. And as I mentioned, we have hired and built a new team. The next phase is to strengthen the partner network. I mean, in the U.S., the smallest part of our partner contribution is in that region. Now we have started to work on that. We hired a new partner management structure as well. So I trust that this year, we'll do a better job and can see more elements for growth in the U.S. market as well. We also introduced a solution for PrivX that adheres and is compatible with the U.S. government cryptographic standard, something called FIPS 140-3, which certainly will help in the federal government space as well.

40 new opportunities with Leonardo, how has that developed in the last month? How was it in October when the partnership officially started?

Yes. Question was about those roughly 40 opportunities for Leonardo, how much was developed in each month and how much was it in October. I'm not going to go too much in detail, but there's been an accelerating trend towards the end of the year now beginning. So we are on a positive trajectory in creating together more opportunities.

You mentioned a big EUR 3 billion deal by Leonardo. How big part of this do you expect for SSH to gain from this? How big opportunity should this be for SSH?

Yes. I mean, there are lots of big frame agreements like this PSN or FREIA and others as well. We're not going to give any kind of distinct targets for us in those opportunities. But I think they, over the coming years, can be a significant opportunity to grow in those as part of deliverables. I mean, there are both wide sets of services and solutions there. So we will be just part of it. But certainly, they can give us a nice new opportunity as well.

Do you expect bounce back in license sales in 2026 or is the focus fully in recurring revenue? Was there some license deals pushed to 2026?

Yes. Question was do we expect some bounce back on license deals or are we just on ARR and subscription -- new subscription sales, and were there some pushbacks from last year to this year from license. There were a few midsized license deals. I mean, there may be some customers that prefer CapEx and license investments. So we are willing to listen to that and maybe adhere to that. But no, nothing significant in the license area. Our selling strategy and price lists are on subscription sales and as-a-service sales.

And now a few questions from Jacob on the chat. It seems like APAC is growing very nicely, maybe not in Q4 but for the full year 2025. And you recently announced 2 strategic partnerships during the quarter in Vietnam and Taiwan. Is it possible to briefly describe the regulatory tailwinds in these markets when it comes to your product suite? And what products are more or less benefited due to the regulatory landscape in APAC?

So if I can remember the question. So a long question about Asia, that we've been growing nicely there, maybe a bit slowdown in Q4 and new partners in Vietnam and Taiwan in addition to the existing partners there, and then whether regulatory topics are helping or inhibiting growth. First of all, I mean, the regulation in Asian markets is actually much less. Europe maybe has gone a bit overboard in regulation. And now we are dismantling that in Europe, as we all know. In the U.S., you have very clear regulation and legislation and even rules for cybersecurity players to help the government. Maybe you saw that silly message from BitLocker encryption keys being handed over from Microsoft to FBI just a few weeks back. We will not do that in Europe, for sure. So I think being a European vendor, having a secure way of delivering products without any back doors, and for dual-use products, getting them approved for export licenses, is a kind of security aspect that the Asian market certainly appreciates. So I see no reason why we could not continue or even accelerate our growth in Asia, even though it's our smallest region. But it's a massive region with a lot of countries and long distances and many cultures, which is why we need regional partners, partners in Japan, in Taiwan, in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in Malaysia, in Singapore, in Thailand and so on and so forth.

One more question. Due to the long lead times within the industry, should we expect any uptick in growth resulting from the Leonardo partnership to be tilted more towards the end of the year? Or do you expect it to contribute already in H1?

Yes. Question about the long lead time of these deals before they materialize from initial vendor selection, proof-of-concept testing, negotiations and then preparation for deployment and then the deployment itself. So what is the impact of that and what is the impact of Leonardo into that? And will that be more towards the end of the year or also in the beginning of the year? I'm confident that we will see some deals being closed, and one now in the next months together with Leonardo, and why not, with other partners as well. But majority, I would say, of the revenue stream will be more towards the end of the year just given the time cycles. For instance, global cybersecurity center of Leonardo offering, our solutions-as-a-service will be made available toward the middle of the year, as an example.

No more questions.

Okay. Thank you. You can see on the screen our calendar. So we will meet next time on April 28 for the first quarter investor call. And the presentation and recording from today can be found on our website, ssh.com/investors.

Thank you from my side as well.