Earnings Call: Q4 2025

Feb 19, 2026

Annual report

Welcome, and thank you for logging in here. We are going to present our 2025 results. The presentation will have two sections. We'll talk about the 2025 results, about the short-term outlook for 2026, and then we'll talk in a little bigger picture about the strategy plan. We have announced a three-year strategy plan from 2026-2028, talking about our offering, our go-to market in the new strategy, and also around the AI, which is key to the strategy. Just a quick look into the 2025 results. Excuse me. If we're looking to the 2025 results, we are presenting a pretty solid business. Yes, we have a decline in total revenue of 6%, but looking a little deeper into the numbers, you'll see that we are growing subscriptions by 18%, which also means that software represents 78% of total revenue. We are also presenting a pretty nice EBT margin of 22%. That's slightly higher than we have forecasted earlier. As a result, we are also raising the dividend about 56% to DKK 1 per share. I mentioned before we had a decline in total revenue. That's very much due to the one-time software licenses. Previously, we had some very large international one-time licenses, which are smaller in 2025. The point is, we have had a strong focus on building large customers, but as a part of preparing for the 2026 strategy, we are now piloting and preparing for the growth. The result here is also that we have not reached what we expected on the large customers, so that has a one-time direct effect on the 2025 results. We've seen some postponed international large projects. It's not that we have given them up, so we are still looking to them, but we are a little cautious on expectations there. We did also expect that there would be a fourth quarter government spending, which did not come in this year. This is primarily in Denmark, but that's due to some of the government changes going on here. Clearly the lack of the large international licenses had effect on the export, which is lower, but we still have 28% of total revenue in exports. Services is almost flat, but that's very much as part of the strategy as we are moving more and more our services to working with partners. If we look at the preparation and the piloting we did in 2025, it's been very much focused on preparing going into segments, which we see as a key driver in growing the business and working with partners, and then, of course, also building and integrating the AI into the platform, which is a key element in the growth as we are moving forward. Talking a little more into the 2026-2028 plan, we're talking about what we call Land, Expand, Innovate. Key elements to the plan is that we are limiting our organization restrictions, which means how many resources do we need to grow. As we are working more and more towards partners and selling of standard software, that is restricting the resources needed to do that. We're also reducing the complexity of our business, which is essential to the growth. We're talking about moving from accounts to Land and Expand. That is really one of the key changes internally, because earlier we organized around large customers and building them. Now we're moving into what we call Land and Expand, and we are illustrating that with this matrix, where we have new products and new existing products. We have existing customers and new customers, and this means that our growth model is landing new customers, growing with them, which we call Expand, and then innovating and creating new products with the customers. That's kind of our journey with customers. We are organizing internally. That's part of the change as we're moving to this new strategy plan. What you'll see is we are focusing on market segments. I'll get deeper into that in a second. Landing new customers as we have that focus. We are beginning to work with partners to scale around these segments. We're building a customer base where we, by adding more processes and products, including the AI, can expand the footprint with customers. Still, yes, of course, working with selected large customers, but we expect that you have seen the changes here coming up, going down, so on. We still see large customers as important for the business, but not as a kind of the sustainable growth. As we are looking into the short-term outlook for the 2026, we will clearly have effects related to the fact that we're doing these organization changes. We still forecast 10%-15% growth, and we believe that we'll be able to do that with maintaining pretty solid earnings of 20%-25% while we're doing this. We are now, and have initiated the 2026-2028 go-to-market plan. We are focused on landing new customers. We have announced two segments, the Paperless Ministry and the environmental permitting, which we announced in 2026, and we are prepared and been working on that. As you may have noticed, we landed a large government agreement with the Aarhus Municipality in the autumn, and we believe that that will pave the way for a local government segment. The scaling with partners, we had some initial good results and experiences in 2025. We have mentioned the Romanian project, where we've been able to deliver a pretty large project for the Romanian National Pension. Key here is, of course, the F2 Service Builder, which allow partners to define and implement the processes. Expanding our footprint with customers. Yes, we see the processes and the workflow automation, two key elements for here. For us, the Service Builder, which allow us, of course, to build processes, but also allow the customers to do it themselves. The AI as a key factor, because integrating AI and processes, we believe that's really one of the areas for future growth. We're talking about an F2 AI Task Specialist. I'll get back to that later. Last element here, yes, we'll continue to further develop and innovate with the large customers, which is still our labs in the fields, being allowed to see new products. Just a short thing on the markets, and then I'll get back to the business. We see there's a real lack of resources in the IT field. We know that, for instance, in Denmark, by 2030, there will be a gap, at least from the analysis, saying that you'll need 70% more IT engineers. We believe this is one of the key drivers in the market, pointing to using standard software, which is our offering. We also see security as a still more important thing. When you have a landscape of many different systems and open source components and so on, controlling the security is really very complicated. We also see an appetite for the type of product we're delivering, because this having a one integrated standard platform makes security and control much easier. We also see the whole sovereignty and interoperability as a key area. What you may have seen is that we are doing projects, for instance, with the Ministry of Digital Government, on how you can create the freedom you want to have the free choice between which kind of processes and so on you want. Again, that's a driver for us. The last element, clearly AI. I think everybody's aware that AI is driving us to rethink how we work, the workforce. Of course, that's something we're doing a lot with our customers. It's also influencing even the way we are building products and our internal development. One thing which we saw in June 2025 was the announcement from the White House that they are now moving from building these large system integrator-based solutions to focus on commercial off-the-shelf. And of course, it's not something that happens overnight, but we really see all this as a key driver for the whole cBrain story. If I look at our journey, and I think this is essential to understanding our '26, '28 strategy plan. When we started off in '25, we had a focus on document management. But what we did was we-- Excuse me. So what we did was, we turned it around, because at that time, document management was very focused on archiving. And we turned it around and said, "We realize that people are not really using the document management systems." When we started working with the Danish ministers, 15 or 20% of the documents that should be in the archives were in the archives. We were successful in turning it around and said, "What if we started with users and saw document management and compliance as the effects of supporting the users?" Users first was our success, and we were pretty successful in building that up. The next thing we did was we added the process layer and the self-services. We added the ability to configure your system as an open source declaration. This is where we created what we call the toolchain, and building process libraries, which we've been talking about earlier. The next round for us have been adding registries and what we call mass operations. By adding that, we now have a complete platform. Key elements here is that now we have a platform which is ready for partners. It also means that we have embedded the AI into that platform. If we look at the journey, we have moved from document management to process management to have an enterprise platform, which is our offering as we're moving into 2026-2028. Again, if we look at the customer journey, we moved from ministerial departments as the key focus in the early days. We then moved into agencies. We started going international, and now we are moving into the era of working with partners, which is, of course, a long-term scaling. Looking a little deeper, we were successful, I mentioned with the ministerial departments. Reality was we got almost all of the Danish ministerial departments. We also got the National Digitization Award, being able to get all of them on exactly the same standard software. We moved into agencies, and today we have around 75 Danish organizations in total on the F2 platform, which I think is very unique. This is also where we got the second National Digitization Award in 2027, being again able to deliver standard software for agencies like we did first for the departments. Moving on. With this, we will have been able to actually move into pretty large deliveries. The Danish EPA have now more than 150 processes in the F2 process library, supporting everything from grants management to inspections and so on. We have Deutsche Rentenversicherung now with 6,000 users. We have delivered a new hunting license register with 180,000 users in Denmark. We have delivered the dividends return system for the Danish tax. We have delivered ESR registry with OECD reporting, supporting the 35,000 companies in the UAE. During last year, as I mentioned, the National Pension Fund in Romania, which when fully delivered, will have 4,000 users and supporting all the citizens with more than 90 different citizen workflows. Let's see where I am. Here it was. Yes. Reality, going international, we now have implementation with government in five continents. Ready for moving into the next step here, working with partners. This is where we have our platform ready for doing that. The platform you see is divided into four areas. I'm not going to take you clearly deep into that, but being able to support what we call case and services, which is kind of our core, being able to do the self-services with the portal, being able to support registers and supporting something which you may find a little strange, we call it mass operations. The idea here is that you may actually want now to address 4,000 citizens. What you do is you select 4,000 citizens in the registers. You open up 4,000 cases and operate them. This is an example where you're mass operating citizen services, and this is kind of the complete platform, and this is our definition of what we call commercial off-the-shelf platform for government. Ending up, I would like to talk a little about the AI. Clearly, everybody's talking about AI, so what's our position and where do we fit in? Key area for us is something we call an AI Task Specialist. Before going into that, just let me give you an example, talking a little about a process in government, because when you look at a government organization, they have a lot of different processes. An example of a process may be issuing a driver license. If you look at the process, there may be a self-service where you type in, "Yes, I would like to have a driver license." There will be a number of steps before it's issued. During these steps, you have a number of tasks. You may do a screening and decide, is this citizen actually 18 years and old enough, et cetera? If we look at government processing, we have a model for that, which is core to our process delivery, where you have a number of steps, each of them doing tasks. Going to how you work in government, each task has an instruction. This is what you do as a public servant. With this, we can define this using the Service Builder. That's really part of the innovation in cBrain. Instead of building an individual solution, you can define a process using the Service Builder. In the Service Builder, you define workflows with tasks and steps, and it control the execution. Thereby, whenever somebody asks for a new driver license, it open up a case and go through these steps. That's a way of automating government work. Now what we can do is with the AI Task Specialist, we can now digitize the instruction and the prompts down to the individual tasks. Most of our competitors will be talking about agents, which are people kind of holding your hand as you're moving forward and supporting your task. What we do is we are down to the task level. This is where the real work is going on, because each task may just take a few minutes, but if you had to do thousands of these tasks, that is really where you're spending all your time in government, to make sure that you do the task and at a high quality level. Each of these have an instruction, and what we can do with the F2 AI Task Specialist is you can automate the individual task. You can tell it, "You should screen this, you should look for this and do this, and the result is so and so." What we do with the AI Task Specialist is we automate the task. This means that, and that's the reason we talk about a colleague, because now what you see is you have an AI and humans sitting side by side and executing this. The simple business case here is that every time we can have an AI Task Specialist taking over the part of the work which was done by a human before, you will free up that time. This leads to two things, the automation here, clearly, it takes away time, which is money. Secondly, what it does, it often can give you a higher quality. Because when you have, let's say, 20 employees sitting and doing this task, depending on who's doing it, you may have different effects. Now what we can deliver for government is higher quality and automation of work. You may say people get sad, they're losing their job. Well, they're not losing their job because there's a lot of things to do in government. We are automating a lot of the tedious work and so on, because often as an employee, you have to sit and read through 20 or 30 or 40 pages to understand something and agree. This is something you can do extremely fast with an AI. We have pretty good first examples of doing these. This is really supporting in on our Land and Expand here with the process and workflow automation. We can use the integrated Task Specialist to automate and help on the processes. I think that ends up my presentation here. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please type it into the box and click submit. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Move us on to the questions. Good. Yeah. There are no questions from the audio, if you wish to proceed with the webcast questions. How do we take these two? Should we take the second one first, then? Yeah. We have a question here from Mikkel. Do you believe you are better positioned versus competitors in terms of AI? Are you afraid that AI will totally limit the need for cBrain software over time, as customers can use coding to build their own codes? Thank you. Two questions in this. As I tried to explain with the Task Specialist, I think there is a very nice sweet spot for cBrain in the AI, because our focus has been from the very beginning to support the processes. For us, AI is a nice add-on. Therefore, I'm also using the phrase that we see AI as a new digital colleague, because up until now, cBrain has focused on not the content, but actually the processes. Now what we can do is we support the processes, and now we can also help, as I said, have the AI taking over what the user would be doing. We have already with the F2 eliminated the process control and these steps and so on, so AI fits nicely in as an extra component. I think we have an advantage there. The combination of the Service Builder, which allow you to define your processes, and the AI Task Specialist, which allow to also, in reality, we can now have our customers setting up the processes and defining their AI, and doing that on their own. Should we take number three? We go to number one. Could you please give some color on the assumptions you have regarding one-time licenses in your guidance? You say that larger contract wins represent upside potential. I guess not a lot has been included in the guidance. That's correct, Mikkel. Clearly, we expect some one-time licenses. When we're talking about the upside is that, yes, we're working on a number of larger deals, and we have some expectations that things could happen for us in Germany or in the U.S. We talked about that before, but we have not taken a larger portion in. It's clear if we land a new super account like we did in Germany, that will positively affect the numbers. Let me see if I can scroll down here. On the reprioritization of commercial investment, I appreciate that you reiterated the organic growth guidance 10%-15%. Could the reprioritization in fact indicate you have met some challenges that mean you don't see the sense to spend so much money? I believe you are referring to that we in 2025 set aside a larger sum for investing in U.S. if we saw opportunities. That was set aside in 2025 as a one-time, and that was because in the beginning of last year, we saw some opportunities where we believed that it could make sense to do a larger one-time investment. We don't see similar options right now as we're moving into 2026. Therefore, these were one-time for 2025. We also told that, and we have not prolonged them as we are moving into 2026. I don't know, Lars, do you have comments? There's a number of questions on the first one here. Yeah, we could take the first one. It's about how to grow the FTE and how we expect the FTE to grow in light of the partner strategy. Well, the partner strategy, as Per mentioned, allows us actually to scale, especially internationally, by outsourcing, so to speak, complexity and local knowledge and solution details to partners. In that way, that enable us to scale without having a corresponding growth in the FTE. That's the central thing about the CaaS platform, actually. Just let me add to that. Yeah. In reality, you can say we ask the partners to take over the delivery element, so we do not really see our internal consulting and delivery organization growing. However, as we're working with partners, we may see growth as we're building a partner strategy and a partner channel. That's probably where we'll see the FTE growth. The second question, how will the new partner strategy impact P&L? Higher external expenses, other effects? Basically, we expect the partner strategy to be a growth driver for our revenues, as we pointed out on the way. It allows us to scale without having a corresponding growth in cost. In that way, we'll be able to chase opportunities still across different countries, different regions, without being afraid to insource complexities into the organization. I think that's the one. Will you take the next one? I think three and four relates to things we are doing in the AI space. I'm not sure if I get the question right here. The question here is then related to the revenue side because we see AI as integrated components offering. When we are out, we meet a customer. They have a process supporting certain things with citizens and so on. What we deliver is a solution where we combine the process and the AI as an integral. Of course, by delivering a complete solution, fully integrated as a platform, we both deliver the process software and the AI software. We will see revenue from process and from AI, but we may often deliver that as an integrated solution at a fixed price, not necessarily separating the process and the AI. Clearly, as you're looking into the revenue model, you're also talking about that this may actually have fewer licenses, and that's correct. It's clear that if we are delivering AI agents, you may not have 20 users doing a specific task anymore. You may have five instead. The point is, with our revenue model, as we are charging for the process and the AI, we hope that that will both compensate but actually deliver and there will be an uplift. Because it's clear that the real cost for the customer is not the user licenses. I may elaborate a little bit more. Yeah. I'm with some of the customers, and I used to be a customer actually. I think this is really a potential game changer. A lot of our customers, public agencies, et cetera, they face large budget costs and increasing political demand for quick solutions. This being able to, within a controlled process environment, to automate different tasks and thereby increasing efficiency with several points easily. That's a very potential offer we have. As opposed to many other AI companies who offer agents that doesn't work in context, we really allow the customers to maintain control while using AI, and that's critical in my opinion. We're very optimistic about that AI Task Specialist will be a driver for our sales. I have to say, we are announcing these products right now. Of course, we are looking very much forward to see the reaction. I say that the initial reactions we've seen is extremely positive. Clearly, our focus right now is on our customer base, so where we already have the software in. It's pretty easy for us to sell these add-ons. I expect that we'll, say, around half year, be able to talk much more about it. Yes, and news about Kenya. Yeah. Yes, we're still working with Kenya. I have to say, there's a lot of political things going on. I believe that we will be able to talk more about Kenya within another far distance from now. We don't have news on Kenya, but I can share that we are doing a lot of work around this installation with the ICT ministry. We're working with a number of partners. In the autumn, we also had a delegation from Kenya visiting us from the ICT ministry. I can also see that the things we've been doing in Kenya is gaining quite some traction in some of the other countries. I was actually with UNDP people from New York this week who's been looking into what's going on. We cannot really share more on contracting, on what's going on there. There's a question here on how much do you think can grow sustainable from existing customer base through upsells? I'm sorry, of course, we have numbers on that, but that's something we cannot share, as we're not dividing into what is new business and existing business. Last question is whether international customers still prefer the license model over the SaaS model. I don't think we see a change in that as of now. We still see that the international customers are still having a focus on the license model. I think one thing which is also driving this right now is the whole sovereignty discussion, which not really has something to do with us, but clearly due to some of the large tech companies from U.S. who are very much driven the SaaS model. I think I see customers internationally trying to push back from the SaaS model, and of course, that may have an effect on what we're doing. Still, as we are selling licenses internationally, we'll still see subscriptions, because typically we'll have a 20%-25% subscription on top of one-time licenses. I think that was on the questions. Yeah. Yes. I can hand back to Heidi. Yes, there are no questions from the audio if you'd like to proceed with closing remarks. I don't know, Lars, will you sum up? Say we're having a number of presentations now. Yeah. This was our first presentation. Yeah. We have a number of meetings with investors in the coming time, and I think the numbers are what they are right now. Also, I think we should add that we're quite optimistic with the new strategy. We have a real good feeling that we have figured out the right next steps in order to get our revenue growth back. We are quite confident in the strategy and optimistic about the different things that we have on the shelves and that we are marketing and selling right now, including not least AI Task Specialists. I think, Heidi, back to you. Thank you.