So hi again to this small round as usual in our earnings calls, and welcome to the full year 2025 earnings calls of FamiCord. As usual, we have prepared a small presentation for you, just a couple of slides to get into the topic, and then I will hand over to Jakub, and he will lead you through the presentation. Afterwards we have time for a Q&A, of course. So Jakub, please go ahead.
Welcome everyone. Maybe some others will join because we got some emails from investors interested, but who knows whether they would be able to join today's call. We published our results as planned. The year was pretty good. We delivered more or less what we expected. Revenue grew solidly by over 7%, earnings even more, by 12% and 3%.
We had, as usually, a certain impact at net level related to goodwill impairment. What is worth noticing is that we noticed strong shift of our clients towards subscription services. So much more of them are selecting yearly payment over those who decided to prepay for five, 10, or 20, 18 years, depending on the option.
What we also announced in our guidelines that we noticed in the second half of the Q4, a sudden change in consumer behavior, and that already continues in Q1 of 2026. One important information, we decided not to continue supporting our CAR-T project, understood that we cannot afford investing more.
So we stay as a minority shareholder, but having less than 20% of the equity, and we are just a passive shareholder, and we are not consolidating the result of the company, which is called FamiCordTx or FamiCord Therapeutics. That company is burning cash because it is typical R&D company. We are living in pretty difficult environment that everybody knows, which is rather getting more complex and complicated. There are less and less children. Economy is really fragile.
That overall uncertainty may have a strong impact on our potential clients' behavior. It is also related with AI because I believe that certain industries might be under pressure in terms of maintaining jobs of people, particularly, let us say, younger clerks or simply employees of corporations which are the age of, let us say, 30, 35, and that is also part of our target group.
So we believe that impact of AI could be also responsible for the change of shift of interest in our services. From the cost perspective, we believe we are trying, at least doing our best to maintain the cost in order, and we reduce, let us say, unnecessary spendings. Also we decided to postpone unnecessary CapEx until having more clarity how the situation develops. That is it, I think, from the summary. Maybe, Thomas, you can add something from your end.
Can you go one slide back just to see if we said something about financial stability for FamiCord? We are taking care, of course, about the development that we will see maybe this year. We are close monitoring our cash position. As you saw on the first page in the summary, equity ratio went down to 3.3%, which is pretty low, which is not a major situation for us, but needs to be understood that it's mainly driven by impairment and also by expanding our asset balance. Therefore, the equity ratio came down, but is closely monitored. Maybe from the financial side, that's also something we might add to be aware of.
I did not comment on particular markets, right? Because it's not all the markets are doing the same or were doing the same. We see still continued growth in GCC despite the situation caused by a war between Israel, U.S., and Iran, right? We see that our operations there are doing pretty well, and that they are doing also pretty well in Q1 and April. Certain selected countries in Eastern Europe are also pretty resistant to potential issues we see in other markets. It's not that everywhere we see a sudden drop of interest, but it's in majority of countries, but not in all of the countries. Yes. One more comment.
Regarding this year, we decided to be really cautious as the situation is really unclear and economic environment is influenced by, let's say, political decisions and distortions, and the outcome is completely unclear which direction it will go. We know that there will be no more children, that there is no magic solution to be implemented in the short term.
At least nobody invented that. Maybe Chinese will do something because they have even bigger troubles. So maybe something new will come from Asia, who knows? Taking all of that into consideration, we decided to issue that kind of forecast or guidelines showing revenues in range of EUR 80 million -EUR 90 million for 2026 and group EBITDA in range of EUR 9 million - EUR 11 million. I think that's it from my side. If you have any questions, happy to answer.
Great, Jakub. Thank you. I'd say as we have such a small round here, just please feel free to open your mic anytime and ask a question. Tim, as I saw. Happy to take you first.
Thanks, Jens. It is understandable, I think the outlook, right? I was a bit disappointed, or it comes at a timing where at least from the last reports you had to Q3 with placenta banking, positive sort of momentum in Eastern Europe, at least in some countries. The overall impression is so much more muted, obviously, which then I am pretty certain also led to those new impairments because the muted outlook obviously then results in another business outlook.
My question there would be, is this what you already see? You mentioned this, that you are seeing parts of this in Q1, right? That is led to this stance. Maybe you could just sort of outline where is it coming from. Is it more the overall contracts, pricing pressure, in what regions? We just understand a bit more, where your cautious sort of outlook is coming from?
Is it more a precaution than actually what you are seeing? Then, Thomas, probably the follow-up for you, monitoring your equity ratio is an interesting formulation. Are you at levels where you have to take action? Your covenants for the banks, et cetera, that is all should be fine, right? Your EBITDA is good. From my point of view, but please tell me if I am wrong, it is more cosmetic topic than an actual financial distress situation.
Maybe I will start and then Thomas will answer.
Yeah.
First of all, we see something which is pretty unusual that consumer sentiment dropped in most of the countries. In the past, it was like some countries were performing very well, sometimes some of them not so well, some of them were in average. . That was balancing. They are the more balanced. At the moment, it is different. We see drop of sentiment or interest in majority of the geographies. This is why we started to be really cautious, because that is probably the first time in our history.
It has never happened before. As I said, we are doing well in GCC, we are doing pretty well in Turkey, we are doing pretty well in Hungary, Romania, Poland is also not that bad. Some of these countries are, although they are doing not that bad, they are doing below our expectations. Yes?
So that means that even the countries which we consider healthy are sometimes below what we would have expected. Whether there is one reason for that is unclear, because we do not see what you ask, maybe. We do not see that much pressure for price, but the fact that more people are choosing subscription is an indicator that consumption power is smaller or people do not like to spend money.
Yes? So we do not see that suddenly we should lower our prices by 20%, but the selection of giving packages is also an indicator that price might be an issue. Yes? We do not see competitors being suddenly hyperactive or offering special prices or being somehow desperate. No, we do not see that. So I think it is overall market perspective rather than one action or one cause or one reason.
We also mentioned in our letter that we should also adjust our marketing strategies due to AI and the way AI is now used and how the information is searched. So all the, let us say, digital communication was optimized for SEO. Traditional search engines, now we are simply optimizing that to be better visible by engines supported by LLMs, by models, because they are providing information in different way and also they are reading information in different way.
That will take us a couple of quarters to adjust and adopt to be better visible or to have higher or bigger efficiency of marketing campaigns. So, that is more or less the situation from the market perspective. Obviously, there is one factor which we believe is rather positive after political changes in Hungary. A lot of money should flow from European Union to Hungary.
So we believe that country would benefit, so indirectly also some of our potential clients will benefit out of that. It is a very good market, but it is not that big market overall. As I mentioned, we do not see very negative impact of the conflict in Middle East at our operations there. We are still growing. We are actually at the record sales there.
The question is only whether we can continue growth. That we do not know, because that also depends on the political situation. We are not only operating in Emirates, we have also partners in Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, so in the entire region. Yes, and otherwise, I think that Thomas may comment
Yeah
on the banking side.
Yeah. Thank you, Tim, for the question. Why did I mention the equity ratio? To say it in the first step, it's not an issue of us, of course, because often we have one financial covenant, which is net debt to EBITDA, so it's not the equity ratio. But for somebody who's not within our business, it sounds strange to see an equity ratio just of 3.3%.
But if you understand our business as you do, it's mostly coming from our contract liability, so enhanced balance sheet, plus, the situation that we had some impairments last year, especially on FamiCord AG, so our German entity, and our Portuguese subsidies, Stemlab. And of course, we had some M&A activities last year, so our debt position increased because it was financed with cash and debt last year. So overall, that's why our equity ratio came down.
It's not worrying us, but we are taking care, of course, especially since last year, our operating cash flow changed since we have more subscription, which is good to have in the long run. It's a sustainable development. But nevertheless, we have less cash that we receive. So this is something we are really taking care and taking into account what Jakub said and what we are seeing in the outlook. You just need to be careful. That's why we highlight this and, let's say, our job to be careful on this, whatever would come in the market or in the macroeconomic development.
Okay. But just to clarify, the equity ratio itself is nothing which would require you to do any kind of capital measure or... Okay, I just wanted to clarify that.
Of course, Tim, it's better to have a higher ratio.
Sure.
Yeah.
That is clear. Okay. I will jump in the queue.
Great. Thanks, Tim. Any other questions today? This does not seem to be the case.
Okay. If nobody has a question, of course, I have another question.
Okay.
Can you give an update on the placenta banking? I remember that Portugal was the next country you were looking, and I remember that you had some surprisingly positive signs from Germany also, what this topic was so-
Yeah. Portugal, we introduced placenta banking in December. At the moment, what we see is a practical execution because hospitals in Portugal were not well-prepared for that. Obviously, it's not our responsibility in terms of Portuguese regulations. It's different in Germany. We are gradually now training hospitals in Portugal to be familiar with the topic.
Sometimes we have cases that somebody signed the agreement, and then hospital did not collect placenta, which is not complex, as you know, because we are just taking entire placenta. We are not doing anything with that. Cord blood collection is much more complex. That was done, and we believe that we will improve in Portugal. We don't expect to reach that ratio of 35%, 40% we have seen some countries, or even more than 50% of people taking that offer, but at least minimum 20% is the goal.
Germany, yes, we got the license after more than two years of discussions with the authorities. We have collection license, production license. What we started is signing the agreements with hospitals across Germany. It is required, and it's very regional process. There is no pan-German or federal standard on the topic. We have to do it at the level of Länder in Germany.
At the moment, as far as I remember, we are at a range of 35 or 40 agreements signed, in that range, out of more or less 600, which is the total number of hospitals. In that case, we believe that after we'll have at least 100 agreements signed, we will launch the product in the territory of Germany. We believe that will be in Q3 this year. Yes.
It's more complex in Germany because due to regulations, not only we have to have it in the form of a written amendment to our existing agreements with hospitals, but also we have to formally train the hospital staff, collecting placenta like we do regularly for cord blood and cord tissue. What is planned for this year is Hungary. In the past, we were rejected to get the license because the authorities in Hungary told us there is no law in Hungary which will allow to issue such a license.
We believe that that was a wrong interpretation of the law, and we reapplied to get the license. I think we placed the request again in end of February, and we expect rather positive answer. Obviously, the government is now changing, so we will see also maybe some changes in the Ministry of Health and all the agencies. That will be probably a little bit longer process than usually. But we really believe that we may introduce also this product in Hungary this year.
Maybe a quick reminder, I think you once mentioned that your expectations or what you're seeing currently is that it doesn't really cannibalize the navel blood-
Yeah, cord blood.
Cord blood.
Yes. There are two things. One thing that we simply have more money per client. Obviously, we cannot sell with the same margin. It is an add-on product, so the margin percentage-wise is smaller, but it is simply a higher margin per client. Obviously, there is another factor which is important. Placenta seems to be well accepted by stakeholders. If you would ask a person on the street, what is placenta, everybody knows, almost everybody knows what is cord blood, not necessarily so.
From that perspective, we see that. This is why the takeout is so high for the new product. On average, it is over 35%. I think it is even more. Even weighted should be over 40%. Another country I forgot to mention, we also introduced that in the U.K. So we will not process it in the U.K. We will use our Portuguese laboratory for that, because we have already license in U.K. We do not have the license placenta yet. So we also introduced that in placenta banking in the U.K.
Okay, thanks. All the best.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Any further question at this point? I think that is not the case anymore.
Maybe one from my side, Niels here.
Yes, of course.
Thank you very much for hosting the call today. Maybe you could also share some light on the ongoing efforts on Cryo-Save. Where do we stand there in terms of customers, which you have won from the existing customer base, and how do you see the future in signing up more of those customers?
Pretty positive. I think last year we solved all the formal issues related with court proceedings we are involved in and which were blocking us from active communication with these families. There is entire process of communication going on. We started the year much better than we expected. We see rather positive response of these families.
I believe that these families will contribute positively to our, not only revenue, but also profit this year, which would be first time since we saved all these samples. There is an action plan prepared. We select a certain cohort of clients per country, per year of storage and so and so. We have a dedicated call center for that, multi-languages call center, which is operating from Warsaw with some help of our daughter companies across Europe. I'm rather positive.
The main issue we have is the addresses and contact numbers we have are unfortunately in 30% or 35%, they are simply old and not correct anymore. It's an issue how to get to these families, yes. We can use official channels to identify the person, but that is pretty cost exercise, yes. We are rather focused on mass now.
We are sending communication to as many as possible, which makes sense, and then trying to obviously upsell, because we are not only offering storage, but we are offering extra services, including also check of the physical check of the sample, right, whether it is expanding, cells are expanding, cells are growing. And we can also test, reconfirm the genetic origin of the sample and this kind of stuff. I'm rather positive. And that should grow in perspective of next years.
How many clients have you already signed, and what is the current target?
Over 50,000 signed. You should remember that in the very beginning of a couple of years until we had the so-called backup agreement binding. Backup agreement was between PBKM in Poland and bankrupt Cryo-Save. We were accepting prepayments, which were paid before to Cryo-Save. Now we are not accepting them anymore because backup agreement is over. This is why I am pretty positive in terms of growing revenue from these clients.
To remind everybody, we are talking about roughly 50,000 families out of more or less 225,000 families who were direct clients of Cryo-Save. On top of that, there are also B2B relationships. These are partners of Cryo-Save who stored their samples with Cryo-Save, and we have, at the moment, I think four agreements signed with former partners of Cryo-Save, and these companies now are our clients, right? They are paying B2B, so wholesale price, not individual price. It is different in terms of profitability.
What is the current target in terms of customers from Cryo-Save? How much of the 225 will you convert?
No, we are not disclosing that kind of information.
Regarding the recurring revenue, where are you standing there, and where will you stand at the end of the year, roughly?
Last year, I think that we disclosed that information.
22.7.
Yes. Maybe, Thomas, you can comment on that, yes.
Yeah. Last year, we had EUR 22.7 million recurring revenues. The end of the year, I'm not 100%.
Yeah, that's interest. But these are recurring, so they are paying annually. Yes. On top of that, we have also roughly EUR 7.5 million extra cash from prepayments done by existing clients or clients who prolong a finished contract. So altogether, roughly EUR 30 million from cash, yes, from existing clients base.
Where do you think will you stand at the end of the year?
Subscription base should grow. Now, it's natural process, yes, because churn is low, as you know. The question is only the prepayment component. Here, we don't know. Really, we don't know because we see that less people are choosing prepayments overall, right? Even for those who would continue expired contracts, we don't know which fraction of them will really go for prepayment. So the component Thomas mentioned, EUR 22.5 million, let's say, that will grow.
By how much do you think?
It is natural. Assuming you can calculate with that information is public, cash-wise, it should be in the range of between EUR 500,000 and EUR 1 million yes. That depends on the ratio of how many clients will select a subscription model. Cryo-Save has an impact, because Cryo-Save, we also offer both annual payments and prepayments, and we push for prepayments here in case of the Why? Because mostly these clients are older. They banked 20 years ago, 15 years ago. So people are at age of 50 today.
They are probably stronger from financial point of view. Yes. Because when they were banking at age of 30, 35, likely their income was lower than they have at age of 45, 50 or something. Yes. Prepayment is better accepted across, ex Cryo-Save clients than for our regular clients.
Did I understand it correctly that you expect a growth of EUR 1 million in the recurring revenues, or is it EUR 1.5 million?
No, no. Between EUR 500,000 and EUR 1 million . Yes.
Okay. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Niels. Any further questions? That doesn't seem to be the case for the day. Then I think it's time to close the call. We've reached the end of today's earnings call. Thank you all for participating in this small round. For those of you who were not able to follow the call from minute one, we will download this conversation and make it available on our website in the course of the day. For the time being, and until our next call in the middle of the year, thank you all for joining, and have a great weekend.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye