Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the earnings call of secunet Security Networks AG following the figures of the year 2025. I would like to welcome the company CEO, Marc-Julian Siewert, and CFO, Jessica Nospers, who will guide us through the figures in a moment, followed by a Q&A session via audio line and chat. With that, I hand over to you, Mr. Siewert.
Thank you so much, and a very good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining our call with these very pleasant figures from last year. We have announced them in January, and we are happy to dive deeper today. Let's get into it. I give some of the highlights from 2025, and my colleague, Dr. Jessica Nospers, will then guide us through really the financial year 2025, the share and dividend planning, as well as we will give a strategic outlook obviously for 2026.
As we are going through extremely fast-moving times with a lot of impacts from the outside, I can say so much upfront that secunet is steering through this area that is somehow challenging from the outside, yet posting a lot of opportunities for secunet and the business we are in. Looking back at 2025, we really had a record year with a revenue of EUR 458.8 million, up 13% in sales and an EBIT of EUR 52.6 million, up 21% from the year-ago and all above previous year and above plan. Most importantly, we had an absolute record order income.
As we always look into the future, the order income from last year obviously sets the foundation for this year and the following. We can today with gratitude confirm the preliminary figures from January and show the significant improvements on earnings and especially a very good order situation for the current year, 2026. We are also confirming our outlook for 2026, and we will go deeper in the guidance later on in this presentation. With this, Jessica, the floor is yours, and we look forward to more details on the figures.
Thank you very much, dear Julian. A very warm welcome also from my side. Let me now take you through our main financial figures by starting with group revenue. As you can see, revenue went up by 13% last year, so we had a double-digit growth that we are very proud of and that we could also show in the last year. We had two effects in 2025 leading to this. First of all, we had a strong first quarter where revenue increased by roughly 36% as a result of some orders that had moved from Q4 2024 to 2025. Also, as usual, we had a very strong Q4 in 2025. We will see later that both segments did contribute to this development.
We also, as usual, had a kind of diversification effect while German public authority business was not as strong as it used to be because of the special situations with the late Bundeshaushalt, Defense and Space and also Homeland Security counterbalanced this business side. When I might give you a sneak preview to Q1, I maybe change the slide first. Here you can see what I said before, that we had in Q1 2024 quite a strong 2025, quite a strong Q1 compared to 2024. We expect in 2026 to rather that we go rather back to the old seasonality. In 2024 and in 2023, seasonality is rather as depicted here on the left side, while 2025 had this exceptional Q1.
Nevertheless, it is just this exception in 2025 from the seasonality pattern, and we do not expect this to happen in 2026 again, but with zero impact on our guidance. We expected this, and we are still very, very optimistic for the current year. Coming to the next slide. We can see that in the Public Sector, the top line increased by 11% more or less in line with the group development as it is also the dominating sector here. We are very proud with this disproportionate but very positive 23% increase in earnings as seen in EBIT.
It is very much driven by the high growth rates in Defense and Space that, let's say, come along with the geopolitical development, but also which is very nice, the strong growth of homeland security in 2025, partially due to the new Entry/Exit Systems in Schengen that, by the way, are running very well for us currently with everything being very good when it comes to the ongoing performance of these systems and not everybody in this industry can say that about their own products. On the next slide, you can see the development in the Business Sector, and yes, we had a strong revenue growth. We had a high demand, let's say, around industry and eHealth, both divisions, and overall growth rate comes down to 27%.
EBIT is negative as we had continued investment in our edge cloud activities, but in total, very positive momentum for sales. When we come to geography, you can still see that we have a very large portion of our revenue in Germany with 11% growth, but also disproportionate and positive growth development in our international revenue growing by 26% year-over-year. We have good customers in Europe and the Middle East and also international organizations, EU and NATO, which we are very proud of. Now, coming to the earnings development.
As stated earlier, expressed in our EBITDA and EBIT, we have a double-digit growth of 24% and 21% respectively, in results from a higher top line, fixed depreciation effects, but also ongoing cost discipline and as a result, we can show a margin increase finishing the year at the upper end of our expectations. Net income was up 19%. Our tax payments increased in line with increasing net income. Now we are going further to cost development. We can see when we're looking at our cost development that cost of sales increased in line with top line increases while selling expenses and G&A show a more moderate growth with mid-single digit percent.
R&D costs are down by 17%, resulting from quite a high starting point in 2024 after lower expenses in the years before. We see this slight decrease as a few extraordinary projects were finished in early 2025, but there is a very clear commitment for us to increase R&D spending in the future. Now, the next stop is our balance sheet. Our balance sheet total increased by 14%, mostly actually driven by cash on the left side, so to say, also showing a positive effect on equity. While the equity ratio was slightly decreasing, we have a very strong balance sheet. Some people call it a bit boring, which is nice.
The most relevant factor of this is that we are completely free of bank debt, which is a very comfortable situation in these days, and it will also give us additional fighting power for the future. Coming to the cash flow, we had a very significant increase in cash from EUR 57.6 million - EUR 87.4 million. It increased by more than 50% last year. Operating cash flow increased slightly, but we had lower cash flow from investing that led to the overall development. Cash flow from financing is, let's say stable as usual. Very little bank debt, a foreseeable dividend and that contributes to the overall development.
In 2024, cash from investing activities was partially affected by a late earn-out payment, and apart from that, we had planned a few bit higher investments in 2025 that were postponed a little because they need to match to the proper revenue development. When I come to the share development and the dividend, that's the next section that we have here. You can see the overall positive development of our share price triggered by the positive business development. We outperformed from both SDAX and TecDAX by far, and the total increase was 59%. That started in March 2025, and that also led to us being part of SDAX again in 2025 in Q1. Last slide from my side, the dividend, as you might have seen.
First of all, from the payout ratio and earnings per share, you can see that we have higher earnings per share with a little bit fewer dividends. We defined a new dividend policy. First of all, we changed the basis of our dividends from the standalone financial statements of secunet AG, the net income, to the group financial statements, the net income. We anticipate that the business results of our subsidiaries will have a greater impact on secunet's group overall financial results in the future. That is why we change from standalone to group net income. Also, we thought it was about time to make the payout ratio a little bit more flexible.
Instead of a fixed payout ratio as in the past, the payout will be determined within a range of 30%-50%. This will enable us to utilize the group's internal financing capacity more flexibly in case we want and can fund further company growth. In total, we believe that this is a change that is a good balance between shareholder participation and funding future investments. With these remarks, I hand over to Julian again for some comments on our strategy and our outlook. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Jessica. Perfect. I believe in summary it was, it's all said by saying it was a record year. I want to point out the situation. There's no debt and a substantial free cash flow. Together with all these changes in dividend policy and our strategy, this will give us a very good basis for the future. All this besides a demanding geopolitical environment when we speak globally. Since our last call, the world has changed even more again. We talked last time briefly about Russia and the U.S.-EU relations.
If you remember in the meantime, we had the situation around Greenland, we had the interventions in Venezuela, and now, on the last mile, the recent weeks, the substantial impacts from the Iran interventions or the conflict between Iran and parts of the rest of the Western world, which basically really unravels energy prices, all kinds of supply chains, besides the impacts on people in the region, which we have obviously managed closely where applicable. We have taken a lot of care in the last weeks to secure supply chains for our business this year. As you probably all hear and read, the situation around GPUs or any kind of memory storage devices and IT equipment is stretched.
I'm glad to say that the team was able to secure all our volumes for this year and partially beyond. We are taking an aggressive stance on remaining able to supply at all times, which has proven very valuable for secunet also during the COVID years. Per se, cybersecurity, if we look at the second pillar, is ever more important. It's everywhere. The world is moving extremely fast, and if we briefly look beyond our core business to what happened around artificial intelligence, around the impacts from the OpenAI moment in the United States and beyond, that basically came from Austria initially, yet had a huge impact on how AI is evolving and on also, and this I want to point out, how AI functionality needs to be secured.
There's coming a lot of use cases and a lot of cases where security becomes ever more important, even broadening the scope of cybersecurity requirements. This will, to a certain extent, also impact our clients as well, who really need to automate. We know about state deficits. We know about demographic changes. They will have to automate to a certain extent, and we see also more uptick in requests around AI security. Sovereignty also in that context, also in the context of our core business, plays a key role. The debate is everywhere and I wouldn't see in all our research any company better positioned, more sovereignly positioned than secunet. The same, Jessica mentioned in the Defense sector, we continue seeing growing budgets and demand.
We slowly see the demand really reaching the supply chains and the focus on procurement really hitting industry. We remain in our position in our vision and ambition to be the guardians of Europe's digital freedom and sovereignty, and have a very clear and strengthened ambition towards the end of this decade, where we really are further evolving the scope of the company and focusing on all these trends shown before. Going one level deeper, I run very briefly through the sectors.
In the Public Sector, we are seeing a further expansion through the customer base, also more regional and local requests and requirements because we see that cyber threats are really reaching industry and public, especially where you have the weakest links. We have over the last years really secured the state level very strongly at the federal level in many areas, even if it's critical infrastructure is having a lot of catch-up to do. We see these requests. We see also follow-on effects from the defense drive. We're focusing on new...
In the middle pillar, we're focusing on the new technologies around confidential computing and cloud computing in the eHealth segments, which can be applied, including our industry and edge offerings that connect basically the physical world into the cloud and into the digital world. We see a growing footprint in this critical infrastructure area between eHealth and industry. We see substantial uptick in cloudification, and we have made substantial progress in our own IP and product portfolio for the cloud. We see, as I mentioned before, also the first requirements around AI, where we are best positioned with all the certifications that we were able for the cloud business to obtain in the last years, especially important C5 and secret certifications and allowance for usage.
We are far ahead on really providing secure cloud computing in a sovereign way for our high-value and high-security clients to eventually also enable them to use new functionality that in the transformation from previous ways of working through generative AI and agentic AI going forward. We remain very committed, and we had substantial successes in the end of last year in the international market. We are really pushing out the ecosystem in order to enable connectivity for high-level organizations to speak among each other. For this, we had really good progress last year with the EU Commission, with the EU Parliament, and also with NATO. Of course, we are extremely committed to our ambition for 2030, which we will also underpin with further acquisitions to supplement the organic growth.
We still see substantial opportunities for organic growth throughout the different verticals and segments, expanding our own product service. Yet we see also the need to continue with acquisitions opportunistically in terms of product portfolio and very strategically in terms of market access and to underpin our growth ambitions. This story, especially on the organic growth, is absolutely underpinned by the substantial increase in order backlog, 36% year over year, as of December 31, 2024 to 2025. We have a very strong order backlog that helps us a good start into 2026, and we also see a very strong pipeline in 2026, while we are really focusing on being able to deliver also beyond our plan. We are careful in terms of growth of workforce.
We are also transforming and really modernizing some of our ways of working. Substantial growth over the last 10 years is seen in the organization, and we see a lot of upside with automation and further working on this. We basically focus on having over proportional growth compared to much over proportional compared to the growth of FTE. I think I should hand over to you, Jessica.
Thank you very much. You can see our guidance. We changed the idea of how we present our guidance a little bit. We have now a range for revenue, EBITDA, and also EBIT. Also, in a little bit, kind of the idea of a reaction to the criticism that we get sometimes that we are conservative planners, which we still might be considered after that guidance. At least I heard it from one or two of your analyst colleagues. We are quite happy with the way we present our guidance. As Julian has said before, we are also happy that we can still confirm it, although the memory media shortage is a subject that will certainly accompany us for the next few months.
I think with this, we are at the end of our presentation, and we are happy to receive and answer your questions. Thank you for your attention.
Yes. Thank you very much for the presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, now it's your turn. We are opening the Q&A session. If you would like to ask your questions in person via the audio line, please click on the Raise Hand button. If you're dialing in by phone, please press star key nine to raise your hand and star key six to unmute yourself. Additionally, you are also welcome to ask your questions in our chat box, and I will read them out loud for you. We have already received a raised hand by Mr. Wolf. You may unmute yourself now.
Mr. Wolf, can you hear us? I can see that you-
Hi. Good morning. It's Andreas from Warburg.
Yes, we can hear you perfectly.
Can you hear me? Great. I have a couple of questions. The first one is related to the memory chip shortage and the subsequent higher hardware prices that we see in the overall IT market. What are the implications for secunet? Do we have fixed prices with your clients so that potentially higher hardware prices could be an issue that secunet has to deal with? Or can you pass those on? The second is related to the level of IT investments that we should expect during the course of 2026. You've already mentioned, Jessica, that in 2025 the level of investments was lower. Should we expect a tick-up again? The last one is related to the cybersecurity market in total.
I was trying to understand today's share price reaction. Someone tried to link it to Anthropic, new cybersecurity related releases. I think this does make a lot of sense, but maybe you can share your thoughts on potential or on the overall moat of secunet in the market that you're active in. Thank you.
Thank you. I will take the first question on storage media and all the pricing and what impact it will have. We need to differentiate a little. As Julian said before, volumes are largely secured over the contracts, prices are also. There are a few media storage or memory items or memory chips that showed a heavy increase in pricing, but also play not such a large role in the overall composition of our products. We can absorb some of the price increases without it being not beneficial for secunet. That's the first portion. There's the second portion where we have contracted a large volume and also had a back-to-back delivery or sourcing from our supplier. That shouldn't be such a huge problem.
Third of all, we are, to a certain extent, able to pass on price increases. We will certainly do so. We already have done so. We are also in discussion partly with our customers, if we can also talk about a multi-period model, so to say, where you can, let's say, build up a certain level of price increases and then take it down again, you know, so that you have a pricing that might not in the first place cover all the price increases but have a higher pricing for an enduring portion of time in order to enable our customers also to be able to kind of deal with these price increases.
As of now, we do not see price increases coming into effect for secunet that will really distort our margin or the expectations on the margins that we have as we secured a large portion. Nevertheless, we know that the market is crazy currently, so we do everything, also these discussions on multi-period pricings with our customers so that they are also in the loop, that they are part of the discussions and that we, and that they are also aware that we think of their side too, and not only try to pass on price increases. Because we also need to be sure that in public authorities they have their budget, and if you have higher prices, they usually do not get more budget.
We are dealing with the situation, but we are also dealt with the situation, I think quite well in the last crisis in 2020 and 2021. Currently we are very optimistic when it comes to the current year and also still monitoring closely the development on the market. But some say there's already a peak, let's see what the situation is in three months, but so far, no issues on our side. When it comes to the IT investments, we've always been a very asset light company. We are really seeing if we really urgently need an investment. It is also kind of triggering additional revenue.
The investments will be bigger, I guess, in the future because the cloud business is a little bit, CapEx heavier than the business that we had before. I think 2025 was a little bit of an exceptional year where a few projects were postponed. We had this earn-out of roughly, I think EUR 8 million-EUR 9 million that was in the 2024 CapEx level included. I think 2025 was exceptionally low, but we expect the investments to pick up again. I think the last question on share price, Julian, would you like to take over?
Yeah, I'm happy to comment, and thank you, Mr. Wolf, for the question because it's extremely relevant and obviously we are deeply i nvolved in analyzing this. I think I fully share your perspective, the reactions are not really explainable, and they are not related from our perspective to the Anthropic announcements. On the contrary. I spent some really intensive time also in the United States, looking deep into what is happening in the AI landscape and what does this mean for cybersecurity. While commercial companies are obviously increasing the security levels in their systems for their own reasons, because in the end, reputation is everything for these companies. The large language model producers are very. There is a very wide variety.
It is coming more and more together between closed models like Anthropic and open models, especially the closed models are obviously concerned about agentic AI that is going rogue to an extent. Basically that offers a lot of opportunity, but also if applied, that creates a lot of risk. We see it on the contrary, we rather see opportunities, especially with our secure cloud infrastructure that was built over the last years to actually enable the application of all kinds of models in a secure way, making sure that rogue agents do not mess up the systems, do not change things that are unintended. We are really looking deeply in that.
We see zero relation, or threat from what Anthropic is doing, in terms of cybersecurity, purely commercial, focused on AI, closed large language models. We rather see on the other side opportunities as AI applications pick up in the government space, where again, there needs to be a sovereign, trusted instance that really makes this secure, and that's where we see secunet.
Great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Wolf. We did not receive any further questions in the meantime, so please put your questions in the chat box. With me saying that, we also received a question in our chat box by Mr. Zinkovic. He asked, "Can you elaborate on the structural changes at SysEleven?
Yeah, happy to. Maybe I start and then, Jessica, if you want to add. We have rebranded SysEleven to SysEleven by secunet because SysEleven really has been benefiting from the experience of secunet, especially in the SINA Cloud, in the high secure applications of cloud, where we really offer from all I see today the best-in-class solution of physical segregation of tenants. A lot of this experience comes from secunet. We have more closely aligned the collaboration between the teams, whether it's sales and development. For the moment, SysEleven by secunet is running the cloud business strongly supported by secunet for the SINA Cloud.
With this way, we really have creating a very clear positioning, and you will see more news coming up around this between the public cloud environment, so high secure transmission of data into the cloud. In a public cloud environment, all the way to fully air-gapped and closed solutions for high security applications and even public cloud applications that are certified to be used for high security, C5 and even other cases for high security applications. Anything to add, Jessica?
No, thank you. Perfect.
Thank you so much for your questions. There are, again, no risen hands or any other questions in our chat box. I would say with no further questions, we come to the end of today's earnings call. I thank you very much for your interest in security, in secunet Security Networks AG. A big thank you also to you, Mr. Siewert, and Mrs. Nospers for your presentation and the time you took. Should any further questions appear at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. I wish you all a successful day, and I'm handing over to you once more, Mr. Siewert, for your closing remarks.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the interest and your time. I believe we are in many ways, we are living through a time of many tipping points that really are going to shape the future. We fully believe, and the entire team is energized and aligned to play a very crucial role in really enabling these transformations and making them successful for our clients, for our customers and partners. We will focus even more on partnering and partner networks, and we look forward to 2026, to making 2026 another record year, and to shaping the sovereign security industry throughout Germany and Europe. Thanks for your interest, your support, and we look forward to seeing you again soon. Best wishes.