Alma Media Oyj (HEL:ALMA)
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Apr 28, 2026, 6:29 PM EET
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Earnings Call: Q3 2025

Oct 31, 2025

Elina Kukkonen
Communications and Brand Director, Alma Media

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this interview report session of Alma Media's third quarter 2025. My name is Elina Kukkonen, and I'm responsible for the Communications and Brand of Alma. We will begin with the presentation shortly, and we proceed as usual. Our CEO, Mr. Kai Telanne, will be the first to go on stage, and he will present the overall result of Alma Media and highlight the performance of each of our business segments: Alma Career, Alma Marketplaces, and Alma News Media. After Mr. Telanne, our CFO, Mrs. Taru Lehtinen, will present the financial position of Alma Media today. Mr. Telanne continues about the operating environment, the strategy going forward, and our outlook. We close the session with the Q&A, and we first take the questions here at Alma premises in Helsinki, and then we answer your questions coming from online.

Our Director for Investor Relations, Mr. Teemu Salmi, will moderate the online questions. Once again, warmly welcome to this session to join us today and follow us. Please, Mr. Telanne, the stage is yours.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Thank you, Elina. You are all warmly welcome to the third quarter result presentation. I will start with the main achievements and the numbers as usual. Later at the end of the presentation, a few words about the strategy and some of the initiatives that we have made. As we all know, the market conditions, underlying markets all over Europe, they have remained as is, more or less quite a soft market. Despite this, we had quite a solid performance in every segment. Operating profit improved, especially on the Marketplaces and also the News Media sector. Revenue grew more than 5%, of which about half came from organic growth and the second half from add-on acquisitions, mainly on the Marketplaces side. The profitability of the third quarter is actually all-time high. One quarter EBIT result.

We are closing the long-term target, 30% profitability target, which is, of course, a good sign of the cost control of the company also. The transformation from print to digital is proceeding as expected, and according to the plan, the share of digital business on a record high level, almost 88%. With the good results and good cash flow and cash generation capability, our balance sheet is getting stronger and stronger. We have plenty of room quite soon for new investments. The leverage is 1.5 and equity ratio close to 50%, which is, of course, good for us and for the new initiatives. As said, the biggest contributor to the revenue and profitability growth was Marketplaces, where we have had the investments during this year, like Edilex. The latest EUR 4.1 million increase in revenues split 50/50 with the organic growth and M&A.

Adjusted operating on that segment, EUR 1.2 million up according to our plan. On other businesses, quite solid performance on revenue-wise and profitability-wise. The most growth came from digital services, of course, because the M&A came to that sector. The classified businesses are picking up, and the underlying markets are picking up slowly: housing and premises, cars, and recruitment as well. The ad market in Finland is on a low side still, reflecting the weak consumer confidence and the retail sector difficulties here. The digital advertising and the digital content sales of ours is growing nicely. This was the overall picture. If you go deeper into the business segments, just to remind you, these three business segments that we are running the business: Alma Career, Alma Marketplaces, Alma News Media. The heads, the leaders of the businesses are available for you in this room if you have any questions to pose.

These are the main numbers. We will go into details next. I start from the Alma Career. We have some fluctuation between the quarters in revenues, and we have also differences in the countries, how the underlying markets are developing. The revenue on par with the last year. We have increased development costs on Career United project that are weighing the profitability. The invoicing in Central Europe is growing around 1%, which is a good sign. The labor market in Finland is on a very low level at the moment, still around 12% down. Free jobs, and the market is on a very low level. There are light at the end of the tunnel, yes, but that needs to be seen how big the growth will be. For us, the next slide will show you the differences between the invoicing and the revenue recognition.

Here, which is, of course, a good sign for us. Anyway, the cost control is good also in this segment. There is, in Central Europe especially, an inflation going on, quite heavy inflation also on the wages. We will be able to mitigate the inflation with the reduction of headcount, and that will continue also in the future. We are at a high profitability level, but we aim at being even higher during the coming years. As said, the invoicing, the sales, is picking up, and the revenues are coming later. This is a sign of small recovery, slow recovery in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Southern Europe as well. The North should come later and start getting better. Alma Marketplaces, all the business units were able to increase the revenue and the profitability, as said.

In Finland, the real estate market from the used dwellings, used apartments has been growing already for a couple of months. Unfortunately, the sales of the new apartments is still on a very low level, and there has been no change for that. The same applies to the car market. The used car market is growing. The new car market just started to grow. The growth was around, was it 2% or something like that. Hopefully we will see a speeded up market recovery also on the new car business. Our performance on those were really good. The transactional services are increasing. Like for the DIAS digital house market and buying, more than half of the apartments sold in Finland were done by DIAS digital service. Most of the growth, as said, comes from the digital service, like 23.6%.

The Edilex acquisition is, of course, one of the main reasons for and behind that. Also, the other services are growing as expected or even better. On the real estate side, the biggest growth came again from Sweden, from the commercial property business growing more than 20%. The other parts are growing also, which is a slight sign of recovery of those businesses also in Finland. At the classified market, 12% up, so the Marketplaces of ours are working properly and are developing nicely. We are developing and deploying AI into all of those services step by step, and that will increase the productivity of those and enrich the services as well. Pretty nice development, and we see that there's a possibility for this to continue as well in the future. There are a few slides on the market as we just told.

The housing market update and the vehicle market update in these slides. I don't go into details these, but you can read this later. I would say that on the housing market, that is more or less like a buyer's market still. There are a lot of supply, like you can see from the left down part of this, but not that much demand on the market, which means that the prices of the houses and apartments are still going down in many places. In the mobility market, like you can see from this slide, the market is going up. The used car market is moving like expected. The new car market is still on a very low side, but still picking up about 2%, if I remember it correctly. That is a little bit different case from the housing market.

There are also demands, 7% up the visitor base on our services. There are lack of advertisement in the listings in the services and in the market compared to the demand. This is more like a buyer's market because the new car sales is at a low level, so there are no new items, no new cars in the market, which of course affects also the used car business. Lastly, the News Media. Once again, a strong performance in every brand and sector. We gained some market share in digital advertising. That was a really good performance. The print advertising is going down as expected. The content revenue growth came from digital. The print revenue and content is also. Lagging behind and declining.

Very good cost control ends up to the result of 17.3% EBIT, which is a high level compared to any markets and any colleagues, and that's really good. Transformation is going as expected. 63% was the digital rate there. That will continue and even speed up with the high decline of the print business. There's also still a high demand for the journalism, like in Iltalehti, Kauppalehti, and other brands. We have now over 223,000 digital subscriptions and growing. The Iltalehti Plus and all the initiatives around the business media are going really, really well at the moment. We are pushing a little bit further and investing a little bit more on those as well. That's it. Very nice. Digital up 5.2% and print going down like 9%. The transformation will go on and even speed up.

This is a cloudy market on Finnish advertising, and unfortunately, there's not much light in this. The print newspaper advertising is heavily declining still. The online advertising is slightly up, but not much. There's a heavy task to keep on growing on this market, but we will push on. That's it. The key numbers and achievements were these. I come back with the strategy and some of the latest initiatives after Taru's presentation of the financials. Thank you, Taru.

Taru Lehtinen
CFO, Alma Media

Thank you, Kai. Good morning also from my behalf. It's again a great pleasure to present to you our financial performance, stable development in our businesses, and our financial position is improving quite strongly at the moment. First, to go into the details of our financial position. Our balance sheet KPIs are progressing really nicely and according to our plan.

Our net debt decreased from the previous year, amounting to EUR 145 million at the end of September. Our equity ratio and gearing going down and up according to the plan, so improving really nicely. What is maybe worth mentioning is that our financial costs and interest costs have been decreasing compared to the same period of the previous year. There are like three elements behind this. Of course, the market interest has come down, but we have also done some active management of our debt portfolio in a way that there has been more weight in the commercial papers, which has slightly decreased the interest expense, of course, due to that. In that sense, stable development in the financial position and balance sheet.

Moving on to the cash flow, the Q3 cash flow in 2025 was really strong, amounting to EUR 21.5 million and being EUR 3 million stronger than in the previous year. We have some bigger tax payments allocated to Q3 this year, but actually our effective tax rate hasn't changed. This is more or less this kind of quarter-to-quarter type of fluctuation and seasonality, how the taxes are paid. When looking at the cumulative effects on the taxes paid, they are more or less coming from the previous year, why we had some prepaid taxes from the tax authority related to 2023. The improved cash flow is mainly driven by the operative result, of course, but also by networking capital change. Our advance payments received from the customers was EUR 1 million stronger or better than in the previous year. This is mainly driven by the Czech market.

Like Kai was going through the invoicing and revenue recognition chart, we can see the same effect happening also in the balance sheet at the moment. What comes to the cash flow after investments, it was EUR 15.1 million, a little bit less than in the previous year, and that mainly related to our investment of Effortia Oy. In our investments in Q3, the biggest item was Effortia, the business operating under Alma Marketplaces, and our CapEx level remained stable around EUR 1 million in the quarter level. Finally, the earnings per share, also our KPIs, the return on equity and return on investments progressing really nicely. Actually, the earnings per share also EUR 0.20 stronger than in the previous year. This is also mainly explained by the strong operative result, but also with the lower level of restructuring and other negative one-off items.

We also in the previous year had negative effects of the fair value of interest derivative. Actually, the long-term interest has been quite stable during this year, so there haven't been that big fair value changes in this year and in Q3. I will shortly comment on our financial performance against our long-term targets. Actually, the revenue growth was 5.4% in Q3. Like I mentioned, half of this is coming from the organic growth and more or less half coming as a non-organic. We actually in the quartile level, we were above our long-term target, but the cumulative 2025, 4.6%, and last 12 months, 4.5%. We are actually progressing really nicely towards our long-term target, and the profitability level remains more or less stable in the 25% adjusted operating profit margin. Maybe comment a little bit about our adjusted operating growth development now in Q3.

Like you remember, we had an extremely strong growth, not extremely, but was a bigger growth in Q2, a little bit less than 9%. Now if we compare the Q1 and the cumulative growth rate for adjusted operating profit, it's more or less like stable, around a little bit above 6%. What comes to the leverage, the KPI is proceeding according to the plan, so well below our threshold of 2.5% and the goal of the target level of 2.5% representing 1.5%. That was more or less everything I wanted to go through.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Thank you. That was solid. A few words about the underlying environment and markets going forward. This is something that, of course, every business wants to change at the moment. Quite a sad picture, so to say. On the left side, we have the business confidence of the Finnish industries.

I would say that same applies also for many other countries. The consumer confidence, which is on a very low level in Finland due to too many reasons, is the sad thing here. The worst business sector overall in Finland is, of course, the construction, and the new apartment problems are reflecting to this and many other businesses in Finland, like the Finnish wealth is in touch with the construction industry and the value chain. This is something that needs to be changed. If the consumer confidence is not going to change in the forthcoming quarters, we're going to continue as is, meaning a very soft market. My view is that in Finland we are not going to see any rapid development in the market, in the GDP growth, having these kind of slides in our site.

On the other hand, we have here the GDP forecasts for our main key operating countries and smaller countries as well. If we look at this, it seems that we're going to have pretty much the same environment that we have had this year in every country. There are no big differences in GDP growth. The unemployment rates are not going to grow. They are quite low in Slovakia and high in Finland. This tells us that we have an okay environment. It's still soft, so we have to be able to survive and grow in a softish environment also in the future, at least in the coming quarters. The challenges will remain. On the other hand, we will take advantage of the possibilities that are coming from the AI and the tech development. Of course, the main markets, if they grow, we will take our share.

This year we have been able to take market share almost in every business, which is a good sign of the productivity and the effectiveness of the operations, and that will continue. A few words about the strategy. We will build on the good position, leading brands, and the current plans in every business. We will concentrate on these market areas more or less. We will continue expanding in new geographies in the south as we are doing at the moment. This is a good standpoint for future development, of course. We are number one in recruiting, houses and premises, vehicles, news media, and digital advertising in Finland. A very strong player in the Eastern Europe. The journey continues. As said, we are at the moment integrating our services into digital platforms, like increasing our share and volume in value chains.

We are enriching with the data and AI the services and helping our partners to develop their own businesses by integrating those to our platforms and doing more on digital. With the AI also, we are concentrating heavily on personalizing the services for different customer needs, which is increasing the quality of the services and effectiveness. If we can find proper targets for acquisitions, we will continue doing those, both the add-on or bond-on acquisitions as we have done also this year, but also bigger moves if possible while the balance sheet is getting stronger. To be precise and clear, transform continues. All the current businesses are in a transform phase from old technology to new technology. We will grow, diversifying our businesses into new services and revenue streams and accelerating that with that organic growth with M&A. We concentrate on the businesses that are scalable.

We create new products and services into current geographical areas and new geographies, of course, if only possible. As we know, Alma is a synergistic company. We use all the resources in the company for the benefit of every business. We share the audience, data, technology, and countrywide ad sales. We concentrate on these three business areas: advanced marketplaces, intelligent insight services, and inspiring media and national media especially. This is the concept of Alma that we continue. As said, from traditional revenue sources like advertising and content, we move on to transactional services and transactions like digital house transactions, DIAS, or other data-related businesses in houses and premises, insight services, car business, and others, just to name a few. That will continue.

The revenue streams and the revenue setup will be leveraged into more transactional step by step, also with the help of AI and the ability to personalize the different services. Where we are at the moment in deploying the AI, as we have disclosed the core strategy, the steps that we take in deploying AI, we use this kind of simplified view. We are at the moment in the phase of increasing the internal productivity to take the tools at our use on corporate level in every business, in every team, and on personal level. We are in a good split with this. We have a lot of initiatives around this, and we have the needed tools at our use. We are moving into the stage two where we have a bunch of nice examples already. I can show you those later.

Enriching the services with the help of AI already, good results on that, on productivity, on quality, on customer usage. The third phase is, of course, the most difficult one that comes later, like changing existing businesses into new value chains, disrupting our own businesses with the new technology totally, or creating completely new businesses that we have at the moment. That might come. Also, the competition might come on that side later, but now this seems to be nicely under control. We have dozens of different kinds of initiatives on the table and going on inside the company. We have quite a lot of investment also on the AI side. The personnel in Alma, they seem to be really, really excited of deploying all the new technology around the AI scene.

A few examples, I don't go very deeply into the details, but as mentioned, in every segment, dozens of new initiatives in order to deploy, in order to learn how to use the AI, how to increase the productivity in the first place, but then how to increase and enrich the services for the benefit of the customers, are they private consumers or businesses. In Alma Career, this is not a new thing. They have developed assisted services with the, how to say, hard AI for years, like for content generation, automatic summaries of feedback, and so on. The newest ones are Jobly Vibes , which is a new service for summer jobs in Finland. It is about to launch right now. A lot of things happening here in Alma Marketplaces as well. A lot happening around the search, like semantic search on Etuovi.

Edilex AI, which is of course one of the key investments this year, intelligent legal content search for professionals. It's really nice. Others as well. On the media side, News Media side, Sophi is the dynamic paywall. It takes care of or into consideration the context and the consumer usage, the personal way of using it. Different kinds of moderators, chats, and AI-produced podcasts. A lot of happening here, which is interesting to see. All the time new things and new initiatives arising from the current feedback and learnings. That's good. As said, we just made a little bit changes in the outlook. As you already know, we expect our revenue and adjusted operating profit to remain at last year's level or grow. We are well on that path. That's it. Any questions? There are a few.

Speaker 8

Hello, this is Nikola from SCB. Thank you for the presentation.

I have three questions, one of which regarding the guidance and then two business area specific, but let's start with the guidance question. What was the trigger that made you update the guidance two weeks back? What business areas or parts were those that were doing better than you had initially expected?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

The marketplace business is growing better than we expected, actually. Part of that comes from the slight increase and pickup of the markets, underlying markets, like from the housing market and car market, but mostly from our own operations. The marketplaces where all the business units were growing faster than we expected, especially the Swedish commercial property side and the inside service side. That is a nice, it's not a surprise, but it's going better than we expected. Overall, the marketplaces.

Speaker 8

All right, thanks. I then maybe could continue on that topic on Marketplace's growth there.

Could you a little bit more open how much of your improvement was driven by your own actions, how much of the market, and then how long do you think that you can kind of continue growing with your own improvement actions at the pace of this?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

As we have disclosed before, we have quite intensive investment phase going on. That marketplaces side, like we have OviPro and. On the car sector as well. They are set up, and now we are in a phase for deploying and integrating the customers into the services more or less. That will come next year, more or less, the revenues. The current services are working as expected, and while the market is going up, the results will come. We have this kind of product and pricing initiatives going on there.

We are developing our products, prices combination, which are a little bit increasing the prices as well. That's a combination of volume and prices in every sector. It's a little bit difficult to say how much of all the increase comes from the market and our own initiatives. It's a combination. As we saw in marketplaces, like broadly, the housing market, the used apartment business is growing. I have the numbers here if you need. The used apartment business is now growing, started to grow. It's a biased market as we see. There's more supply than demand at the moment. The prices are getting up and the used apartment market is going up. The new apartment market is still going down or it's stable. We are on the bottom of that. The same for the cars. The car market is on a very low side.

It's a 2% increase in new car business, but nice, was it 6% increase in the used car market. Of course, we are going to benefit on that growth, at least with the market share that we have. That's clear. Underlying market development, own initiatives on product development and pricing, and of course the productivity initiatives in doing the businesses with the help of AI, that's a combination of this. That will continue.

Speaker 8

Okay, so there should be room to continue improving.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 8

Great. Then on Career, where you mentioned that the current expenses are elevated and you expect also, or said that you expect the profitability to improve in the coming years. How long should we expect that we start to see profitability or margins improving in the business area?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

We are doing productivity initiatives all the time, but the double cost for the tech, like the, let's put it this way. We are doing the cloud migration at the moment. The local technology is transferring to cloud, to Amazon Web Services in our case. There we have double costs. That will continue until the end of next year. We have extra costs there until next year. Plus we have the product development costs on the Career United project. We are creating the setup for the thing. This is the final part of the project of three, four years going on, and that will end up at the end of next year. The margins will, at last, get up. We are doing other initiatives as well. The technology is not the only one, but others as well. Of course, the markets are getting better there.

We have seen growth already, and the invoicing is growing in our case. We are quite positive on the market development on that side as well.

Speaker 8

Okay, great. Thank you. That's all from me.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Thank you.

Petri Gostowski
Co-Head of Research, Inderes

Petri Gostowski from Inderes. Continuing on Career, you've seen the invoicing going up and advances going up. Are you expecting the revenues to continue on an upward trajectory from here on, or how do you see it?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Yes, we are. Yes, we are. Definitely, yes.

Petri Gostowski
Co-Head of Research, Inderes

Continuing on the Career United development costs. Did I understand correctly that the costs have picked up now on Q3 compared to the first half due to increased development, or?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

We have continued there. There are a little bit more costs on Q3, but especially compared to last year's Q3. On the other hand, we have decreased the amount of personnel in order to mitigate the wage inflation there.

We have 10% less personnel than we had last year, around 10%. Of course, that only keeps the cost on par compared to that. At the moment, now we are in a phase where we have all the old costs there on tech side and product side, and increased new costs because of the cloud transformation. That will continue by the end of next year, as I've heard, unfortunately.

Petri Gostowski
Co-Head of Research, Inderes

Jumping to the real estate business in Sweden, you've grown rapidly there for some time now. Can you talk about the market growth or the development of your market share? Where are you taking the market share if you are taking some?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Good question. That's also a combination of market-based development and own initiatives. The market is growing in Sweden. It's a totally different market than we have in Finland. There's a lot of movement there. We are market leader there.

On the other hand, we have developed our services, products, and prices as well. It's a combination of those. In Sweden, we are really good at that. The services are performing really well. We have Santtu Elsinen here who can answer.

Santtu Elsinen
Head of Alma Marketplaces, Alma Media

Yes. Okay, so you can hear me. Santtu Elsinen, Head of Alma Marketplaces, to continue Kai's comment. Yes, we have taken market share also from the competition.

Petri Gostowski
Co-Head of Research, Inderes

Can I add on that? How do you differ from competition there?

Santtu Elsinen
Head of Alma Marketplaces, Alma Media

In principle, most of the marketplaces are feature-wise fairly similar. Of course, we have many features that the competitors don't, and some of them have features that we don't. Our success in the Swedish market largely relies on the fact that we have performed really well on search engine positioning.

When people are seeking for, let's say, properties in Göteborg or so, typically, the first search results come from our services. We have put some effort into this, and that, of course, helps the sales. Since clients see that we are the top providers of traffic to their properties, it helps our position, let's put it that way.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

The service, of course, performs. It brings you the best results, like the market-leading service should do. That's actually the final reason for succeeding in the market. Yeah.

Petri Gostowski
Co-Head of Research, Inderes

One more on the same topic, if I may. How many players are you there currently on the market that you're competing with? Maybe if you could share some idea of your current market share.

Santtu Elsinen
Head of Alma Marketplaces, Alma Media

We have not been disclosing the market share, and it is also somewhat difficult because we don't have exact figures from the competition.

There is one service which is similar to ours based on Göteborg, called Local Guiden. There are, of course, the services of the large real estate owners. Those are, in a sense, competition. They also advertise on our portals, but they are significant players in their own right, the largest ones.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

They have their own services, right?

Santtu Elsinen
Head of Alma Marketplaces, Alma Media

Yes. Yeah.

Petri Gostowski
Co-Head of Research, Inderes

Thank you. That's all from me.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Okay, thank you. Any other questions? From online?

Teemu Salmi
Director of Investor Relations, Alma Media

Yeah, happy to say we have quite a few questions online, so.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Good.

Teemu Salmi
Director of Investor Relations, Alma Media

Let's start with Pia Rosqvist- Heinsalmi from DNB Carnegie. Your Q3 sales grew by 5%. Whereas adjusted EBIT grew slightly less than 4% year- on- year. Any temporary timing-related issues in the costs, or what explains the faster cost growth compared to sales growth?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Yeah, it's time-related, but then we have also the extra development costs.

The comparable Q3 last year was really good, really fast. Overall, our view is that we have a steady growth, like rolling 12 months. Development is really steady from our point of view. There are differences, of course, between the months and quarters, but we are going in the right direction. I would say that the speed has remained from a revenue point of view and from a profitability point of view as well.

Teemu Salmi
Director of Investor Relations, Alma Media

Second from Pia. Marketplaces grew organically 9% year- on- year. How much of this growth was driven by price increases and how much by improving volumes?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

We don't disclose exact numbers, but the overall view, Santtu, you can say if you want, if you have the better view than I have.

Santtu Elsinen
Head of Alma Marketplaces, Alma Media

Yeah, so Santtu again here, you probably saw the graphs concerning the total volume growth, and I guess it can be said that there hasn't been any dramatic growth per se. We have increased our pricing mostly via packaging, but of course, some small market pickup has been seen as well. There are services where the volume has clearly grown, like DIAS, the digital property trade. We enjoy currently around 60% market share of the Finnish trades, and this has improved by 10%. Over 10% during this year. It was below 50% at the beginning of this year. There are services where the volume has definitely increased as well.

Teemu Salmi
Director of Investor Relations, Alma Media

Thank you. Third from Pia. What is your current view on your cost growth outlook for 2026?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

I would say that we haven't done the close to the budget yet, but we have extra costs for the AI, definitely.

The tools, but they are there already. I would say that the cost rate that we have, the burn rate that we have, would be quite normal for the coming quarters and years. The salary increase will be according to the agreements that we have, a couple of percents maybe. I can't see any big extra costs in terms of current businesses. Of course, if we acquire new businesses, that's a different case. Taru, you have?

Taru Lehtinen
CFO, Alma Media

Yes, maybe I comment a little bit with the details. Our reported cost increase has been more or less the cumulative numbers. I think it's more relevant to focus on the cumulative numbers, has been like around 4%. The organic growth of cost base has been more or less like 1.6%.

I would say that that's representing quite nicely about the effects of inflation and so on, and also the continuance of the cost base.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

It's difficult to see that the running costs of current businesses would increase more than that. Of course, with the help of AI, we either try to decrease the cost or speed up the time to market with the new services that we are doing at the moment. It's actually a good target to speed up the time to market, to speed up the development with help of the AI, with the new tools. Yeah.

Teemu Salmi
Director of Investor Relations, Alma Media

Okay, you mentioned the M&A pipeline a little bit, but Pia was also interested to know about the description of the M&A pipeline. Are there larger target companies under negotiation currently?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Pia, good try. We investigate all the time. In every segment, there's a specific procedure investigating the markets.

As I mentioned, we are considering the three main focus areas: classifieds, information services, and media. In every sector, we have all the time discussions, investigations, negotiations going on, which is normal. That's no news. We will definitely continue with doing this kind of bolt-on investments, speeding up the product development and speeding up the service integrations into current businesses. We have increasing room for bigger steps, also like at the moment around EUR 200 million, I would say, and developing. Of course, we are interested in using this resource in the future if we only find the proper targets that we are currently investigating, of course.

Teemu Salmi
Director of Investor Relations, Alma Media

Thank you. Finally from Pia, you are committed to reaching your financial target of an adjusted EBIT margin of more than 30% in 2027. What are the main hurdles to reach this target?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

I would say that we don't have interim hurdles at all.

All those will come, if they will come, outside of the company. They can be regulative, they are geopolitical, they are underlying market-based difficulties that, of course, we have to be able to adjust like we have done in recent years. Inside the company, I can't see what would hurdle the development and reaching the target.

Teemu Salmi
Director of Investor Relations, Alma Media

Okay, it seems to be the final question is coming from Caj Toppari from Nordea. What did product development investments include within the Career segment, and do you expect them to continue within the next quarters?

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Yeah, Vesa-Pekka, you can actually. Would you like to answer that?

Vesa-Pekka Kirsi
EVP of Alma Career, Alma Media

Yeah.

Teemu Salmi
Director of Investor Relations, Alma Media

Yes. What did product development investments include within the Career segment, and do you expect them to continue within the next quarters?

Vesa-Pekka Kirsi
EVP of Alma Career, Alma Media

Thank you. We have, as Kai pointed out, actually several operative projects going on.

One of them is the Amazon Web Services transfer from old servers, local servers, onto a cloud-based. This is one of the reasons of our increase of cost or double costing that was already reflected today. The product development, you can put that into two categories. One of them is developing our joint one product platform for Career. The main time of development has been this year and next year. We already implemented these components to the job boards Career-wide, and that implementation is almost mostly done by the end of next year. In addition to this platform development, we also do new product development. Kai mentioned earlier Jobly Vibes, which is a concept we are now first launching in Finland and taking over to other countries beginning of next year. The investments are both for platform as well as for new products.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

All right, any other questions?

Was this all we have for the time being? All right, in that case, I thank you very much for your attention, and we'll see us next time with the final year 2025 results on Thursday, February 5, and the Q1 on April 29. Elina, anything else?

Elina Kukkonen
Communications and Brand Director, Alma Media

We're ready. Thank you.

Kai Telanne
CEO, Alma Media

Okay, thank you very much. Have a nice.

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