Welcome everyone to F-Secure's quarter one results session. Good to have you with us. As the header says, we have been working on our strategic partner or Tier 1 growth for a couple of years already. We are now starting to see good progress with that. That growth is now starting to materialize. We're very, very happy about that. Let's get to the story right away. We made strategically, as said, good advancements in the quarter that we have just closed. We've overall had good momentum in our partner ecosystem. Our currency neutral revenue growth was 2.1%. Unfortunately, we had some headwinds with dollar and yen. Our reported revenue decreased by 2.1%.
Sari Somerkallio, our Chief Financial Officer, will go into the details how this is now in a way portrayed in our different channels and in our products. Big differences there. Our adjusted EBITA was EUR 11.5 million, which is roughly 32% of revenue. A slight decrease. Sari will once again be going into some of the reasons why it has gone down. As major advances, I will come back to those on our Tier 1 partner front in a moment. Naturally, right after closing quarter one, a major piece of news was that we signed our partner agreement extension with Verizon for a service they call Digital Secure on the 8th of April, and on the same day we launched the service to their customers.
This resulted in a positive profit warning. We raised our revenue outlook. We had already in our plans taken into account that we would be gaining more traction in terms of revenue thanks to the Verizon deal in our plans for this year. We actually launched the service slightly earlier than we expected, therefore we needed to adjust our revenue outlook upwards a bit. In the beginning of the year in January, we made some organizational changes in our global sales and services teams, which resulted in some items affecting comparability. That's the high level in terms of our biggest achievement in the beginning of the year, as said on the side of quarter two.
Anyways, we are delivering a whole host of embedded security capabilities to Verizon, one of the biggest communication service providers in the whole world. A deal and a project we've been working towards already for 2. 5 years. We've been in an implementation phase already from, well, from the second half of last year, which now came to fruition with the launch of the service in April. For the first time in our Tier 1 partnerships, we also have a minimum guaranteed revenue, forming part of this agreement, which means that we will get a $1.25 million per month for each month of service, and that's the minimum level.
You know, there is a possibility naturally for us that, together Verizon and F-Secure, we manage to make the service successful, and there will be more users coming into the service. These are the users practically who already had the service but based on different technology that are now being converted to the refreshed F-Secure technology-based service. More growth is possible once we manage to work with Verizon to increase the user numbers. This is naturally good news. Then on other highlights on our partner front, we also launched together with AT&T in their ActiveArmor application, a new capability called Financial Monitoring, and that went live in February. We made an anonymous release on this deal in December.
Now that the service is out, it's obvious that AT&T has extended their Active Armor application with a new capability, once again called Financial Monitoring. That also was launched precisely as planned, but slightly ahead of our expectations, that also gave us more reason to increase our revenue outlook for the year. On the major partner side, you know, if you, if you think of years 2022 to 2025, we've been very much talking about upselling Total to partners who have had a narrower offering. Now it's very clear that a lion's share of our partners are already on Total, now they are expanding their service scope to also cover scam protection. On this front, we had several agreements that we signed during the quarter.
We launched several services during the quarter, and then also we had other contract extensions with Total, either as an increase of user figures or more modules taken into use. Overall, our Total business fell short of our plans in quarter one, but that was more than made up by the positive development that we made on the embedded security and strategic partner front. In embedded security, on top of the bigger deals that I already mentioned above with Verizon and AT&T, we have partnered with TP-Link, which is the world's largest wireless router manufacturer. They made a soft launch of Sense in the U.S. That comes bundled with their premier router models.
That's an important new kind of opening for us because that's retail channel, not only router channel through operators but also in retail. That's an interesting new offering. Then also with TP-Link, we delivered the first containerized Sense solution to Hong Kong Broadband Network. The value of this delivery is actually the fact that in the past, router security solutions have been relatively integration heavy, whereas this is now a containerized cloud delivered application directly into the router, simplifying the process of taking or rolling out a service like Sense, and rolling it out to vast numbers of customers. This is in a way delivery from delivery point of view, a massive improvement to how we're taking the product to market.
Looking forward to similar experiences with other operators in the near future. We've talked for a few years now how we actually want to be the number one security experience company in the world, I believe that we once again got awarded precisely for that by AV-TEST. This is their 2025 award for Best Usability, which means that the alarms and the protections that we're providing to customers are actually accurate, and we don't generate unnecessary noise that we call false positives, flagging or calling for wolf when there is no threat. This was best in class out of all the players. Very crucial in terms of providing a smooth experience to users.
A step back, if we talk a little bit more about strategy, we've talked about this before, for instance, at our annual general meeting. We are solving the two big problems that, you know, we see out there in the consumer security world. One is the scam pandemic, roughly EUR 450 billion lost in the past year to scams, and the other one being complexity from a consumer's point of view. As I just said, we got awarded once again for making sure that there is less complexity and noise in the user experience. People still feel that security is too complex.
70%, seven out of 10 saying that it's still too complex, we have our work clearly carved out for us on that front, and we're working every day towards making this simpler and more relatable for users. Those are the things that we're solving better than anyone else. Excuse me. Naturally, in the age of AI, there are completely new kinds of threat vectors and developments that were not in the market before. For instance, agentic browsers are rising at a very rapid pace. You know, for instance, malicious prompt injections into chatbots or AI chat agents are a new kind of threat that did not exist in the past. AI source traffic has exploded by increasing in the past year by over 500%.
Naturally, when you start from a small number, initial growth is fast, but it is actually mind-blowing. Secondly, when we get to Agentic AI, there are new kinds of threats, and the way that agents perform is that they have access typically to your personal resources. They have a way to communicate with the outside world, for instance, by emails or messengers. Also they may be exposed to untrusted content that they use to give us results. You know, when you combine all of this, we call that the lethal trifecta or the perfect storm of threats, and we need to work definitely on that to make sure that Agentic AI ecosystem becomes a trusted one. Finally, the rise of scams in social media, it's not letting go. It's just getting worse.
Just read yesterday that over $2 billion have been lost in the U.S. alone to social media scams in the past year. Over $2 billion. That's a massive development. Also an interesting development is that AI assistants are expected to decrease app usage by a quarter. Instead of going to specific applications, people will be using chatbots and chat interfaces to engage with the internet and mobile services. That's an interesting new development. Most likely some levels of security need to be now, instead of being in the apps, may need to be in AI chat interfaces.
A lot of numbers on this slide, I don't intend to go through all of them, if you go to the left side, you can see that trust on the internet is eroding at massive speed. People do not know. You know, if I would bring just one number to your attention, the lower left-hand corner, 84% of people worry that AI will make it impossible to tell what's real online. 84% of people, roughly five out of six. That means that, you know, if we're starting to lose the foundational trust to what we're seeing on the internet and on mobiles, you know, we're not on a good path. There's a big, big demand for the kind of things that we are actually delivering.
Secondly, on the right-hand side, you can see that the numbers once again confirm that the communication service providers are seen by consumers out there as a natural party who should be solving their needs and looking after their backs when they are on the internet and on mobile devices. The fact that we are very partner-centric and are the 500 lbs gorilla in the CSP partner channel shows that we're in the right place. Finally, our strategic priorities for 2026. Number one is that we want to successfully serve, scale, and grow every strategic partner.
We've told the market in the past, let's say, five months, we've signed a good number of very, very meaningful deals. Now naturally we are making sure that we can deliver on promise, we can scale those services to the kinds of volumes that we've never seen before in F-Secure. Then naturally make sure that those services become commercial successes. That's something that is absolutely crucial for us. It is our number one objective. Number two is that in terms of our partners that we have overall, you know, 200+ partners, out of those maybe 160 are CSPs, we see that there is a lot of growth potential within them still. We've looked at adoption rates of consumer security services out of our partners' user base. It is still at a level where we see a lot of growth potential.
Naturally, that means that we have to make it easier for our partners to onboard customers. Less needed from a customer to join the consumer security service, as well as then be able to convey value when they are on the service so that we can retain those users. We're putting a lot of emphasis right now on easier onboarding and empowering our partners to convey value for the services that people are using. Finally, data, AI, and new ways of working drive our innovation and growth. Just last week in F-Secure, we had our AI Hack Day. It used to be an AI Hack Week, but because of AI, we can be that much faster in producing actually cool results.
We had once again a massive number of initiatives from across the company. It's absolutely astounding how quickly we can now produce completely new kinds of solutions that may be about, you know, consumer experience, may be about better protection, may be about being more scalable in the way how we support and serve our customers and partners. In terms of, you know, the purpose for this, some concrete things, we continue to deepen our scam protection market leadership, especially AI-related scam threats that are arising right now. We are busy validating our new consumer app, Halo, product market fit. We're looking forward to launching that to market towards the end of quarter three. We are very keenly, you know, adopting AI by every single individual in F-Secure and applying it on team and function level.
We spent much of 2025 to make sure that everybody is fluent in using AI-powered processes and tools, and now in 2026 is the time when we actually start applying it more concretely into team function and company-level processes. Once again, I have to say that I've been super excited to see how quickly that development process has moved forward inside the company. That's all from me. We can come back in the Q&A session later on. Now I'd like to hand over to Sari Somerkallio to talk through the financials.
Thanks, Timo. Good afternoon and good morning, everybody. Let's take a deeper dive into the financials. Starting with the partner channel. Here our currency neutral growth was 4.6%, and I think comparing to numbers last year, this is a good one. The sort of negative part here is that the reported growth was slightly negative. It feels very remote, but last year in Q1, USD was at 104, quite a big difference. That's also reflected in our result. When measuring the business performance, 4.6% is the growth. Here the embedded side is now really showing with the 29% currency neutral growth that now we are starting to grow and this is really the reason for the header of the whole quarter. Now it's starting to materialize.
Timo mentioned the AT&T Financial Monitoring. It's a big one, and went live in February, so that will be reflected then in later quarters this year similarly to Digital Secure. We expect this to accelerate throughout the year. In Security Suite, the numbers are then just flat development in terms of currency neutral growth. Here we still see ARPU increase in many places. Now we don't talk so much anymore about the total conversion because there most of the job is done, but now it's about scam protection upsell. That is a good one. Finland and Sweden continue to grow well, but then the old story about Germany and challenges there, they continue and we can expect them to continue still.
It used to be a big business and we are constantly churning there. Not only us, but it's the problems with the customer. Maybe still highlighting from this embedded side and Japan. Now I'll actually jump to the next slide. Here on the right-hand side we have the geographical split and you see that rest of world, which is mostly Japan, it shows an 11% growth number, but there was a one-off item last year. That was a reduction last year, this makes this number look better than the underlying business is.
There we lost one service with one key customer, but also we have been able to sell more to this same customer, so it's only about one service and not a major problem. There are growing customers in Japan as well, but this one item has an impact on that. In terms of geography, so North America with the embedded business is growing really nicely and Nordics continue growing, but not quite as fast as earlier. We've had many years of good growth in the Nordics. If we still look at the direct channel on the left-hand side, so their business is declining, and this is as expected, because we are still continue the strategy of not investing in marketing there.
Actually, the quarter was very good. Very positive development in billings compared to our own plan. Because of revenue recognition, only part of that is shown in this quarter and it will be reflected in the later quarters. Actually things going better than expected in indirect channel. If we look a bit on the costs, very slight increase, 0.9% higher OpEx than the same period last year. Here, we see a reduction in sales and marketing, and this is related to a restructuring we've made during the quarter. You also see that we have booked EUR 1.7 million in IAC. Yes, there was no announcement about that.
It was in terms of numbers, not very big and mostly outside Finland, but still there was a cost impact to which is visible in EBIT and net profit of course. R&D, here we see a clear increase in OpEx. Actually the activity is even higher than that. You see that we have CapEx exceptionally high here, EUR 4.5 million compared to EUR 2.7 million last year. This is related to all the investments we do to our capabilities. It's partly OpEx, partly CapEx. CapEx is very much related to development of the portfolio and which we are now we have prepared that to be ready for the Verizon Digital Secure launch.
It's not only that, it's also other platform capabilities for the embedded business mainly to somewhat to simplification of our architecture. Here the CapEx was high in this quarter and going forward this year, you can expect the quarterly CapEx to be smaller than this, which of course means that as mostly CapEx is our internal work, so it will be then reflected as higher OpEx in the rest of the quarters. Gross margin, here on the left-hand side, Based on the growth of the embedded security, so it comes down now at 83.4%, and it can still expect it to come further down when the embedded side grows. But still it will be on a high level, so not no, like, dramatic change is expected.
In general, we have said that embedded has lower gross margin than other businesses, but there are also big differences between the deals, and also important to highlight that the contribution of all these deals is still positively contributing to the EBITA percentage. Even if gross margin is coming down, the result impact in general should be positive. In terms of EBITA, 31.8% or EUR 11.5 million is the adjusted EBITA for this quarter. It in our plans this was actually, even though it's lower than the previous quarter, it is on a good level.
We've still made a lot of investments, and we still need more growth to cover the cost base that we have at hand. In terms of cash flow, maybe the key comment here is that cash conversion was lower in this quarter than normally. Well, there is always fluctuation, and we've seen even lower, but here, the main reason is the high CapEx in the quarter, and I would expect this to be better than towards the rest of the year. No other drama here. In terms of outlook, like Timo said, and you all know, we made the positive profit warning during the quarter related to the Verizon Digital Secure deal and increased the revenue guidance now at 7%-12% currency neutral, but we didn't touch the profitability.
Of course, we have gotten many, many questions about this. There are so many things that have an impact here. We need to see how FX goes, and there's still a lot of months remaining in this year. We, for example, regarding the profitability levels of these big new deals, we need to see the activations because that will actually then show how much we have cost of revenue, and that will define the exact gross margin for the rest of the year. Many uncertainties yet, and that's why we have kept that broad. Of course, the focus is now on profitability because now we have the big deals, now it's about converting this into profits.
That's the current situation and I hope that we will then be able to, or my successor will be able to announce then better later on. Currently, this is the view that we continue with. This was now my last session here after four years of being the CFO. Robin Pulkkinen will start as CFO next Monday, and I will still be around here during Q2 and ensure the best possible knowledge transfer from my point of view, so fully committed to that. Thank you for these years. With Timo, we are happy to answer any questions.
The question from the chat. We have first one about AI. Can AI create cost savings for F-Secure within one or two years? If so, what functions would the savings occur?
Short answer, yes, in every function. We are actually at it. The size of these savings not easy to measure yet, but we are seeing things that we were never able to do before. We can see things that we can do much faster. Measuring those, I have to say that this is happening at such speed that our measurements of the gains that we're making are not there yet. I'm absolutely certain that we will be able to show that in the quarters and years to come. The second part of the question was?
If so, in what areas?
Yes. Okay. As I already said, we can see this being taken into use all across the company. You know, finance, legal, services, product, our leadership team, naturally engineering. All over.
Thank you. Next question is for you, Timo. You said that Total business fell short of your expectations. What is the reason in your view behind that?
I'd say that the bigger reason is that there have been ownership changes in the market as always. You know, there's consolidation. Because of some of this consolidation, there have been adjustments into our existing agreements. That's one. Second one is that we have a couple of partners who have not quite performed at the level as they had forecasted and planned together with us. Unfortunately, there are some setbacks on their front and, you know, there are quite fierce price wars going on in certain markets where we are operating. Due to these price wars, there's also then increased churn with some of our partners.
You know, if there's a partner who has a very high penetration rate of security services and they're suffering from churn, then also we are suffering from churn. I'd say that's another one. These are the primary reasons. Sari, anything you would add?
Yeah, I could actually complement my comment related to the profit part of our guidance. Also one thing that is contributing to the current view and how we are, we want to be conservative with the profit guidance is that actually embedded side has gone better than our original plan. Then on the Security Suite side, there have been some disappointments. Of course, we would have wanted the embedded to come on top of all the existing plans, but now some disappointments on that side. If we have less growth in Security Suite, it doesn't change our costs at all. As that is like the old F-Secure with more than 90% gross margin, that is directly away from the result.
Thank you. We have one question about embedded security. Can the embedded security gross margins improve as the business gets more scale?
Yeah. Definitely yes. There we also have. What is in the P&L for embedded, it's the royalties that are a big cost factor because we have also some features that we are not producing ourselves. In some of those cases, we have minimum commitments. Even still when the service is small with our partner, we pay a certain fee. The pricing is such that when we get bigger volumes, the unit cost goes down. Definitely there's scalability there.
There are differences between different embedded services. Some of those may be completely F-Secure IP, so selling more of that naturally brings us very, very nice gross margin. There are others where they have a higher level of content coming from a third party, so naturally gross margin being slightly lower. That also, you know, defines at what level of gross margin, for instance, we hit in those deals.
Thank you. Let's continue on embedded security. Can you explain the FX exposure on embedded security? There is a massive difference between the organic and reported growth.
As we say, most of the embedded business comes from the U.S. and another important market is Japan. In both of these, we are currently suffering from weak FX. Lion's share of embedded is in those currencies. What we do in our currency neutral growth is we are taking last year's numbers, translating them with today's FX. Last year, USD was at 1.04 during Q1, the difference will not be as big going forward, assuming that nothing strange happens on the market, because last year it changed in April, the level in Q2 was totally different compared to Q1.
Naturally, a question that arises is that, why are we not hedging? What would you say?
Yeah. FX can go both ways. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. When you hedge, you always lose a tiny part, and you are basically pushing the impact to later on. Our cash flow is very stable, so we have chosen to do it like this.
Thank you.
The currency neutral numbers tell about the underlying business development.
Thank you. Scam protection upsell replacing Total conversion. Does this mean that Total conversions have reached its limits?
We're starting to get close to the limit now. Yes.
We have some of these cases, like the Germany problem, who haven't migrated to the new Total. There are some of these customers where it will not happen, but those who are on board, mostly done.
Yes.
Thank you. Could you provide an update on the so-called legacy customers in Europe, the ones that see their user base declining?
I would say that if there is any kind of common thread in these partners, they don't, for whatever reason, they don't have a strong focus in turning security into an integral part of their core proposition. There may be many different reasons for this, one of them being that they may feel that on their strategic agenda, they have other things that are more, let's say, burning platforms that they need to fix. For instance, they may be losing more customers than they would like to. For instance, churn is something that has a lot of factors in it. You know, we have players who are extending their speeds. They are rolling out fiber. They may be providing new infrastructure for homes in terms of wireless routers and so forth.
For instance, improving the bandwidth and the internet service experience that customers get. If that is a focus, that may, you know, take hundreds of millions and massive focus for a company. This is one of the reasons in this price competitive markets, for instance, that I've mentioned earlier. You know, there are many ways to react into churn. We feel that the best one is actually to put the pedal to the metal with security services because we have massive evidence that customers with security services are likelier to stay with you. I'd say that that's the biggest reason for declining numbers.
Thank you. How does the Tier 1 partner pipeline look like?
Can I be short again? Good. Both with existing partners and new ones.
Thank you. Does the AT&T Financial Monitoring deal have a minimum revenue guarantee?
Actually, I believe it does.
Not quite sure, but there was a base that we started.
Yes
... With, so it didn't from zero.
This is why I'm puzzled. A good question, but I'm puzzled. A certain part of the customers that AT&T has had immediately access to this service, so that gave us a business right from the get-go, but it was not through a revenue guarantee.
Let's continue on the Tier 1s. Can you elaborate the link between the cost of sales and activation rates in the new Tier 1 rollouts? If adoption goes well, how should we think about the net EBITA impact?
Yeah. Typically our royalties are based on activation, so you could say that in short term it's good if the activation is low because then we get the revenue of the user, but not much cost. Of course, in long term, that's not good for the partner satisfaction. We want the activation to get high, and we just need to ensure that we price the services correctly.
Thank you. Can you estimate the percentage of OpEx that is U.S. based versus Euro based? It looks as to the EBITDA margin will have been impacted by FX, and one may presume that this may reverse at some stage.
Yeah. We have actually quite good natural hedging in USD, and I don't have the exact number, but the ballpark is that whatever is the USD impact on top line, so about half of that flows through to the result.
There is natural hedging.
Yeah. Quite strong.
Thank you. Will you need or want different sales channels, resellers for the Halo product?
We are starting as a market, testing the product market fit. We're doing that in the direct channel. Naturally, in the future, based on those learnings, we will define our next steps. I would not be surprised to see a Halo for partners. First we need to make sure that the product market fit with the end users is there.
Thank you. One final question. How low leverage do you expect for 2026 year-end? Can we expect higher dividends for 2027?
Yeah, the leverage will continue to decline, and of course, profitability and cash flow of the quarters will define that. As per our dividend policy, we say that the normal level is above or around 50%, but as long as leverage is higher than 2.45%, which is our target level, it can be lower. I guess that threshold level is coming closer, I'm sure we will look at this internally and with the board in the autumn, then we will find out next winter.
Thank you. Those were all the questions. Also that was the Q&A for today.
Okay. Thank you very much. I want to thank for my part for great partnership, you, Sari. It's been great working with you, and I hope that you have also enjoyed us delivering the messages with regards to F-Secure together for the past four years. I'm wishing you all the best in your board professional career that starts now. Thank you for these years.
Thank you, Timo. It's been a pleasure being with you and with you as well. I have really liked this. Thank you.
Thanks for joining.