Welcome to today's presentation, where we are joined by Inderes. Today's topic, of course, full year 2025 results released yesterday and the 2026 guidance and a kind of a look into financial market also, I guess. You are a good indicator on what is going on there. So if you're not an investor, maybe it's still worth to follow this presentation. So we are joined by Mikael Rautanen, CEO of Inderes. As always, it's possible to ask questions down in the box down below. During the questions, we will take the main part in the end. And also for full disclosure, we, of course, need to say that HCA and Inderes have a partnership, and Inderes has a 20% stake in HC Andersen. But I think with that, I will hand the call over to you, Mikael.
Thank you, Michael, and welcome everyone watching the webcast. So financial statements we released it yesterday. Let's go through the full year, the fourth quarter, a bit of deep dive into each of our businesses and strategy update. The year we ended on a, like, positive note, I would say. Growth picked up to 12% in the last quarter. EBITDA improved 6% from 1% last year. Not great, but significant improvement year-over-year. At the same time, like, last quarter picked up. We had some good momentum now also in Sweden in the events business. And, like, the market sentiment we feel is getting better, especially we're seeing more and more concrete signs of recovery in the IPO activity, which is a significant driver for our target market growth.
So overall, there's, like, a positive sentiment in the air, going to 2026. Looking at full year yeah last year, full year growth 4%. We're not happy with that. Profitability adjusted EBITDA 11%. The combination fell short of our long-term target, so we're not where we want to be. On one side, in Finland, our business is in very strong condition. Record result. Even though it's been a very tough market in Finland, we're growing and doing extremely strong profitability. Then on the other hand, we have been investing in international expansion, and those costs have affected the result, and we haven't achieved the growth level that we are aiming for in the international part at the same time. So that's what has been affecting there. And why haven't we succeeded in achieving the level of international revenue growth we are aiming for?
One thing is that the previous strategy that we had, we kind of, like, turned it around because the first strategy we started off, the international expansion, wasn't successful. So we updated our strategy last year, now focusing on the three different business units, each of them with their individual international expansion strategy. This change has brought in a lot of focus in the operations, and we're feeling that this was the right choice to do. So I also have a positive feeling about that change.
Yeah, so that's on the full year on high level. We'll dive a bit deeper later on into the individual numbers. First, going through each business unit, the research business on high level. This continues to be extremely resilient business. Strong profitability, strong cash flow, sticky customer base in a declining market, but new customer acquisition has been challenging. Here, the business in Finland is doing very strong profitability, and at the same time, we've been investing aggressively in two things. First one, developing the Inderes platform and the AI tools related to that operation to improve our international scalability.
And the second investment area has been Sweden market entry, where looking back, the past few years when we've been going into that market, we haven't achieved the volume that we have been aiming for and the growth we've been aiming for. So I want to be honest here, we are still working on finding the recipe for international scalability of the equity research business. And we will not increase our investments from current level until we find the recipe.
So, we still need to work on finding the go-to-market recipe to scale this business. It's extremely strong and resilient in our home market, but we need to find the recipe to scale it internationally. And no doubt we're going to find it, eventually. On the Inderes platform numbers, that also continues to be resilient. Some pick up in the platform reach. So, we're having 66,000 active logged in users annually, 21 million site visits per year. So that's kind of, like, demonstrating the strength and reach of the Inderes platform. And that number doesn't calculate our distribution channels through which we reach even bigger groups of investors. Going to events business, low single-digit growth here, margin at previous year's level. This is a bit two-sided.
On one hand, in Finland, this business did an excellent, excellent result. Strong profitability, good growth. And this is because after COVID, we made a strategic choice to push into hybrid events, and that strategic choice is now paying off. I mean, when COVID came, everyone went online. When COVID went away, everyone went back to, like, physical events. So there was a bit of a pullback in the market, and we believe that it's going to be hybrid more and more in the future. And especially in the investor relations segment, hybrid is the future. And this strategic choice is, is now starting to. We're seeing it from the customer feedback. We're seeing it in the demand. This strategic choice is now starting to pay off.
So building the capabilities to do also not only the online events but hybrid events is starting to pay off. On the other hand, in Sweden, we had a tough first half of the year in this business. That was mainly because of our internal changes. So we did a structural adjustments to this operating model in Sweden. And the good news is that in the second half, development stabilized and we won some quite good deals also, on the event site in Sweden towards the end of the year. For example, big Capital Markets Day productions of some major companies. So good traction there as well going to this year. In this business, the development projects we're working on, we're also improving the scalability of this business in many areas, implementing AI to our processes.
One big change this year, we're bringing in automation and remotely controlled studios that will enable this business to better scale internationally. Then on the software business, so this business reached the level of EUR 3 million revenue last year, growth of 22%. We're growing in all products, extremely sticky customer base. Good growth. Growth is mainly coming from Finland, but we've been building the capabilities to grow internationally as well. And that's also starting to kick in here. A big milestone for us was the partnership with Euronext Corporate Solutions, where they have taken our Videosync platform, as part of their events business. So they're running their events business on our technology platform. And we have also strengthened that partnership. So we're partnering in Sweden with Euronext Corporate Solutions on the investor relations software offering.
So that's one example of the strategy we have chosen to expand through partner channel. And Euronext Corporate Solutions, as they're kind of like a vast ecosystem integrated in the European capital markets. So it's a very good and strong partner for a player like Inderes to be in. And our offerings, like, they're super strong in governance and compliance offering. So their offering is also very good, complementing to Inderes offering, the IR Suite we launched last year. So we're kind of, like, bringing the whole software portfolio of Inderes together to one platform. And we've been migrating our customers to this platform. And, of course, the feedback has been excellent.
So, very, very good, very good feedback and feeling about the choice we have made in this business to bring the product portfolio together, not only, like, bundle the offering in sales, but also bundle the offering technically, because that will bring a lot of efficiencies for the investor relations of the listed companies. Then, one thing to highlight from last year, we did the ISO 27001 certification. So, that's also improving our capability to serve even larger and larger demanding enterprise-grade clients. So good, good momentum here and also positive vibes going through this year, given, like, how fast our product portfolio is developing in this area. Next, if we dive deeper into the profit and loss statements.
So January, December, EUR 19.1 million revenue growth of 4%, recurring revenue up by 4% and recurring revenue accounting 61% of revenue and international revenue 23% of all revenues at previous year level. In the cost structure, no major changes. The only significant item affecting the cost, the non-recurring cost related to restructuring of the Swedish operations we did in the first half of the year and adjusted EBITDA 11.14% compared to 11.6% last year, so fell slightly below last year and reported EBITDA 1.6%. So there you can see the impact of the non-recurring items. Here, I would like to always remind that we are operating under the Finnish accounting standards, which means that we are amortizing the goodwill from acquisitions in the history, every year.
So this accounting item is affecting our profit and loss statement last year, EUR 0.9 million. That's purely an accounting item. That's why we're encouraging investors to look at the adjusted EPS and EBITDA to follow our operating performance. Last quarter revenue growth 12%. International revenue picking up slightly. So there are some positive signs in Sweden and margin improving to 6% from 1% last year. Minor changes in the cost structure given the balance on how much we're using external resources versus our own staff in the event productions. Balance sheet remains strong. No major things to highlight on this one. We did EUR 1.9 million cash flow from operating activities. Investments were slightly up last year.
That's mainly given the seasonality in CapEx that we have. Some years we're investing a bit more than others to update the gear and studios and offices. So no, nothing dramatic there. And cash at the end of the year EUR 1.8 million. And given that we're a company still doing strong operating cash flow, we have a strong balance sheet. We have a strategy that we can execute with the operating cash flow the business is generating. We are sticking to our payout policy of annually increasing payout, and that calculates dividends and share buybacks. Now here, this year, the big change is that while we continue to increase the annual payout, we're giving a significantly higher weight on share buybacks over dividends. So we're roughly halving the dividend compared to last year.
And then, we have announced a share buyback program worth EUR 0.9 million, targeting maximum of 4% of our outstanding shares. And, yeah, I think that's signaling the confidence of the board in the chosen strategy. Looking at the outlook for this year, so we're guiding revenue to increase from last year and relative profitability, in terms of adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of 10%-13%. And the background of this guidance, we're expecting our market to pick up slightly this year. And, profitability will continue to be affected, namely given the investments we are doing in the software business. And, also good to note that we're expecting the full year earnings to be weighted towards the second half of the year. Financial targets.
In 2024- 2025, we fell short of our target of combined revenue growth and profitability of 30%. Looking at how strong our business is in Finland and what kind of profitability and growth levels we can achieve in areas where we are in more mature stage, we can easily stick to this target level, and see that it is achievable. All right. Any questions, Michael, at this stage?
No, let's take them at the end if you have something. I think nothing really. I think they are broad. Let's take them at the end if you, then we can finalize the presentation.
Yeah. All right. Let's zoom out a bit on where this company is going. In terms of evolution. So, basically Inderes was a Finland-only story until 2022. Very successful scaling first the research business and then expanding the product portfolio to cover the events and software business. Very successful execution of that strategy. Then from 2023 onwards, we've been on the road to scale this business internationally. Now, we started this journey by basically taking the Finnish operating model with the full kind of like end-to-end offering and tried to take that to a new country. And that strategy choice did not work. It lacked the kind of like spearheads to go into those new markets. It was kind of like you need a sharp edge to go into a new market. And the previous strategy lacked that.
So kind of like I see 2023- 2024 as a time when we were kind of like recalibrating our organization, recalibrating ourselves into how should we work and organize to turn a company that has been locally operating for over a decade into an internationally thinking organization and company? How should we structure? How to organize leadership and so on and so on. So after that recalibration and also learning from the failures that we did on the way, we updated our strategy in the first half of 2025. So we split this into three business units: equity research, events, and software. Now, each of these businesses are quite have their own unique characters. They're somewhat different business models, somewhat different markets, somewhat different competition, and so forth, even though there's also a lot of synergies between them.
So now we're going into the international growth with this organization split more clearly into three different units that have their own spearheads and own international strategies. And that has just brought so much better focus into leading this company and finding the recipes to also grow outside Finland. So, I have a good feeling about this change that we have implemented. In software, I see the path is quite clear. Also with events, it's pretty clear how we're going to execute the strategy until 2030. In equity research, as I mentioned, there's a very solid and resilient business that we have, but we still need to work on cracking the code on how to scale the business internationally.
So, in the equity research part, short term, I wouldn't expect a strong growth. It's mainly going to be mainly short term driven by the IPO activity. Going to the IPO activity. So we often talk a lot about IPOs, but the other side of the coin is the number of delistings. Well, you know that pretty well in Denmark where there's been. I don't have Denmark in these graphs, but you have quite a lot of delistings. When you have a lot of delistings, it means that the market is declining. But now, going to this year, we're seeing more and more concrete activity.
And that's a positive sign for us, especially given that our product offering and the portfolio is much stronger and much more comprehensive compared to the last IPO wave that we had. So that's a good sign. And not too many de listings, either in Finland and Sweden. A few words on AI. How we approach this is, well, first of all, you can look at it from the kind of like market perspective. What's happening in our industry because AI is changing how investors find and analyze companies, how they pick stocks, and that is changing how investor relations should be run. And that we can approach from the point of view of each of our business units.
For example, with research, if you're using AI tools to go through a company that is under Inderes research coverage, you're probably going to find the AI tools referring to Inderes research. And that's because our research is open and accessible for all investors. You're not going to find the bank research that is behind locks. So for companies, it's becoming more and more crucial to make sure that there's accurate and accessible information in the tools that investors use. And our research is basically solving this problem. In the events business, I mean, we're seeing an AI flood, the flood of new content. Like what's any more relevant? There's so much content coming from every channel because it's so easy to generate content. What's relevant? How can investors pick the signal? And what we're doing here is it's this is real time.
This is the company CEO speaking with their own face. This is authentic. So I would say the relevance of this type of investor communication is only going to be emphasized, going forward. So I think live events is a great product for this. Then on the software side, complexity of running your IR is increasing. The world of investor relations is becoming more and more complex. And at the same time, you need to be managing separate systems from multiple vendors, and it's becoming difficult. So the importance of getting all the tools for running your IR on a modern integrated platform is probably going to be the future. And that's where we're aiming for. So that's like where the what's how we see what's happening in the industry.
I think the key here is to understand like how is investor behavior going to change because that in turn is going to be changing how companies should run their investor relations operations. Looking inside Inderes, of course, we have a lot of AI experiments and projects going on throughout the organization on all different business units. Goes without saying that, we need to start using these tools to improve our productivity significantly, but that won't give us like a lasting competitive advantage. That's just something you need to do to stay in the game, I believe. At the same time, we're all the time bringing in new features, AI-based features to service that we offer for the investors, namely in the research side. We're bringing in new features to the investor relations products that we're offering, and we're improving our international scalability.
For example, in the research business, language barriers have been one of the obstacles for international scalability because local language, especially for the retail investors, has been important. And basically, that obstacle is now going away. We can produce content in multiple languages with a very low cost. And that, of course, helps the scalability. And then, of course, looking into how can we come up with completely new products and business models? I think that's always been the strength of this company and the culture. We've been quite curious about new technologies and tools and quite agile into coming up with new ways to use them to democratize investor information and build new businesses. So with that conclusion, shall we go to the.
Yeah, let's jump into it, Mikael. Software is increasingly important, but software is pronounced dead due to AI. What are your thoughts about that potential competition? I've seen any new players out there. Can you, of course, extract some synergies. You can come up with new products, but I guess does it open up also a new playing field for competition coming in from the outside or how do you see that and how are you protecting yourself from that threat?
I mean, we are a quite new entrant to the software space. So kind of like I see us as a new player coming into that market and quite a bit disrupting and renewing that market. So that's how I would position Inderes. And then one thing with this industry is that the buyers are quite conservative and not often that like tech-savvy. So it's also kind of like a balance between kind of like how innovative you can go or how much you invest in compared to how kind of like eager the clients are to switch to new technologies.
So yeah, it's a balance. So you are the one eating the software, if I should understand you correctly. Then there's why such a large interval on the margin guidance? You have 10%-13%. That was it's a large interval. Last year you were above. Is that the uncertainty on how much you're going to invest?
I don't see it as that large, given kind of like how uncertain the world is nowadays. So leave some flexibility for that and also leave some flexibility if we see good investment opportunities that we have the ability to move without needing to issue a profit warning, basically. Because if we see investment opportunities, usually it means in our case, more cost because we're running everything through our profit and loss statement. We're not activating R&D and so forth.
And then there's a question. Do you see Claude as a threat or opportunity in the equity research model? You know, Claude coming out with this pretty fancy model for yeah, especially financial analysts. Do you see that as a threat or is it as it has always been that financial analysis is also about the name, about, you know, having an opinion and having trustworthiness versus, you know, all these highly improved AI models helping, you know, to model and do financial equity research?
Yeah, I would more see it as an opportunity to increase the productivity of the research operation significantly, still having the equity analyst, the human, in the driver's seat. I think that's going to stay at least for the foreseeable future because, I mean, equity research, there's also like what type of information will the investors trust? Yeah, will they trust AI-generated equity research and recommendation? Will they? If the supply of this type of equity research and content is going to explode, like what's the information that investors who are humans will consume? And I believe that. The role of having the analyst with their face and the personal brands around the equity analyst is just going to be emphasized. But those equity analysts have to start using more and more AI tools to remain relevant in their profession.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have started talking about how we're going to train up junior equity analysts because that's actually their job is. Yeah, that is under pressure with Claude. It's very, very good at doing their job, you know. But as a business, we kind of need to take on a responsibility because if we don't train anybody, nobody's going to be the senior. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then on the software side. You talked about increasing investment and you talked about in the international organization. So is it, are you inventing new products or it's more about integrating with such one as Euronext Partners and so on, integrating and more into the international business? Is that where you're seeing the main part of your software investments and partly satisfied with the product offering you already have? Or is it also new product offerings you are looking at investing into this year?
Well, you can never be satisfied with your product portfolio. You need to always invest and improve it. In the software specifically, it's two things. The first one is R&D. Actually, last year our R&D spending was up by 40%. That's driven by both the investments we're doing in equity research, but also in the software business. So R&D and the second fund is sales and commercialization. So those are the two areas where we're putting more investments in.
And then Euronext, that's quite a big partner in Europe. Ramp up. Is that why you're saying second half you're expecting some growth or is all the IPO activity? How fast is this going to ramp up? I know a partner driven is nice. It gives you a very, very large sales force, a very potential for accelerating growth. But you also are not in control of the speed of or always of the partners. So any thoughts about how fast is this going to ramp up with them going out and offering your solutions?
Yeah. There's two things here. So the Videosync partnership that we announced in November 2024. That's. They are taking our system to run their events operation. So kind of like once the implementation is completely completed, then it's going to come as a revenue for us. And that has been reflected already in the last year and fourth quarter.
So you're starting to see some of that business actually now having been implemented in their systems and starting to run. Is that how we should understand it?
Yes, yes. Then the second part of the partnership that we announced early this year. So that's pretty new. Yeah, that's focused on Sweden and that's where we combine our IR software offering into their compliance offering. And that's going into a new market. So new sales. Usually products that have pretty long sales cycles. Yeah, they might have some vendor locks with the existing suppliers. So that's a partnership that should be viewed in a quite long term because it's SaaS revenue and it starts accumulating one client by one client.
So perhaps that's the color I can give on those two aspects. And then overall in the big picture, of course, it's a we're super happy with the partnership and kind of like they're a major player in the European capital markets. So it's a very, very, very important partnership for us. Last, then I will leave you off the hook.
The questions you asked as an equity analyst, but don't want to answer as a CEO change from dividends to share buybacks. Do you think your share is undervalued? Is that behind this change or any other thoughts about changing the way you know, you still want to distribute more, but now you just do it in a more flexible form?
I mean, it's what we're saying is completely in line with our payout policy. Yeah. That says that we're going to it has the flexibility on how much is dividend, how much is buyback. And then the board makes a decision that what type of phase split is optimal for long term shareholder value creation. Yeah. Let's just put it that way. Check.
So you learned a political answer in this one.
Exactly. Yeah. I learned from the best. So others. Yeah.
You covered Nokia and a lot of big companies in the old days. Perfect. I think that was actually the last question. Mikael, thank you for taking us through your results, taking a look a little bit into it. Nice to hear a little bit of optimism about the IPO market. That's always a sign of financial markets. And yeah, the final comments here. So thank you, Mikael, and thank you for the audience listening in.
Thanks, Michael. Bye. Bye.