Good afternoon, welcome to Qt Group's Q4 2025 results presentation. My name is Heli Jämsä, IR Lead, and with me today are our CEO, Juha Vareus, and Interim CFO, Ann Zetterberg , to present the results. After the presentations, we will have Q&A first in the room, and if there's time left, move on to the questions from the lines. Without further ado, please, Juha, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. We have a same agenda as always. I go a bit through what happened on the Q4, and then Ann is gonna go through the numbers in more detail. I'll talk a bit about the future outlook, and then questions. The Q4 we had a growth of 12.6% or 18.6% comparable currencies, and of course, IAR acquisition, which we completed, contributed in this development. IAR was EUR 8.1 million on Q4, and our organic growth was 6.1%. Compared to the very difficult year we had last year, it was a decent quarter, and we were happy on that.
Our EBITDA margin was 35.6% and EUR 27.5 million, and that's there is a decrease compared to last year, but we did have one-off costs on the acquisition that we're burdening that. I'm gonna talk more about the overall market environment, but of course, even the year changed, the market environment hasn't changed that much. We had quite a bit challenges last year, which affected our customers in a way that we had tariffs and whatnot, uncertainties. Selling developer licenses last year was slow, if put it on one word.
On the whole year, we ended up on EUR 216.3 million, which is a increase of 6.6% on comparable currencies, we went pretty much on in the middle of our guidance. Distribution license revenue grew very well last year. There were a lot of new things coming into the market, new programs started, which ended up on the 26.4% growth. Of course, the main growth drivers industries for distribution licenses is the automotive, medical, and industrial manufacturing. The whole year, EBITDA was EUR 51.8 million, and there was a decrease. EBITDA margin was 24%. Our personal increased end of the year all to 1,100, out of which 215 are IAR employees.
But the, we did continue our own hiring as well. The one-off costs for IAR acquisition, EUR 5.8 million. The, we're gonna talk that also a bit later, but the, of course, we all know that the IAR profitability has been less than the acute, so that affects the overall profitability of the group growing forward this year. We haven't disclosed the ARR before, on the ARR, we had a growth of 8.3%. There on the small print is that it is Qt and the QA developer license base, and it does not include the IAR licenses and distribution licenses. That ARR is the Qt and QA business.
We plan to give that ARR number now in the future, also in the half a year sequence. You can see that because one of the questions affecting our revenue has always been the shift from one to three-year licenses. Of course, last year, we did see the cautiousness in our customers, it was slowness in sales, it was also people shifting from three year to one year. Now, presenting this ARR, we don't have to, you don't have to worry about the shift from one, three year to one year because we can follow the ARR. Our plan is to give that number now next time after second quarter and so on. Obviously, it's the, it's a number that doesn't change that much.
We might even go on a quarterly basis if that's needed, but the, like I said, it's a much slower moving measurement. Well, here are some of the product-related things we did in 2025. There are always questions about AI. Is AI going to eat our lunch in a way that the, you know, that there are a lot of predictions on AI, that the, no developers are needed, and AI is gonna do all the code? Well, at least as of now, we don't see that development. We do see that there are a lot of AI assistants being used, like we are offering them in Qt and our design studios and on Squish. On writing test scripts, for example, you can use AI, and then the Squish does the actual testing.
They help on that. Do we see that specifically on embedded world, that the AI would become and replace the developers? That kind of a development we don't see as of yet. At the same time, of course, it's good to realize that the, I think that the U.S. companies are planning to invest EUR 500 billion-EUR 600 billion next year. Obviously, they are expecting to get something out of it. The, I have, I don't see that developers would be going away next year or even in the coming years in that sense. On the on partnering side, we did on Axivion, we do have a partnerships with NVIDIA CUDA. The when you're doing CUDA code, you can or using CUDA, the you can use the Axivion.
On the R&D, on the defense sector, we did have the FACE certifications and the working with Infineon over there on the AI consumer power devices. We are expanding our ecosystem through the Qt Bridges, which will enable more languages over there, basically. These are just some of the highlights that we're working on the product development. In general, all our products have always been very good. We get a very good feedback, this is just to show a few examples that we do continue our R&D, and we do, we are on the forefront of product development all the time, making sure that all the Qt products are very competitive in the market, and that seems to be the case on all the customer surveys from our users. Uh, with this, Ann, please-
Good. Thank you.
Some numbers.
Yes. Yes, I am, Ann Zetterberg. I am. I have been the CFO of IAR for, I'm on my fifth year now. With the acquisition of IAR, I had the opportunity then to step up and become the interim CFO for Qt. I'm going to tell you a little about the numbers then for this quarterly report. Delighted to meet you all. There will be a bit of a P&L first, maybe a little repeat on what Juha just mentioned. We had in Q4, we had a growth of 12.6%, and after exchange rate impact, it was 18.6% at comparable currencies, and the organic growth with removal of IAR revenue, which was EUR 8.1 million, that was 6.1%.
We all in, for 2025, the growth was 3.5%. Exchange rate impact has been pretty bad, both for Q4 and for the full year, especially the dollar has behaved very, very badly for us. The growth there for 2025 at comparable currencies was 6.6%, and the organic growth was 2.6%. As Juha also said, we plan to show the ARR, as that shows better the yearly underlying growth for the company. It doesn't, it's not affected from which contract length the customers chooses. As we recognize 95% of the contracts upfront, it depends, it matters a lot if they choose a five-year contract or a one-year contract for revenue, but ARR illustrates the underlying growth very stably, and that is growing good for us.
It was 8.3% of growth for the Qt part, excluding IAR, during the year. Looking at expenses, the personnel and on year-on-year grew by 267 individuals. That's the growth of 31%, but of course, a lot of that relates to the IAR acquisitions. 215 people worked at IAR at the acquisition, so that increased the headcount to 1,136, both on average for the year, but also at the year-end. IAR contributed EUR 4.8 million in staff costs in the P&L. Under other OPEX, the IAR acquisition had some extra cost than EUR 4.1 million in Q4 and EUR 5.8 million during the year.
Also, I wanted to highlight, even though it's a very small cost, the capitalized asset, as IAR has interpreted IAS 38 a bit differently than Qt has, and has capitalized R&D assets in the balance sheet. Presently, there is EUR 5.4 million of capitalized unfinished assets in the balance sheet of IAR, and those are expected to be finished under 2026. This means that we will have a small positive effect on the P&L from these capitalizations, removing cost and putting it into the balance sheet. I don't expect any large amounts from this, but it's still good to understand that this is what it looks like now. Over time, there will be some harmonization within the groups so all companies look at this in the same way.
Of course, the profitability, like Juha just mentioned, has gone down. The EBITDA margins are lower, both for Q4 and for the year. IAR has a lower profitability, so that contributes to that, and as does the acquisition costs. Of course, when you join two companies, there are also opportunities for integration, efficiencies, and cost reductions, which we are going to work with on starting this year. This means that the earnings per share has gone down to EUR 0.73 for the quarter and EUR 1.25 for 2025. Moving on to the balance sheet. A lot has happened to the balance sheet, obviously, from the acquisition of IAR. The preliminary PPA added EUR 204 million in net assets to the balance sheet.
Of that, goodwill was EUR 122 million. There were identified other intangible assets of almost EUR 90 million. Those were customer relations, technology, and trademarks, and those will be written off over 15 years. So the amortization yearly and net of tax, would be EUR 4.8 million. Also the PPA added, or the acquisition added other net assets of EUR 11.2 million in IAR. Some of those assets on the asset side of the balance sheet and some on the debt side, sort of spread over, but the net of them all are EUR 11.2 million. Some of those assets were trade receivables then, which increased the trade receivable balance to EUR 58.7 million in the balance sheet.
There are also other receivables, which could be good to know. One booking of EUR 5.1 million. We have booked the full value, 100% of the shares to the balance sheet, as there is arbitration going on, and we are obligated to buy the rest of the shares, we are not showing any minorities under equity. It's only a matter of time until we own 100% of the shares. That can also be good to know. The ending cash balance was EUR 40 million, EUR 40.1 million, a little lower than compared to last year, as we have made this large acquisition.
As the balance sheet has expanded, the equity ratio has gone down from 81% to 50% in, also the interest-bearing debt has increased. The interest-bearing debt is EUR 143.2 million, and of those, EUR 134.4 million are debt relating to the acquisition of IAR. We have paid off some of the debt already. It was EUR 150 million to begin with. Also on the deferred tax, on the debt side, relating to those intangible assets that were EUR 90 million on the other side, there is also deferred tax booked on the other side, which is EUR 18.5 million. Good to understand that also, how the PPA affects the balance sheet.
On the short-term liabilities, there is a debt of EUR 5.1 million, which is the amount we expect to pay for the remaining shares of IAR after the arbitration is finalized. I can just, as a final note, say that the operative cash flow had gone down a bit, but mainly because of the profitability going down, so nothing strange about that. With that, I suppose I'm done with the financials, and we will take questions afterwards, but I will then leave to you, Juha.
Mm-hmm
take the next of the slides. Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you.
Yeah.
2026. Well, I think the first big thing is that during the next three years, as you know, IAR has been on a perpetual model, during the next three years, we're our target is to shift that into subscription model. That's roughly the, by the way, the same plan we did have early on with Qt when we did this few years back. If this goes as planned, IAR revenue will be going down this year, it's gonna be decreasing this year. Depending on how aggressively that goes down this year, the swing back will be bigger next year. It's the early phases, we've started the journey.
We have now two months behind us. It's the to make exact predictions at this point is there is a bit of a room for that estimate still. The well, or the well, I think it's the market's been uncertain so long that the uncertainty will definitely continue. As we know, there are a lot of global tensions going on as we speak. That's what we're looking this year. Some of our customers are in a challenging environment. The like in automotive, the Chinese automotive manufacturers are putting a pressure on the European manufacturers. At the same time, there are tariffs that's obviously gonna continue all this year, and so on and so forth.
I think that on industries, the automotive will be in challenge, medical will not so, and the industrial automation seems to be doing pretty well. Defense is doing really well. In if I now look the two of our biggest industries, they are actually medical and defense at this point of time. They've grown quite substantially over there, where they've been. The long-term growth prospect, well, like I said, on the AI, this software really defines the value of the products. Each product will have software going forward, and the new versions of it, we don't see on embedded, but the AI would be eating all that market away, far out from that. The we do see AI improving our own products on many respect.
That's what we are implementing. Before we've given our estimates that we've given you a range, but we gave up on that range. Now we're saying that our full year net sales will increase at least 10%. We're saying that that's the floor, but we're not giving a range, so we're not giving the upper part guidance. That's a bit different. We're saying that our operating profit margin will be at least 15%. Again, we're saying that that's the floor, we're not giving the upper range. We've, we're not giving those ranges anymore.
Going forward, we're going to start after Q1 or at the Q1, we're going to start giving you more info on how the. We'll start sharing this ARR, which will give you a better understanding. You don't have to worry about the shift on the three-to-one-year licenses. We're going to give you more on the revenue per product, so you get a better understanding on how the licenses, distribution licenses are coming. We're looking to open up that a bit. I don't know if it's going to make your life any easier because there is a lot of fluctuations, but at least you can then see that fluctuation.
The we've been listening the what you've been asking and the so that's the. More to come on that later. I think the ARR actually will help you more than seeing the license distribution, license sales, and whatnot. The more of that. Do you have any questions? Okay.
Good afternoon. It's Matti Riikonen, DNB Carnegie. Couple of questions. They are very simple.
Mm-hmm.
Do you expect the legacy Qt business to decline in 2026?
Simple answer, no.
Okay. Do you have a rough estimate of how much IAR's revenue would decline in 2026 versus 2025, if you give a broad range? You say it's going to decline, and you say that you don't know yet, but roughly, where are your thoughts at the moment?
Well, double digit.
All right.
Low.
And-
Double digit
... third question before I give the mic to somebody else: How will IAR's fixed cost base develop in 2026?
Simple question, longer answer. Well, I mean, you know, we're not looking to increase the IAR cost base. What you're going to see now is that the IAR, the revenue decline really depends on the on the how well can we go on a subscription, and we try to go as aggressive as possible. You know, if I say low double-digit revenue decline, somewhere there, right? I don't know yet, but somewhere there. 2027, I do expect to see a double-digit, you know, high double-digit growth on the you know, maybe close to 20 something, to give you an idea how it roughly could work, right?
on a cost level, when we, when we see costs, obviously, we're not going to be increasing costs because the prices are increasing, right? But we do have some R&D-related initiatives over there, where we think that we're going to be increasing cost, and they are related into the fact that IAR is very much on a functional safety-critical environment. In automotives and whatnot, we are looking for a product development that we can broaden that segment, roughly, to put on a broad perspective. Then we have a few places where we're going to mainly on sales, we're going to increase sales costs, but we're talking very modest cost increases on the IAR side.
If you look the old IAR, I know you have the numbers from there, we're looking very. We're looking some cost increases, but fairly modest over there. Still, if you model that, the revenue development on IAR numbers with that revenue dip, you're going to be seeing that the EBITDA contribution for the whole group this year is going to be pretty much break even or even slightly negative. First of all, on the guidance, we those are the bottom lines. They are the floors. They are not the, we say that that's the bottom, right? We do expect a bigger numbers.
The IAR negative contribution will be on this year, but when it swings next year, we don't there is no need to increase costs for that because it's basically a price increase. It'll swing the IAR EBITDA. Well, it's a licensed sale, so everything that the revenue will be increasing will go directly to the bottom line. That's the that's the implication. On Qt Group. Well, you call it legacy group. The time changes. So we'll figure out the better name than Legos.
Anyway, the old Qt, we're not expecting organic decline, and we're not expecting that what we saw last year, the bottom line, we're not expecting there to see a declining EBITDA that we had last year. That's the bottom performance, right? We expect that the bottom performance be last year level and higher from there. That's kind of the overall picture. It's maybe not that gloomy than you were first thinking. I don't know how gloomy you were, but that's my educated guess. Thank you for the simple questions.
Thank you. That's all from me so far.
Hi, Jaakko Tyrväinen from SEB. On distribution licenses, what happened in the sales in Q4? Since I recall that the commentary after the first nine-month performance was rather moderate also in this revenue stream. I'm curious whether there were some customers filling up their inventories in terms of distribution licenses and how should we look at the revenue stream for 2026?
Thanks. Well, maybe later on a first Q, when we open up more the product distribution, you're going to see. The distribution licenses is really hard to predict because the. It's not like this. I mean, quarter-on-quarter, like last year, it went like, you know, well, first quarter, second quarter, boom, and then up again. That changes every year.
The quarters are not alike, so you can't expect that what was last year on second quarter is going to be the same, and that makes it really difficult. As you know, distribution licenses go that some customers buy them afterwards, telling that how much they shipped, and some people buy a chunk on pre-buy. That's why it's hard to predict. On general level, we can always see that we know that some big new products, productions are coming into the market, then we know on a yearly level what's going to happen. Last year was, on that sense, very good. If you look last year numbers and distribution licenses for this year, I would take them slightly down. That's my expectation for this year.
Given the market volatility, given the what's the customer demand in Europe and whatnot, I mean, you know, at the end of the day, our distribution license revenue comes from a product what the consumers are buying, right? That, that's, in a general terms, it follows. We do have. We are in 70 industries. We are both on commercial devices like industry automation, robots, and whatnot, stuff that goes into hospitals, stuff that goes into factories, but also on consumer goods like auto, cars and whatnot. That's where the fluctuation really comes. I would, you know, I would not put on my model same growth this year than we had last year. This is going to be substantially lower. Same number or a bit below that would be my best guess, and that's a guess.
Understand very well. Just to confirm, Q4 was strong in distribution license.
Yeah. Yeah, it was, yeah, it was a good. Last year, the on-distribution licenses, Q2 was very good, Q3 was very weak, Q4 was good, yeah. Q2 was, if I remember correctly, the best on distribution licenses last year. Does not mean that that's going to replicate. It really goes like this.
Good. Thank you. On the ARR, thanks for sharing that to us and the growth of 8% there. Could you give some color on how much of this was pricing and how much was coming from the effect that customers changed from three-year to one-year, which obviously should have kind of positive pricing impact on the ARR number, annualized ARR number?
Oh, that very good and detailed question that Those numbers I don't have. I, you know, we can, we can come back later, but those I don't have out of my head. On general level, I can say that there was some shift from three-year to one-year, if I look on a whole year number. It, you know, it's slowing down. That shift is slowing down. Definitely what we saw through all the year was the fact that on renewals, what people used to do is that they had something, and then they renewed all the licenses. Nowadays, customers are counting that how many developers we really have, how many, you know, licenses we really need. In general, money has been very tight.
I mean, our customers are very, you know, they're very tight on money, so the, they're looking all the costs. On many R&D budgets are such now that the R&D budgets are not growing. If they do something additional, they need to stop doing something old.
Good. Thanks. My final one, on the possible AI disruption also in the embedded side, I heard what you said, but could you give us or for a dummy explanation, why the embedded world, what are the barrier entries for AI-native solutions to break in?
Well, as of today, what we see, first of all, that the, you have a lots of safety critical, you have lots of functional safety type of things, like car brakes and whatnot. You need certificates, and there are, you know, there is a very tight regulation, what do you need in order to have software? You can't just ask AI that, "Do me a car brake system. Thank you." Implement it, right? The second is that the, on embedded, the, software goes into products, right? In products, you know, if you need to do a product recall, that is really, really expensive. You now have to be fairly certain that what are you doing. The third is that the, embedded is fairly slow-moving.
There are huge companies building these cars and all these devices, medical devices, and whatnot. The time of the change and how secure they need to be, that if I'm building this medical device, that nothing really goes wrong. They change relatively slowly, right? Whereas if you think that on a website that I wanna do a mobile application, I do a mobile application. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, it, you know, it doesn't matter so much. It's kind of a different environment. Then if you think about coding, just building the software is, you know, it's one part of the process. You need to define what you want. You need to discuss with people that what are we building, what this product is doing, and on, and on, and on.
AI is definitely not ready for that yet, right? The where it's really gonna end, we'll see, but that's what we see as of today. We see AI as assistants and you know. Like, if you're designing something, you can use AI to give you creative ideas. Because us people, we tend to start looking, you know, one-way street. AI can open up your creativity and whatnot, but yet you're still using tools. My prediction is that the next phase you're gonna see on SaaS environment and the products like ours is yet another pricing change. We're doing this just to mess you up, right?
Yet another pricing change, the pricing change is gonna be that the pricing, I think, is gonna go more towards from that the, what has been built, how much the tool has been used, rather than a deficit, right. That's where I see the AI is going. You know, I had a one breakfast discussion, and the person pointed out that. Remember a couple years back, this person said to me that, "Remember a couple years back, everybody in Finland were talking that the even grandmas need to learn coding because software is in every device, and everybody needs to learn how to code so that we can use these products." There were all kind of coding school started and whatnot. That was two years ago.
Now, everybody is talking that developers are, you know, nobody needs developers anymore. There is a bit of a hype on the speed of the change. I mean, over time, you know, of course, AI is gonna you know, 10 years from now, AI has changed a lot how we work, but the and live our lives. In the near future, I don't see a much of effect. This is the Qt development, right? On the IAR compiler business, where you need all the certificates and whatnot, there is no way you can use the AI for a long time. On our testing tools, well, whatever you do with AI, you need to test. I see that there's gonna be more and more software that needs to be tested because you can't rely on AI. The testing business is gonna grow substantially as a market.
Excellent. Thank you.
Hi, Felix Henriksson, Nordea. Three questions. Firstly, on Q4, the revenue growth, organically accelerated a little bit, we discussed about the distribution licenses being strong. Was there anything else that improved, for example, the lack of large deals that we saw in earlier quarters? Did those sort of come back at all?
No, no. If I look on the regions, I would say that we're doing well in APAC. We're doing okay in Europe. We have room for improvement in Europe, in some markets. In general, we have lots of room to improve in U.S. The maturity of our softness being in U.S. You know, we come to the point that if we talk about AI or if we talk about that is there a competing product or is there a price change? What I see in the markets is that we're doing fine in APAC, whereas we're doing fine in Europe, and the main softwares we have is in the U.S.
Even in the U.S., we have some teams that are doing okay, but then some teams are really suffering in that respect. That's why I'm fairly confident that it's not about AI eating our market, because if it would be, it would be eating our market everywhere, globally, right? This is more a local softness we are having. Same thing for prices and competition because we have same type of... You know, in APAC, we have the same industries and same type of customers we have elsewhere. Our softness basically has come last year, that we've been a bit soft, is being a U.S.-related, right? I'm very confident that we can fix that and get the efficiencies over there on a better shape.
Right. On the guidance, you mentioned that you're no longer giving those ranges...
Yeah
... you know, the upper end.
Yeah.
Can you expand on that a little bit? What's changed with your guidance philosophy in a way that triggered that change?
Yeah. I wasn't very good at that last year.
Okay, so maybe more conservatism in that way?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, hey, we gave two profit warnings. Was not on my plan.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
Very clear cut.
Yeah.
Lastly, on distribution licenses, I mean, we've started to see memory prices going up, and there are some supply constraints emerging that, you know, potentially are impacting your customers, I presume. Do you think that's a sort of potential headwind when you look ahead, and what are your customers saying when it comes to this?
No, that's a downwind because that's where Qt really shines. The fact that if you use Qt, you can do more with less memory. That's the, I mean, that's been the basic promise since the beginning. The, with Qt, you can have the same performance with the lower-end hardware, and that's the main selling point we're having as of today. You know, higher price is better for us because at the end of the day, our customers will have to build those products anyway. It's greater question of that how what kind of performance they want, what kind of a end user experience they want, and the that's where we shine. That's where, you know, like Android doesn't shine, right?
You use Android, and you need a lot more hardware than using Qt and so on and so forth. Same goes with Unity. Most of our competitors, they may be, in some use cases, like Unity, Unreal, they might be able to do a better 3D visualization or it, you know, it looks better, but it consumes so much hardware that if we go on a low-end hardware, we can beat them, and you can get a good enough, you can get a fairly good performance and the a lot lower hardware using Qt. That works for our benefit.
Thank you.
Hi, it's Atte Riikola from Inderes. One question: we know that the last year's growth was quite sluggish, and there is still uncertainty around this year. Is that affecting your own investment plans, or you just keep on going with all the growth investments that you have planned before?
Yeah. I mean, yeah. We will continue our investments, yeah, for sure. That's the no doubt about that. We do have these few areas where we see the... Well, first of all, I think that we wouldn't be here in the first place if our products wouldn't be so competitive, so we need to keep them in that way. Then, of course, we are exploring the opportunities that the AI is opening up. We need to do product development to have AI agents in our own products and so on and so forth. You're gonna hear product releases as we go forward this year. Yeah, definitely we're gonna do that.
At the same token, like Ann was saying over here, that we just merged two companies, and of course, we're going through all the processes. We're going through that where can we be more efficient? We've grown very fast. We're 1,200 people, and we do have also the efficiency programs, if you like, but it's so it's not all more, more, more. It's also efficiencies at the same time, and that's very much on Ann's table as well.
Thank you.
Hi, thanks for the presentation. Waltteri Rossi from Danske Bank. Few questions about AI. Did I hear correctly that you said that, you might change your pricing model in the future due to AI?
Yes. I said that that's probably gonna be the first change that we see on AI, that the, you know, the source models' pricings will start changing more from based on consume, the, consume of the tool rather than the per-seat. I did not say that we're gonna do that change, and I did not say that we're gonna do that change this year, but I said that that's what I see, that the, how AI is gonna be affecting source companies in general, that the pricing will change as going forward. I don't see that AI will be taking over the tools business per se.
Yeah, I understand, but no timeline.
No. No, no, no.
Okay. That would imply in a, in a way that there is at least a big threat on your developer license sales domain.
No, I don't see it that way. I see it that the that's gonna be the effect, that the source business will go more towards that the people are charged at how much you use the tool rather than the per-seat. I see that development coming, but no timeline. Definitely not this year, next year or so, no.
Okay. Well, next one is still on AI. What would you say is basically Qt's value proposition for the customers? You know, there's the argument that AI will make developers work more efficient, so that's kind of eating up your one of your value propositions.
Mm-hmm.
What else do you basically offer for the customers?
We offer a tool that they can build their graphical user interface or applications, as we are here today, AI is not capable of that. You need the human, and you need the tool. It's debatable that when will a AI be able to do that, the favor? We see that if you need certifications, you need like on defense, like in automotive, on many industries, on medical, there's a long list certifications you need to meet.
Mm.
Who's gonna train an AI that will meet those certifications and make sure that the AI does the things every time in that particular manner, and everything is met? I mean, you know, that's years away, if ever.
... Yeah, agree. Still on that, actually, a follow-up. We know that programmers are already today using AI assistants, but are you saying that you don't see your customers yet using them?
No. You see a lot of developers using AI on the web technologies. If you wanna do a simple mobile application, you can do that, or you wanna do web pages, you wanna do your own homepage, you can use AI for that. Of course, they are so simple that you can, you know, if you wanna do your own web pages, they are on the web already. What AI does is that it takes a web page, and then it produces a new web page, right? That you can do, yeah. The on embedded building on products, no.
One last, on AI. Can you please elaborate how Qt is currently using AI in the framework? Or do you have an add-on or something?
Yes, you can have add-ons, you can have assistants over there that helps you getting started. For example, on testing, you can use AI that it helps you doing the testing script and these type of things. It helps you kind of, you can, you know, think that it helps you building a better for story or text, but yet still you have to read it and modify it. That's what we see as of today. Yeah.
All right, one last question on the usual one to three-year licenses. Do you have a number on how much that shift from three-year licenses to one-year licenses impacted last year's sales?
No, we're gonna give you the ARR, so you can start follow that.
Yeah. Thank you.
Matti Riikonen, DNB Carnegie. A couple of questions more. They are even more simple. First of all, you discussed the capital, capitalized cost policy so that you would basically, go towards Qt's policy, which I read that you would not any longer capitalize some costs that IAR has. Should we expect that there would be none whatsoever on the capitalized costs in 2026?
2026, there will be some, because we have unfinished assets in the IAR balance sheet, and we need to continue capitalizing on those, according to IAS 38.
Right.
There will be some capitalization of R&D assets during 2026, but we expect that those will be finished on the 2026, the assets that are not finished. After that, we will harmonize between the companies, so we can find a common application of IAS 38.
Ann, you wanna come over here, so we have you on camera as well.
Yes, sorry. I apologize. Yes, about the capitalization, since Qt and IAR has handled the IAS 38 application very differently. IAR has been capitalizing R&D assets into the balance sheet, which increases the profitability, and then you write off the assets over time. After the acquisitions, we kind of cleaned out the balance sheet, but the assets that are not finished, they are still there, and we will have to follow IAS 38. We will have to continue to capitalize on those until they are finished.
Otherwise, we don't follow the bookkeeping rules correctly, and we don't want to break them. That will happen, and in that time, we will evaluate and harmonize between the companies, so we can have a common approach to this. I expect that we will not capitalize anymore, but I cannot 100% tell you that that will happen. We will have to have a common approach anyway within the group on how we handle this. join there.
What kind of magnitude of capitalizations do you think there would be in 2026?
It will-
Just roughly.
not be a lot. Those assets are almost finished. They're EUR 5.4 million there now. I don't expect there to be any huge capitalizations. As you saw during Q4 on those assets, we capitalized EUR 200,000. It wasn't a lot. You can, then it can go up, and it can go down a little, depending on how much work the R&D department puts into various projects. I don't expect it to be, I mean, anything that affects the profitability much. It can be good for an analyst to understand that this is a difference from how Qt has handled it before.
Right. Thank you.
Mm.
That's helpful.
Mm-hmm.
Second question is about the annual recurring revenue disclosure that you plan, which is an excellent idea. How long into the history will you bring that? Is it possible that you would bring maybe a couple of years' history so that we could start to track it already from there, and not just from here on? Of course, in the ARR pattern, the history is what counts, and current day is less interesting if you don't know the history.
Oh, we already gave the last year number, right?
That's not a very long history.
Well, it's the last year.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Well, we'll look into that. Yeah, great question.
Mm
think it that way, but we'll look into it.
All right.
On capitalization, the, it's like Ann said, that there are a few projects we need to continue, of course, in general, you know, going forward on a longer term, we're not looking to capitalize. We rather implement the Qt policy going forward and not capitalize the development. Yeah.
All right.
It's a better way.
Very good. Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
A brief follow-up on the profitability dynamics and IAR part of that. Let's say the revenue is down double digit something like you said, Juha. Would this imply that IAR as a standalone would be in at breakeven or even red numbers in 2026?
Red.
Thanks.
This is... Oh.
sorry, one last one from me. You said you are going to continue-
You were-
Sorry?
You were-
Waltteri Rossi, Danske Bank.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You said that you are going to continue recruiting this year. Could you elaborate a bit on where exactly are you going to recruit?
Uh, you-
You said invest, but.
Uh
The question may be yes.
... regionally or by function?
Say again, I didn't quite hear.
Do you mean regionally? Well, I mean.
Both. Both, please
you know, I think that the we do have few markets where we're gonna be increasing personnel. Probably the U.K. is one, and you know, these are small numbers, but then they add up. For our Italian business, more or less in Japan, we're gonna be increasing the personnel, the China, probably, and the. In particular markets, I think in the U.S., we're pretty much on a headcount we like to be at this point of time. On R&D, there are these new technologies, like the one that interests you a lot, which is the AI. Of course, on these new technology areas, we, instead of trying to learn them ourselves, we are hiring people, so we do have some of these new technology areas.
If I look in general on the R&D, the Qt is very well staffed. The QA business function itself, it's still on the investment mode, so there you're gonna see pretty much on each and every function, so a bit of marketing, bit of sales, bit of product management, a bit of the R&D. On IAR, we are strengthening some of the R&D functions over there. IAR, I would say that the most personnel additions will be on a product R&D side, and then some on sales. When you have so many different locations, you add up and, you know, then you get the personal increase. That's basically what we're looking for.
Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you so much. I believe that concludes all the questions from the room. As we are running out of time, I give it back to Juha for closing remarks.
Okay, that came quick. Thank you very much for being here today, and as we go into this year, like I said, one very big item for us this year is going to be the subscription change on IAR Systems, so going from perpetual to subscription, that's one of the core things we're doing. And of course, integrating IAR Systems into the Qt family, so we're going to be a bigger, happy family. We're also looking forward this year that, yes, it's going to be challenging year. I like to emphasize that the guidance we gave was not a range, so we just gave a bottom line that what is the floor level where we expect to be this year. Of course, we're expecting to be better on those numbers.
On a profitability side, we're not looking on Qt to decrease on profitability nor on sales. The IAR subscription change will affect our profitability this year. That's why the lower guidance. Where it's gonna end up, how aggressive can we be, remains to be seen. In any case, the 2027 for IAR will be a revenue growth year and a profitability year. The question is that how steep is that curve over there? It's still very early phases to see that how rapidly we can drive this subscription change. I think with these words, thank you very much.