Growth story. We're gonna go into Q4 in depth. I'm gonna share some success stories, and then my CFO, Per Øyvind Stene, is gonna go through some of the financials for Q4 and 2025 in a bit more detail. And then finally, at the end, we're gonna do a live Q&A, live this time. We've-- we're taking feedback, and it's gonna be Teams-based, and you basically have to raise your hand, and then the moderator will let you know that you can ask the question, so we have a bit of order. All right, so let's get into it. We start with the Q4 2024-2025 highlights. We had a strong quarter.
The revenue came in at NOK 184.6 million, which is 20.8% up year-on-year. Growth in Q4 was really driven by strong activity in the EMEA and APAC markets, based on the normal drivers that we see in our business, which is rights renewals, upgrades by leagues, and kind of driven by larger investment in live production infrastructure. The gross margin for the quarter came in at a strong 73%. It's slightly down from the same period last year. That's largely based on the U.S. tariffs, but which was mostly compensated by positive product mix, as we'll come back to later. The underlying EBITDAC came in at NOK 12.6 million, which equals a 6.8% margin.
Just a repetition here, we use EBITDAC, where this C stands for capitalized development expenses. So EBITDAC is EBITDA less capitalized development expenses. We use that as a measure to make sure that you can compare our profitability with our historic numbers, where you can compare them with the EBITDA, essentially. We started capitalizing in 2025. We're using the underlying measure because we IPO'd last year, and we have quite significant costs related to the IPO, NOK 10.5 million, to be specific. So when we use underlying EBITDAC, we are reporting without the impact of the IPO, IPO-related one-off costs. The free cash flow ended at NOK -14.4 million, which is down NOK 8 million year-on-year.
This was again, you know, strongly impacted by the IPO-related cost, and then also increased capital investment, as we are heavily investing in a strong platform for many years of future growth going forward. Now, if you look at the full year, 2025, revenues came in at a very strong NOK 800.9 million, so NOK 801 million , which is up a whopping 32.3% year-on-year. That is in line with the guidance that we provided during the IPO process, and it's driven, you know, by sort of broad growth across our regions, and really expansion within a lot of the tier one premium live sports accounts that we have developed at the... and that we are expanding within, as we'll get into a bit further as well.
Gross margin came in at 72.3%, which is exactly the same as 2024. Again, we're seeing sort of adverse effects, obviously, from U.S. tariffs, but it's being compensated by our product mix and our ability to kind of balance those things out. We're really happy about that. The full-year underlying EBITDAC came in at NOK 142.2, which is seventeen or which equals 17.8% margin.
This is within the range that we're guiding, EBITDAC, which is between 17 and 20, and it really shows that, you know, the operating leverage that our business has, as we kind of scale and grow, really helps drive, you know, strong profitability. And we, you know, we plan to keep the business in that sort of 17%, 17%-20% interval. In terms of free cash flow, we had strong earnings and cash generation. So we had free cash flow at NOK 64.2, which is up 8% year-on-year. And it really, you know, adds to our increased available liquidity, which Per Øyvind is gonna come back to a bit later as well.
Now, I think it's important to kind of retell the Appear growth story. We're the new kid on the block on the Oslo Stock Exchange, and so just a bit of a reminder of which market we're playing in, and which role Appear has in that market. So a quick glance at 2025, we had 270 active customers, and at the end of 2025, we were 225 people. We launched two new significant products at the back end of last year, the X5, which is the solution that we're offering into acquisition for the long tail of Tier Two events, and the VX platform, which is our software-based platform for production processing.
You'll – you might have – if you follow the company, you might have known that we won a lot of industry awards last year as well. Particularly happy with the ones that we were awarded for the big, at the big shows and the big events, and typically, we get awarded for our products and technology, which are absolute industry-leading, particularly in this Tier One market. Our global footprint, you know, the way we're set up, the way our company is set up, is obviously headquarters in Norway at Lilleaker in Oslo. We manufacture our products at Hapro, our contract manufacturer in Oslo, and most of our engineers are based in Oslo.
Then we have a direct sales organization through our wholly-owned subsidiaries in Southampton, now to cover the EMEA markets, LA to cover the Americas, and out of Singapore to cover Asia Pacific. And then we also have a development set up that is growing in Stockholm, in Sweden. A little technical issue here. Oh, there we go! Let's see. All right. The market that we play in is live production technology, and the way we define it is basically any technologies, the hardware, software, and services that are deployed between the cameras on the stadium, the racetrack, the venue, and that sort of that produced content ending up at the consumer's screen, at the home or at the mobile. We typically split it into three different subsegments.
We split it into acquisition, which is the technology deployed at the stadium or at the racetrack, used to capture all the video feeds, video streams, and the audio, compress it, process it, and transport it to where the content is produced. The middle part is production processing, and that's really content production. It's all the applications and used to create sort of live workflows, to mix audio, video, graphics, to create the finished goods. It's the product that we watch. And then the final phase is consumption. So that's really where that finished product, the finished feed is delivered to consumers, to viewers, either via linear distribution, traditional linear TV, or via OTT, which is essentially streaming. That's the market that we play in. Now, this is a large market.
This is a $5.5 billion addressable market. If you look to the right, you see kind of how we, how we previously split it in acquisition, processing, and consumption. Appear predominantly operates in acquisition and processing, less so in consumption, and the acquisition and processing markets are growing to some extent, so between 4%-5% going forward is the estimate. So we're obviously growing much faster than the market. Now, below, we've kind of indexed on the customer types, and you'll see, and I'll get to the fact that this market is highly driven by the leagues and the rights owners. That's really where most of the value comes from.
It comes from the leagues and the rights owners, and the customer's willingness to pay for content that is produced and delivered from... driven from those rights. So the main business of the leagues and the rights owners is selling and monetizing the rights, but they, many of them also acquire, process, and deliver their own content, so they are, in their own rights, also broadcasters. Now, the main customers of the leagues and the rights owners are the sports broadcasters and the media rights holders. So they buy the right to monetize content, and they pay a lot of money for it, as we'll get to. And there's, of course, an ongoing fight amongst the sports broadcasters for end-user subscriptions.
The streamers, so Amazon, Netflix, you know, Apple, Disney, they're all getting into the sports broadcasting business because this is highly valuable content that consumers want and demand more and more of. So there's a big dynamic in there. Then you have another customer type for us, which is connectivity providers. That's the telcos or the companies that provide connectivity between the stadium and where content is produced or between content production and delivery. Then you have a range of companies that we call production services companies that typically offer managed services around content production. It's a very sort of specialized operation and a set of work streams and technologies.
Again, the consumer demand for top-tier sports rights is growing, and so, and hence, is the value of the sports rights. And, you'll see that market growing and, and it's really interesting to look on the right, where you see the top-tier sports account for a very large portion of the total value. So it's, of course, very important to be part of the ecosystem around these rights holders, because that's where a lot of the value flows from a business perspective. If you look at the triggers for Appear, so what triggers an investment in Appear?
It's important to understand that for the broadcasters and the streamers, and the companies investing in creating viewing experiences, they have to compete for subscriptions, as I said earlier, and they do that by increasing the production value, right? They have to invest in a better product to sell, but also then a cheapest possible way of having it delivered, which is operational efficiencies. And what we see in terms of triggers, right, is that the leagues and the federation, so the owners, they have an annual, you know, cycle of where they play, basically, and where they don't play. And in this sort of annual recurring market, they typically invest in more production value and in operational efficiency every single year.
This is an ongoing battle. And in addition to that, you have a lot of other, let's say, triggers for this type of investment. So you have some of the non-league, but annual global events like Super Bowl, Tour de France, you know, Stanley Cup. You have biannual or quadrennial global events, so the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, FIFA World Cup. Then you have another category, which is media rights renewals. So when media rights are either renewed or they change hands, that unleashes a huge amount of investments in the entire ecosystem around the rights. Then you also have regulatory change and industry consolidation.
So Netflix looking to buy, you know, Warner Brothers, that drives a lot of investments, but also the shutdown of C-Band, which drives investment in technology that moves contribution or distribution of live from satellites to the internet. All right, so let's have a quick look at Q4 in more depth. As you'll see from this, you know, we've had a really consistent, strong growth trend for many years now. So from Q4 2021 to Q4 2025, we've had a CAGR, so an annual growth rate at 33%, which we're super happy about. And that means that we've also had 11 quarters of year-on-year growth from Q2 2023 to Q4 2025.
There's no indication that, you know, our growth is sort of substantially slowing down. We see a strong continuing demand for our solutions going forward. If you look more into sort of into decomposing Q4, you'll see that the revenue by product type is... well, you see the trend that the in the revenue by product type. We have increasing revenues from software and support, and that's really great for us because that helps that helps support our gross margin and the and the profitability. If you look into the regions, you'll see that the Americas had a a 10% decline from last year, so from from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025.
That really only reflects timing of revenue recognition, which can be, you know, impacted by larger deals. The full year growth came in at a solid 18.3%. And again, the underlying development in the market is strong and positive. You can also note that several of the larger deals that we've done in the Americas in 2025 was long-term support contracts, which gets sort of revenue recognized over several years instead of at the point of delivery. For EMEA, you know, we have a super strong Q4, 66% year-on-year growth, and a whopping 45% full year growth.
This is really a testament to kind of refining and kind of fully implementing the direct sales model that we've had very, very strong success with in the U.S. market. And then obviously, APAC is with the establishment of our commercial entity in Singapore, is showing very good signs of growth, but of course, from a relatively small base currently. But we do expect to see continued strong growth in that region, and actually, in fairness, in all regions. Right, so Q4 2025, as I said earlier, was the third highest quarter that Appear has ever delivered, and with, you know, this consistent gross margin. So the increase quarter-over-quarter was 20.8% year-over-year.
And that's actually a much better, let's say, exit velocity into 2026 than we had into 2025 from 2024. The underlying EBITDAC, again, at NOK 12.6 million, excluding the NOK 10.5 million in IPO-related one-off expenses, and with a product mix that contributes to this consistent 73% gross margin, which really helps, you know, us keep our profitability. And, and we're really, we're really happy that we're able to kind of keep our gross margin at that level, even though, you know, we've had some headwinds, both with U.S. tariffs and with Forex. Right, so the question we get often is where, where did growth come from in 2025? So we're trying to kind of break it down a bit for you, here.
So if you look on the left, in terms of customer concentration, our tier customers, or our tier one customers, still remain sort of a significant contributor. And that is, you know, really part of our strategy. We have this land and expand strategy with our or we have the strategy of expanding within our big tier one accounts. There's a lot to gain from that. You know, we do have a sort of a reliance, obviously, of our top five customers, but that sort of reliance on the top five and top ten is reduced over time if you look back to 2022.
In terms of new and existing, again, most of our business is coming from existing customers, although, you know, some from new, and that is, you know, definitely part of the strategy. And it really reflects on the very strong relationship we have with these global tier one customers, and that is a very big asset for us. And then, of course, in terms of product mix, most of the revenue came from the X Platform, which is, you know, a big winner in the acquisition market, and as planned and as communicated earlier. And so, and so, you'll see that kind of mix changing a bit now as we move into 2026, having launched two new product lines.
Coming back to the slide that I shared as part of the IPO process, the strategic drivers for growth, and kind of indexing a bit on 2026, we are launching new products and capabilities onto the X Platform, that will drive, you know, more revenue and kind of help maintain the strong commercial momentum we have in the acquisition market with the X Platform. Additionally, we are launching, or we have launched, the X5 Platform, which is capturing kind of a new market for us. It's capturing the Tier 2, the long tail of smaller events, so the Tier 2 events, with a product that has a price point and capabilities kind of targeted at that market segment.
Then we have launched our VX platform, which is our pure software-based platform. It's a very important move for us in that it gives us the opportunity to expand our product offering, product offering and become a pervasive end-to-end supplier in live production technology. The VX platform is a software-based product, and hence, it will take time for it to gain, you know, well, to become a significant contributor to our revenue growth as the revenue here is subscription-based and not sort of upfront CapEx-based. The other avenue is, of course, the transformation into our, let's say, commercial playbook, the direct sales organization we've been rolling out in the U.S., now very successful in the U.K. and in Asia.
So that we see, you know, a strong growth component coming out of. And then, as most of you know, we do have plans to make strategic acquisitions. We are actively looking at sort of prospects. But of course, we're not saying anything about sort of timing, when, where, and how. This is something that we're working on and evaluating, and this is going to be a value-driven approach for us, not a time-driven approach as such. All right, now I'm gonna talk to you just about a couple of 2025 success stories that we're really proud of. So the first one is very relevant.
So, some of you may have seen the NBC Sports press release that they put out about their collaboration with Appear for the Winter Olympics. If you haven't, then go on our website and check it out. But, NBC is a big... well, Appear is a big provider of technology for NBC's live coverage from the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. Our solutions are deployed at all the venues in a very wide range of cameras, and really an integral part of the way NBC gets video and drives sort of the live coverage from the event for the Americas market. So we're super proud about that.
Across other, you know, NBC Sports and other customers, we have sort of recognized between NOK 50 million and NOK 60 million in revenue, kind of distributed across a range of customers in North America and EMEA. The other event that, or the other success case that, we'd like to share with you is the project that we've done in refreshing LaLiga's entire production infrastructure for live football.
So in 2025, we partnered with Telefónica and LaLiga in their endeavor to do a massive upgrade of their production infrastructure, and that essentially ended up with Telefónica partnering with Appear to put Appear X Platform in every single LaLiga stadium, to backhaul all the video feeds from the stadium to their new centralized production facility, also in all LaLiga 2 stadiums and actually their VAR infrastructure. So Appear has sort of video infrastructure now deployed across LaLiga's entire sort of stadium base and are feeding all the stadiums' kind of content live directly into their new production hub. All right, I'm going to hand it to Per Øyvind for the Q4 and 2025 financials.
Thank you, Thomas. Let's start with the numbers for the quarter. As Thomas mentioned, we had the third best quarter recorded on revenues, with the revenues ending at NOK 185 million, NOK 32 million up from last year. Our gross profits, gross earnings, ended at NOK 135 million, at a margin of 73%, slightly below the margin last year, with positive product mix effects compensating for adverse tariff effects. Looking at the OpEx side of the... We increased our headcount. We ended Q4 at 225 FTEs, compared to 190 at the end of 2024. So we are investing in future growth. And also on the other operating income, we have 10 in the NOK 47 million.
We have NOK 10.5 million in one-off expenses related to the IPO, but we also have investments there related to establishment of our offices in Singapore and Stockholm, and an ERP implementation. I guess the best place to see that we are investing in future growth is the capitalized development expense, expenses, and we capitalized NOK 18 million in the quarter. EBITDAC for the quarter ended at NOK 2 million, adjusted for the one-off expenses related to the IPO. Underlying EBITDAC was NOK 12.6 million at the margin of 6.8% versus 5.6% in the same period for last year. Our EBIT operating profit ended at NOK 13.8 million.
Then our net financial income was driven by interest on money market funds, and for this quarter, positive currency effects. So, our effective tax rate was 25% due to non-deductible IPO expenses, resulting in total profits for the period at NOK 16 million, compared to NOK 10 million for the fourth quarter last year. So looking at the full year, as we've mentioned several times, our revenues ended at NOK 800 million. That's a 32.3% growth year-on-year versus 2024. Our gross profits, gross earnings came in at NOK 579 million. That's a gross margin of 72.3% at par with last year.
We had positive product mix and pricing balancing out the adverse effects of tariffs and currencies. We, as we say, we are investing in future growth. If you combine the total employee expenses and other operating income expenses, that's also including the capitalized development expenditures, we had NOK 455 million of costs, compared to NOK 351 million last year, which is a growth just slightly below 30%. Those numbers include NOK 17.8 million in one-off expenses related to the IPO. So we are really committed to investing in future growth. Thomas mentioned that we will launch more products next year, and the NOK 65 million that we capitalized in development expenses was mainly related to products that we'll be launching in 2026.
So EBITDAC for the quarter, NOK 124 million, compared to NOK 87 million last year. The underlying EBITDAC, which we are focusing mainly on, ended at NOK 142 million, and that's a margin of 17.8%, compared to 15.4%, last year. It shows that we are growing profitably, as we say, and also combining the underlying EBITDAC growth with the revenue growth, we are well within the Rule of Forty. Our EBIT for the year ended at NOK 171 million, compared to NOK 73 million in 2024, and the profit for the year was NOK 129 million versus NOK 70 million in 2024, so a substantial growth from last year.
When we look at the cash flow, what stands out here is really the proceeds from the IPO of NOK 191 million and the transfer of NOK 275 million to money market funds. However, if you look at the free cash flow components, we see that the cash flow from investing activities outweighed the cash flows from operations. Here, it's worth mentioning that we've been running an ISO 27001 certification project that has highlighted some areas of improvement that we decided to improve. And the PP&E CapEx for the quarter totaled NOK 12 million, NOK 24 million for the year, which is NOK 6 million higher than we've previously indicated.
Looking at the total picture, we started the Q4 with NOK 159 million in our bank account and ended it with NOK 60 million in our bank account. However, the available liquidity improved naturally with the proceeds from the IPO. Looking at the NOK 269 million growth from the end of 2024, NOK 191 million came in from proceeds from the IPO. The remaining seventy-eight million is then related to positive cash from the business side. Working capital was fairly stable throughout as a percentage of our revenues, was fairly stable throughout the year. Q2 stood out both in revenues and we ended that quarter with a higher trade receivable.
But we end the year with 8% of working capital over annual revenues, which is right in the middle of the 5%-10% range that we have guided on.
Thank you, Per Øyvind. Let's look at our guidance for 2026. So, as you know, we do not guide on the quarters, we guide on the full year. So, our 2026 guidance for revenue is NOK—or approximately NOK 1 billion. And that, if you look at the, you know, the medium to long-term targets that we've communicated, they are consistent to what we communicated during the IPO. So the medium to long-term, you know, revenue growth, we target in the interval between 25%-30%. Now, NOK 1 billion is 25% up from the NOK 800 million we did this year. And that's really because we want to provide a strong, reliable guidance to the market on revenue.
In terms of the recurring part, we're looking to stay in the interval between 15%-25%, obviously growing that share over time, as we introduce more software-based solutions. Gross margin at around 70%, and then an EBITDAC margin in the interval between 17%-20%, which I think really articulates the level of investment that we're looking to do to continue growing Appear at a very significant rate. With that, I'm gonna invite Per Øyvind to come up with me, and then we're gonna head to our live Q&A.
Very good. So for everyone on the teams link, please raise your hand in the teams functionality to sign up for questions. We already have a few who have signed up. First one out is Christoffer Wang Bjørnsen at DNB Carnegie. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.
Yes, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I, I was wondering, just given the, the ongoing supply crunch, challenging a lot of companies these days, could you maybe help us understand a bit your visibility on, on key components in your, in your physical products, as well as if you've seen any changes to your customer behavior? I expect like a customer who is rolling out new infrastructure for a new league towards the fall, might be prudent for them to, to pull forward some of their, their sourcing to, to either Q4 or, or, or Q1. So just, like, how you think about that whole dynamic would be helpful to get some color on.
I can start with the last part of it, whether we see any change in behavior. We do not. We see that the customer's investment, they are related to, for example, off seasons, in more or less the same pattern as previously. When it comes to the component crunch, we're watching it closely because of course, it may have an effect on our COGS. We have had to increase our inventories to make sure that we have enough.
It has an impact both on our COGS with the memory prices going up, and that we are tying up a bit more capital. But as we have a pretty good like the lead time, so many of these components, they are long lead already, so they are increasing. But we are following it closely. There have been some cancellations of orders that we managed to reverse, but it's a situation that we just have to monitor closely. And it is critical components, but we have good relationships with our suppliers, and we have secured components for deep into 2026.
I think just to add to that, I think this is a situation where it's really good to have strong financials as we are able to, you know, to kind of secure, you know, volumes of sort of components that are, let's say, in popular demand at a high enough volume, at the early enough time. So-
... We've never not been able to deliver because of components, not even through COVID. So this is an area that I think we have pretty good control over historically as well.
Just a quick follow-up on that. I sure appreciate the guidance for the full year. But could you maybe help us understand, like, how to think about the seasonality, how it's been historically, and if you see any reasons why it should deviate from kind of the historical trend? It would be very much appreciated.
Yes, we are introducing new products, of course, in 2026. And we believe that the revenues from those new products are most likely coming more in towards the latter part of the year. But the seasonality patterns, well, whether things are coming in Q1, Q2, that's a lot of the time, some are in the first and some are in the second, so we... But the overall seasonality should be more or less the same because we are operating mainly within the acquisition market. So the seasonality, yeah, more or less the same, but then with the addition of more products, and then, I...
We can maybe just allude to our service revenues that have been, and we are calling them recurring, but they've been more up and down throughout the year. But we're also changing that to such that we do the accounting, and that we have more flatter recurring revenues, and that's, of course, also going to impact that we move some of the revenues to the first half of the year.
Thank you. Appreciate that.
All right. Thanks a lot. We have one, another, question from Øystein Elton Lodgaard from ABG Sundal Collier. Please, unmute yourself.
Good morning, I have several questions, but maybe we can start with FX. So FX movements have been pretty, pretty large lately. We estimate that it had a 6% impact now in Q4 and 6% maybe in 2026, but maybe can you comment on, have you taken FX movements into account in the guidance? So, and what's the impact of FX now in Q4, and what do you expect in 2026?
Yeah. In Q4, the effect we didn't have any major negative effects, so in Q4. Actually, we had the slightly positive effects in our in the financial income, that relates to... That we got higher prices realized or a better currency effect what we realized than what we had invoiced. We are exposed to currency FX effects, because our revenues are, like, roughly speaking, 60% U.S. dollars , 20% EUR, 20% GBP, while our costs are, you could say, rule of thumb, 55% NOK, 20 USD, 15 EUR, 10 GBP. So we are exposed to Forex. We have...
Well, we have lower rates in our estimates. They are slightly above the currency rates that we saw yesterday. But yeah, looking just at yesterday's rates towards the 2025 rates, the 6% on revenues is according to our estimates. However, there is then the slight hedge on costs, where it would be 2%-3% lower cost. But of course, a lower currency or a stronger NOK will reduce our profits.
Yes, very clear. Thank you very much. And you have taken this into account when we in the NOK 1 billion guidance?
Yes, we have lower rates in 2026 than in 2025 in our guidance. If they will stay at the level we saw yesterday, which was a bottom for the year, then it will probably come in slightly lower, but not substantially because we have planned on lower, or a stronger NOK for 2026.
Yeah. And a bit over 50% of your COGS is NOK, in NOK. Now, with the fact that you sell in USD and EUR, and GBP and have 50% of your COGS in NOK, should we expect gross margins to come down in 2026 because of this?
Yes-
Or can you offset that in some way?
Well, not completely, because as you say, we have most of the labor work being producing our goods in Norway, then the labor cost is in NOK, so we will not be fully hedged. So we are exposed that our revenues are more in U.S. dollars than the hedging effect on the COGS. On the other hand, we've had, like, beneficial effects with weaker currency previously, so this is something we have to live with being a global exporter.
Mm-hmm. Of course, of course. That's something you can't control. But on the component side, we, of course, seen very big price increases on memory. There's now also talk about price increases on CPUs. To what extent does this impact your COGS, and are you able to completely pass those price increases on to your customers?
... Yes, memory, it depends a bit on the setup on the cards, but it is about, well, between 3%-5% of the COGS. So of course, the price increases there will impact on the margin. However, those kinds of prices increasing, that hits the whole market. And also we've seen that with the tariffs, that we have managed with pricing to mitigate most of that. So I think that, like, underlying price increases, we are able to mitigate because that hits all the competitors in the market as well.
I think also, it's worth noting that we typically have a range of alternatives for, you know, the key components, so memory, for example. So it's not like we're single source on memory. We obviously have to observe the market, but we see that the fact that we have designed in components that have, you know, several alternative vendors in the kind of same form factor, they're basically interchangeable. In terms of production, it gives us the opportunity to look for kind of the most cost-optimal solutions every time we make a component purchase.
Yeah. But you don't expect any gross margin impact from that? You should be able to pass this on to customers relatively quickly, these price increases?
Yeah, I think largely that's what we think.
Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. And on the last, there has been, of course, we've seen some very big kind of increases from the streaming players in terms of bidding for sports rights. Can you say, is that... We know you have delivered to Netflix, you have delivered to some others. Is that something you expect to be a positive tailwind for you, that you can kind of also deliver to these streaming giants-
Yes, that-
And benefit from that?
Absolutely. I mean, the streaming giants are becoming, you know, the largest buyer of premium live sports rights. I read somewhere that Amazon Prime is expected to spend $14 billion in 2026 on sports rights. So that... And you can imagine they don't have a lot of legacy infrastructure for live production, acquisition processing, particularly. So the part of the value chain where we specialize and typically are the preferred vendor, right? So for us-
Mm.
You know, we are heavily engaged with all these large players, really from just the nature of typically our X Platform and the product offering that we have, that kind of really lends itself and drives value with, you know, big scale and big complexity, and that's really where these guys are coming from. And they-- The other benefit the streamers have is that they have a completely different monetization model. I think, I'm not sure it's been on record, but I've heard Netflix...
No, I've heard Amazon Prime say that they can pay twice as much for any, you know, specific or premium live sports rights package than any other player in the market, just because they have a much better monetization model for that rights, you know, passing it down into their platforms.
Mm. Very interesting, interesting. Thank you very much. That was all the questions I had.
Thank you.
Thank you. We have one more question signed up from Mr. Dag Eide. Please unmute yourself, Doug.
Thank you. Can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Yeah, good. Two quick questions, if I may. They have partially been dealt with, but the first one is on seasonality and the second one is on FX. So, on seasonality, is there seasonality? And can you please then explain the drivers behind it? In the last couple of years, it seems to be that Q2 is high, and then the rest is kind of steady increasing. But-
Mm
... prior to that, that was not really the case.
Yeah.
On FX, are you managing FX at all? Or, alternatively, is the lead time so limited you kind of live with it on a more or less spot level?
Yeah
... and possibly adjusting prices?
I'll answer-
Thank you.
The first, Per Øyvind will answer, the second. So, the... We've obviously seen a big spike in seasonality in Q2, in both in 2024 and 2025. You know, we did a big, you know, pivot some years ago from the consumption part of the market, so, you know, infrastructure for linear TV, right, to acquisition, which is, you know, part of why we've been able to kind of tap into this massive growth in premium live sports rights. Now, if you look at the triggers for buying, part of it is the ongoing, like, seasonality of the leagues, and we see that, you know, particularly in the U.S., it differs a bit, right?
A lot of the leagues kind of focus on, let's say, activity in Q4 and Q1, and then sort of a, you know, a break, let's say, in Q2 and Q3. So that's something we see driving, you know, part of the seasonality, and the leagues and triggers from the leagues off-season, where they do invest in improving their product, right? And investing in operational efficiency, that is a driver kind of to look out for. For 2025, a big driver was investments into the two very, very large events this year, which is the Milano-Cortina Olympics and the FIFA World Cup in the U.S. later this year.
Not all, but a lot of the investments for those big events kind of came in in Q2. Then the other thing I wanted to say was that there was a shift last year, a shift of revenue from Q1 into Q2, due to the tariff situation hitting that—or the uncertainty around the tariff situation, hitting this sort of late Q1 into early Q2, which made some of the customers kind of, you know, pause a bit before they hit the purchase order button. So I think that cumulative effect of that, of course, made Q2 last year very significant.
Yeah, and then to Forex, we currently don't have any future contracts or hedging. We did it to some extent last year. However, the currency rates kind of stabilized over the second half, but it's something that we are assessing. But it wouldn't be taking speculative positions in that case, then it would be more to just secure the rates that we have on our orders. We are managing sales on a gross margin kind of different thresholds. So then it would be more related to securing larger contracts and the currency rate that we have when we sign orders.
But currently, we don't have any hedges, or future currency contracts.
All right. Thank you.
Okay.
I think, hopefully, that was, I put down-
Yeah, just a quick follow-up on seasonality, I'm sorry. Just to-
We don't really have time, so I'm gonna have to cut you short. I'm sorry.
Right. Okay.
I have an interview at,
Thank you
... Finansavisen TV in a few minutes. So go there and watch the follow-up if you're interested in more. Thank you so much for calling in, and until next time.