Thank you for joining this Q&A for our trading updates. We have scheduled half an hour, hopefully we'll get through. First of all, Q2 clearly is coming in below our expectations. The preliminary results for the second quarter 2026 show revenue at NOK 189.6 million, compared to an exceptionally strong Q2 last year of NOK 271. The preliminary H1 2026 revenue came in at NOK 241.3, compared to NOK 433.3 million for H1 last year. The shortfall is primarily driven by a weaker short-term commercial execution outside the Americas, and timing of certain contracts that are now expected in the second half.
As we have explained before, short-term fluctuations is the nature of our business, and large infrastructure decisions don't necessarily tandem with calendar quarters. Importantly, though, we see continued solid performance in the Americas. We continue to see strong underlying demand in live sports and positive product and innovation momentum. We are revising our financial year 2026 guidance, which reflects our current visibility and realistic view on near-term run rates. We are taking concrete measures to strengthen commercial execution outside the Americas, and our medium to long-term targets remain unchanged. With that, I think we'll open for questions.
Yes, good morning. Could you maybe give some more flavor on what types of contracts that you think that you have missed outside the U.S., and to what degree these are lost opportunities versus being pushed to the second half?
Well, yes, mainly we've seen in EMEA shortfall. APAC is also slower than what we expected when it comes to the contracts. Most of the contracts, a vast majority of the contracts have been moved from Q2 to Q3. We have lost some of that.
Not more than usual.
No, not more. Well, it's lower, less than that part of the contracts that we have seen go over into Q3. On the short term, we've seen quite a large amount of contracts going from Q2 to Q3.
You're still taking down the full-year guiding, indicating that.
Yes
There has been a lot of lost contract as well for the year that you don't expect to come in, not just being pushed to the second half of the year.
Yeah, it's contracts that were lost, it's also, as we say, the commercial execution in certain of these regions indicate that there are contracts that we are not part of the processes either. That's the commercial execution part of it, that we don't have the reach that we want commercially. I don't know if you want to put some flavor to that.
Yeah, it's not necessarily we're winning or losing more. It's just the overall, let's say, pipeline or our share of the EMEA market that isn't where we want it to be at present. That's something we are actively addressing as we speak, and have kind of started actioning. Yeah, if you look at the North American market, that's still performing well and kind of delivering in the range of what we expected. We have a job to do from a commercial execution perspective. I don't really want to go too much into detail, but in EMEA and also in APAC, we need to sharpen our, let's say, posture to take more of the market share on the business volume.
Øystein. Øystein, [Non-English content ]
[Non-English content ]
Okay.
Yes. Okay. Since trying to get an understanding of why this has come as a surprise to you now, you say on one hand that you haven't been invited to the tenders or the sales process that in the main for all types of opportunities, but still this has been included in your guidance for the year. This seems to have come as a bit of a surprise to you. Can you maybe help explain that a bit to us?
It is twofold. One part with the first half, as you remember, Q1 was a very strong quarter. We went into Q2 also with quite a lot of optimism with respect to the pipeline. We see that things are moving out in time. Also our guidance for the year has been NOK 1 billion, and we've been measuring ourselves constantly against that. We get a shortfall in the quarter and also some reduction in the pipeline for certain deals for the rest of the year, which the sum of that is really what's reducing the guidance. We know that we need to achieve NOK 240 million the remainder of the year to get to the new guidance, to get to NOK 900 million.
Compared to previous quarters, it's pretty high volume. However, we've been, what can you say, aiming at or steering at higher volumes. We've seen that in our numbers that it was a realism to it. When we get both effects of slippage and pipeline reductions, that has compounded to the reduction of the guidance for the year. Those things coming on top of each other is very much related to that we don't have a strong enough market presence, the commercial execution in certain regions .
Can you comment on the type of measures you're now implementing? Is this mostly changing the way you approach sales in those regions? Or is it also cost savings because revenues are lower than you expected?
Yes. I think fundamentally, the measures include strengthening commercial execution, improving pipeline conversion, and sharpening our regional capabilities to ensure better follow-up of key opportunities and improve our ability to build pipeline, which involves getting into more deals faster, just create a higher volume. We know we have a strong and highly competitive product portfolio with [Shaw Mat]. This is really about making sure that we have the capabilities.
I know the word capabilities is slightly annoying because it's quite encompassing. Overall, I think we understand the gap and that we are addressing it. I think that's the fundamental piece. Now, overall, we still believe in our long-term growth ambitions. We're not changing our medium to long-term guidance of 25%-30% year-on-year growth. We are lowering the expectations for this year to reflect the weaker Q2, the shortfall we have in commercial execution, which we are determined to mitigate and remedy in the short term.
To answer your question on costs, we have scaled our plans and the ramp-up of costs this year towards the guidance that we had. Of course, when we are lowering the guidance now, we also have to make measures to control the costs such that we manage to deliver on profitability.
Great. At the same time as you're saying that you're lowering costs or not scaling costs to the same degree to meet your profitability target, you're going to improve execution. Does that mean that you have to change the people you have there? Are they working in the wrong way? Can you give some flavor of what that means? How quickly should we expect an improvement from these measures?
I can't really go into too much detail on because this is really an internal thing, right? That we have identified and we are rectifying. The measures are across the board. It's operational, organizational sort of tools and process. I think it's fair to say it's well within our hands to solve. Yeah. I just can't share any sort of further details than that's kind of internal matters per se.
I'll have to come back to that later. I think how to think about this in terms of timing, because I think that was the other part of the problem. I would say part of the fallout that we're facing now is something that we understand the origination of and we have a solution for, but improving commercial execution involves things that do take some time. Customer engagement, pipeline management, sort of local and regional capabilities, and conversion processes. Some of these can be initiated quickly and some take a bit longer. The overall sort of revenue impact takes a bit of time, and I think that's part of what's being reflected in the sort of lowering of the guidance for the year.
If we just look at not kind of your expectations for the full year but look at Q2 in isolation. Of that 30% drop in revenues year-over-year, how much would you say is due to contracts slipping into H2, and how much that is due to actual lost opportunities?
About two thirds of it is slippage.
The reason then that you're taking down the full-year guidance so much, is that because you expect other contracts that you previously had for H2 then to slip into 2027? Is it just being cautious? If you think two thirds of that is due to slippage, why take down full year so much?
Well, yeah. Forecasting quality and working with forecasting measures is also one of the capabilities that we will work on, and that's one that we've started up already on different measures there and relating that to incentives. It means that the outlook for the remainder of the year, that we're not compensating for the shortfall. That's the amount of deals that we have in the pipeline. With this deficit that we're getting in Q2, then in order to reach the guided number, we would have to have two quarters of NOK 290 million. With the pipeline development that we've had, we don't see that that's realistic. The sum of those two components is why we have reduced the guidance to where it is from today.
Does this change your previous assessment of what kind of is normal seasonality for you? Previously you kind of had thought that Q2 should be the strongest quarter of the year due to broadcasters being ready for all the leagues starting in the second half of the year. Now was it kind of maybe that Q2 last year was unusually strong, is this quarter unusually weak, or does this change your view on what is normal seasonality for you?
We can only learn from history, right? The last two Q2s have been exceptionally strong. However, we clearly see a World Cup effect, basically, on buying behavior. A lot of media companies in the world are busy with operating this quarter. I think part of the shortfall at least, and part of the reason why so many of the Q2 deals slip over to Q3 is really just customers being busy executing on the World Cup. I think Q2 has been strong in the last two years, but there are specific reasons, I think, other than commercial execution for the actual slippage part, basically.
Thomas also mentioned at the Q1 presentation that, of course, Liberation Day in 2025 was a factor that caused many companies to delay their purchasing decisions from Q1 to Q2 as well. It should be more balanced. The underlying drivers that we see being leagues investing in their break, it's still there. Of course, it's the World Cup in the U.S. It's a World Cup that's much bigger actually than previous World Cups as well. That's something that Thomas has been seeing on the behavior of certain clients.
It's definitely a factor, is the currency effect. I think quarter-on-quarter compared to last year, we have a currency effect of around NOK 16 million on EBITDAC because of the exchange rates. Just to be mentioned, at least. Further questions? Lisa?
Hi. Good morning. How should we think about margins for the year after the revised revenue outlook?
We don't have any changed view on the margin picture. We have seen increasing prices on memory in particular, we've also increased our prices by almost 20%, more than 20% on certain line items. The reception has been that the customers understand it. Of course, we haven't seen if that in itself will reduce OpEx. So far, we don't have signals of that. For our margin, particularly the gross margin, we are steering our business towards more or less the same margins that we've had. Our sales force, they have certain thresholds when they go below various margins. That hasn't changed. We expect on the gross margin to be similar. Of course, as I mentioned on the cost side, we have a plan this year on reaching a high revenue target. We won't be able to reduce costs fast enough to get the same type of margin percentages that we were looking at. We will definitely do what we can to maintain also our profit margins.
Thank you. Also last, but have you seen any increase in competition or has anything changed competitively? Yeah.
Yeah. I think, we're not commenting on individual competitive processes, but I think what we can say is that we don't really see any signs of a change in the overall market or our technology position. I think the answer is no. We don't really see any sort of main weaknesses in our competitive positioning. This is really about short-term commercial execution outside of the Americas and as Per said, slippage of deals from Q2 to Q3, driven at least partly by The World Cup making a lot of the markets just operate and at least for a short period of time, take their eyes off investing and building.
To just get some more comfort on the second half of the year, can you say anything about the proportion of the implied total revenue that is covered by current backlog or signed contracts, and how much is dependent on new orders?
Well, I answered Øystein's question about how much of the shortfall there is due to the slippage and said about two-thirds of it. I think that's the answer to that question.
Okay. We got two minutes left, happy to take any further questions.
If you want to reach us or reach out for us throughout the day, send probably an SMS or an email, we can schedule a call. We will be available for questions.
All right. Well, if there isn't anything else at the moment, thank you so much for dialing in, and that's it for today. Thank you.