Earnings Call: Q1 2026

May 8, 2026

Quarterly report

Welcome to ContextVision, welcome to the first quarter 2026 report. Today, with Richard Hallström, our CFO, and myself, Gerald. We have good news to share, really good news to share. For the first quarter, we're happy to report an underlying revenue growth of approximately 7.4%, and it is mainly due to continued execution on our portfolio and customer projects and a stabilizing market. In the first quarter, we have also announced a collaboration with BeamWorks, an AI company for quantitative ultrasound based in South Korea. We show continued progress in our clinical development program at the University of Washington, and we have strengthened our management team with the appointment of Marco Marien Voormolen as CTO for ContextVision. We've also successfully participated and had excellent customer engagement at the European Congress of Radiology in Vienna. Let's look into the details. Let's start with a market update. As I mentioned, a driver behind the revenue growth that we have seen was mainly a market stabilization. If we compare that to previous year, we should maybe take a look into the total of 2025, where we had estimated initially a market growth, but then also reflected in our actuals, seen a decline, and have also earlier on commented on the market decline. Now, with 2025 being closed in the first quarter of 2026, we see the first official market reports coming in that underpin the comments that we have shared earlier. Namely, the Chinese market, which is a relevant market for our ultrasound business, has declined in 2025 by -8.5% compared to an initial growth expectation of around +3%. Those numbers confirmed our comments that we've given earlier. And likewise, we see a stabilization now in the Chinese market and currency effects that help us with tailwinds in the first quarter so that we see the underlying growth in our license sale mainly. Maybe worth commenting that the root cause of the decline in the Chinese market was linked to a centralization of the procurement process in China, and that stalled the market for the end user, namely hospitals. It's not a reduction in underlying demand. It's more a temporal seasonality effect, the market should recover at some point in time, and we're optimistic that that recovery starts happening with the positive signals that we're seeing now reflected in our license sale numbers. Having that said, let's look into the development of our business. As I said, a very strong customer engagement at ECR, and that's typically a good temperature check for the new products that we have developed and launched into the market. In particular, we see continued interest on high diagnostic image quality. For the leading and premium OEM customers, the focus is slightly moving to more robust performance expectations for complex cases, difficult patients that were not easy to diagnose earlier on, and obviously workflow simplifications. There is a slight change in the demand for image enhancement and image quality, which we had anticipated earlier in our development programs and are now able to deliver on those expectations. Quite a positive signal from those customer engagements at ECR 2026. I think the progress on our clinical study is also worth going a little bit deeper into, that is related to the study that we're running at University of Washington in Seattle with respect to developing a clinical biomarker to quantify liver diseases. They're according to plan. We have already enrolled nine patients. That means they are being scanned, and the data has been delivered to our R&D team in Linköping, where data analysis is going on and revealing interesting insights. Maybe worth to mention that, based on that study, we have, during customer meetings, both at the conferences but also in person, received a high level of interest on that specific study, in particular because paired imaging, so taking MR exams, ultrasound exams, blood samples, patient data, all at the same point in time, for a single individual, is a very complex and difficult study to execute. That interest is also reflected by the richness of the data, which is revealing already now invaluable insights for us. All in all, already now I would say this was worth the investment and the extra mile that the teams, both from our partners as our own teams were taking. Well done, so far. We're not resting, we're taking it a step further. We have announced the collaboration with BeamWorks, a software company in South Korea that is focused on AI-powered quantitative ultrasound imaging, so a powerhouse of data scientists in quantitative imaging. The huge opportunity here is really to combine the capabilities of BeamWorks with the quantitative measurement technologies and ultrasound engineering that ContextVision has built up into a combined offering that will deliver an unseen CATi, CATx, and biomarker technology to the market. Stay tuned for the progress in that collaboration. Last but not least, we have also strengthened our internal capabilities with the appointment of Marco Vermeulen as CTO for ContextVision. Marco is a well-known individual in the industry and even in the academic world, based on his experience in working with major OEMs in the signal processing chain and ultrasound engineering. We're grateful that he joins our team and we're already seeing a lot of traction for executing our roadmap technically, but also in the collaboration with OEM in the image chain to drive those new solutions to the next level. Maybe that's a good segue to look a little bit more into the strategy that we're executing together with Marco. For those that have read the annual report, which was recently published in our marketing material, those of you have seen that we have launched a new brand tech line for ContextVision. That new brand tech line indicates and underpins our transformation into quantitative imaging. See more, know more. As simple as that, we will move into the second generation of ContextVision. Far, we have been focused on visualization, creating a better image that is easier to read. High image quality is the driving factor here. Since the launch of POCUS, which is sometimes called, from an accounting perspective, the data quality initiative, we are transforming into quantitative imaging. We will help clinicians to know more. To get there, we have decided on a stepwise transformation. Today, as you can see in the infographic, focused on helping clinicians to see more, to read an image better with visualization and image enhancement. Those products in the portfolio is typically tied to a business model where perpetual license revenue is linked to the OEM system costs where the software is built into. Once we move up the value ladder with our portfolio, we'll be able to tap into new revenue models and business models in line with the portfolio evolution. For example, once we detect abnormalities in an image, or if we're even able to quantify the malignancy of the abnormality, then we can tap into reimbursement codes that are already available in the market, and that will define our revenue potential. Just in terms of magnitudes, this represents a factor of around 1,000 compared to the perpetual model that we're running today. Once we can link the diagnostic scoring from what is called a CATi and CATx to a specific treatment regime, then we can tap our revenue model into treatment-related reimbursements, and that can reach a magnitude of up to SEK 50,000 per scan compared to a value per scan in the model today. That should be music to your ears from a financial perspective. It's what we're striving for also from a technical perspective. This journey is not only fantastic in terms of new revenue and value pools that we're tapping into, but it will also require significant investments, both from a regulatory side, but also in terms of AI capabilities. As I mentioned, that can be together with partners or organic investments. We're already at the beginning of the journey. We have launched at ECR the first product into the detect or CATi model, which is called the MASLD setting, which is really able to help clinicians to better detect liver disease in at-risk individuals. I think I've talked a lot about the journey that we're on, that we're having ahead of us, and that obviously should be reflected in the numbers that we see. Maybe, Richard, if you want to give us a bit more meat on the bone for the first quarter. Yes, I will. Thank you, Gerald. Revenue for the first quarter amount to SEK 28.5 million compared with SEK 26.3 million in quarter one of last year. This represents a growth of 8.5%. The main driver was increased license sales together with additional contracts signed with customers. During the quarter, we refined our assessment of the timing of revenue recognition for certain customer contracts under IFRS 15. This had a positive effect of SEK 1.6 million. The effect was, however, largely offset by translational FX effect of minus SEK 1.3 million. Overall, we see a solid revenue performance in a cautiously stabilizing market with an underlying revenue growth of approximately 7.4%. Profitability improved clearly compared with the same quarter of last year. Adjusted EBITA reached 5.8 million SEK, compared with 2.1 million SEK in quarter one, 2025. This corresponds to an adjusted EBITA margin of 20.5% compared to 8.1% of last year. EBITA amounted to 2.8 million SEK versus a negative 1.7 million SEK of last year, giving an EBITA margin of 10%. Adjusted earnings per share also improved to 0.05 SEK compared to 0.1 SEK in quarter one of last year. The improvements was mainly driven by increased revenue and continued cost control. As part of our transformation to quantitative imaging, we continue our investment into data quality, while a more efficient allocation of consultant resources contributed to the overall lower R&D costs. Cash flow from operating activities was SEK 4.3 million after changes in working capital compared to SEK 0.3 million in quarter one of last year. Cash flow from financing activities was a negative SEK 2.9 million, mainly including the share buyback and lease payments. Total cash flow for the quarter was a negative SEK 0.8 million versus a negative SEK 3.7 million of last year. At the end of the period, the cash balance was SEK 69 million, which means we continue to have a strong financial position. With that, I hand back to Gerald. Well, Richard, thank you. That was a wealth of positive information, and I think that really confirms that we're on the right track, executing both in our image quality business, but also embarking on our quantitative imaging journey. In terms of looking ahead, I think we should remain confident that we're facing a stable market environment for the remainder of this year. That we're confident in executing our strategy in the long run, while remaining agile to capture opportunities as they come along, being partnerships or commercial opportunities that we continue to focus on for this year. Thank you for being with us today, and stay tuned.