Good morning, and welcome to the Cint fourth quarter 2025 results presentation. My name is Patrick Comer, and I am the CEO of Cint, and I'm joined by my two colleagues, who will introduce themselves as well.
Good morning, I'm Niels Boon, CFO. Give you the words.
Good morning, this is Brett Schnittlich, COO.
Fantastic. Thank you. So let's get right into it, as we look at the fourth quarter. As a reminder, as to the business of Cint, we are the world's largest survey exchange, and we run a business that matches the demand of thousands of surveys from customers globally, with the answers of millions of respondents that generate the critical insight data that drives the market research and measurement industries. Looking at our fourth quarter figures, we had net sales of SEK 41.5, gross profit of SEK 36.5, a strong OpEx of SEK 25.7 in terms of cost control, which managed an EBIT of SEK 10.8. Want to call out the 26% margin versus last year, 28%, showing clear operating leverage even though sales has been lower. But let's dig in a little bit deeper.
We want to point out the sequential improvement quarter-over-quarter in terms of sales. At a high level, it's important to note that 63% of Cint sales are in U.S. dollars, and given the recent FX dynamics, it's important to review our underlying momentum in terms of constant currency. What you'll see is an improvement, not only from our third quarter trough, but also quarter-over-quarter in terms of growth throughout the year. It's important to also note that this is the strongest quarter-over-quarter growth that the company has seen since the IPO. What this shows is a resilience in our underlying customer base, particularly on the exchange side, which saw challenges in terms of migration from Q2 to Q3, but clear recovery going into Q4.
Additionally, what we want to point out is the overall discipline that we've had throughout the year, but also exhibiting in the fourth quarter. As I said before, the 26% margin in the fourth quarter via lower OpEx, even as we have lower sales, shows the operating leverage capability of our business. Also important, and an important highlight for the business, is that we ended the year in the first net cash positive position since the IPO as well, and the first overall debt-free status as also. We also continue to improve our collection velocity, which has been a point of import for the company, as we've gotten to a point of 38.3 annual reduction of AR throughout the year. Not only do we want to point out the numbers, but also how our customers are talking about our business.
These are two important partners to Cint. Frame is a geospatial AI company based out of the U.S., that generates hyperlocal population insights, and they run their data collection infrastructure on the Cint Exchange. And this is an important partner that exhibits how the migration, but also the unified platform, are contributing to partner success. Now, as much as we have demand-side clients, we also want to highlight Rewardia, which is an important supplier to our platform, as they also have gone through migration and change with the Cint Exchange. Rewardia is a leading Australian rewards platform, and we've helped them scale their business and their revenues all on the new platform. And so this is two of many testimonials of success that our customers are having in the new Cint Exchange.
Not only do we look at the fourth quarter in isolation, we think it's important to understand the fourth quarter and 2025 in the context of our three-year strategy. Reminding everyone that we released the new strategy we call Cint 2.0 in January 2025, with a three-year arc from foundation to inflection to full potential. This year we did the heavy lifting of that consolidation. The most important and critical event last year was the launch of the new Cint Exchange, which unifies the legacy platforms from Cint, but also our acquisition of Lucid. We also spent a tremendous amount of the year in terms of migration milestone, and we understand, yes, there were challenges in the third quarter, but we see strong recovery in the fourth and ongoing capability into the year. Critically, we also spoke in our strategic deck about our financial stability.
We went through a rights issue where we successfully raised SEK 600 million to fix our overall balance sheet, improve our AR and cash flow. Also critically, in 2025, we wanted to move from a build of the new platform from an R&D standpoint to new product development. All three of those have seen success in 2025, which sets us up for a growth and inflection year in 2026... Now, I think it's also important that we spend a little more time looking at exactly how we were successful, but also potentially challenged in 2025. Let's review some of the key areas. What worked for us? As we already mentioned, net cash position at the end of 2025, for the first time since our IPO, via the rights issue, but also through operational and financial discipline.
We've improved our working capital, and not that we are complete in our overall improvement to our working capital position, but we saw a dramatic improvement since the beginning of the year. We signed an important partnership with our colleagues at Kantar, which deeply embeds our technical platforms together in a multi-year deal. Over several quarters years ago, we also talked about quality leadership as being important in the platform. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we had the best quality metrics we've seen in recent history, which shows continued investment, execution, and also communication about our quality leadership within the industry. But also importantly, we launched two new products within the measurement space in terms of social measurement, deterministically, but also Forced Exposure. These are two new capabilities which will drive customer interest and revenue growth in the measurement business on an ongoing basis.
In terms of challenges to the business, it's quite obvious we were challenged by the third quarter cutover, which was harder operationally than we expected for our customers to move, going from the second quarter to the third quarter. We saw a year-over-year decrease in revenue of 20%. This, of course, marked a low point, as we spoke about in our last earnings report, of our operational and technical transition. I think everyone is relieved to see the rebound of recovery that we've seen in the fourth quarter. We also were very challenged by comparables in 2024.
As a reminder, the U.S. election happened in 2024, which sees huge incremental volumes in our exchange business, but also was challenged in our measurement business because it forced advertising customers to spend money in the third quarter that we normally would have spent in the fourth, but did not, in order to avoid the higher cost of the political season. What that meant is that the third quarter comparables were quite challenging. It's good to see that in fourth quarter, year-over-year, a strong rebound in both those businesses. But not only do we deliver our R&D and operational and financial goals for 2025, we actually pulled forward some strategic pieces of this plan. First is what we call outcomes. We signed a major deal with Affinity Solutions, which provides retail purchasing data.
What this does is allow us to match an ad campaign to its actual point-of-sale information, so we can talk about the success of the campaign, but also how it leads to actual sales. This is of high interest to our ad partners. We've already announced our roadmap for outcomes with the release in 2026 and see strong interest from multiple advertising and marketing customers globally. We also saw a need for a unified data strategy. We hired Phil Ahad to run the data business unit. This unifies not only our existing data partnerships, like Affinity Solutions and our data capabilities, but also puts AI and our synthetic capabilities under a single roof strategically. We think these are important pull forwards to show not only can we deliver expectations for the year, but we can move faster than we normally would have expected.
But let's spend a little bit more time into the specifics of our segments, starting with the Cint Exchange, and I think I want to remind everyone, we're looking closely at the constant currency, because around 50% of the exchange business is tied to U.S.D, and given the FX impact over the last few months, it's important to see the underlying growth or the underlying success in terms of constant currency basis, rather than reported numbers. What we see here is commercial stabilization. Now, obviously, we want to move the growth curve to the positive, but outside of the trough in the third quarter, we see that the number in the fourth quarter is similar in sizing to the numbers from the fourth quarter in 2024 and ongoing.
Now, as we mentioned in the last earnings report, given the feedback from our customers and the challenges they had operationally, we had a strategic extension of our migration into the new year. This is not new information. We spoke about it last quarter, but we want to remind the market that we've given more time to our customers to make that migration for two important reasons. One, to match to their own operational cadence so that they have success on their end from a customer standpoint, but also to prioritize revenue stability and revenue retention from our larger enterprise customers. Also, we start in earnest the Lucid upgrade, which is a much lower risk because the new Cint Exchange is built on the Lucid architecture, which means that it's a simple upgrade process for those customers to move from a legacy scenario to the future.
And we look to see those upgrades happen over 2026. Now, I also want to look more closely at our media measurement segment. One of the most important things we talked about last quarter was the pull forward and the hard comparables, and I think you can see the very high comparable numbers in the third quarter of 2024. Just to remind everyone, the reason why those numbers are so high is that typically ad spend, and therefore brand lift or measurement occurs across fourth quarter as the strongest quarter for the year. But given the high cost of advertising, CPMs in the fourth quarter of 2024 during the election cycle, advertisers chose to pull forward into the third quarter.
Therefore, a lot of the spend, and therefore a lot of the work with us happened in the third and fourth quarter of 2024, and you can see that highlighted here. That made the flat number in the third quarter of 2025 concerning for most parties, and everyone wanted to see a return to higher growth. You can see sequentially from the fourth quarter of 2024 to 2025, that we've doubled the growth rate between those two quarters. It's important to also note, as we've said before, that we've launched two critical new features within the product base for measurement. The first is deterministic measurement, basically from the social perspective of TikTok, Meta, and YouTube. This solves what we call the walled garden problem.
For years, our customers have wanted to be able to understand the impact of their brand campaigns within the walled gardens of social media. And now we're able to deterministically solve that cross-media capability, which is of key importance to our measurement customers. We also launched Forced Exposure, and what this does is allow for a customer to test the campaign before it goes in the field, as a pre-campaign testing, and allows to understand the impacts of the actual creative of a campaign. Unlocks new TAM for the business, and we've seen strong pickup of this capability in the fourth quarter, and we look forward to continue to grow in 2026.
Of course, we've been scaling our Survey Creator DIY tool, which makes smaller campaigns, but more importantly, it gives a growth curve for EMEA and APAC as they have smaller campaigns and smaller customers than in the U.S. market. We've seen strong resilience and success within the media measurement business in the fourth quarter and throughout 2025. Also, we announced in the fourth quarter that we're going through a change process at the CFO level. It's important to note that the recruitment process for a permanent CFO is running according to plan. And to ensure an operational excellence and also continuity, we have brought in an interim CFO by Jeremy Fletcher, which we announced this week. He is focused internally as we have a dual track CFO structure throughout the recruitment process for a new CFO.
So Jeremy Fletcher, our interim CFO, will focus on the internal dynamics, direct oversight of the financial function, and will have direct people management and finance leadership. We continue to be supported by Niels Boon, who will be focused in this dual-track method externally, really focused on the annual report for 2025, as well as the first quarter earnings in 2026. We want to express thanks to Niels Boon for his continued efforts to support the company through this transition, and we welcome Jeremy Fletcher to the business as he steps into the interim CFO role. Now, as we look to 2026, the 2025 year was that foundational year. Critically, we launched the Cint Exchange, which combines the capability and the features of both the legacy Cint and legacy Lucid infrastructure.
We learned lessons about migration, and so we've gone through the process of de-risking both the Cint migration as well as the Lucid upgrades, and so we want to reduce friction, and we've de-risked the risk of revenue. We've seen tremendous innovation in the measurement business with outcomes, Forced Exposure, and deterministic social. In terms of go-to-market, we have a stable and predictable, stable engine for our go-to-market plan within the exchange business. We launched a new sales infrastructure at the beginning of last year, and we're starting to see tangible growth across that business in terms of the ability for those teams to deliver new sales in particular. That's part of the momentum that we're seeing this year. I've spoken about the new sales momentum for the exchange business before as we've rebuilt the sales capability, and we're seeing good dividends from that now.
But also on the measurement side, we've heavily invested both in the European but also in the APAC region to show global growth as another vector of success for measurement. And we've seen that our operational and financial improvements to the business give us that operational leverage, and we should be able to see that scale throughout 2026. We've also been able to pull forward and set the stage for growth vectors that are ahead of plan. The data capabilities and the strategy around TripleLift, Snowflake, and Affinity that we launched in 2025 will start to pay dividends in 2026.
Bringing in Phil Ahad as our leader of our data business, points to our focus on data streams, both integration and provisioning to our customers, is critical to the success of our business, but also shows our investment in AI and synthetic as part of the, the excellence of the business on a go-forward basis. And finally, looking at our quality infrastructure. We signed an important new deal with Rep Data, which is a leader in the quality space within the market research industry, and we have improved and continued to advance our own Trust Score capabilities, which uses AI to improve the overall quality benchmarking of the company. And we've seen success in quality, as we have the highest quality metrics that we've seen for many years.... We believe this is the successful foundation being laid for 2026.
Yes, of course, we've had challenges in the year, especially with third quarter, but we believe the foundation is laid for success along the strategy plan that we laid out in Cint 2.0. Now I'd like to pass the conch to our CFO to run closer review of our financial update. Niels?
Thank you, Patrick. I'll go into the financials. We already heard a couple of the numbers, of course, but I'll take you through our usual slides. Starting with the first one, just as a reminder, our financial targets that we announced almost exactly a year ago. Medium-term targets, sales growth organically of 10%, combined with EBITA ratio of 25%, leverage ratio of 2.5x, dividend policy is no dividend, and the net zero sustainability targets. Jumping into the financials. As Patrick already mentioned, we had sales of SEK 41.5 million. That's a decline of 8.5%, 1.2% in constant currency. You see the big effect there of FX as well, with the weaker U.S.D.
Moving on to the middle graph, gross profit, SEK 36.5 million. So that's lower than last year. It's driven by lower sales. The margin was also lower as a percent because of that, but in overall absolute costs, the costs were actually lower in absolute amount. So you will see that later on in the P&L as well. So we are still good from the cost side. And you also see that reflected in EBITA on the right. So we had EBITA of SEK 10.8 million, so lower than last year, but overall, OpEx was almost SEK 2 million lower than last year as well. And also, it was the highest margin of the year, which is typical for Q4 in our seasonal business.
Briefly, the segments reporting, of course, Patrick already showed some graphs, so no surprise here. So in exchange, down 10% in constant currency, and media measurement was up 17%. And then if you look on the right, the regional splits, that more or less mirrors the business segment performance as the media measurement business is mainly in the U.S. So therefore, the Americas is kind of flat, and the other two regions are down as a whole. And then diving more into the numbers. So here you see the full P and L. Maybe to highlight, we already discussed briefly the OpEx, so OpEx overall for the year is down by SEK 2 million. You see there also an amortization of intangible assets of under SEK 93 million.
That has to do with an impairment charge that we took, related to the acquisition of Lucid. So the carrying amounts in the books was still quite high, and that has been, adjusted right now in the Q4 numbers. If you take that out, you can see that EBIT was actually positive compared to last year. So we had an EBIT excluding impairments of SEK 4.1 million, combined, compared with SEK 1.4 million, last year. Other than that, we already covered the items on this one as well. Then moving on to the cash flow. I think, cash flow was quite strong, in Q4 and also overall for the year.
So focusing on the yearly amount of SEK 43 million operating cash flow, that's almost three times what we had last year, and also by far the highest since the IPO. It has been negative in 2021, then small positive in the years thereafter. Last year, year, the SEK 15 million, and now SEK 43 million, which is quite, quite a positive development to see. It also represents 29% of net sales, which is quite a high ratio, obviously. If you look at cash flow from investing, that one is lower, SEK 10 million, than last year. There we have SEK 18 million. However, that's also positively impacted by the sale of minority stake that we did in Q1 this year. If you were to adjust for that, it's in line with the previous year.
The financing cash flow has to do with the Rights Issue that we performed at the beginning of the year, followed by a debt reduction as well. So therefore, a small positive on a net basis. That brings us to total cash of SEK 63 million and the first net cash position that we had since the acquisition of Lucid at the end of 2021. So this is also quite a nice achievement. Then moving on to the final slide. Working capital. So overall, working capital reached the lowest point in one and a half years with SEK 46.8 million. You can see a strong reduction in accounts receivable from SEK 120 million to SEK 82 million.
Also during Q4, that means only an increase of SEK 1.5 million, whereas last year we had an increase of SEK 16 million during Q4. So that's overall also quite positive. Then I wanted to highlight the next line, which is other current receivables. So that one went down from almost 30 million SEK to 19 million SEK, so a reduction of 11 million SEK. And what that means, like, other current receivables consists mostly of uninvoiced projects. So projects that we already delivered but didn't invoice yet for different reasons. And we changed a lot on the finance side to improve invoicing processes, make everything faster and more efficient, and that drove also this reduction here. So if you look at the combination of accounts receivable with other current receivables, it went down from 150 million SEK to 100 million SEK.
So a total reduction of SEK 55 million during this year. And then partly it was of course compensated by the accounts payable developments. So as we already discussed many times before as well, A.P. and A.R. often goes to some extent hand in hand for us, as we have many clients who are also a supplier, and then if we reduce or increase on the AR side, that is partly compensated then on the AP side as well. So that's what you see in there. I think that's actually what I wanted to highlight here. We still keep on improving and focusing on working capital in general, of course. So overall, as an absolute amount, accounts receivable will always be too high.
We will always want to improve that further, but it's a remarkable reduction, and we're definitely on the right track compared to the past. I think we will get Patrick back and maybe also Brett, and then we can take some questions from here.
That's exactly right. Thank you, Niels. I think we can drop the feed for the deck and just use video, if that's possible, as we move to the Q&A portion of our presentation. Brett, the floor is yours.
Yeah. Actually, I think we're gonna start with the phone, so I'll pass it off to the production team.
Thank you.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Thomas Nielsen, from Nordea Bank. Please go ahead.
Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions. First, with regard to the disturbances in operations that we saw in Q3, with sales being down quite significantly, can we now confidently say that this is all behind us? And second, you've probably addressed this before, but don't you have, at Cint, companies offering brand and ad campaign tracking and, doesn't media measurement offer a similar product? And, I know things are probably not black and white, but is there a risk if you're competing with your own clients, with your media measurement product? Just to get some clarification on that. Thanks.
Sure. I'll go in reverse. The first question is around our measurement business and does some of that lift measurement actually compete with some of our customers? It's important to note that we do not offer Brand Tracking. We offer a Brand Lift product, where we help our customers understand the effectiveness of their brand campaigns that they're running advertising with. Brand Tracking is more of a, how well is your performance? And it's a research product that a lot of our customers on the exchange side definitely use. And we do not offer that product. What's interesting to note is that a number of our customers for our Brand Lift or measurement capabilities, there are other market research agencies who like to use our technology infrastructure to provide that Brand Lift research capability to their customers.
And so as much as we offer that product directly to ad agencies and to brands themselves, we also offer it to our research customers, so they can provide research products as well. So we see it as complementary to our research customers in that regard. I think your first question is on, have we put behind us the operational challenges of the third quarter crossover with migration? And I think the numbers speak for themselves. Of course, we're still working with larger customers on their operational transition to the new Cint Exchange. Last quarter, we talked about how during the fourth quarter, it's the busiest business season for our customers, and they did not want necessarily to have an operational shift during that time frame.
Now that we're in 2026, the first quarter is our low point in terms of business volume, both for Cint and for our customers, and so they have the time and energy to actually make those transitions. So it's a much lower risk process. So the overarching question is, yes, we believe the third quarter trough, both from a performance standpoint of Cint, but operational challenge for our customers is behind us, and we've done a lot of efforts to de-risk the operational and revenue risk to our business and to our customers moving into the first quarter of this year.
Okay. Thank you very much for that. And one final one, if I may.
Sure.
Are you seeing any inflection points that you are approaching a return to growth? Would that be in that case geared towards the second half of 2026, or do you have any time frame you would like to give us on when we can expect Cint to return to organic growth on group level?
Yeah, I want to be careful not to set expectations well ahead. But what I can clearly state, and you can see it in the numbers, is that we see continued momentum and growth within our measurement business as we release new products and services across the board. We see stability within the exchange business as we have the new Cint Exchange, and we'll be able to scale and grow from there over time. But I wanna remind everyone that our first quarter, from a sequential revenue basis, is our lowest every year. It's the smallest quarter of sales for the company. So I think that what we would say from an exchange standpoint is it will take time to get to the growth curve.
Our main focus right now is customer success through our final bits of migration and revenue retention, with those customers on the exchange side.
Okay, thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
The next question comes from Daniel Thorsson from ABG Sundal Collier. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you very much, both. When I recall your Q3 comments, you said that some large customers moved activity to other platforms during your migration, and you were not interested in fighting them back with lower prices in the coming quarters. But with Q4 now showing these quick improvements, have these larger customers came back or come back voluntarily, or did you, at the end of the day, actually lower prices to get more customers back?
Well, what we've seen is that the quarter-over-quarter sequential growth was actually even larger for these larger migrated customers. So we pulled a segment of those customers that migrated from the second to third quarter, which were the driver of the trough, and looked at their sequential growth in the fourth quarter, and it was higher than the overall company numbers. So there's been strong resilience and rebound from that. In terms of pricing, we have not changed our pricing model, and we've not gone back to customers with a dramatic shift in unit economics in order to bring them back to the, the, the platform. The essential reality is that our customers have been relying on the Cint Exchange for delivery for multiple years, and they want the scale and delivery capacity of Cint to be a part of their primary insights generation.
And so your... I think your core question is, did we lower pricing to have a return on growth? And the answer to that is, we have not changed our pricing dynamic.
Yeah, okay. That's, that's clear. That's encouraging. And another one on regions here. You grow quite nicely in Americas in Q4, but decline in the EMEA and APAC. Is that reflecting the focus of the firm into 2026, or is it just explained by the fact that media measurement is heavily tilted to, to the Americas?
I think there are two points. You hit on the one that's pretty clear, is that media measurement is primarily U.S. driven, and so that growth is gonna reflect in that market. In terms of Europe, it's also the opposite. The legacy Cint customers that had the largest operational challenges are mostly European focused. So I think that change is reflection of where the legacy Cint business was mainly focused versus the legacy Lucid business, both in terms of the exchange and in terms of the measurement side of the coin.
Okay, but your operational focus is to grow in all three regions in 2026, or has anything changed?
No, no, we, we still have both account management... Let me rephrase differently. We've not lost focus on Europe or, or APAC in terms of our growth curve.
Mm.
The exchange business continues to have new sales and, of course, the customer support in order to build that business in all markets.
I see. That's clear. And then another one here. In terms of like global marketing spend, advertising budgets, and their correlation to your business, how important are 2026 events like Winter Olympics, FIFA World Cup, U.S. midterm election, to materially actually have an effect on your revenues and growth in this year? Do they-
That's-
Do they have a tangible impact?
That's a smart question. Yes, a lot of advertising is spent for the Olympics and a lot of... And therefore, that advertising needs to be measured. And so therefore, we have the opportunity to win significant measurement deals based upon the Olympics, which has been a key focus area of ours. The exchange business will see an incremental volume increase for the midterm elections based out of the U.S.. It's about a third of the size of a presidential election cycle, so there will be potential improvement there, but it wouldn't be as large as an election year. Overall, I think what we're seeing, our customers see the expectation of somewhere between a 4%-5% GDP growth in the U.S..
So the confidence of advertisers in the U.S. is increasing, which is a very different signal than what we saw going in the second and third quarter last year, where geopolitical tariff questions were driving some advertisers to pull back. We're seeing a more investment-forward-looking focus from our customers going into 2026. So we're seeing a strong foundation laid for a momentum within the measurement business in particular.
I see. That's, that's clear. And then last from me, please. Number of employees in Q4 down 1% versus Q3. What's the plans for reducing or scaling up the employee base in 2026?
Right now, we feel right sized for the employee base. What's in particular is that, there's a significant amount of headcount focused on R&D and product development. Over the past two years, that's been dedicated significantly to infrastructure and the building of the new Cint Exchange. Over the back half of 2025, we started to transition into innovation. You see that through release of products, particularly on the measurement side. That ratio will continue to change throughout 2026 as we start to build new product also for exchange and for our data businesses. And so we want to keep that investment in R&D on a go-forward basis. It lays the foundation for TAM expansion and for, growth, not just recovery on the exchange side, but growth on the exchange side as well.
Okay, I see. But the actual number as of today is, as you say, right sized?
For current business operations, we feel right-sized.
Yeah. Perfect. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
... I believe we're done with, excuse me-
There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers.
As the robot said, we're done with the call, so I'm gonna move into questions in the chat. And as a reminder, feel free to put your questions in the chat. The first one is from Alexander: "How should we think about the 27.5% decline in completed surveys in terms of value per survey, and when does this become comparable again year-on-year?
I'm so happy we're talking about completes volume. This is a good shift as we're looking to the underlying KPIs and momentum of the business. So thank you for that question. In terms of completes volumes, obviously, there's a dramatic increase in high volume, low value from a unit economics basis in the 2024 election. So we really need to compare to, like, say, a 2023 number versus a 2024 number. Additionally, when I came into the business, one of the key realities is that we were driving a lot of high volume, low value completes, not just for the election. But a number of customers had what we would call low-quality demand, which means there was volume there, but the impact to our ecosystem from a trust and safety, from a quality standpoint, was negative.
And so we removed some of those customers from the demand side of our platform in the back half of 2024, which had impact in 2025 volumes. Because volumes overall are lower, a -27% in completes, but only -10% in terms of revenue, means that our unit economics are improving throughout the year, as we focused on higher quality demand versus just demand itself. In 2026, we are now reinvestigating some of those partners. We've released new capabilities in terms of our ability to match the good quality aspects of some of those demand streams, which will help improve our completion volume. On the exchange side, we should see higher completion volume for the midterm elections as well.
And if the question really is underlying, when do we expect to see a comparable year-over-year completes volume to understand underlying momentum and, kind of unit, drivers? Essentially, it's gonna, it's gonna take a while before we have clear year-over-year comparables, where we look at that change and say it's going to be, reflective of the revenue shift as well. So I think it's gonna take a little time for have appropriate comparables, given the transitions that we've had to new platforms and the consolidation year of 2025. Does that answer your question? I wonder... But it's in, it's in chat, so it's gonna be hard to-
I think that does. Our next question comes from Velt at Alpha Invest: "Can you expand a bit on the reversal rates in Q4 and provide some details on current levels and change versus prior quarters?
Yeah, well, if you look at our history as a public company, there was an industry spike of quality challenges and the reversal rate in 2022 going into 2023, which had a negative impact on our numbers. Especially since I've come into the business, I've spent... And my team knows this, every week we meet on quality and trust and safety to understand what are the key drivers to improve the overall line. This led to one of our larger deals this year with Rep Data. Rep Data is a quality provider for fraud, and we've integrated their capabilities within our platform. They're also a customer of ours as well, which is a good symbiosis.
But we focus critically on not only the technology of improving quality, but also the process of how we go through working with our supply chain and our customers to make sure quality is improving across the board. As a comparable from the 2022 industry spike, we're roughly half of the quality challenge, which means we've improved quality by over 50% over the past few years, with a clear lowering over the past 18 months. Quality at Cint will continue to improve, as we have a robust product development pipeline in front of us. Also, quality is improved by the singular new Cint Exchange, as we can focus all of our quality efforts on a single platform, which has scaling impacts for improvement across the board. So I expect quality continue to improve over coming quarters.
Beautiful. Thank you, Patrick. Our next question is from Ina at SCB. It's a two-part question, and the first one, I believe, has been answered, but let me just repeat it. Which is, given the aim to return to organic growth in 2026, what should we expect from OpEx growth this year? And, again, I believe that question was asked and answered by a caller. The second piece is, are there any significant areas where we believe we need to invest more in?
I'll take the first question. Obviously, we—I think it was more about headcount, was the question, and we said we're the right size for headcount for the business operations today. And in general, for overall OpEx, we do not expect a fundamental shift in our operating expense structure in 2026. We do have, obviously, operating leverage. As you can see, we've been more disciplined financially in 2025, and we expect operating leverage to scale for EBITDA as revenue grows over coming quarters. And the second question, I think, is around what kind of investments are we making and what kind of innovation are we staring at?
Correct. Correct.
... We spoke in this earnings report around some of the key areas of measurement innovation, where we focused on deterministic social to open up the social media walled gardens for our customers. We talked about Forced Exposure, which allows our customers to do pre-campaign or campaign testing of the creative content itself as a new TAM expansion for us. But most critically is around outcomes, where we have done a large partnership with Affinity Solutions, which connects point-of-sale information to the actual advertisement itself, which allows the holy grail for our customer to not only know that the advertisement improved the perception of the brand by the user, but actually compel the user to go buy the product. And this connection of sales results to the brand lift measurements itself is critically important.
We announced it at Advertising Week in New York in 2025, and our customers are quite excited about release of product in 2026. On the exchange side, our big product and innovation, of course, is the Cint Exchange, which we released in the middle of last year. We have ongoing improvement and development efforts there, particularly success areas around, say, like feasibility and also quality control. That's an aspect of feature and innovation within the customer base, and showing the best quality levels for many years now is a testament to the work done there.
There's a strong product development pipeline within the exchange business as well, but the clear focus in the first half of the year is revenue retention and operational success with our customers, and we'll start to see more innovation and product release for the exchange business in the back half of the year.
Brilliant. Excuse me. Let's move on to our next question from Eric at Invest AS. How do you see the OpEx and CapEx level in time going forward? Will you consider to start paying dividends if the cash flow remains strong in the coming quarters?
These are good questions. We have not announced a change to our dividend policy, and we've had the same dividend policy, I believe, since the IPO. Is that right, Niels, or we're not paying out-
Paying out.
The dividends?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. So I don't expect that to change. Obviously, we want to match CapEx and OpEx with the forward, kind of growth cycle and expectation of innovation cycle. And I've said before, we feel like we have the right OpEx, and therefore, a piece of R&D goes into CapEx as well, and so we feel like we have the right footing there. Niels, do you have anything you want to add to this CapEx, OpEx question?
Yeah, exactly. I think it's good to to understand this from our, business model perspective. CapEx is quite related to OpEx in the sense that it's capitalizing salaries of developers in the end, to keep it, simple, right? So that's related to the headcount question as well, just different lines in our P&L and, cash flow statement. You can, of course, see that operating cash flow is quite strong, and if you are going, to achieve growth, it should only be stronger because we're keeping, costs under control by definition, right?
We're currently trading 2-2.5 x operating free cash flow, which is, of course, quite low, but yeah, so we have optionality, I would say, but no change announced, and it's also a decision or a proposal by the board to the AGM ultimately, right? So that's not up to us to decide upon.
Kind of a quasi-related technical question. Are there any... From Pontus, are there any plans for share buyback?
There's no mandate.
I would say we have no announced plans for share buyback at this time.
Yeah, exactly, and also no mandate without EGM or AGM.
Just a reminder, if you have questions, please put it in the chat. We have one more that's posted right now, and this is from Sven. First, congratulations on strong delivery and turnaround. Could you please elaborate on the expectations and strategic focus in the new data business entity, and specifically, your new hire?
Excited to talk about Phil Ahad, who's an industry veteran. Phil comes in to really focus on two primary areas. First, we have an existing data business, and as you can tell, data partnerships are critical to our success, not only for our measurement lines of business, but also for the exchange business. And so Phil is working with the team to accelerate our ability to ingest third-party data to drive product development, but also product interest through our customer base. But also, as we've talked about several times, there's a growing desire for AI and synthetic generated research. Phil is very focused on the proprietary capabilities that Cint can generate through these efforts, so that we can be a leader in how AI impacts the automation and execution of the research product globally. So pretty excited about this.
Obviously, we're heavily invested in the data parts of our business to hire a senior manager to focus on that line of capability.
Great. I do not see any other questions popping up, and really great questions today. Thanks, everyone. So Patrick, I will pass the mic back to you.
Absolutely. Well, thank you, Brett. Thank you, Niels, and I appreciate all the questions. Thanks for the well congratulations. We do feel, obviously better about this quarter's performance as compared to last. Obviously, we wanted to set the stage for success in 2026. When we did a look back of everything that we accomplished in 2025, we didn't want the halo... Actually, it's not the halo, the impact of the third quarter financial results to over and supersede all the success we had with launching the new platform, of all the efforts that we've had in terms of our cash position, our AR position, our debt position. We've had such a huge success in improving our balance sheet and cash flow for the company, and also setting the stage for financial stability and a foundation we can grow from into 2026.
Appreciate your time and interest today. Onward. Thanks, my friends.
Thank you.
Thanks.