Welcome to Nepa Q4 2025 report presentation. For the first part of the presentation, participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on their telephone keypad. If you are listening to the presentation via webcast, you can ask written questions using the form below. Now, I will hand the conference over to CEO Anders Dahl. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and welcome to Nepa's year-end report 2025. I am Anders Dahl, the CEO of Nepa, and I will give you a short introduction to Nepa, what we do, and then an overview of Q4. We will do a financial summary, and then we will give you an outlook, and then we will end up with the Q&A. Together with me today, I have our VP of Finance, Edvard Hagman, who will step in and take some part of the presentation as well. Nepa is one of the leading marketing intelligence companies in the world. We drive brand growth by insights-filled market analysis, and we track daily 7,500 brands and measure thousands of advertising campaigns annually across the globe in more than 50 markets.
We deliver insights to CMOs, marketing teams, and insight departments of global consumer brands. We also speak, in many cases, directly to the C-level executives of the companies to justify and to build a solid foundation for marketeers around the world to claim and a market budget that is appropriate to what they are gonna accomplish when it comes to growth. Our core offering include brand tracking, campaign evaluation, and MMM, and those are supported by brand advisory services by our consultants, so on a very high-end level. This really gives the CMOs and inside departments a full 360 degrees view of what they do in marketing, and I will come back to that a little bit more, what we call the Trinity offers, the combination of those three different pillars in our offer.
We combine market survey data with cutting-edge technology and an excellent consultancy organization to deliver both recurring and ad hoc insights. We do have a strong presence when it comes to sales and insight consultants in Northern Europe and sales offices in the U.K. and U.S., and we also have an operation center in Mumbai. Despite of that, we can work globally. We work with brands, and we work with marketeers in more or less like all markets around the world. Even if we don't have people in that specific market, we can easily do the trackings and then analyze the survey data, but we can also do insight meetings and perform in that market, in spite of not having an office even.
We offer both subscription services and ad hoc projects, and the subscriptions stands for 60%, roughly, of our revenue, and the ad hoc projects stands for about 40%. The main pillars in our subscription offerings is Brand Tracking, continuous Marketing Mix Modeling, and Ad Tracking. Then we do Consumer Experience Tracking, and also we have recurring data deliveries to some clients, where we actually provide them into their dashboards, directly into their environment. We do ad hoc projects, and we have done more of them over time before, but we have now narrowed it down to more kind of repeatable scalable and repeatable ad hoc projects, so we can really scale them as well.
Some of the biggest ones are campaign evaluation and Campaign Pulse, and marketing mix modeling on an ad hoc basis, and Brand Touch and Brand Asset studies. And then we do category insights and some other key marketing insight projects. But that has been kind of a mindful and narrowness of projects in order to not be too broad when it comes to really customize some of this and really make sure that we have scalable and precise offerings. The Q4 , in brief, we continued to see growth in sales bookings, close to 21% year-over-year. In our numbers, you see a legacy churn that will distort the year-over-year comparisons, and we do also present underlying figures that you will see in this presentation, and you will also see that in the report.
We have a very strong underlying ARR trend, and that is kinda one of our main focus areas, to build our ARR business, to build a sustainable business over time, and we've done that for the last 2, 3 years. You see a strong year-over-year growth in the underlying ARR trend. You also see an underlying net sales that are more or less flat, but minus when it comes to reporting, because we have the underlying churn in that. The underlying subscription revenue is growing, and that is mainly driven by the ARR business. Then the Adjusted EBITDA less CapEx margin stands for 11.1% in this quarter, which is the strongest margin we have had since, I think, Q4 of 2021.
So this really shows that the strategy we implemented a couple of years ago is now really hitting in a very positive way. The board has decided not to propose a dividend for 2025, and more about that in the report. When it comes to sales bookings, we see a continued strong growth in sales bookings, and this number shows the ARR bookings over the fiscal year and on the Q4 . You see there's a significant growth comparative to previous fiscal year, and it's a significant growth comparative to the previous Q4 of last year.
But this is the same numbers, but broken down into quarters, and you see that the trend is clear, that we managed to keep clients, we managed to expand the contracts, and we managed to get new clients into our business. And those initiatives that we launched in 2024 or early 2024 and now are kind of part of our strategic initiatives in our transformation strategy. These are four of them, four of the four of the bigger ones when we work with resetting the revenue mix and then the strategic shift towards recurring revenue, and you see that very clearly in the numbers now. It's completed, but it's also kind of an ongoing focus to make sure that we share...
The share of profitable recurring revenue is increasing, and the legacy churn is more or less like throughout Q2 2023 to 2026, they will affect the numbers, but then they will be phased out. Cost base, we have right-sized the cost base, and we have also changed very much of the operating model. It is completed, but we also continue, of course, to find new ways of being even more efficient when it comes to our operations. We see clearly in the numbers that the commercial transformation and revised go-to-market strategy is really hitting the market in a positive way. It's implemented, and we have seen a much stronger pipeline.
We also, with a reset in the organization, with a reset in our ICP list, that is really paying off in a good way. And our work of simplifying our tracking platform and the tech consolidation we started up in 2024, work with you in 2025, is ongoing, but will be fully implemented during the first half of 2026. This slide shows a little bit more about the new brand tracking platform that we have tested out and worked with most of our big clients during 2025, but we now will be fully rolled out in 2026.
That will give us a new, a new platform with much lower maintenance needs and a much easier way to, to kind of reduce our custom, custom configurations that over time have created so much kind of friction cost within the organization. It's, it will also be a much better client experience with the new platform. This is definitely one of the main drivers to, to kind of shift the focus from not only working with internal efficiency, but being able to work with client deliveries and client satisfaction in a much better way, and innovation. The whole marketing mix modeling and the presentation of those numbers will be more client-tech driven, and it's a, it's, it's a, it's an output, so to say, of the, of the much more kind of efficient way of delivering our brand tracking going forward.
We have platforms, but we have also strengthened up our teams, and these are three of our newest recruits, Lisa, Andreas, and Björn, who are kind of leading our Marketing Acceleration Group. And especially when it comes to tie those different Marketing Mix Modeling, Brand Tracking, and Campaign Evaluation together in a good way, this team is definitely instrumental in doing that. We all know that the world and the day-to-day work of marketers is not getting easier. We know that close to 70% of marketers are struggling to prove the ROI of their marketing efforts.
We also know that close to 70% of the marketers struggle to balance performance marketing and creative branding, and I think that's where we can come in and help with the brand tracker, with the campaign evaluation, and with the marketing mix modeling tool. We can help with pacing, we can help with channel optimization, we can help to find the right balance between brand advertising and performance advertising. Some of the new clients that we presented during the fall are, in some cases, native digital brands, and we had a hard time to sell brand tracks to them before.
But now, with the balance or with the full view of brand tracking, campaign evaluation, and marketing mix modeling, we can show the brand people within those companies and the performance people in those companies, how those things are kind of working together in the best possible way. So we can prove short-term investments combined with long-term investments and have that dialogue with the marketing team, as well as with the C-level team. So this is the Q4 financial development, and I will hand over to Edvard to walk you through those numbers.
Thank you, Anders. So moving over to the financial development of the company in Q4. So overall, Nepa delivered a quite solid performance across our key metrics in the Q4 . 2025 was a transformational year for the company, where we have seen gradual improvement through the second half of the year, ending with a robust final quarter. But let me start with the top-line development. So we entered the year with extraordinary churn and phase out of low-margin contracts, and also highly customized contracts and tracking setups. And this will continue to impact our comparable growth figures until Q2 2026. But excluding these discontinued contracts, underlying net sales were essentially flat during the quarter, while the reported net sales declined by 15%. On the subscription side, the story is more positive.
We've seen a clear improvement in our remaining subscription base, supported, of course, by all the solid ARR bookings throughout the year and a strong finish to in Q4. Underlying subscription revenues increased by 4.5%, while the reported ones declined by 21% because of the extraordinary churn and contract phase outs that I just mentioned. On the add-on side, with our existing subscription clients, we saw renewed confidence in the quarter. Add-on revenue from subscribing clients grew 10.5% reported and 12.5% underlying. This is in line with our strategy, combining long-term tracking and continuous contracts with our professional services in MMM, campaign test, and other one-off insight deliveries, just like Anders mentioned previously.
Finally, add-on revenue from other clients declined by 20.6%, and that reflects our focus on deepening relationships with core subscription customers, rather than chasing opportunistic one-offs that aren't scalable in the long run. Turning to our recent transformation and cost development, we're quite pleased with the results from the transformation efforts during the year. We've embedded a stronger business mindset across the organization, with incentives tied to both sales and product margins, and we now believe that this is truly reflected in the results. The gross margin is up 3.5 percentage points year-over-year, and we also account for other product costs such as delivery hours, we see a material increase in product margins over the past 2 years.
All of this comes from more efficient workflows, better integration of global resources, and increased use of AI to amplify our processes. On the cost side, the saving measures in the first half of the year, both in personnel and in other fixed costs, including the relocation of our headquarters, have had a significant impact on our results in the Q4 . Personnel costs are down 23% year-over-year, and other external costs are down 16%. As a result of this, we can present an Adjusted EBITDA CapEx margin of 11.1% in the quarter. This is the highest margin, just like Anders mentioned, since Q4 2021, so we're happy to present that this quarter. Let me also move on to cash flow and our financial position.
So we started the period after Q3 with a net cash position of SEK 12.4 million. During a switch of banks in the second half of the year, we temporarily utilized about SEK 10 million in credit by the end of Q3 to facilitate the transition and manage working capital fluctuations. So total cash position ending Q3 was SEK 22.6 million. And this quarter, operating cash flow before changes in working capital was strong. However, most of that was offset by negative working capital development, and I will touch a bit on that as well. Even though our total order intake in Q4 grew by almost 21%, we had not by the last of December collected all the cash for those invoices sent and booked.
As a result, trade receivables spiked compared to Q3, when we recognized some of the revenue. We've also not seen any deterioration in payment behavior; this is rather a normal year-end pattern for us, given that Q4 is our most active sales period, and this reflects the typical client behavior of closing deals and closing purchases in the end of the year. We also had a high level of supplier payments in the Q4 versus previous quarters, which meant that overall working capital was a negative contributor to operating cash flow. Finally, back to the credit facility and cash structure. During Q4, we successfully migrated to a new bank and a new global cash pool structure, which is much more flexible for our cash management than our previous setup.
We managed to repay the entire outstanding credit facility during the quarter, resulting in a negative cash flow from financing activities of SEK 10 million, and total net cash flow of SEK 8 million negative. If you look at the net cash position on this slide, it's evident that it has improved during the quarter from SEK 12.4 million to SEK 14.5 million. Just to summarize, despite the extraordinary churn and contract phaseout impacting reported growth this quarter, we believe that the quality of our revenue base, margins, and cash position has improved, giving us a stronger platform going into 2026, in this year. Back to you, Anders.
Thanks a lot, Edvard. When it comes to outlook, we are now moving, or we continue, of course, to transform where we think we need to transform, but we are more moving into an acceleration phase, and we have already seen that in Q3 and Q4 of last year. We continue to build on the current ARR momentum, and we foresee or see that there will be a continued growth in ARR business during 2026, at least what we can see now from our pipelines. And strengthened ad hoc service segment with scalable advisory offerings, not like we have done before, offering a wide variety of different ad hoc solutions, but more scalable solutions where we know we can scale and grow in a profitable way.
We expect the positive—like I said, we expect the positive ARR trend to continue in 2026. When it comes to product innovation, Nepa focused on product innovation in a large extent, but they are mostly connected to kind of a three offer or the Trinity offer between brand and marketing and mix modeling and campaign evaluation. And that is to enable clients to track brand performance, optimize media, evaluate campaigns with a single modern suite of a toolbox that they can use. But of course, one of the main components that we must emphasize and have hard discipline is to have cost discipline and profitable growth focus going forward. So we remain mindful of macroeconomic uncertainty, and we'll maintain strict cost discipline and focus on value-added growth.
So with that said, I would like to hand over to the Q&A session, and thanks a lot for listening to this part of the presentation.
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. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. There are no phone questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.
... Thank you. So we have received some written questions in, in the chat that I will read out loud. Starting with the first one. In, Q2 2024, you mentioned that SEK 3 million of ARR bookings started in the following quarter, Q3, and was not included in the ARR number. Is there a similar effect in this quarter? And, let's say that, whenever we close a deal, we always start recording the contract value on the start date of the contract. So that will, probably always be the case whenever we close a deal in, in the end of the quarter, and the contract started is in the following quarter. So I cannot comment on any specific levels or so, but that will always, be the case.
That is a part of our business model with our clients, so that will continue to be that way.
The next question is, during 2026, you have added some new open positions in the Nordics. If everything turns out as you expect, what positions do you want to add?
The positions we are, like I stated in one of my bullet points, that we're looking at profitable growth. We are very cautious when it comes to expanding the organization. We're also thinking about adding different... We have been pretty early on when it comes to using AI, for example. So we're using AI and automation in a lot of the different processes we have internally. The main growth areas, recruiting more people, is like Lisa, Björn, and Andreas, a good example of high-end consultants that gives a lot of value to our clients, especially in those Trinity projects, but of course, also sales and marketing.
So during the last year, we have invested more and more carefully, again, with really evaluating every dollar or krona or euro we spend, with a very clear ROI anticipation, and also a very agile way of doing it. So sales, marketing, brand building, and high-end consultancy, and looking at how much of the traditional kind of processes we do, how much of that can we automate and infuse AI into?
On the topic of AI, we have another question here. Given the fears that AI will destroy all software business or platforms out there, could you please elaborate how you see the AI threat, what you can do to defend against it, and if there are any certain elements in the business, for example, the human advisory part, that could make it difficult for AI solutions to offer the same value to your clients as you are?
Yeah, this is a really good question, and I think we definitely see AI as an opportunity, maybe not so much as a threat, because we still see that there is a lot of need for handholding and advice, and advisory when it comes to the high-end consulting. But yes, definitely, a lot of our kind of basic processes are very data-driven and therefore prone for kind of putting in AI. And we have already, since late 2024 or mid-2024, we have implemented AI processes in a lot of our delivery platforms. So we are kind of on the forefront when it comes to using AI, and we will continue to develop that going forward.
For us, it's more about how can we be more efficient in the traditional deliveries of the data, analyzing the data, to be able to move more of our investment and resources into the high-end consulting on a C-level in those companies where we work for. This is definitely a disruption of the industry, but I think we can use that disruption in a very good way to move more towards the higher value to the clients.
Okay, next question. Have customers started to see the new functionalities that you've launched on the platform?
Yes. We just had, just before this meeting, we had a couple of client presentations where we, where we, where we kinda showed, internally and also for the client, how we use those new tools, the new dashboards, the new way of presenting data, the new way of kind of bridging between brand tracking and MMM. How you can both look in the long term, but also in the short term, how your investments are paying off. For some clients, maybe market research and market insights have been very much of a kind of a nice to know, of a long-term way of using the knowledge about the market.
With our tools now that we have been launching now for the last two years, we can also prove that we can be in the day-to-day tactical part of the client's business, and we can show significant, clear ROIs in the day-to-day business from our clients. These are big retailers, these are big brands, and we are sitting into their meetings, their decision meetings, on a weekly and a monthly basis to help them make the decisions based on short-term or long-term impact, impact of the brand advertising and the performance marketing. Yes, we have rolled them out already, and then, of course, we are developing them constantly, but they are definitely being seen and showed and used by our clients now for months.
The next question is: What was the driver of higher net revenue retention in Q4? Basically, a result of very good expansion sales on existing clients, where we increased the number of markets, categories, et cetera, on several clients, but also less contractions in terms of downgrading of tracking business, and less more normalized churn levels. So that was the biggest contributors to a higher Net Revenue Retention in this quarter. Next question is, your five largest clients contributes approximately to 24% of revenue in 2025. Can we expect the number to decline to less than 20% during 2026?
I think you that have been with us now for a while have seen that we are moving away from those. Of course, we do like big clients, but we have been also more diversified when it comes to having smaller or mid-sized or challenging clients. So with our change in focus when it comes to our ICP list, the impact of that will, of course, be that there will be a decline in the percentage of how those biggest clients will impact our total revenues. There will be more clients with a smaller amount, but a bigger size of diversification. Yes.
With the current sales momentum, should we expect higher bookings versus last year in H1 2026?
We're not giving guidance of that, but like I said before, I think we expect ARR trend to continue into 2026.
The sales team has clearly done a great job. What was the main driver behind the Q4 performance? Was it internal changes or a shift in the market compared to 2024?
I think there are an underlying change in the market, a little bit more positive view on 2026 and onwards. But I think without doing what we did when it comes to building up a new business team, total reorganization, the client success organization, I think we have missed a lot of those opportunities if we didn't have had that change in the organization. So that really helped us to kind of catch those opportunities that are out there in the market.
It's a blend, but I think the work we have done internally is definitely one of the driving factors for us being able to capture new clients that normally don't go to companies like Nepa, for example, because some of them are very performance-driven, some of them are traditionally kind of buying from different types of vendors. I think we have managed to break into a new segment that we weren't really active in before.
The next question is, does the Nordic region still dominate bookings, or were there other markets that performed well in terms of bookings?
I think Northern Europe is better to say, because we have clients that are, might have some kind of presence in the Nordic, but they are more like Northern Europe. And we also see that some of the clients that are typically Nordic or Northern Europe, we are now growing with them in other markets, in Europe, Southern Europe, Central Europe, Southeast Asia, and also in North America. So of course, we don't, like I said before, have boots on the ground to that extent in more than Central Europe and U.K., and to some extent, North America. But the world, the word is out there, and with some of those clients, I think there will be more attention and an interest in using NEPA.
If you take one of the big global brands in one category and that becomes publicly known, of course, there are companies from South America or Southeast Asia that see that can Nepa help them in the same way? And we have gotten quite a lot of those leads coming in through our website, for example, based on references to big brands that we have managed to win in some key categories.
Next question is, can you talk a little bit about why investors should look at Adjusted EBITDA as CapEx instead of net profit? And, I can take that one. We believe this metric provides a more accurate reflection of the underlying operating profitability, rather than looking at EBIT or net profit. This metric is more closely correlated with free cash flow and also less affected by accruals. So the rationale here is that Nepa has historically capitalized intangible expenditures, which has resulted in ongoing amortization charges today that are non-cash in nature. And, the equivalent expenditures today are no longer capitalized on the balance sheet, but instead, thanks to shorter product-to-market cycles, et cetera, et cetera, they are expensed as incurred in the PNL.
To ensure a like-for-like comparison between historical and current figures, the most relevant measure is Adjusted EBITDA less CapEx here. However, as we don't have any CapEx today, Adjusted EBITDA without the less CapEx ending would also make sense to look at today, but we have kept the original metric for historical comparisons. Of course, going further down the PNL, you also have net financial items and taxes in net profit. Other than tax, net financial items are mainly currency-related, unrealized gains and losses on intragroup loans, which are also non-cash. Basically, we believe that this metric, Adjusted EBITDA less CapEx, provides a more accurate reflection of underlying profitability.
It also links into the previous questions about that if AI is killing sales companies and platforms. I think this also shows that we are now much more working with third-party solutions. We are much more of an orchestrator of AI agents and tools, and that means that there is more to kind of the core competence of what we can deliver to our clients than it actually is to develop software or develop specific first-party platforms. It's more about how to use those existing, especially AI agents, will be definitely one of the main topics going forward, to use that type of thinking in growing and building a sustainable and profitable business going forward.
Good. Thank you. I think that was all the questions we had from the chat, so handing back to you, Anders, for some final remarks.
Yeah. Thank you very much for listening in. Thanks, Edvard, for doing the financial presentation. And then, and again, I think this report is a statement to more or less like a financial inflection point, where we went on a journey in 2024 to transform this company. We had a couple of bumps in the road during 2025 or late 2024 that impacted our 2025 numbers. But I think now, going into the future and seeing what we have done in 2025, shows that this strategy is working. The focus on ARR, the focus on our clients, the way we have kind of, how we work with our clients, how we set up the client relations internally, and also how to work with the clients.
Our product, our product portfolio is much sharper and more precise now than ever before. We have kind of cleaned up a lot of the ad hoc business that were somewhat of a cost driver, especially in the long term, when the market, the macroeconomic impact were a little bit volatile. Of course, people, we have developed a lot of internal programs in order to develop our own internal organization, to be able to kind of go from that change to be more of a high-end client advisory solution than we have ever been before. Also recruiting new talent from the outside to be able to add on to the strong team we have internally.
So this is very much of a teamwork, and I'm really proud of what we have accomplished in Q4 and then the late part of 2025. So thanks a lot, all of you, and we will be back. Thanks.
Thank you.