Good morning, everyone. I think we're online. I heard we're online, so let's start. It's a pleasure to invite you to the 23rd Annual General Meeting of Talkpool AG. We've existed a bit longer, but the first year we didn't have to hold annual shareholders' meetings, so it's now the 23rd. It's very late. It's our latest new record in late. It's the 15th of September 2025. It's a pleasure to invite the full room here of people in our headquarters. This is the first time in this room here. We shrunk a little bit, so the room where we've been sitting previous years, we don't have anymore. It's lent to someone else. Here we're now in our new office room in our Swiss office. Just to welcome the team here, we have the Notary Dr. Ettisberger here visiting. We have the auditor, Mr. Chironi. Welcome. Thanks for being here.
From Balmorethian, the auditor. We have the proxy, Joseph Gabrieli, coming far away. He used to be Kudert, but now somewhere else. More happy place in Lahken. Cool place. Also the full board, including Mats, who flew here from Stockholm. Erik and myself, we're here most of the time. Very important, Erik Loretz prepared the numbers back from holiday, I think, just now. Yeah. A new face, or as you can see the angle of Sarah here, who was assisting with the voting and the protocol and the sharing and so on. We have a slightly different format now. We introduced this online format with Corona a couple of years ago, but now we're not in Corona anymore, but we're still in this online modus.
That has now become like permanent that we hold the annual shareholders' meeting in this way with some people present and some people that can attend by video link. I think it's just two, I think it's two persons attending or one or two. No, I'm down. No, I'm down and one up. Do you want to take it?
I don't know. It's from Teams.
all right.
I don't know. The second person is not online.
We had two persons that signed up, but we have one person not attending, as we can see here. The format is also slightly modified, so we're going straight onto the agenda by the report of the statutory report from the auditors, and then also going on to the approval of the annual report, the management report, and the financial statements of 2024 and consolidated financial statements of 2024. I'd like to mention, every year I mention that we have two different accounts. We have the consolidated, that's for the group. Oh, yeah, now we have another then. The consolidated, that's for the group. That's typically the most important financial figures that you look at. Then we also have just the Swiss headquarters, the Swiss parent company alone. That's the company that we're representing here today. We also need to take that as a whole statutory financial report.
The auditors have obviously audited both these reports extensively. I think I'll hand the word directly now to Mr. Chironi to present this or to say any comments. It has been published, of course. We published it according to all rules and regulations. I should also mention that we've invited the shareholders to this meeting according to all known rules and regulations. Kind of tricky, but both in Switzerland here with this process of the gazette publishing and at the same time, simultaneously sending out the press release through the SHIS station, the NASDAQ regulation inviting. It has been followed with at least 20 days in advance. We can hold this meeting in order. I'll just go back now to the first point. From Balmorethian, I'll give the word to Mr. Chironi, please.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I can actually keep it very short. As the Chairman has summarized quite correctly, there are basically two audit reports. The first one with regard to the consolidated financial statements and the second one with regard to the standalone financial statements of the parent company, Talkpool AG. Both reports are basically included in the annual report. It's basically both reports advise to approve the financial statements. There's nothing I have to add to the written reports, but clearly, if there are any questions and more, we're happy to answer these.
Thank you, Mr. Chironi. Yes, we've seen it. Everyone has had the possibility to look at these financial reports. Some of you have had some comments. We tried to answer those comments. I'd like to then go on to vote if we can accept them, the annual accounts as they are. Again, approval of the annual management report and the annual financial statements 2024 and the consolidated financial statements 2024. I've got a question for you who says that is it okay if we just vote once or do we have to do it individually of each report? I think once is enough.
Regarding which report you're speaking?
Just the annual report. Perhaps you know better.
Basically, the review is consolidated financial statements and a status quo is standalone financial statements. I think the question is whether we have, we need separate votes for the two different financial statements or whether we can vote or the shareholders can vote for both together. The executive would say we do it twice.
We do it twice. That's probably the best. In that case, I would then first start with the statutory financial statements of the Swiss company that we were busy with for a long time to go through a very detailed audit. We vote for that. Who's in favor of approving these statutory financial statements? Who's in favor? Now we need to start vote counting. By doing so, you are keeping the votes. Is that correct, Sarah?
That is correct, yes.
Very well.
I'll figure out where.
Yes.
She pushed.
Yes. We go on to the second separate. That's the consolidated financial statements for the group. Who's in favor of approving them as audited by Balmorethian and proposed by the board of directors? Anyone against? No one against? Any abstained? One abstained. Erik Loretz abstained. Very well. Sarah, I sent you this presentation. Could you try to share that presentation? I'll take the opportunity now just here to make a short presentation of last year. It's more of just a reminder of what happened last year to look back, where, yeah, what did we go through? I think it's good to do it in the beginning of this meeting so we all have like a refresh from last year. I'm not sure if we have anyone that can answer, but I hope we're sharing now.
Last year, we had this, a lot of trees, and now we changed that to more tech-based. This is the last time we're looking at the nice lake and trees. We had a motto of reduce to the max last year so that we tried to reduce the cost and also prepare for maximize the future potential. We can go to the first page. That's the last year then. We went back to our roots. We focused on the network services that we know well, that we have been providing for many years. We brought mobile telephony to a lot of places all around the world, many, many countries, more than 50 countries on all continents. We had a lot of experience. That's why we became very international. We moved on to Internet of Things and some other focus. Now we've gone back to our original focus.
That happened very strongly last year. We took that decision before last year. Last year was more and more of a that became then part of our new strategy. Very decisively, we discontinued some interesting projects. It was relatively tough, but we were quite strict with keeping costs down. We were quite strict with not starting new projects and discontinuing any kind of activity that came with the cost. We trimmed operations. We decided to keep our hub in Pakistan. That was in the middle of last year. That wasn't voluntarily, actually. We tried to sell the Pakistani business, but nobody wanted to buy it for the price we were looking for. In the beginning of the year, we had some commitment from an investor, but we never received the money. We had several commitments. Looking back, we came up quite far, even signings and agreements and so on.
In the end, we decided to keep the Pakistani business and to focus on international business, to use the resources in Pakistan to sell to international clients. That was a big decision, and we're no longer trying to sell the Pakistani business. Instead, we're using it as our hub, and it is now actually the lowest cost country in the world, from what I understand. At least that's what the Chinese told me, Huawei. They have 4,000 working there in Pakistan, or their Chinese company, with a lot of inexpensive, but Pakistan is much more competitive than China nowadays. They're growing, so the Chinese are growing their Pakistani hub for outsourcing. Hopefully, it can be an advantage for us long-term to have a low-cost hub in Pakistan, not just for people, also for technology coming out there, cost-effective. We continue the stable business in Germany and also the Caribbean.
We had an all-time high performance in Germany, and the business we had in Haiti from the Swiss headquarters, from the Swiss company here, it's from here, that continued stable as it has been for many, many years. We also spent a lot of time in the board to do different strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threat analysis and develop strategy. We didn't publish it this year, I think, in April, but we started that work last autumn and spent quite a lot of time meeting several times. That ended then in April in this Vision 2030, where we also put up some financial targets of $40 million revenues. That's a big step because we were at, yeah, with much lower, like $15 million, $56 million. It's a long way to go up to $40 million. If you go back four years, we were at $25 million.
We reduced from $25 million to $15 million, by consolidating and selling assets and repaying loans. Now we want to start growing again from this year, and we want to reach 14% EBITDA. Those are the targets we communicated. We will not jump at every opportunity, but select the most promising ones and also not develop our own solutions and products, but instead partner with the original equipment manufacturers that make products and hardware and solutions. We can go to the next one. Just to look at the margins there, if you look per quarter, those you can't see in this annual report, but the revenue was kind of stable because we didn't try to grow last year. It was around $4 million per quarter. The first quarter is January to March, and the last quarter from October to December. You see also the margins.
They were relatively stable and quite high, higher than they have been in previous years. It was a good year for us operationally, with some slight positive trend, but almost flat. We had operational cash flow of $1.4 million. That's probably a new record. I think it was higher than it has been. Compared to the previous year, the margins, the net margin is lower, but that's because in 2023, we had some extraordinary events, especially related to the Pakistani purchase. We had a settlement with a seller, and that gave us an extraordinary positive boost in 2023. We didn't have such a boost last year. Operationally, the numbers were better last year than the previous years. We were also cautious with accounting. We held back, more cautious than we have been in the past.
That's also part of this reduced to the max, reducing everything, building in some potential opportunity to improve in the future. It was stable. The business was stable. We didn't improve much either. I think operationally, it was almost status quo, some small improvement that we can do next. We had a convertible loan that we started to, we took a decision in September to start the process of converting that, but it took longer than to the end of last year to weigh into this year. We'll speak about that later. That's not part of last year's results. That's important to say. It has a potential upside this year that we can improve our results, improve our balance sheet, shifting loans to equity. We have another share options that was launched last year. On March 15th was the first phase of four total.
That share option scheme was going to take us until 2031. That's been approved by the Swiss tax authorities. I think it was 16, approximately 16 staff that participated in the first round. Hopefully, that can be a driving force, part of various driving forces to improve results and share performance as well. It worked really well. I think actually the first round was a success. We were in the money. We weren't in the money at the end of last year. The end of last year, we were not in the money, but that changed in the first half of this year. We can take the next one. Here, we went through a NASDAQ compliance update. It was more thorough than it has been in the past. We're down to 299 shareholders with three mid 500 or more.
We have much more shareholders, but 299 of those shareholders have CHF 500 or more. We can't see all the shareholders because they're kind of bundled in insurance funds. We probably really have much more shareholders, but these are the ones we can see. We can see 299 separate shareholders. We had a free float of 74% at the end of last year. That's pretty high. That's good. We have someone providing liquidity. That is, they are buying and selling on the stock exchange. If there's someone that wants to sell, they're helping us to buy them. They're not looking for profit. They're just trading a kind of minimum trading. It's not anything big. We generated sufficient cash. We still generate sufficient cash to keep on operating. We had very low investor relations. We had no remarks from the stock exchange.
We had like a penny stock, not the high valuation, but we are compliant. Despite the very small team, you've got to say that we're just four. I think Mr. Chironi, you will agree that it's a challenge for such a small company. We're listed on a stock exchange, and we need to deal with all the compliance issues, all the financial challenges, speak with investors, and also spend some time with the clients. That's what really matters in business development and developing that strategy and so on. There are a lot of different tasks for, we're just four people here, and not even that because it's not all full-time. Anyway, on to the next one. This is the last one. Looking back, it was like reduced to the max focus last year. Cash flow, we reached CHF 1.4 million operational cash flow. We cut cost.
We had cut cost already previously, but last year, we were spending more effort on preparing for growth. This year, now we have seen growth accelerating. We have seen continued decent cash flow. We have published some Vision 2030 and 2030 long-term targets, and more will follow. Mats is here now. We're going to spend time in the board today, tomorrow, to develop our business plan and get more into details of vision and what exactly are we going to do to define that better. We're in a challenging world. Let's see with the global trend. Maybe the biggest global trend is that it's crazy. There's so much craziness going on everywhere. Even sustainable energy is still a trend, but even that trend has been kind of impacted by all the craziness, political instability, and things going on with wars. The war in Ukraine is still going on. Full-blown war.
This artificial intelligence, that is starting to show. We're starting to see that. We believe we have a role to play in that because there's like something like more than 90% of all AI projects fail. There's a lot of failure with artificial intelligence. A lot of failure. I think people like us or companies like Talkpool can help clients to implement AI tools with bringing the AI into benefit, make the values, yeah, bring it, including tools and value into use. That's a part of our strategy and business plan. Any comments from anyone, Erik?
Yeah, good and short summary.
Yeah, it's just short. Just to remember, okay. Yeah. Last year, we even tried to sell the Pakistani business. It was not so long ago, but now that is totally different. Some important changes we've gone through in this phase. I think we can go back to the agenda here and the appropriation of the balance sheet result. That is then based on the annual report and the figures that we voted on. Here, I don't think we have much of a choice to start paying dividends and so on because we don't have the reserves to do so. The appropriation is in the invitation that was sent out. I think you can see it. The loss carried forward was at the end of 2023, it was CHF 9.072 million. That's Swiss francs. That increased now to negative over CHF 10 million, CHF 10,539,672. We have a big loss.
Most of that happened a few, like five years ago, when we went through our IoT big investments. It was added on now, a loss for the year. Last year, we had a loss coming from a write-down of Pakistan. The majority of that came from write-down of our Pakistani asset. It's not the operational loss in that sense. This is for the Swiss company. This is not the group. We performed much better if you look at the whole group. This is just the Swiss company that was hit pretty strongly by this write-down of the Pakistani asset. I believe we need to vote on this, that the loss carried forward to the new account was CHF 10,539,672. That is the proposal from the Board of Directors. Who's in favor for approving the suggestion from the Board of Directors? I'm in favor. Everyone in favor.
I'm still going to ask, is anyone against? Any abstained? No abstained. There we go. Have you noted that? Very well. The next question is then a discharge of the members of the Board and the Executive Board. That is then the Board of Directors. It's the three of us, Mats, Erik, and I, and then the Executive Board. That's Erik and I, and myself, Magnus Sparrholm. When voting for this, we will then abstain. Who's in favor of discharging the members of the Board of Directors and Executive Board? We will not vote. Who's in favor? Thank you. Who's against discharging us? Any abstained? Thank you. With one vote, we're discharged. On to the election of the Board of Directors. That is individual elections. Just to mention that the thinking behind this, that we're not ready, we started something last year.
We did some workshops, and we came up with a strategy. That needs more detail. I think we do have some business planning and strategy work and also the mission, so going into the details of that ahead of us. Also, now this phase of growth will be some business development-related work from the board. I think it was good. In my opinion, we had some decent board activity, and it's not completed. The suggestion is to re-elect the same board with exactly the same roles and so on as previous year. That would be then first a re-election of myself, Magnus Sparrholm, Swedish citizen. I will abstain. Who's in favor of approving the re-election of me? Did you get that, Sarah? Very well. I will also ask, who's against re-electing me? Abstained. Then we have Erik Strömstedt. You would then abstain.
Who's in favor of re-electing Erik to the board of directors? Who's in favor? Against? Any abstained? Then we have Mats Palving. Who's in favor of, so you will abstain, of course. Who's in favor of having Mats Palving for another year in the board? Yes. Anyone against? Abstained? Yes. Would you? What I didn't see, did you abstain? You're on top of the voting. Yes. Then we have this remuneration committee. It's a bit of a challenge because we're like a part of the case. It was Erik and I, and the proposal is to have the same team doing this remuneration committee again. I think we will do an individual vote of myself. In that committee, who's in favor of having me as part of the remuneration committee? Yes. Against? Abstained. Then we do for Erik. We do who's in favor of having Erik in the remuneration committee?
Against? Abstained. Very well. That's the election for the board of directors concluded. It will be the same board of directors, same as before, same remuneration committee as before. I think that's a very good thing. We're working on something important. We get a chance to finalize that work and increase business development part of that. On to the election of the auditors for the next financial year. First, I'd like to thank again Balmorethian for the work. It has been a lot of work, a lot of work, not always easy. The board of directors is proposing to re-elect Balmorethian for 2025 this year. Who's in favor of approving this Board of Directors suggestion? Who's against? Any abstained? In that case, I'm very glad to welcome you, Mr. Chironi, and Balmorethian, to support us next year.
As a representative of the auditors, I would like to express my gratitude for the re-election. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Yes, I'm glad we can continue with this relationship and to develop something positive. We have the independent proxy. That's Mr. Joseph Gabrieli, who is coming here, although he's not living here anymore. The Board of Directors is proposing that Mr. Gabrieli can be re-elected until the next Annual General Meeting as a proxy. Who's in favor of this? Who's against? Any abstained? I can mention that there is a challenge with some shares for the voting there because in these lists that we receive, we had two lists. We have this from Euroclear in Sweden, and we have another list from Switzerland here, Compushare, I believe it's called. When looking at that, we don't see all the individual shareholders.
Some of them have all their shares through an insurance company or some kind of fund or some bank. In that, we can only allow election when it's visible, when we have some kind of proof that those shareholders actually own the shares. That is a challenge that we have every year. It's specifically more of a challenge for us because in Switzerland, there's more confidentiality. Typically, in Stockholm, where we're listed, it's much more transparent in terms of banking and sharing information for who owns which shares. Even there, there's a lot of people holding shares through different constructions, so you don't see that they actually own those shares. They have some tax benefits, probably. That will remain a challenge in this voting through the proxy. Here, number seven, we go on to consultative vote on the 2024 remuneration report.
There's an explanatory note about the annual report that can be downloaded. I think most or everyone has downloaded that. It's according to Swiss law and the Code of Obligations that we follow, and also as a listed company so that we fulfill those criteria. I believe and the Board of Directors proposes that the remuneration report for 2024 be approved on this non-binding vote. I'm probably abstaining. I guess Erik and I, we should probably abstain because we're part of everything. The rest of you can vote. Who is in favor of approving this non-binding vote for the remuneration report? Who is in favor? Who is against? Abstained. I think Erik will use the abstain as well.
Yeah, I guess I'm allowed to vote myself.
Yeah, I think we're not allowed to vote because we made this remuneration report, right.
Is it, I mean, part of the remuneration for it's also for the board? I don't know. Can I, how much Mats can vote for it?
I can't decide that. We care what's right.
The board part, Mats can also not vote.
What is the rule?
Yeah, that is next point, I believe. It's approval of the maximum total amount of remuneration for the Board of Directors.
Point one is for the complete remuneration report. That includes the board as well. I don't know who can vote for that. I'm not sure.
It's also part, so no one can vote in that case. That's a bit weird.
In a proxy.
Except for the proxies.
Yes, and they have limited voting because of the. Can't see their shares.
Who can with that now? Did you see them in Europe?
Because there are numbers there under the box of proxies.
Well, yeah.
They're not voting, right?
Technically, no.
Where did you get the numbers from?
I think we need to, after the meeting, I need to go through the voting exactly. I'm not sure that it's 100% up to date, everything. We need to check whether we can. The ones listening in here, if you have any personal proof to that, please send by email or in any other way some proofs that you actually are shareholders. We're trying to verify if we can find any kind of proof that you are shareholders. If that is true, then we can countervote and through the proxy. If we can't see it, then we can. Do you have any comments on that? Yeah, I think let's move on to 7.2. That's the part of this remuneration report, which is some legal, yeah, legally required in Switzerland. That's for the Board of Directors.
The Board of Directors, they're proposing a maximum total amount of CHF 30,000 for the remuneration. I believe it was also CHF 30,000. In fact, we're looking at 2024. I think it was CHF 1,000 a month, right? It's CHF 12,000 last year. We were way below CHF 30,000. This is like a maximum amount. Erik and I, we get salary, and it's included in our salary. We don't get a separate board remuneration. That's the actual situation. The proposal is to continue having this maximum amount of CHF 30,000 for the board. Who's in favor of continuing with CHF 30,000 until the next annual general meeting? Who's in favor? No, what? What? No, no, no, no. I'm going to stay abstained. Sorry. Yeah, it's one in favor. Who's against? Abstained. Erik, we abstain. Yes. On to the next one.
That's a max approval of the maximum total amount of fixed remuneration for the executive board for the coming year of office. That is including executive board. That is Erik, myself, and Erika. For the three of us to have a maximum total amount of CHF 500,000. It was CHF 500,000 the year before as well. Previously, in 2022 and 2021, it was higher, but now it's been CHF 500,000. That's the proposal. Obviously, we can't vote on that. Who's in favor of this suggestion from the Board of Directors to continue with CHF 500,000? Who's in favor for the executive board? One voter for that. Yes, that was pretty.
Quite powerless, though, wasn't it?
Yes. Otherwise, definitely, no, that would have been, it can be really quite challenging. Who's against? And abstained. That is Erik and I. That's important. If we don't get any salary, that then. We come on to the 7.4, total amount of variable remuneration for the executive management for the. No variable remuneration was paid last year. I don't think we need to vote on that because there's no variable looking back. That is looking back. You kind of approve the backwards, the variable remuneration. I think, for some banks and so, that's a challenge. The managers take a lot of big bonuses and so, but here for us, we haven't taken any bonus last year. That's that of us on the remuneration. According to Swiss law, we voted on all those topics. We come on to a pretty big important point. That's the articles of association.
We have made some changes. Some of them are compulsory. It has been changed. There are changes to Swiss law, so we need to adopt our articles of association. Some of them are voluntary. We're doing, or we have done some actions that we need to. The first one is to delete Article 3A about authorized capital. That used to be the case. Then to introduce a capital band. That's a new concept that has been introduced, and it's the same article. This capital band is replacing the previous authorized capital structure. That's a compulsory change based on Swiss law. There we have a suggestion about this capital band. Maybe I should read this out loud. Should I? Or do you want to?
It has been published.
Yes.
If you want, you can repeat. Anyway, you've probably also.
No, in that case, I won't read everything. It's basically an upper limit of CHF 500,500, and that corresponds to 10 million shares. That can be then compared to now we're having 6.778 million or 6.778097 shares. We can increase that from 6.8 million shares approximately up to 10 million shares. That's the band we have. We have the band to go up to a maximum of 10 million shares. That's within, yeah, responsibility or the Board of Directors is allowed. This meeting is allowing the new article of association allows the Board to make decisions within those ranges up to now a total of 10 million registered shares. There are some rules exactly how this will happen. It's in here. I'm not going to read it. We already split a lot of words. Of course, the new shares and the previous 3A are expired.
They expired anyway on June 7, 2024. Otherwise, we would expire them now. They are already expired anyhow. The whole text is in here. I'm just going to go on, unless anyone has any comment or wish me to read this out loud. I'll just go on to voting for who's in favor of approving this new Article 3A, the capital band. Who's in favor? Who's against? Anyone abstained? No abstained. Then 8.2, the next one, that's an amendment. Here are some amendments for meetings. The general meeting should be held within six months of the end of the financial year. Now we're later. It should be convened as often as necessary. The Board of Directors determines the venue of the general meeting. It can also be in Sweden if desired. We're listed in Sweden. We have a secondary listing in Frankfurt as well.
We could hold this meeting in Sweden. We're allowed to hold that in Sweden. That is something that has been amended. It can be held at various locations, multi-local general meeting. That's something new, I believe. The shareholders that are not physically present can attend. That's what we're also doing now. It used to be corona-related, COVID-related, but now it's part of our articles of association. This is enforced since 2023 in Switzerland. Now we're introducing that to our articles of association. I believe this is the last decision in this annual shareholders' meeting. Let's vote on amendment of Article 7 of the AOA of the Chamber of Commerce. Who's in favor of approving this Board of Directors proposal? Who's in favor? Who's against? Any abstained? Very well. We go on to the next one, and that's miscellaneous.
We don't have any miscellaneous input to this, so there is no miscellaneous part. Before we conclude, I'll just check if the voting, did you manage to get all the votes or any discrepancies or anything? We were supposed to be like less than an hour, and I think we are now. In that case, before ending, I'd like to ask, is everything within anything, any comments or anything? Is it okay? In that case, it's 10:55 A.M. We conclude the meeting at 10:55 A.M., and I thank you, I thank all the attendance, online attendance, in the meeting attendance for helping us through this and for being interested and supporting us in this continued journey. In that case, there's no other comments. I'll just conclude for today, the 15th of September 2025. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Bye.
Thank you.