Hi, and welcome to this earnings call from Vertiseit. We have today, yesterday we have published the company's interim report for the first quarter in 2025. My name is Jonas Lagerqvist. I'm Deputy CEO and CFO of the company.
My name is Johan Lind. I'm CEO of Vertiseit.
Yesterday, in addition to holding the annual general meeting for 2025, we also published the company's Q1 report. Here is the first page of the report, and we can report an ARR of SEK 281 million for the quarter, and more on that topic in a few minutes. The agenda for this earnings call is that we will first browse through the financials for the quarter. We will highlight some events during the quarter. We will also give an update on where we are in terms of the integration of the Visual Art acquisition. We will give some more flavor to the IXM Grid, the group's joint platform backend. In the end, we will open up for a Q&A session. Please use the function in the webinar to post your questions, and we will answer them at the end of the webinar.
Great. Thanks, Jonas. For those of you who are new to the company, Vertiseit, we are a SaaS company offering an in-store experience management platform to leading brands and retailers. The aim of the platform is to orchestrate all digital touchpoints in store to bridge the gap between the customer journey online and offline or digital and in-person interactions. Looking into the financials, as Jonas said, we reported SEK 281 million in ARR. If you look at the chart here, the latest two quarters, of course, in Q4, we added the ARR from the Visual Art acquisition. I am really proud that we have managed to keep the pace of organic growth even during this process. What we can see in the report is that the growth rate is 19%, right?
Yes, compared to last year in constant exchange rates.
Yeah. Of course, we have a little bit of headwind when it comes to the Swedish krona that were strengthened quite heavily, like 10 percentage points in the quarter. As more than half of our revenue is from non-SEK currencies.
Compared to last year, when expressed in constant exchange rates, we grow our ARR by approximately 67%, including acquired ARR. Out of this growth, 19% is organic. We closed the quarter at SEK 281 million. As we can see on the profitability levels, both EBITDA and cash EBITDA is lower than Q4. Just as we have guided for previously, this is all according to our plan and is affected by Visual Art's different revenue mix and different profitability profile, basically. During the quarter, we have also welcomed a new investor, Eiffel Investment Group, French institutional investor, which affects our net debt. We decreased our net debt to SEK 140 million compared to just about SEK 200 million in the last quarter.
Both the profitability, of course, and the cash flow for the quarter is somewhat affected by both the currency headwind and also the integration of Visual Art. If we go into the SaaS metrics, we have a quite strong ARR growth during the quarter. If you annualize the growth during the quarter, we see that we are like above 20% on a yearly basis. We can also see that we have a stable development of the net revenue retention and also growing the average revenue per brand. Financially, we are happy with the growth that we perform over the quarter. The revenues and profitability is according to our plan.
Great. Thank you, Jonas. Looking into some highlights from the quarter. We press released the KFC win in the U.K. It's a Visual Art win, 1,000 restaurants, 5,000 licenses that we will roll out during the year. We have signed an agreement and have initial orders from Caffe Nero. They run 1,000 coffee shops. The rollout might take between two to three years before it's fully penetrated. It is a great win. Shell Netherlands is won by Pixel Inspiration, our partner for Dise, and also ICI Paris with 200 stores. Just to give you a little bit of names around to understand what's in those ARR figures. Most importantly is, of course, how the Visual Art integration is performing. It progressed exactly according to plan. It's according to our budget, internal budget. It's according to our internal time plan.
As of now, the integration project is completed in regards to group organization, group management system and processes in place, and also the group IT platforms. Now all main processes in Visual Art are run on the ERP stack that we have in the group. This is a quick overview of how it looks like. In Salesforce, for example, we now run the full marketing automation, the whole marketing activities that are data-driven is run on Salesforce. The same with support, the same with sales and CPQ, etc. I will not walk you through all of this, but it covers basically all of our operations. We are super happy with that. As Jonas said, what we see now is, of course, that our profitability level in percentage decreases as Visual Art have a slightly different revenue mix.
Post-integration focus now, the first off is in Q2, we will recertify Visual Art according to ISO 27001, 14001, and also SOC 2. They are in line with the whole group. We will then start to realize the operational synergies. It's a focus for Q2 to see how can we realize the synergies now. The third and the most important thing is, of course, also to tweak the revenue mix according to our strategies, meaning putting more of systems and consulting into the hands of partners, basically. We get a lot of questions about IXM Grid, which is the foundation in the tech stack. We decided to give you a little bit of a look behind the hood, how it actually works. As you all are aware, we have the business brands Dise, offer the in-store experience management platform for partners.
We have Grassfish, which work side by side with partners, and the offering is platform and consulting expertise. Visual Art offers in-store concepts, especially targeting the food and beverage as the specialty. The Visual Art development team have now joined the Grid team and the Grassfish IXM team. The IXM Grid supports both the Dise platform and the Grassfish platform. It works like this. We have a unified core that is running on a microservice architecture on Azure, where we have core building blocks in what we do. It is audience management, it is content management, it is location management, etc., that are shared. We have a shared design system that can support our multi-brand approach going forward. We also host all of the product-specific features in a unified way. We share the playout layer.
In the bottom, you see IXM Player, where we need to integrate to all operating systems, basically, to be able to run all of the in-store tech. Tizen is the internal platform for Samsung. If you run on a Philips screen, for example, they use an Android implementation. webOS is for LG, etc. Lots of other things are going on, but it is a huge undertaking to support any device in this space. Of course, this is core of our strategy, to do this once and share it with the current two platforms, Dise and Grassfish. Of course, also future platforms that we might take in our acquisition strategy going forward. Great. Now I hope you have a lot of questions for us, and we are happy to answer as many as possible.
Yeah. We have Fredrik Nilsson, analyst at Redeye, that wished to ask a question. Hi, Fredrik.
Good morning, Johan and Jonas. Thank you. I want to start with the quite high increase in average recurring revenue per brand quarter over quarter. Could you elaborate a bit on that?
Yes. That has a quite simple explanation. I mean, in the group, we have, of course, a lot of brands with just a few licenses. What we have done is to define a brand as a brand that has more than five licenses so that we can actually consider them like a truly active customer. That means that the number of brands in our definition has decreased. If you look in the diagrams, the historic numbers are also recalculated according to this principle. It is a more correct way of describing how many active customers we actually have.
Yeah. The result of this is that active brands are just above 1,000 brands with this new definition.
Yeah.
Okay, great. Also, capitalizations of R&D came down quite a bit compared to last quarter. I mean, what is a reasonable level going forward with Visual Art as a part of your group, and what's driving the decrease?
I would say that we're at the level that we see in Q1, that could be in some regards, like the level that you can expect being like the run rate going forward.
Yeah. As we also start focusing on cash EBITDA, cash EBITDA is what we track going forward. It should not affect our key metrics.
I see. Okay. I mean, there's no big difference in your R&D investments, or is it anything like that as well?
No.
Okay. Great.
Q1 is quite representative for the run rate.
Okay, great. As you touched upon, I mean, FX is getting of greater importance in the current environment. Could you give us some kind of rough FX split on proforma figures, including Visual Art?
Yeah. In rough numbers, just a little bit more like 50-60% of the group's revenues are in non-Swedish crowns. Normally, we have quite a natural hedge in terms of FX as we have costs and revenues more or less in the same currencies. When the movements are a little bit bigger, the effect is mostly derived from the SaaS revenue because they are high margin revenue, which are highly affecting profitability.
Just to give a little bit of flavor, that normally we do not calculate and reasoning around FX implications at all, to be honest. It was a huge shift, like a 10% change in the quarter, of course, makes a difference. I think if to give some sort of like SEK 3 million headwind.
Yeah. Profitability-wise, approximately SEK 3 million for the quarter. Of course, it affects the comparability between quarters when the shifts are this material.
Okay, thanks. If we were to see significant tariffs on displays in the US market, what impact do you believe that will have on the demand for your solutions? I mean, you are not selling the displays, but still, it's an important part of the overall solution.
Yeah. I do not think it will be the case. Of course, they do not produce any LCD displays in the U.S. I do not think it long-term will be the case that they accept to have 100% tariffs on those displays. As of now, our exposure is pretty low, like average, let's say 5% or so. Of course, it is a market where we are focusing on to grow. It might affect the growth rate and time plan for some projects in the U.S. market, but it does not affect our current business.
Okay, I see. Last question from me. Could you tell us something about the KFC deal? How much of the licenses were active already in this quarter? Also, if you could give some insight regarding other big QSR customers coming from Visual Art, how long have they come in their rollouts?
The rollout, the big start of the rollout will be in Q2. It is really just the initial implementations that have been done. It had no significant impact on Q1 for the KFC deal. In regards to other QSR brands, we are growing according to plan, but I have no exact figures on how much or how many licenses each brand have grown in the quarter.
Okay, thank you very much. That's all for me.
Thank you, Frederik.
Thank you, Frederik.
We have one question related to the CEO comment in the report where we elaborate on the acquisitions going forward. Asking us to tell us a little bit more if there is a change in M&A strategy or not.
There is a slight change in M&A strategy. If you look at the last three acquisitions that we made, all of them have been really large compared to where we have been as a company in all those situations. Like the Grassfish acquisition had a huge impact on the group. So did MultiQ, and now Visual Art brought in like 130 people into the team. Now, as we have the grid, the ERP structure, the management system in place, we now also look to a phase where we can take on smaller acquisitions on more of like a roll-up tactics in relation to that. That is also due to that we have strengthened our financial position, and we also generate a stronger cash flow and expect to do going forward. We can do more with our own capacity than what had been possible basically the years that passed.
Do you want to elaborate on that, Jonas, or?
To conclude, I mean, we have a proven effective M&A process. With all of these, with the platforms and the foundations in place, we think that we can leverage on that recipe in order to actually also grow with smaller acquisitions and not only focus on the transformative acquisitions that we performed like the last three or four years. Next question is that, okay, profitability is lower in Q1 than in Q4. What can we expect for the rest of the year?
Good question. As we started the guide, just after the acquisition of Visual Art, we said that this will have a negative effect in Q1 and Q2. In Q3, we want to have the profitability on the revenue streams back on track so that each individual revenue stream is in line with what it was, like SaaS, consulting, systems. The work starts as of now, of course, also to look at cost synergies and start to change the revenue mix according to our strategy. We would focus on SaaS as a larger portion. That is the guiding that we give. You can expect the revenue streams to be back on track in Q3. You should see a progress on both cost synergies and a shift in revenue mix as we go.
Great. That was it for today. Thank you very much for listening in, and have a nice weekend. Thank you. Bye.
Thank you.