VNV Global AB (publ) (STO:VNV)
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May 5, 2026, 5:29 PM CET
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Earnings Call: Q1 2026

Apr 22, 2026

Per Brilioth
CEO, VNV Global

Okay. Hey, welcome everybody. This is our, as in we are VNV Global, this is our Q1 investor call. I'll kick things off. We have this usual summary page, which is the next one. Yeah. NAV $462 million, which is down a bunch since the end of last year. As we try to sort of highlight in the narrative in the report, it's because of market and the peer group, the public sort of peer group from which we take multiples, they're down a lot. In some cases, there are names that we use that are down like 30%, and that's the main driver because the portfolio at large is doing really well.

As I wrote, if that sort of peer group multiple that we download and multiply with what we see at our companies, if that would've been flat this quarter, the NAV would've been up since the end of last year. This is how we value the portfolio, and we can't change that from quarter to quarter, even if we don't think it reflects the reality of the value here. We're subject to that volatility and if the second quarter were closed today, it would've been up. We'll see where it closes. We're basically subject to that volatility. That volatility has taken the NAV down. It's not reflective of what's going on in our portfolio. I don't know if one sort of just has a go at trying to put the big sort of high-level reasons for why this peer group is down.

I think it sort of falls into two main buckets. One is this fear, uncertainty, combination of those and what AI will do to a bunch of software companies. As we've been on and on about before, we really don't see that as relevant. It's nearly the other way around for our portfolio companies, is that we feel that these companies in our portfolio, they benefit from the emergence of AI platforms, models, that whole new toolbox in so many ways. The combination of hardware sort of proprietary data sets and sort of a customer base that sort of goes directly onto the platforms without any intermediaries. Just the ability of these new ways of writing code and software, et cetera, is so beneficial basically for these companies.

The other one, of course, I think you'll agree with me, is this sort of are we heading to a recession? Energy prices are up, inflation is up, interest rates are high because of inflation and that whole thing. The point there is that we have sort of strong elements of counter-cyclicality in our portfolios. When in tough times, you use these products more. It's most intuitive around BlaBlaCar. We'll come back to that. It's there basically. Yeah. With that sort of long winding intro, I thought we'd sort of kick off this, we'll take you through the numbers and touch a little bit upon the different names. Björn, do you want to run us through the numbers?

Björn von Sivers
Senior Investment Director and CFO, VNV Global

Sure. Starting off the overall portfolio, here is simplified breakdown of the balance sheet. As Per mentioned, NAV down to $462 million, down 15% over the quarter in dollars to $3.61 per share. In SEK, that's SEK 34.25 per share or down 12% over the quarter. Total investment portfolio amounted to $503 million, consisting of sort of $486 million of investments and $17 million worth of cash. Important to note that we have an additional $30 million of cash and cash equivalents, but in liquidity management investments. All in all, we're looking at sort of cash equivalents, and liquidity placings in the range of $47 million. Borrowings down to $45.7 million as per quarter end. Continue to trade at a significant discount to NAV. As of today, sort of 49% discount.

Moving down to the sort of big drivers over this quarter is, of course, the larger constituents of the portfolio. Just going through the few largest ones here. BlaBlaCar, obviously the largest driver, down 27% or $44 million to $120 million for the holding. Primarily driven by depreciating multiples over the quarter, both driven from the overall rapid developments and uncertainty coming from the AI space, but then also, of course, from the geopolitical tension, whereas BlaBlaCar sort of part of that peer group is in the OTA travel-related marketplaces that have been hit a lot. Same goes for Voi. That's also down over the quarter based on multiples. It's an order of 16% or $20 million. HousingAnywhere here actually valued on a new transaction. We participated with EUR 1 million and another sort of $1.5 million converted from earlier convertible investments we held.

Numan Breadfast-based valued on transactions, so relatively flat, a little bit of FX on Numan. Bokadirekt down roughly 10%, also driven by contracting multiples. All in all, these six names represent SEK 26 per share or on an aggregate basis, 77% of the NAV. Again, sort of ended the quarter with $17 million of cash equivalents and $30 million in liquidity management investments. Also, during the quarter, we bought back another close to 500,000 VNV shares and also a small amount of the outstanding bonds, which I'll come to now, which we also sort of announced today, a partial buyback offer of the outstanding bond up to a transaction cap of SEK 275 million.

This is to sort of effectively take down the gross debt, and also lower the interest expense going forward. We launched this today, and we'll hopefully have sort of the outcome sometime next week. With that, I thought I'll hand back to Per, and he will touch a little bit more deep in the larger portfolio holdings. Thanks.

Per Brilioth
CEO, VNV Global

The structure of the portfolio looks very similar to what you've seen before. Nothing really to comment here, but if we flick to the next page, this portfolio, as we've been on about, trades at sort of roughly half of the reported NAV. As I think it's clear, we think that NAV is attractive, cheap, and hence we've been buying back stock, as we think that that's the absolute best thing one can do with shareholder money. Our sort of aim is absolutely to continue doing that. The reason being, as the next slide shows, as you've seen before, is that this is a portfolio that at large is positive, is earnings positive, is profitable. The slight downtick from a year ago is because of the absence of Gett, which is a profitable company.

At large, this portfolio is profitable and not sort of craving a lot of money to stay alive. That's not a reason for saving money to sort of put it back into this portfolio names. We can use the money we have to buy back stock. This profitability does not come at the expense of growth. We've made a new slide, which is the next one, you'll recognize it from earlier that this portfolio continues to grow over the past, sort of is it three years? You've got a CAGR of nearly 30% across these six top names, in terms of revenue growth, and it's turned from being slightly negative profitability to positive.

Big change there. As we try to highlight here also just as a reminder of how markets move around, those six names back in 2023, this quarter, first quarter of 2023, we had them in our NAV at $446 million. Total NAV was like $800 back then. We now value them at $358. Despite that sort of big shift in loss-making to profitable and the very sort of steady growth this last quarter, that portfolio grew by some 25% still, but marked lower. The overall NAV is of course lower because we've sold some stuff to pay down debt. I think that's a useful reminder of where we've come from and where we are today, both in terms of sort of quality of the portfolio, but also how we market. We then go into the bulk of the portfolio, there's nothing really new around BlaBlaCar.

This is a good summary, I think, around how they sort of closed 2025 with EUR 2 billion of GMV, which is a sizable number. I know GMV is not revenue, but as you remember, a bunch of their markets are unmonetized yet, and some of them are really coming strongly into monetization, like Brazil now. Others remain unmonetized, waiting for liquidity to sort of further improve. Still, GMV, that's the tool that many people use to sort of value these kind of sort of platforms, et cetera. If you use that number, and to where we're marking it today, it's 0.4x GMV, which I think is fair to sort of categorize as attractive, certainly in my mind that is. If you go to the next page, we also have a BlaBlaCar that's doing really well at this start of 2026. They have had a strong start.

Also of late, we've really seen this element of counter-cyclicality in the business model, where oil prices go up, energy prices go up at large, driven by oil prices now, the activity of BlaBlaCar goes up because it's more expensive to drive a car, and you're more prone to get other people in to fill those seats. You do that through the BlaBla Car platform, so BlaBla Car gets more business, and the graph on the right sort of highlights that. I think that's sort of all for BlaBlaCar. Let's go and talk about Voi. Dennis, do you want to run us through Voi?

Dennis Mohammad
Investment Manager, VNV Global

Happy to. Thank you, Per. Voi closed a record 2025 with EUR 178 million of net revenue. This is up 34% year-over-year. An adjusted EBITDA of EUR 29.3 million, which is up 70% year-over-year. An adjusted EBIT of around EUR 3.2 million, up from essentially breakeven in 2024. Very significant improvement across the board in the P&L. As we alluded to earlier, the company during the year also did a tap of EUR 40 million on the existing bond framework to fund growth CapEx for 2026. They also secured an RCF with Danske Bank and Swedbank here in the Nordics for EUR 25 million, which is still untapped but provides additional financing flexibility should they need it. In Q1 of 2026, we've written down the value of our stake in Voi by 16%.

This is primarily driven by peer multiples trading down, as Per has already talked about earlier, but in part also driven by FX as the dollar has appreciated against the euro during the quarter. Operationally, Voi has had a strong start to the year. It continues to win tenders. In Q1 alone, they've won tenders in Netherlands, in France, in Germany, and in Norway. They've also started to roll out their new fleet of e-scooters, the V9 e-scooter and the e-bikes, the E5 and the EL2, across the streets of Europe, putting to use the bond money that they raised at the end of last year. The company will issue their Q1 report on Monday next week. That's on April 27th. More information will be available then. I see we've already jumped to the next slide, which is good.

As Per wrote about in the intro to the report, when Voi issued its bond in 2024, it pioneered a financing model that industry peers have since either replicated or attempted to replicate. We have now received the first public financials from one of those peers, and the comparison truly reinforces our conviction in Voi's strategy and in their execution. As you can see in the numbers here on the graph, while Voi grew revenues by 34% year-over-year and generated reported EBITDA, different from adjusted EBITDA, but reported EBITDA of EUR 19 million and EUR 24 million of cash flow from operations, the European peer here saw a revenue decline of 16% year-over-year. On essentially the same revenue base, generated EUR -13 million of EBITDA and EUR -20 million of cash flow from operations.

We've excluded EBIT here as the peer changed methodology on this metric during the year, so making a like-for-like comparison difficult. That number was heavily negative as well for the peer. As I said, we are convinced that Voi's strategy and execution is the best in the industry, and I think one additional data point that supports that is when looking at the revenue generation per vehicle and day on the right-hand side of this slide. Voi generating EUR 3.94 per vehicle and day in 2025, and the peer down at EUR 2.88 in revenue per vehicle per day. We can see here that that's a 37% more revenue generation per vehicle at Voi.

I think this really shows how Voi's investments across the full platform, everything from hardware, where they have their own proprietary IT module, high-capacity swappable batteries, to software, where they use machine learning for fleet optimization. They have a very strong fleet and inventory tracking system. And lastly, operations, where they have best-in-class fleet sourcing, fleet management, maintenance, and eventually resell, is truly paying off. With that, we can go to the final slide, where there's really nothing new to report. They've seen continued growth on top line and improvements on profitability across the board, as I alluded to earlier. As also mentioned, their Q1 report is out on Monday, so we encourage you to keep an eye out on their IR website then. If we then jump to the next company being HousingAnywhere.

HousingAnywhere has had a good first year under Antonio Intini, who joined as CEO roughly a year ago after having senior roles at both Immobiliare and before that, Amazon. Looking at their 2025 financials, the company closed the year with continued growth on top line and a positive adjusted EBITDA, which is a big improvement on the year before. In Q1, as Björn mentioned, HousingAnywhere closed a financing round where VNV participated with EUR 1 million, and where previously held convertible loan notes were converted to equity. With this new funding, we think that the conditions are in place to push growth harder from here, and we look forward to following that in the quarter, which was done around the NAV mark at year-end last year. If we finally go to Numan.

Numan closed a very strong 2025 with north of 125% growth on revenues and positive adjusted EBITDA. As we've spoken about in the past, their weight loss vertical has been a key driver of this growth over the past couple of years, and 2025 was no exception. In Q1 2026, the company has continued to grow, albeit we have seen growth come down from the levels it's seen in past years, primarily driven by some price changes in the market for GLP-1 in the U.K., which initially led to some stockpiling behavior ahead of the increases and then some slightly lower activity following. As said, they're still growing year- over- year in Q1. We value Numan on the back of a transaction that they closed last summer.

However, should we have valued it on the back of a peer group model this quarter, it would've been roughly in line with the mark we currently carry. That. Finally, this company continues to invest in its unified Numan 2.0 platform, which we believe is a key driver to long-term LTV growth and patient retention, and we look forward to seeing the results from those investments in the quarters to come. That's it on Numan. Handing it back to you, Björn.

Björn von Sivers
Senior Investment Director and CFO, VNV Global

Thank you. I'll finish off with sort of a short comment on Breadfast here, who continues to see strong growth in its core e-commerce business, and also sort of initial promising dynamics in its fintech offering. During Q1, the company announced sort of the final tranche of their $50 million funding round, which they completed sort of majority of last year, but the final tranche sort of closed in Q1. The company is funded and continues to grow well and sort of flat valuation still based on this transaction. Finally, on the top six here, we have Bokadirekt, who's also sort of down during the quarter, primarily driven by multiples, but on sort of that side, continued strong performance, strong profitability. Bokadirekt also announced a small acquisition during first quarter.

They bought a company called Zoezi, which is sort of a niche SaaS player for gyms and personal trainers, which will add both sort of top line and profitability to the company. With that, I think we're through the top six names, and we'll head to a Q&A. Just as a reminder here on the Zoom, please use the chat function or the Q&A function in Zoom, and we'll try to address them. I believe we have a few questions. We could start with this one for you, Per, perhaps. Once you do the partial bond redemption, what do you think is the remaining headroom to repurchase shares? Or put it differently, how do you weigh sort of the bond redemption versus share buybacks going forward?

Per Brilioth
CEO, VNV Global

Yeah. Our goal for a long time, as you know, and which we've sort of achieved now with the sale of Gett, is to sort of become debt-free, and not to sort of be burdened by paying a coupon because of the debt we have. This is just a continuation of that. At the same time, we absolutely aim to have liquidity to make use of this sort of gift that the market is giving us of valuing us where we are and put shareholder money to work at that. We've been active around that, and we do it in the way we do it. As I think you've all sort of seen, we do sort of highlight in press release what we bought the previous week. I think it's fair to expect us to continue to doing that and also to fund that.

Now, this partial bond redemption sort of leaves a little bit of cash. We still don't have cash, but or yeah, just barely, but we are. It leaves liquidity to continue to do that, so that's good. When we get to the sort of end of the duration of this bond, then during that sort of period, we see that we will have completed several more exits. There's an ongoing sort of process, some driven by us, some driven by sort of things at large, that will provide us with liquidity.

It's too early to talk about that because nothing's done until it's done, but I feel sort of assured that we will have sort of ample liquidity both to sort of retire this bond in full and then to buy back stock. But nothing's done until it's done, but this redemption leaves us with, I think, a good balance of liquidity to make use of what we want to do here in the market.

Björn von Sivers
Senior Investment Director and CFO, VNV Global

Thanks. Another question here on BlaBlaCar. You mentioned profitability at BlaBlaCar briefly. Could you give us some color on how this would scale if the higher activity levels from March were to persist during the year? Does the increased activity translate into higher p rofitability as well?

Per Brilioth
CEO, VNV Global

For sure it does. We unfortunately are not at liberty to share any further details as much as we would like. We're not at liberty to do that. For sure, this drives business revenue and higher earnings. It is a positive, for sure.

Dennis Mohammad
Investment Manager, VNV Global

Maybe I can add there, Per, without saying too much to your point, we're not at the liberty to do so, but the core carpooling business that they run operates at north of 90% gross margin. Any kind of revenue coming outside of what we anticipated covers the fixed cost that's already covered. You get a pretty high contribution on the bottom line from that. To Per's point, the answer is yes.

Per Brilioth
CEO, VNV Global

Yeah. No, well described, Dennis. Yeah, I hope that answers that question.

Björn von Sivers
Senior Investment Director and CFO, VNV Global

Yeah. Then a follow-up question on buybacks of shares and bonds. Given the volatility in the markets and contracting multiples, aren't you more eager to increase buyback levels of the share? And/or if not, are there other plans for additional investments in the existing portfolio companies or new funding routes?

Per Brilioth
CEO, VNV Global

Just having a go at that question, the different parts of it. There's nothing major. None of the large ones have any large rounds going on. There's small bits and pieces where we've been active in the portfolio, but they're really on the marginal side of things. Not a big draw on liquidity. Yeah. If we had liquidity to do more now, I absolutely would be a strong advocate of doing more in terms of buybacks. I think it's very attractive. I really, really believe that our NAV will be able to deliver serious returns over these coming years. If we had the liquidity to do more, we'd do that, but we obviously need to balance that liquidity. Very eager to participate in the way we're doing now.

It's that balance that you may feel keeps us doing this at a frustratingly timid kind of level. It's necessary to do it that way. If we can accelerate some exits that are at NAV or around NAV, then of course it makes a lot of sense to do those and then sell. Nothing's done until it's done. I feel very strongly that we will be able to complete some further exits and hence we'll have liquidity to do more, but got to keep an eye on that balance.

Björn von Sivers
Senior Investment Director and CFO, VNV Global

Another question here, specifically on the Voi valuation, maybe for you, Dennis. Other than contracting multiples, what levers have been moving around on that in the model?

Dennis Mohammad
Investment Manager, VNV Global

The multiples is the primary driver. As you know, we value in the next 12 months, so we've moved one quarter forward. The NTM outlook is obviously higher than it was in the previous quarter since the company is growing. You also have FX, as I alluded to earlier, that the dollar has depreciated against the euro, so that's one negative contributor, also net debt. In the case of Voi, we don't simply take cash minus debt. We look at what obligations the company has with the existing cash. In this case, it's CapEx investments for 2026, where they've improved payment terms significantly over the past couple of years. Cash outflows happen during the year to a larger degree than everything going out when you place the orders. It's a combination of FX, net debt, but primarily, as said, multiples.

Björn von Sivers
Senior Investment Director and CFO, VNV Global

Thank you. With that, I don't think we have any further questions at this point in time. As always, you're happy, feel free to reach out over email. I will try to be helpful. Other than that, I'll leave it to you, Per, for any final words.

Per Brilioth
CEO, VNV Global

Yes. Nothing more to add. Frustrating quarter because of all the stuff that we've talked about. We feel really positive about the portfolio and the opportunities that we have here. Yeah. When's our next report, Björn? We're looking at-

Björn von Sivers
Senior Investment Director and CFO, VNV Global

July.

Per Brilioth
CEO, VNV Global

Sorry?

Björn von Sivers
Senior Investment Director and CFO, VNV Global

July 14th.

Per Brilioth
CEO, VNV Global

July 14th, the National Day in France. That's when we'll speak next. Thank you, everyone.

Björn von Sivers
Senior Investment Director and CFO, VNV Global

Thank you.

Dennis Mohammad
Investment Manager, VNV Global

Thank you.

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