LeadDesk Oyj

LeadDesk Oyj

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Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptMarch 4, 2026

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

Hello, everyone, and welcome to LeadDesk's earnings call for 2025. My name is Olli Nokso-Koivisto, and I'm the CEO of LeadDesk.

Together with me on the call, I will have Teemu Rautiainen, our CFO, and we'll be presenting 2025 figures and topics for you during the call. The call will first highlight on the key takeaways for last year.

We'll then remind you what LeadDesk is all about. Then we'll let it off to Teemu to explain and deep dive on the financials.

Then after that, we'll take the focus more to 2026, our strategy, and then outlook. At the end of the call, we're going to be having a fireside chat and a Q&A session together with Lotta Backlund, and you'll have a chance to ask those questions then in the chat at that time.

Without further ado, let's jump into the key takeaways from 2025. I'm super excited to be able to here present to you our success for last year.

Last year was very much about the Shisen integration. We announced the acquisition of the Norwegian contact center software provider Shisen, and we closed the deal in early February, and we've been successfully integrating and executing on synergies for the year.

Our revenue reached nearly €40 million, and, even with all those one-off costs included in EBITDA, we managed to increase our EBITDA to 17%, which I consider an excellent job. On top of this, of course, AI has been on everybody's lips the last few years, and for our new AI products, we've had great success, and we've managed to more than double the usage of these products.

Now going to this year, we'll be further investing into this transformation. On top of all this, we've got the new scale, and now we have also the new management team and the systems to support that.

I'm very happy to say that we are in a great position now to scale even further in the coming years. In brief, Shisen integration successfully completed, EBITDA 17%, best for us ever, and reaching that nearly 40 million in revenues, 25% growth, I think this is a great job for us for 2025.

Then after these takeaways, let's come back to these a bit later, but I'll briefly just remind you what LeadDesk is all about. LeadDesk, we are a contact center as a software and service provider, CCaaS, that's the space we play in.

Where we play in is the European market. Contact center software for the European market delivered from the cloud.

We have two distinct markets: our home market, Norway, Sweden, Finland, where we have a wide range of product offering and where we have a significant market position already. On the other hand, our growth market in Continental Europe, where we are more aligned, we are only focusing on the sales enablement side of the business and where we see the fastest growth also going forward.

At the moment, 80% of our revenues are from the home market, and we have a nice big market share here in our home market. AI transformation is also a big topic, of course, on many software industries, and we're also on the way there, providing AI solutions for our customers.

I'll go a bit deeper into that later. We are a growth company and a profitable company, since our IPO from 2019, we've achieved 21% CAGR, and we've been able to increase our EBITDA margin all the time.

This is basically the cookbook for our growth: so profitable growth now and in the future. We have set our strategy on two phases.

At the moment, we are working on strengthening profitability. We've done quite a few acquisitions.

We have wide range of products. We want to harmonize, we want to be even more focused, we want to be able to support that growth from our cash flows in the future, and that's the mission we are on now.

In the mid-term, we'll be moving the focus more to growth initiatives, remembering, of course, to keep an eye on the profitability as well. With this recipe, with this strategy, our North Star is €100 million in revenues with over 20% EBITDA margin.

At €40 million roughly now, 17% EBITDA, reaching for that 20%, and then to that €100 million. That's LeadDesk in a nutshell.

Now how this relates then to 2025, going back to those highlights, we completed the Shisen acquisition, reached that €40 million in revenues, 17% EBITDA. We invested in our AI product offering and the spearhead products, and we renewed our management team and the supporting systems to be able to scale efficiently also in the future.

Regarding the Shisen acquisition, Shisen, a bit under €10 million in revenues, 8.7 in '24, we acquired the business and closed the deal in February last year. They also had concentrated quite a bit on profitability, running down some business lines, and now I'm happy to say that that has been turned around, and we managed to turn the revenue growth positive for Shisen last year.

This fantastic job, remembering at the same time we managed to execute on synergies, bringing the whole group revenue and EBITDA up. We've been also able to cross-sell Shisen to other geographies and managed to secure other cross-sell opportunities as well.

Shisen has a great go-to-market motion at the moment going on, especially in the Swedish market, especially in the Swedish public sector where we are now ramping up sales and getting very good results. On top of that, Shisen has traditionally a wide partner network, and we've been able to really utilize that now last year.

On top of the other synergies, we are also harmonizing the company structure, we are merging entities and having a more clear structure across the board. This is something that will continue to happen also in '26.

Shisen acquisition, number one thing for '25, and the realized synergies and the completed integration. The second point, AI solutions, what we're doing for our customers is we're securing their customer communication.

We are providing the critical path for customers to reach our customers. We are providing this across a wide range of industries, many of which are mission-critical, such as, for example, healthcare, energy utilities, transport.

It's super important to have that critical path always open and secured. We have that data gathering in our system for the customers to utilize then onwards.

How we envision this is that as we are bridging the gap between the agentic world and the real world, we're providing for the critical path to be always open. In practice, what that means is that you can always be in comfort that those calls and messages will reach somebody, will be handled, and there's always visibility to that process.

What we need to enable is to make that as efficient as possible for our customers. Allow our customers to vibe code, to use any AI technology they wish on top of that, while we always secure the critical path and allow those agentic agents to access the real world in a safe, controlled way.

At the same time, gathering that data for our customers then to use in their AI tools. We are in a very nice position between the real world and a critical business function, which also then safeguards our business going further.

We're not a long tail SaaS, we're really in the business mission-critical parts of bridging that gap between the virtual and the real world. Lastly, one thing we really see is that the voice is really getting a new life.

As now voice is no longer a second-class citizen with regards to AI, but AI is able to process voice as well as text, we see that handling voice is becoming more efficient, and there's a lot of more value that can be brought into those conversations. We believe that voice is going to be transformative to the AI revolution going forward.

We're really there with our CPaaS platform and with our software bridging that gap between the virtual and the physical. Lastly, we announced an acquisition in February of Fluentic, which is a great addition to our customer service portfolio, enabling multilingual customer service in any contact center.

We have some fantastic customers there, just as, for example, Finnair, Iberia, Volvo, and so on, big, great brands offering solutions and multilingual service to their end customers. AI, a big opportunity for us and big transformation going on now.

Lastly, last year, we've renewed our management team quite a bit, and at the same time, we brought in a new financial ERP and other supporting systems to support our growth. We took a big, hard look at all the systems and all the processes we have and see which ones are scalable up to that €100 million.

There was a lot of harmonization ongoing, and there still is, but now we've managed to secure all the necessary capabilities to execute on this journey. Firstly, the beginning of the year, Teemu Rautiainen, who you hear from next, joined us as our new CFO, bringing in a lot of expertise from other listed and private equity owned companies, a lot of SaaS expertise also on the financial side.

Michael Østgaard came to us through the Shisen acquisition as the former CEO of Shisen and has taken up the role of CRO. He has a fantastic background, for example, from companies like SAP running big enterprise sales organizations.

Then lastly, by no means least, Samuli Lehtonen, our new VP of Operations, joined us from McKinsey where he was the engagement manager, and he's really bringing in those best processes and principles from the largest and the best organizations across the globe. Everybody knows McKinsey, everybody knows they work with the best, and Samuli has worked with the largest and the best companies in the field, and now we have that knowledge also in-house to drive our best practices and processes to the right level to reach that €100 million.

Very excited about team. Enjoy working every day with them.

It's been a real honor to have these gentlemen with us now. That's it for the main highlights from 2025 from the executive side.

I'll give it off now to Teemu Rautiainen, our CFO, to deep dive on the financials. Here you go, Teemu.

Teemu Rautiainen

Thank you, Olli. As Olli already mentioned, our financials and operations were very much impacted by the Shisen acquisition in '25.

Our revenues grew strongly because of the Shisen acquisition, our EBITDA grew even more strongly, we hit the all-time high EBITDA margin, and also our balance sheet was impacted by the acquisition. These are the topics I will explore more in the upcoming slides.

Our revenue growth was strong in '25. Our revenues grew by 25%, and that was mainly driven by the Shisen acquisition.

The contribution of all acquisition was roughly €8 million in our revenue in '25. Organically, our revenues grew quite well in the H1, and in H2 they were impacted by the regulatory impacts in the telemarketing, especially in the Continental Europe, and there Spain and the Netherlands.

As we have a big contact center customers in these countries, their businesses as it was impacted by the regulation, it also impacted on our revenues. Positively, we also had some positive development in our business.

The customer service business and software was growing, especially in the Nordic countries. There we had the Shisen impact, we also had other software in the Nordics, for example in Finland, that were growing positively.

Also our AI business relative to its size grew really well organically. Overall, this is an area that we want to address more going forward because we see there positive areas where we are growing organically, and where by investing more in these areas, we can also grow organically in the whole company level and get back to the organic growth trajectory.

Another focus area for us is the net revenue retention where we also had both positive areas, but then areas that we want to improve, and that's something where we can also boost our organic growth development. One example is the cross-sales.

We can cross-sell our AI solutions more broadly to our customers in other industries, in other countries, driving the organic growth development. I see a lot of upside for us also to grow organically.

As we are able to capitalize on these opportunities and investments, also the return on our marketing investments will improve, and that will improve our profitability. Our profitability already now reached, as said, the all-time high 17%, and this was also driven by the Shisen acquisition.

As also said, our EBITDA was the all-time high, and we have actually been able to double our EBITDA during the past three years. In '25 alone, we were able to increase our EBITDA in four consecutive quarters.

In H2, our EBITDA margin was 20%, so that was a significant jump from the previous. Apart from the Shisen acquisition, that was improved by the synergies we were able to achieve, but also other productivity and efficiency improvement we had in our operations.

As Olli said, we had reported some one-off costs related to these in the first half of the year, and now we were able to see the results in the second half. Positively, the improved EBITDA converted also to increased cash flow from our operations.

Our operative cash flow increased by 35% from last year. Additionally, we invested in €1 million more in the CapEx basically coming from the Shisen acquisition as well as our investments in the platform competitiveness both in the customer service and sales enablement side, and also the AI features and functionalities we are building for our customers.

Overall, the EBITDA improvement is also important to manage our balance sheet and the debt we have raised to fund our acquisitions. As said, our balance sheet was impacted by the Shisen acquisition as well.

We raised some external debt, and already now since H1, it has come down by €1.4 million. We have been repaying the loans, and the net debt to equity ratio is now 1.5, which is relatively low, and that leaves us room to acquire more companies in the future.

The equity was slightly impacted by the goodwill amortizations we have been doing related to the acquisitions and also the financing costs. The operative performance improved from last year.

Overall, I would say that we are well positioned to continue executing on our growth strategy, and I let Olli to talk more about that later.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

Thank you, Teemu. Then my favorite topic, our strategy, and the focus then for '26.

As you all know, LeadDesk is a product company. We live by our product.

There, I'm very happy to say, especially in these geopolitical times, that we are largely sovereign European provider with very little ties to the geopolitically risky suppliers. This is something that we'll be focusing even more on and targeting for the future.

We want to become the leading sovereign European provider on the CCaaS market. We're largely there already, and we want to take that even further.

This is really one of the things that drives us going forward. As you all know, European sovereignty is a big thing now.

It's going to be a huge thing going forward with the upcoming regulation, for example, from EU regarding tendering processes and so on. It's going to be a nice tailwind for us going forward, and we're very proud of being European.

Secondly, we are the backbone of our customers' customer communication. We're there guaranteeing that you can always reach somebody in your energy company, in your healthcare provider.

Whether it's voice or text, whether there's an AI helping out there, we're making sure that our customers' critical operations always run, and they are well managed. We're super excited about all the AI opportunities.

Even our HR is vibe coding nowadays, getting those efficiency gains, but at the same time, we recognize that we are the critical path for our customers' customer communication. Thirdly, we are reaching for that 1 billion annual customer interactions that we help.

Now we're somewhere between 3 and 500 million contacts, and that we'll see increasing to 1 billion going forward, which is a great target for us. These are our product North Star targets: so leading European provider, a sovereign European provider in the CCaaS space; backbone of critical communication enabling the connection from the virtual to the physical world; and lastly, that 1 billion customer communications annually handled on our platform.

This then will lead to the financial targets: €100 million in revenues, at least, with over 20% EBITDA margin. How we see this developing is that we'll be growing here in the Nordics still.

As Continental market is huge compared to the Nordics. It's a much, much bigger market.

We'll be growing there as well. We'll be compounding this with inorganic growth, as there's a lot of small competition on the market.

As the barrier to change is quite high for the customers, this the smooth way for us to widen our customer space and get more adoption of our platform and get that efficiency gains that we saw last year on the profitability margins. On top of this, enabling our customers an agentic way of working will bring further then opportunities going onwards.

That's how we reach €100 million. Then my favorite slide second time today, the two-phase strategy here.

Now we're super focused on the profitability side, which you also see in our guidance. We are now all about getting that profitability to the level we want so that we can then turn the page and focus on those growth investments going forward.

Through this, then on the financial side, we'll reach the North Star of €100 million, at least, in revenue and 20% EBITDA margin. How do we then plan to accelerate?

Firstly, of course, we're not done on the M&A path. This market needs consolidation.

There are too many players on the field, and because of AI, many of them can't compete anymore. It's better to consolidate the market now.

We'll be also doing sector expansion, more to the public and especially the healthcare sectors. These are big sectors for us with nice NRR, nice positive NRR, nice growth rates, and we'll be further going into these segments in the future.

We turned around Shisen revenue development. Now it's on a growth path, and we see that this the kind of magic we can bring in to the acquired companies.

Lastly, on the Nordic market, we'll be shifting our focus from sales enablement to customer service, where we are already strong at. In the Nordics, we will be still looking for acquisitions, we'll be doing sector expansion, we'll be working on that positive momentum on profitability, and shifting even more focus into customer service, where we can really bring in that value of AI to our prospects.

On the Continental market, it's a huge market. It's very big.

In the Nordics, we have some 20 million people in Finland, Sweden, Norway combined; in Netherlands alone, there's 18 million. In the Continental European market, this will continue to be our organic growth hub.

We will continue growth there. However, we will be shifting the portfolio focus so that we have a wider portfolio going forward, also to the customer service, widening away from only sales enablement in the Continental market, thereby addressing an even larger market.

Here, we need to really work well, and we need to work wisely. It's a huge market, we need to be efficient and choose the battles we want to take.

Here we are focusing on the higher profitability customers, the ones where we can really excel and bring in that growth and the margins. That's our recipe for Continental Europe.

Together, by exceeding the targets in the Nordics, on our home market, and these Continental European targets, we can really make a big change. Very excited about the market now.

There's a lot happening there. I mentioned our outlook a bit earlier, looking at then the outlook and what are the drivers behind that.

On the short term, there are some tailwinds helping us out, and some headwinds then taking us back. Firstly, customers are increasingly investing into AI.

They are seeing the opportunities, and now they are seeing the effects. This where we can help.

This where we can bring in those efficiency gains. Of course, at the same time, there's regulation.

There's regulation regarding AI. Europe wants to be a regulatory superpower.

There's regulation breaking that growth down a bit, but at the same time, it's giving sovereign European players, such as us, opportunities to the future. As mentioned, customers need efficiency.

That's the name of the game nowadays, working on those margins, and we help our customers be more efficient. The macroeconomic situation, of course, at the same time, while helping us out in that our customers want our kind of solutions which bring in efficiency, at the same time, that macroeconomic uncertainty is bringing the investment levels down across the board, especially in the Nordics and especially in Finland.

Then again, new technologies, such as us, can bring in a lot of that value. At the same time, customers are looking around, and we need to really be the best-in-class for our customers.

Lastly, just to close off, being sovereign European and having our own technology stack, which we own and operate, is a great benefit now going to the future. With these tailwinds, headwinds, our guidance, also connecting to our two-phase strategy, is that we expect our EBITDA margin to be between 15 and 20% for this year.

Here, as said, we are very focused on getting that profitability to a level where we can turn the page and look at those growth investments. That's '26, at least the first half, I think, very much in a nutshell.

This might include also then giving up some less profitable business that especially has come through the few latest acquisitions. That's something we are looking into so that we get all the benefits.

On the other hand, we are interested in getting that profitability up and having a more focused business that we can really grow going forward. We see in the mid and long term, we see a lot of opportunities on the market, and we see that as the market is consolidating, there's going to be huge opportunities for us, and AI we consider as being also a tailwind for us, helping us out then grow into the future.

To summarize, EBITDA margin last year improved to 17%, and we're targeting now that we get to 20% in the mid-term. We are increasing our focus on the customer service segment, both in the Nordics where we already have a substantial part of our business in the customer service part, but also now in Continental Europe where we've been focusing more on the sales enablement.

Our customers are adopting our AI solutions. We really love to work on these AI solutions with our customers and get those benefits delivered.

Then looking at the guidance for this year, we are looking at the EBITDA to grow, and that's between 15 and 20% then for this year. Thank you for the session so far.

Next up, we'll have Lotta Backlund hosting the fireside chat. We'll be right back in 1 minute.

Thank you.

Lotta Backlund

My name is Lotta Backlund, and I have the pleasure of posing your questions and mine to Teemu and Olli. Some housekeeping to start with: you may notice that already there's a lot of questions in the chat, you can post your questions, we will get to all of them.

All right. Thank you for the presentation, and congratulations on yet another quarter of profitability improvement.

Even the headline of your presentation talked a lot about Shisen, and you were saying that we need consolidation in the market, growth through acquisitions seemed to be a solid strategy. Is there anything other potential companies that you're looking at right now, and what would you be looking at in that case?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

Yes. Thanks, Lotta.

Great question. Regarding the market, so as I said, the market is ripe for consolidation, there's been consolidation happening, we've been driving that consolidation as well.

We see that both in the Nordics as well as, of course, in the Continental market, there's a lot of competition that's potentially coming to the market and that we can really leverage then for our growth and profitability in the future. On top of that, of course, like we saw with Fluentic, there's great AI technology that we can bring on board to then horizontally sell to our existing customer base, whether it's LeadDesk Cloud, Shisen, callback solution, and so on.

There's a great opportunity also in that regard.

Lotta Backlund

You mentioned Fluentic, and there's actually a question about that in the chat. How do you see Fluentic's growth and profitability profile as part of LeadDesk?

Can you comment further on the acquisition price? Was the purchase price comprised solely to the €300,000 bank loan is the question.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

Yes. Regarding Fluentic, which was formerly called Transfluent, they are providing translation solutions, automatic translation solutions for customer service, and they have some fantastic customers.

We've been talking for them for a long time, and now things just clicked, and we had the opportunity to bring them aboard. We see that we can then bring these capabilities to our platforms as well at the same time and enable our customers to service their customers multilingually.

There's a great opportunity there. Regarding the purchase price, it was within those limits, we had a fair deal which was in line with the previous acquisitions we've made.

Lotta Backlund

Let's stay on the AI topic, because there's a bunch of other questions around that as well. Has the rapid development of AI agents in recent months changed your view on the short-term impact of AI on your business?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

I guess short term, especially short term, no, because where our business lies is, of course, with large customers who have a longer-term momentum going on. What I do see is that all software needs to evolve.

Long-tail SaaS, of course, has a lot of risks involved. That said, we are not, in my view, we are not long-tail SaaS, we are providing a critical systematic solution.

What we're doing for our customers is that we're providing the connectivity to the real world. We're providing those APIs, we're providing that connectivity, and on top of that, we're providing that secure channel that you know is always on and that you know is going to help your customers reach somebody on your end.

Whether it's AI or not, you want to know what's happening with your customer communication, that's your most important asset, and we're providing that visibility then. Then, how you handle that, that's another topic.

I love ChatGPT, I love Claude, all these, they're great, fantastic stuff, and we use them a lot in-house as well. The thing that we provide is then the platform for you to reliably have those vibe-coded apps running on, or those agentic agents serving your customers with, and then with our platform, you know what's happening, and you can securely do that.

One of the first things that, for example, our first voicebot customer now wanted was that they wanted visibility to what's actually happening on the voice channel because they have this bot, and it's then becoming invisible. What's happening is that it's a big part of their business, their business would be down if that bot would be dysfunctional.

Then we are providing that security to our customers.

Lotta Backlund

This is sort of a little bit connected, because there's another question: are you seeing customers being able to reduce the number of contact center worker thanks to productivity gains coming from AI-powered solutions? Do you have visibility into that?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

Yes, to somewhat. That's a twofold, because this the typical way, like Economics 101, when the marginal cost of something comes down, the volumes go up.

Having a dialogue with your customers is the most important and the most valuable thing you can have. Then, of course, you don't want to have unvaluable discussions, you rather automate them, digitalize whatever, that's been happening a long time.

Now, because of the regulation, it's harder and harder to actually reach out to your customers. Somebody is talking to them.

If it's not you, if it's not your bot, it's going to be your neighbor's bot. That's the kind of world we live in that we need to be where the value is being created in those conversations.

The secondary conversations that bring no value should be automated, but you should remember that there is the opportunity then to talk to the customer or to upsell through agentic means, because somebody's going to do that.

Teemu Rautiainen

From the monetization point of view, of course, then when we deliver value and we find the right monetization vehicle, there's a big upside for us. I don't I don't think anybody has really cracked that in the market yet, so that's something.

We have the same tools, and how we package those to our customers that we know well provides us us with upsides.

Lotta Backlund

Right. Thank you.

Back to business. The profitability guidance appears cautious following the strong H2.

What are the key variables determining where within the guidance range you will end up?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

Yes. One thing Teemu will comment more concretely, but one thing I want to highlight always is that I've always been a straight shooter, and if you look at the guidance, there's no one-offs or adjustments, that's the EBITDA, that's it.

Then that means, of course, that as we are working on those synergies, as we are working on that, there's going to be one-off costs and all that that are going to be included there. On the reasoning behind the guidance, we say that we are reaching for 20% in the short to mid term, and that is the ambition, of course, but then always there's the other side of the coin.

Teemu?

Teemu Rautiainen

No, that's correct. We, of course, we aim to reach this 20% level, but there may be things that are impacting on our outlook, there is a bracket and hopefully we are at the highest range of the bracket.

Lotta Backlund

All right. Very good.

We talked a lot about, or you guys talked a lot about Continental Europe, obviously. You did mention some regulatory changes, specifically in Spain and the Netherlands.

Do you want to explain a little bit what that was about? Yes.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

In Netherlands and Spain around summer, around same time, they had changes which in Netherlands was about opt-in. Telemarketing without an opt-in became illegal.

Then naturally the volumes of telemarketing went down, and that's reflected in our second half numbers. Happy to say though that at the beginning of the year we already saw growth there.

That was what happened in Netherlands, and then in Spain, it was sort of the same story around the same time. That is also now they're mostly behind us, although for Spain, there's big package on energy, regulating all energy companies, it's 200 pages, and there's only one small section about marketing.

That will have some impact also going to the second half. We don't know yet what the full extent, because it's a long regulation to the energy companies which only a small part is marketing, but

Lotta Backlund

There's a question here: could you comment roughly on the current split between inbound and outbound software in your home markets versus Continental Europe? There's a follow-up: could you comment on your growth outlook in Continental Europe with customer service software?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

In the Nordics, as said, the customer service split is actually leaning towards customer service, customer service in the Nordics. Then, of course, it's quite an easy question for the Continental market.

As we said, we've been focusing on the sales enablement until now, naturally there's going to be great growth on percentages in Continental market. We're still formulating the plans now and piecing everything together, so that's going to be one of the growth initiatives going forward as well.

Maybe

Teemu Rautiainen

we cannot comment on the outlook on that level, but as Olli said, the sales enablement software has been our main product in Continental, and one of our biggest customers is the contact center operators. When they are hit by the telemarketing regulation, then that impacted on our, of course, then the sales enablement growth.

We have many other products and software also, and now we prepare the plans on how we are going to actually grow with those, because there we have a good platform to grow.

Lotta Backlund

All right. Thank you.

Do you still believe the regulation changes in Europe to have tail impact on annual returning revenue in 2026?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

The ones we know of is Spain has this energy companies are going to be, but that's still on Spain. Other than that, we have no known impacts from regulation.

Although there's could be also our tailwinds or positive effect that we are a registered telecoms provider and an operator in the markets where we operate in. In the Nordics, in our home market, we are licensed quite high, which means that we have opportunities then when it's regarding the regulation, meaning that we have a moat from anybody offering outside of the market.

Everybody wants to keep the telephone network and that side contained. As a licensed telecoms provider and operator in many markets, we have an edge towards any providers who are not working on the local market like we are.

That's being the sovereign European player then enables us to also provide services to our customers that other providers can't, like self-provisioning telephony, for example.

Lotta Backlund

Related to this, there's a question: in Continental Europe, in which client sectors or verticals do you think you can penetrate with the inbound solution?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

Looking at the industries where we are strong is, of course, one is public sector and healthcare, especially in Norway and in Finland. Those are, of course, certain segments.

On top of that, actually we see quite a bit of growth in the automotive industry. Car dealership and related services, everything related to cars seems to be a growth with nice growth and NRR.

Then other services, such as professional services, for example, and so on, where we can grow, that's the industries where we see. Lastly, actually something that we have both on the customer service and sales enablement, the home security.

We are doing great in both, customer service and for sales enablement, we're top provider in that segment.

Lotta Backlund

Right. You've mentioned Finnish healthcare, and there's actually a question specifically about that.

The financial situation of Finnish healthcare areas, those are the governmental units that provide public healthcare, has improved. Do you see this as a possible catalyst for 2026 ARR growth?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

Yes, for certain. I think healthcare across the board is going to be huge for us.

Finland as one of our home markets is, of course, instrumental here. That being said, of course, the Finnish market and the macroeconomic situation is what it is, and Sweden and Norway are looking more lucrative as options, so that's something to take into account.

Of course, being headquartered in Finland, then we'll be focusing also on the Finnish market going forward. I think Sweden, Norway, the economy, the macroeconomics are fantastic compared to what we have here, and that's going to bring us tailwinds in our home market.

Lotta Backlund

Right. Let's take a step back.

When do you believe the ARR could be turned back to growth, and what are you seeing as key enabling drivers for this?

Teemu Rautiainen

I start, and maybe you can add. The key drivers are the NRR basically.

ARR to us comprises of two things: one is the new ARR, winning new customers, and the other one is NRR, growing with existing customers. Of course, both are important, but I think we have more upside and where we want to improve is the NRR part, growing with our existing customer.

What does that mean? It means that we have a wide software portfolio and also services, we can sell software that we are selling to a customer in a specific industry to another customer in the same industry.

Then also bringing this AI solutions that we have introduced eight, bringing those to the customers, so that we are bringing our offering, the selected, not everything, but selected offering to the customers. I believe that there we have an upside.

I think those are the main things. Of course, then we need to be better also in managing the customer relationships, then that will also improve the NRR.

Lotta Backlund

This is a question that came from two different askers, actually. Then there's a follow-up: is it customers squeezing their number of seats, or are you seeing customers changing to rivals?

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

The biggest effect was from the regulatory change in Spain and Netherlands, so that was by far the largest effect, right? That's why we see that well, that's the regulation, most of them are still our customers, just with fewer seats.

That's the biggest item for us is the regulatory change in Continental market driving down those seats. That was the biggest effect by far.

Lotta Backlund

Right. We've covered part of this question, but maybe there's something you want to add: your gross margin improved notably in H2, what was driving this, and are you seeing continuing tailwind in gross margin for 2026?

Teemu Rautiainen

Yes, our gross margins, again, we have a wide portfolio, it varies between products. We have some software products with very high gross margins, and then we have some where it is lower.

We see potential in improving that on an average level, and I think that's coming from being more efficient in our own customer support, being more efficient in our own cloud operations or hosting the services, and then on the service function. There are drivers that enable us to improve, but we are not promising a huge jump in gross margin.

We are relatively good in that already, always more difficult to improve.

Lotta Backlund

All right. I'm being mindful of time, but if you still have questions, you may post them in the chat.

We still have time for a few of them. There's one more, which is very numbers: how do you see your CapEx level developing in 2026 compared to 2025?

Teemu Rautiainen

Our CapEx has been growing a bit, it grew by million, and part of that was coming from the Shisen acquisition. Yes, we need to invest in the competitiveness of our platforms, but like other costs, we of course want to look at it critically, and we don't want to grow it too much.

If it's growing a little, but relative to revenue at least we aim to keep it quite stable.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

Yes, and here I think it's more about where do we invest that. Now we want to shift a lot of that effort into AI and the horizontal products, providing for all our customers AI insights, great opportunity there, fantastic product.

Combining that with our quality assurance tool really makes a big change, for example, in the Dutch market, I mentioned, that had the regulatory change. This combination of AI helps also there working in the Dutch market in the new regulation where you need to actually guarantee that certain quality metrics are made when you are talking with your customer.

Great opportunity there. Voicebot, that's another spearhead product now.

We actually the first use case that went live was for our 24/7 hotline. We used to outsource our 24/7 hotline, now we have our voicebot there helping our customers out and then, of course, waking up on-duty personnel when required with the sufficient information and so on.

I think that's a great opportunities with regards to these horizontal products, and there's a lot more, and we really want to help our customers out then vibe code their own on top of us and really then bring that efficiency to their customer communication. I believe that software like us, this one-to-one communication, that's where AI is taking everything.

There's not going to be newsletters, mass mailings, that's going to be out of the door, and it's all going to be one-to-one communication powered by AI.

Lotta Backlund

Very cool. Your depreciation increased notably from H1.

What was driving this, and was there any exceptional items impacting or is it now the normal level?

Teemu Rautiainen

It was mainly driven by the goodwill amortizations. When we acquired companies, we generated some goodwill and that was amortized.

It's non-cash item, it didn't impact on our cash flows, but it is there in the depreciations and they are amortized over long period of time, they will also continue.

Lotta Backlund

All right. Those are all the questions we had in the chat.

Thank you so much for being very very active and sending in your questions. We will meet you guys again in a quarter or two to hear what exciting news and developments has happened within all of your business.

Thank you very much.

Teemu Rautiainen

Thank you.

Olli Nokso-Koivisto

Thank you.