Etteplan Oyj

Etteplan Oyj

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Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptFebruary 12, 2026

Juha Näkki

Welcome to this webcast presentation for Etteplan's financial statements for 2025. My name is Juha Näkki, I'm the President and CEO of the company, and at the end of the presentation, we will have a Q&A session where also our CFO, Helena Kukkonen, will be available to answer questions.

We will go with the following contents for the presentation: so first look at the highlights and overview of 2025, look a little bit more in detail to the Q4 development in 2025, service areas in the last quarter, and then see how we did against our targets, followed then by the Q&A session. If I start with the highlights of 2025, of course, very end of 2024 and in the beginning of 2025, we launched our new AI-driven strategy.

We have been working hard to implement the strategy. We've had different kinds of development programs running to get us ready for the change that is required.

We did manage to get our new offering out to our customers, and we managed to increase the AI-driven share of revenue to 5%, still small percentages, but it's a good start. It is moving, and we expect that number to increase further during the years to come.

If we look at then our service area of technical communication and data solutions, this is the service area where we have come the farthest in our AI-driven offering and development. With the new offering, we were able to gain market share and win new kind of business.

Despite the weak market conditions, we were also able to grow, and in the second half of the year, we did improve our profitability significantly compared to the weaker quarters in the first half of the year. This is, of course, encouraging.

It kind of proves that our strategic direction is the right one. Now we just need to make sure that we continue on this path, and also get the other service areas up and running on a similar level.

We also had a strong cash flow during the year. Despite the slightly weaker results, we managed to improve our cash flow a bit, and this was basically due to optimization of our working capital, and then, of course, we had efficiency measures taken over the years, which had an impact on the cash flow as well.

We also completed two acquisitions, which supported our business and enabled us to maintain the revenue at last year's level, or a very small growth. These are certainly helping our market position in Sweden and also in Germany, where the acquisitions took place, and we are really now driving forward to integrate the businesses in full into our business, and really get the synergies out of these businesses going forward.

Of course, on the negative side, the market was difficult. The market uncertainty was high.

Geopolitical tensions, trade policy uncertainty, and also the weak consumer demand really had an impact on our customers' decision-making, and investments were very, very slow to start. Of course, there are certain projects going on, and some of our customers do have sales, but sales of equipment, sales of services, and, unfortunately, this does not have that much engineering or other type of requirements that would increase our demand.

Certainly, going forward, we hope that this will also change and investments will start to pick up all over our clientele. Weak demand, of course, was there for most of the sectors.

Of course, in defense and also in energy, we still had good demand, a high level of investments, which had impact, of course, on our demand. Then due to the weak situation, we did have to, especially in the first half of the year, we did have to implement measures to save cost, and then there were high non-recurring expenses.

Also for us, there was unusually high losses from customer bankruptcies, basically, during the year, and this had an impact on our results as well. If we look a little bit more detail on the operating environment, so, of course, it was challenging.

This geopolitical and trade policy tensions are there, and this certainly didn't help our customers' ability to take decisions, especially on investments. For that reason, the market remained quite weak, and also the weak consumer demand, which ultimately then boils down to demand with our customers, was low, and this also had an impact, a negative impact, on our market position and situation.

Basically, any decisions regarding investments were directed towards cost savings or investments in AI. These are the areas where things were moving a little bit, but on the other investments, it was rather slow.

If we look at then the geographic aspect of the business, in Europe, the market conditions were of course slight differences between countries, but generally the same, weaker markets and so on, Finland and Sweden perhaps having the most difficult market situation. In China, the market situation was clearly better than in Europe.

Of course, the trade war and other political tensions have an impact in China as well, but there the trend of buying services had positive impact for our industry, and we saw healthy demand in China throughout the year. If we look at the key figures for 2025, revenue was at €361.4 million, a very, very small growth.

EBITDA at €24.2 million, at 6.7% for the full year; EBIT at 17.9, 4.9%; and then EPS at 42 cents. Based on the results, our board of directors is proposing a dividend of 22 cents per share to the Annual General Meeting.

If we then look a little bit on the revenue and personnel split per service area first, Engineering Solutions was at 57%, boosted by the acquisitions done in this service area during last year; Software and Embedded Solutions at 23%; and Technical Communication and Data Solutions at 20%. Revenue by service area was Finland 45%, Scandinavia 26%, Central Europe 26%, and China 3%.

Personnel: Finland 47%, Scandinavia 18%, Central Europe 24%, and China 11%. If we then look at the customer segments and the split between different customer segments from the revenue, clearly Automotive was growing slightly due to the acquisition of Novacon.

We've also gained some market share in some other customers, we are doing rather okay in this segment despite the challenges overall. Also, the Aerospace and Defense was growing, now at 8% of our revenues, and, of course, here especially the defense sector has been extremely strong, and the demand is really high.

Marine and transportation also growing to 4%, and the general industrial machinery dropping to 10%, and others remaining at relatively the same proportion as last year. If we then look a little bit on the financial development for Q4, the key figures are relatively similar to last year: a very small increase in revenue, revenue outside Finland growing slightly, 4.5% growth; operating profit EBITDA -0.6%; operating profit EBIT 3%; and EPS growing by 2.4%.

Relatively similar to last year. If we look at the revenue in specific, 92.4, sorry, €92.9 million for Q4, a growth of 1.7%, and for the full year 361.4, a growth of 0.1%, on par with last year.

Of course, the weak demand situation continued throughout the year, and our organic development was negative. If we look at the full year, so, of course, acquisitions had an impact.

If we look at key accounts specifically, key accounts were actually growing in the fourth quarter for plus 0.9%, but for the full year dropping by 1% overall. EBITDA was modest for the full year, €6.8 million for the Q4 at 7.3%, and for the full year, €24.2 million, or 6.7%.

We did have quite significant, in the weak market conditions, we had to do quite a lot of restructuring activity to adjust our operation, and this, of course, had a fairly high impact on our profitability. Also, as mentioned earlier, we had, for us, unusually high losses from customer bankruptcies.

We had credit losses, but we also had invoicing that was canceled, and work in progress that had to be written down. The total impact of such losses were approximately €700,000 to €800,000, which is unusually high for our normal years.

Overall, the non-recurring items were totaling €2.8 million, which is also a high number. Without the non-recurring items, our EBITDA for the full year would have been at 7.5%, operationally on a similar level to last year and okay-ish for the weak or difficult market conditions.

EBIT for the Q4 was at €5.3 million, a small increase compared to last year, at 5.7%, and for the full year 17.9%, and a slight decrease compared to last year. Amortizations related to acquisitions in the fourth quarter were €1.5 million, and for the full year, €6.4 million.

EPS increased for 2025 due to lower non-operative items, the financial items were slightly positive, and also slightly lower taxes, this had a positive impact on the EPS. Despite the lower EBIT, EPS was 1 cent higher than last year.

As mentioned earlier, the dividend proposal is 22 cents from the Board of Directors. Operating cash flow was solid and strong throughout the year, €16.8 million in the last quarter, and then €32 million for the year.

We did continue to do work to optimize our working capital, and also, of course, the efficiency measures that we took had a positive impact on the cash flow. Personnel at the end of the year was at 3,777, a slight drop from last year, and on average 3,846 employees, a slight 0.7% decrease due to the weak market situation.

We have also slowed down recruitment a little bit to accommodate for the lower market, and in Finland we had a total of 168 employees temporarily laid off at the end of 2025, which reflects the weak market conditions that we have had in Finland. In the income statement, nothing major, slightly lower financial items as you can see here, and slightly lower taxes, but nothing other than that.

On the balance sheet, the total balance sheet is at €304 million, two acquisitions having a small impact, but no major impacts into the balance sheet either. If we look at the service areas then a little bit more in detail, in Engineering Solutions, the demand situation remained weak as the investment decisions were postponed quite a lot.

At the end of the year, we normally see that the year-end is a very, very busy time. Now, already during Q4, things were postponed after the year-end, we did see a weaker market.

We also had some customers where they closed down operations for the Christmas break, which had an impact. Of course, the long vacations during Christmas had an impact on all service areas as well.

Here, we did achieve growth of 8.3% for Q4 and 6.2% for the full year, but this was of course helped by or supported by the acquisitions that were completed in the service area. We also had fairly significant non-recurring expenses at the service area of €1.4 million for the full year.

Without these, the EBITDA would have been at 8%, and for the market conditions, a decent performance, but, of course, we need to improve on these kinds of numbers in this service area. The Software and Embedded Solutions, we had clearly a difficult year.

The demand was lower and the revenue was dropping by 14.9% in Q4 and by 14.5% in the full year, and it was also at modest profitability. We did improve compared to the really weak Q3 in Q4, we had 7% profitability for Q4, but still this is far from where we want to be.

We also had during the year here, we had €0.6 million of non-recurring items. Without those, the profitability for the full year would have been at 7.4% EBITDA.

Here we have during the year changed the management of the business, and under the new management and new leadership, we have started an improvement program to accelerate our strategy execution, drive revenue growth, and improve profitability. The implementation of this plan has started and is progressing on schedule.

Also we have introduced news regarding certain rearrangements in our business for 2026, which will have an impact in Q1, but should improve our performance then going forward. We are also heavily working with bringing AI into this service area more, and investing a lot on agentic AI and other new solutions, and this is something that we will be talking about in the coming quarters more.

If we then look at Technical Communication and Data Solutions, in this service area, we were growing throughout the year, and revenue in Q4 increased by 6.9%, and for the full year 4.1%. We have achieved a clear profitability improvement in the second half of the year, and EBITDA for Q4 was at 9%, closer to our sort of group-level 10% target.

Here we have progressed the most in our AI-driven revenue, and it is close to 20% in this service area currently, and we see clear interest for the new offering. With the new offering, we have been able to win market share, and with that we've been able to grow even in the difficult market conditions, and clearly we have been able to also improve profitability.

This is a good demonstration of our strategy work and how our strategy is working when we get the implementation right, and this is something that we will now continue going into this year. Also here, we have had to, in the difficult market, do difficult decisions as well, and non-recurring expenses amounted to €0.4 million.

Without those, the profitability for the full year would have been at 7%, not really where we want to be, but we are happy with the development and we are happy with the profitability direction, and we will continue the work to improve it further during this year. If we then look at a little bit our strategy and our financial guidance for 2026, the strategy that was introduced in the beginning of 2025 is called Transformation with AI, and we are really on a journey to transform our business, transform the way we create value for our customers, and get AI and other new technologies into use as a part of our service offering towards our customers.

The journey has started. We are currently at 5%, and we have a lot of programs ongoing to increase this further.

There's a lot of work being done in all service areas to improve our offering in the AI-driven revenue, and we expect to see good results during this year from the development. These are the financial and strategic targets that have been set: so 35% AI-driven solutions share of revenue, currently at 5%, but started to move during last year; Managed Services share of revenue at 67%, a slight increase for last year; revenue, of course, still staying at the same level, we cannot be happy with that; and then operating profit EBITDA at 6.7%, so far from our above 10 target.

We are working hard with the strategy, and we do believe that when we get the new offering out, we will have better opportunities to grow with our AI-driven offering, and we will be able to win market share and improve our profitability going forward. We've seen that the strategic direction is the right one through the TCDS business, and we expect to follow this trend also in the other service areas going forward.

If we look at the financial guidance for 2026 and also the market outlook, still it is highly uncertain. We have seen the Greenland situation in January, which didn't really help our customers' decision-making, the year started off quite slowly in January.

We will also incur, due to the change programs that we have initiated, we will incur certain non-recurring costs during Q1, the first quarter will be slightly slow. Then with the measures taken, we expect to pick up in terms of growth and also in terms of profitability, and we estimate that our EBIT will be between €19 million and €25 million for the full year, and our revenue would be between €360 million and €380 million for the full year 2026.

At this point, I would like to open the Q&A session for any questions that you may have.

Operator

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key 6 on your telephone keypad.

The next question comes from Emil Immonen from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Emil Immonen

Good afternoon, Juha, and thanks for taking my questions. Just to start off on the cash flow, is the kind of current net working capital, is that sustainable, or what is a little bit of a one-off for Q4?

Juha Näkki

Of course, there's a deviation between quarters, and Q4 is typically the strongest one for us, but I would say that there is no one-time items. We have been working hard to improve on that, and working with different items, working with payment terms, working with improving the work in progress and getting invoices out faster, etc.

This has had an impact on it, but I would say that there are no sort of one-time items that have a major impact. No.

Emil Immonen

That's good to hear. In that case, to go forward maybe with a couple of questions on the AI solutions that you're offering, how easy would these solutions and products be for somebody else to replicate, or are they completely dependent on your proprietary data, for example?

Juha Näkki

Of course, we use and probably everybody else is using different kinds of AI tools already in all their everyday work, this is really something that is happening everyday already in most of the work that we do. If we talk about our sort of AI-driven revenue and the solutions that we have developed there, this is something that we are developing based on our knowledge and understanding of different processes, different ways of working, and the customer value chain, and these are then solutions where we have developed Etteplan's proprietary sort of solutions.

For example, in technical communication solutions, we have our own RACE toolkit, which is our developed AI agents and other solutions. Of course, someone may copy, but it is really something that we built from our knowledge base based on our understanding of different kinds of processes and so on, and utilize different AI technologies to get this done.

Of course, copying is possible, but, it's not that easy, I would say.

Emil Immonen

That's good to hear. Then maybe to close off, on the technical communications, it's quite a good trend now in growth.

Do you feel that that is sustainable and that should be expected to continue, or how are you planning for 2026?

Juha Näkki

It's, of course, in such a highly volatile market, having one tweet changing the mindset of people, it's really hard to say that what is sort of sustainable these days, but certainly, we are able to win market share with the solutions that we have. We have great solutions with AI in the market, and there is very good interest from our customers.

We have won several outsourcing agreements during the last quarter in the TCDS business, and there are really, really good prospects for winning more business. Of course, the growth itself also depends, even if we're able to win market share, the growth depends also heavily on the market conditions.

Should they improve, we are very confident that then we will be able to grow and continue growing and even accelerate, but, of course, it's really difficult to say what happens in the market. There are some positive signs, there are certain industries that are showing some positive signs, but we've seen signs before and they haven't really materialized, we're maybe a bit cautious in stating that right now.

Emil Immonen

Okay. Thank you.

That's all for me.

Operator

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Juha Näkki

Okay. Thank you very much.

Of course, if we look at our history and the trends, now the past 3 years we have been sort of standing still a little bit, and this is something that we, of course, want to improve on, and we want to improve on our profitability next year as well. We have great solutions.

We are developing our AI-driven business models and solutions further, and we do believe that we are in a great position to offer more value for our customers, but we certainly hope that there is some kind of support from the market as well. We will now continue investing in our strategy execution.

We will build new models, and with that, we then hope to get back on the growth track and also on improving profitability. This is our focus for this year, and we will work hard to get there.

Of course, if you have any questions outside the conferences, we are happy to answer any questions that you may have. Either myself or our CFO, Helena Kukkonen, or Outi Torniainen, our SVP for marketing and communications, will be happy to serve you at any time.

At this time, I want to thank you for listening and tuning in, and wish you a great day ahead. Thank you very much.