Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Q1 2026 quarterly presentation from Appear. My name is Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, and together with me today, I also have our CFO, Per Øyvind Stene.

Let's get straight to it. For Q1, we had a revenue of 231.7 million, which is up a 42.6% year-on-year.

This is a really great result for the quarter. This comes mainly from a very strong momentum in the Americas, as we'll get to in a bit, but also a significant contribution from the EMEA market.

Now, if we move to the gross margin, it came in at 70.1, which is 2.7% down year-on-year. The decline or the decrease in gross margin is predominantly a function of the product mix, adverse forex, as probably most of you have been watching, and headwinds from the US tariffs.

We do believe that the gross margin will come up to sort of more normalized levels going forward. The underlying EBITDAC came in at 25.9 million, which equals an 11.2% EBITDAC margin.

That's compared to 15.4 last year. The drop in the underlying EBITDAC comes from the lower gross margin essentially, and then higher operating costs, although the operating costs are according to plan.

Free cash flow ended at -28 million, which is down 34.9 million year-on-year. This is predominantly affected by a higher working capital.

Now, I'm going to give you some updates from the quarter, and I want to start with some of the market trends. We just came back from the world's largest industry event in Las Vegas called NAB, and there's some very clear trends that come through, and I wanted to elaborate on.

In the acquisition segment, we see a clear shift from transporting video over satellite to IP-based. This is a big trend driven by the US government repurposing some of the satellite bandwidth to IP and then auctioning that off for other purposes.

Within content production or processing, as we call it, there's a couple of large shifts also going on. One is away from sort of legacy video infrastructure to more IP-based infrastructure, and the other trend is away from hardware-only solutions into hybrid workflows, which is essentially hardware and software combined to deliver the best sort of video workflows for customers.

I'm really happy to say that Appear's position, our product portfolio, our architecture really, really supports customers in making these transitions and really underpinning the market trends. I would say we're extremely well-positioned on both ends, both kind of the legacy and the future and being the bridge in between.

Now, as we've elaborated on before, Appear is doing extremely well with a lot of the largest Tier 1 customers in live, and particularly in live sports. We have a lot of the largest sports leagues, sports broadcasters, production companies in the world as customers.

There's a finite number of those customers, and so one of our key strategies is land and expand, winning these accounts and then expanding within those accounts. I'm really happy to see that this quarter we're really showing this expand strategy in motion, and it's really working.

Three examples here: one of the big American sports leagues that we started doing business with last year came back in Q1 and did a big deal with us for the X Platform into 30 of their stadiums across the US. Secondly, we also won initial business with one of the biggest US sports broadcasters last year and happy to see that they came back in Q1 and also bought significant upgrades to their X Platform footprint.

Then finally, we had two European service providers that are buying infrastructure in preparation for the big soccer event in the Americas this summer, and, fundamentally, across the board, we see that customers that are buying from us, they come back and buy more. Our land and expand strategy is really, really working.

Also, and this is really important for us, we are expanding our addressable market as sort of a key growth strategy. Our X Platform, which is really our growth engine and where we've been outperforming the market, this is targeted at the big global strategic customers and kind of supports large-scale events.

For that, we have invested in several capabilities that really keeps driving up the competitive advantage of that platform. In terms of expansion, we last year delivered the X5, which is a derivative of the X Platform that targets strategic accounts, but also lower and regionals and lower scale events.

We have started winning really good deals for that platform, among others, a significant win with a golf tour. Then, of course, we have the VX platform, which is our foray into the production processing environment.

It's a pure software-based solution, which will drive recurring revenue. This platform in Q1 reached general availability, which is kind of the first sort of proper commercial release of it.

It's already being used in live sporting events. We're really happy with sort of the initial response to the VX.

At the conference in Las Vegas at NAB, I'm happy to say that the VX got a lot of really good response from the market and from a lot of our biggest customers. Then fundamentally, the Appear Hub and XM are our self-service and fleet management tools.

These are operational tools that we're offering to existing customers and tools that really sort of deliver operational stickiness and is a really important part of our portfolio going forward. Now, the other thing that is happening this year, and the biggest sports event this year, is the FIFA World Cup.

I'm really happy to say that a lot of customers have banked on Appear as the provider of live production technology. We have a very wide range of customers who have bought solutions to support their live production for this event.

In total, the sort of commercial value of orders booked in relation to that event across Americas and EMEA over the last 12 months is around 150 million NOK, it really shows how the large events and sporting events in general are driving investment into Appear and our solutions. I'm also really happy to see that the X Platform is really supporting the drive that a lot of customers are doing into remote production.

It's really supporting customers in their investment into remote production, which is fundamentally a way to deliver live production more operationally efficient. I would say looking at our big success around the FIFA World Cup, the halo effect is incredibly important.

This validation that we're getting from Tier 1 customers throughout the world in relation to this event really rubs off on the market, and we see the effect on our brand and the engagement with customers as an effect of our success in supporting customers producing content from the FIFA World Cup. All right.

We're going to have a look at Q1 '26 in a bit more depth. We'll come back to the consistent strong revenue trend that we're seeing.

This chart shows revenue from Q1 2022 to Q1 2026. You can see the strong growth, 33% CAGR in that span.

As I said on the first slide, a 43% increase from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026. That actually makes up a full 12 consecutive quarters with year-on-year growth, which we think is really strong.

It's worth noting that between Q1 2025 and Q2 2025, there was a tariff event that probably had an impact on where business fell between Q1 and Q2 when you kind of look at the relative growth in the year-on-year growth in Q1 2026. Now, growth predominantly came from the Americas, and I'm really happy to say that this was the biggest quarter we had in the Americas market ever, up 54%, which is super strong.

I'm also happy to say that we had good growth in the EMEA market as well. We're up 25% in EMEA.

Both our main regions really delivered significant revenue growth in that period. APAC also delivered growth.

We're super happy with, as we put in our regional center of excellence or a local direct sales capability in place at the back end of last year. We're now seeing sort of the first signs that this is doing what it's supposed to do, which is building a more sort of significant revenue line in APAC.

Now, before I hand it over to Per Øyvind Stene, our CFO, we're going to show a short video.

We run services

that

have

to be live 24/7. When we choose products to put in workflows for our customers, we have to choose products that have a good reputation in the market.

Integrating Appear into our IP workflows actually opened up a huge number of things that I didn't even consider at the start. We were able to modernize our whole archiving process, all our internal distribution, all our competition monitoring, our quality control.

Appear is a full gateway to our archiving system, to our AI asset management systems, and AI-driven production. Because we have the availability of feeds and the consistency...

Appear is sort of quite a fundamental building block of our network, we use a lot of Appear, and have done for decades. I like the fact that the equipment is built in a factory that I've been to, I've seen it being built.

There's a lot of quality assurance around that, and that kind of shows up in the reliability. We have the connectivity between 22 stadiums, the complexity of the service is because we have to manage a lot of hardware, a lot of software, a lot of circuits between the different venues and the production center.

Appear was there at all moments. The quality of the video signal, the latency, and so for us, the performance is very good.

People know about it, and they trust it, and the Appear X20 platform hasn't let us down yet.

Good morning. I'm here to take you through the Q1 financials, and let's start with the P&L.

Thomas shared some insights on our revenues, and they totaled at 232 million for the quarter. That's 69 million and 43% up from the same period last year.

Looking at the gross earnings, our gross earnings for the quarter was 162 million. That represents a gross margin of 70.1%.

That's 2.7% down from the same period last year, and the negative variance is attributable to the negative mix effects, forex, and also increased US tariffs with higher sales to the US. When we look at our operating costs, we are constantly iterating that we are investing in future growth.

If we look at the total cost of our operating expenses, including employee benefit expenses, and also the capitalized development expenditures, which are really mainly development salaries, the total cost for the quarter was 137 million, up 42% from 96 million last year. It's also worth noticing that we exited Q1 with 237 full-time employees versus 194 full-time employees at the same time last year.

Our EBITDA was 43 million at an 18.7% margin. Adjusting for the capitalized development expenditures, we get to the EBITDAC, which we believe is our main profitability measure.

The EBITDAC for the quarter was 26 million at an 11.2% EBITDAC margin, comparable to 22 million last year and a margin of 15.4%. Our operating profit for the quarter was 36 million, 15.7% margin.

The net profit for the period was 26 million, compared to 21 million last year. If we look at the cash side, EBITDAC here represented by the EBITDA and 17 million of the cash flow from investing activities provided a positive contribution, but it was outweighed by increases in working capital.

We had increases in our trade receivables, and we also increased our inventory levels. That resulted in a cash outflow of 28 million.

That was compensated by a drawdown of market funds of 30 million, resulting in a net increase of cash and cash equivalents of 2 million in the quarter, and a balance at the end of the quarter of 62 million. The cash and cash equivalents, that's the most liquid part of our available liquidity, but we keep the majority of our liquid funds in money market funds.

We exited the quarter with 413 million in money market funds, and the total available liquidity of a solid 476 million. As I mentioned, our working capital increased during the quarter.

Working capital as a percentage of last 12 months sales went up to 11%. That's slightly above the range of 5% to 10% where we intend to operate.

At the same time, we see that there is a strong correlation with trade receivables and sales, and it was a strong sales quarter. We believe that we have good control over our working capital, and that we closed the quarter with a strong financial position.

Thank you, Per Øyvind. Moving on to the financial targets, we reiterate our top-line target for the full-year 2026 of 1 billion NOK, and also reiterate our medium to long-term targets, revenue growth at 25% to 30%, recurring revenue share in the interval between 15% and 25%, gross margin at or around 70%, and EBITDAC margin at the interval between 17% and 20%.

Now, before we move to the Q&A, I just want to do a quick risk and opps. Looking at the risk side, clearly, being a electronic manufacturer, there is clearly an ongoing, supply chain risk, I think both in terms of cost and in terms of lead time.

We are seeing, as everyone else in the market, prices go up and and lead times increasing quite significantly. Our mitigation in in in relation to supply chain is partly our strategic manufacturing, partnership with our contract manufacturer.

We've had this relationship in place for for 20 years, and that really puts us in a very strong position. We're also, and have been, I think since inception, very good at demand planning, and we typically hold a very substantial buffer of components that typically allows us to to sort of have production for at least, or components available for production for for around six months going forward.

We have a buffer inventory for long lead time components. In terms of pricing, we we are, as the rest of the market, increasing our prices to defend our gross margin.

I think that that kind of explains supply chain risk. The other risk that is evident for everyone is tariffs.

Tariffs are here to stay, and at least based on the current regime, we believe that we have implemented all the sort of mitigating factors that are kind of available to us, all the instruments that are available to us, so that the tariffs have as little impact as as possible. We keep monitoring, the changes in in in tariffs and the overall regime around tariffs, but we believe that the impact for us is contained, and our margin is protected.

In terms of opportunities, we actually see, like a lot of companies, AI emerging, but for us, probably more as an opportunity. For smaller scale productions, there is a a clear trend now that that AI is being used to automate and and kind of drive content production.

One of the real requirements from a acquisition standpoint at least is that the feeds that come from the stadium are delivered with very, very low latency, so low latency from the stadium to the production facility, and at a very sort of deterministic way. This is really one of our core strengths.

We see companies gravitating to Appear because this is something that we're really good at. Companies that are investing in in in more sort of AI-led production capabilities, and so, fundamentally, we see that as a driver for Appear going forward.

All right. I think that concludes risk and opps, and I'm going to invite Per Øyvind over here, and we'll go to the live Q&A.

Please go ahead.

For those of you who have logged in, please raise your hand, use the raise hand function in Teams to signal that you have a question. The first question is from Christoffer Wang Bjørnsen at DNB Carnegie.

Please unmute yourself, Christoffer, and the floor is yours. Perfect.

Thank you. Thanks for taking my questions.

Can you hear me?

We can hear you.

Great. I was a bit late onto the call due to conflict, but maybe you've already touched on this, but I have to ask.

Can you maybe drill a bit more down into the into the into the growth in OpEx and cash OpEx year-over-year, and kind of how much of this is sticky, and and and how much of this is is something that was kind of abnormal in the in in the quarter? Just trying to get at like how to think about the the EBITDAC margin for the full year given that it's down year-over- year-over-year, just trying to understand the operating leverage of the business, I guess.

Yeah.

Yes. There are no specific one-offs in the quarter.

At the same time, the OpEx level is according to planned. We are, as I mentioned, investing in future growth, and that's within our plans.

We really have the three measures with the guiding on our top line and our indications on gross margins, and, of course, the EBITDAC range that we are steering towards. We are using accelerator, brake to get our results within that range.

The cost level that we see in this quarter is what we have planned for the quarter.

If last year kind of grew through the year, can you maybe elaborate a bit on how much of the growth in OpEx is due to sales commissions and such, when we look into the next few quarters where growth will come down again, will OpEx come down again materially? Just trying to get a sense of should we expect the EBITDAC margin to kind of stay flattish year-over-year, or could there be material downtick in the EBITDAC margin for the full

year? We aim at keeping the EBITDAC margin pretty close to where we were last year.

The 17% to 20% range is kind of indicative to where we want to be. When it comes to the OpEx, we see that in Q3 we have a slight dip due to vacations here in Norway.

Of course, we have added more people, there will be an increase throughout the year. We believe that the changes throughout the year will be less than last year when we look at the total OpEx side.

Then

finally, just a housekeeping question, there was an initial share-based compensation, or whatever you want to call it, in the quarter. Is that kind of already reflected in the kind of the 17% to 20% range, or should we consider that kind of an adjusted range where we have to subtract the 3 million?

No, that has to be supported by the P&L, so that must fall within the range as well. Understood.

Thank you. That's very helpful, and congrats on the strong growth.

Oh,

the sound was a bit bad there. Can you repeat the question?

No, it's just saying thank you and congrats on the strong growth momentum.

Thank you.

Good morning. Yes, like Christoffer said, congrats on the strong growth.

In the outlook statement, you're saying that you expect modest contribution from X5 and VX. Compared to kind of previous communication, we didn't expect any material contribution from VX, but probably would have expected some material contribution from X5 this year.

Can you maybe clarify that statement regarding the X5, what you expect in contribution from X5 in 2026? Yes, X5 will, we we've the take-up of X5, and I think the, let's say, the forecasting and the and the underlying demand, looks really good.

However, it is a new platform in in a market, in a Tier 2 market that is slightly, new for us, so it doesn't

kind of That wording doesn't really reflect our our trust in the product. We really think that it's going to be successful and deliver the value that we have been looking for.

Don't read that as as us, being less confident in that product. We're actually really confident.

I have to say the signals from the market at NAB was very positive towards the X5. You say you're still confident in the product, but does that mean that maybe kind of when we start to see a lot of revenue from it that is delayed a bit, or is it just simply being cautious in statement, and we shouldn't read anything into it at all?

I don't think you should read anything into it. We're still confident.

We believe it's going to deliver the planned revenue for the year. The fundamentals are there.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Yes, thanks. Just trying to understand a bit better what's going on in Q1 here again.

You noted in the report that the gross margin decline was driven primarily by product mix. Can you maybe just help us understand what particular areas drove that move in the quarter?

Then following on to that is for the rest of the year, the EBITDAC margin recovery, do you kind of expect that to be led both by gross profit margin improvement as well as kind of lower growth in OpEx year-over-year, or is this kind of you're now on the 70% level gross margin, which you have been expecting long term, and this is where we are now, this is new normal?

It's a good question. The gross margin this quarter, as was stated in the report, is is is driven by product mix, forex, and and tariffs.

We believe that the product mix component that we saw in in Q1 will, not materialize in the in the quarters, in in in the next quarter. We do believe the product the gross margin will come kind of back up to the level it has been in the well, that it was at last year, basically.

I think this is more a this is more a one-off. Then the So then the improvement in EBITDAC will at least, it will the improved gross margin will impact or deliver improvement in in the EBITDAC margin.

We can also point to Q2 last year, where we had a 70.6 margin, and we got the margins up again in the last quarter, we are defending our margins.

Thank you.

All right. I think that concludes Q1.

Thank you so much for listening and for following Appear, and until next time.