Good morning all of you and welcome to our Q2 2026 report. I am Anders Dahl, I'm the CEO of Nepa.

Joining me on this call today is Edvard Hagman, who is our VP of Finance. The agenda for today is that we're going to give you a short update about who we are.

We're going to walk you through the Q2 results and the commercial progress. Edvard is going to give you a walkthrough of the financials, and then we're going to say some words about the acceleration phase progress and priorities.

We're going to talk a little bit about our products and our AI implementations that we have been working with for quite some time, and also give you a summary of our outlook and priorities. Then, of course, as always, I hope that you send in questions for the Q&A towards the end of this call.

Nepa is a leading marketing intelligence company and we help global brands to make better marketing and growth decisions. We turn marketing data into actionable growth decisions and insights.

We track the brand health of close to 7 or more than 7,500 brands daily, and we measure thousands of advertising campaigns annually across 50-plus markets. We deliver insights to insights departments, CMOs, marketing teams, mostly of global consumer brands across the world.

We serve more or less the entire globe. Our core offerings combines brand tracking, campaign evaluation, and marketing mix modeling, supported by advisory services, high-end white-glove services to our clients.

We combine continuous survey data based on real people's answers and on our interviews. We mix that with business data, and we analyze marketing investments with technology and expertise to deliver recurring and project-based insights.

We are a global marketing intelligence platform that combine data, technology, and advisory in a modern way. We have strong presence in Northern Europe, commercial teams in the UK and US, and we have our operations center based in Mumbai, India.

As you have seen from the previous quarterly reports, we have been growing our recurring revenue base, and we are also complementing that with project-based insights. As you've seen from the last 12 months, more than 60% of our revenue comes from subscriptions.

Brand tracking is the largest product we have, and we've also launched a couple of years ago now the continuous marketing mix modeling platform, and we do ad tracking on an ongoing basis. We also do consumer experience tracking, and we also in some cases deliver recurring data deliveries to our clients.

Our ad hoc projects are mainly driven by campaign evaluation and Campaign Pulse, which is the largest product in that category, and all the ad hoc projects stands for close to 40% of our last 12 months revenue. Marketing mix modeling is also served as an ad hoc project, even if more and more clients are looking for a continuous marketing mix modeling to be able to use that in an ongoing basis to pace and to work with their marketing investments and match that towards the ongoing reality that goes on outside of the companies.

We also have Brand Touch, Brand Assets, and Category Insights as ad hoc projects that we serve to our clients, and other key marketing insights products. Although the main focus is to continue to grow the subscription and the annual recurring revenue base in order to build a sustainable long-term business.

That is also what we see in the market. The biggest demand from our clients when they see an understanding of combining brand tracking with performance marketing.

Q2 came in with a strong recurring growth and an improved results. On the continued growth in the recurring business, we see that ARR increased by 16.4% year-on-year to 140 million .9.

The underlying subscription revenue increased by 14%, and net revenue retention, i.e., we've been maintained our clients on a very strong base and churn declined also during the quarter. On the commercial development side, we see that ARR bookings came in at 6.6 million compared to 10.5 for the quarter of last year, the same comparable quarter.

That was a very strong prior year quarter that included one large contract that drove those numbers into that. Q1 came, on the other side, in stronger than Q1 of last year.

Total sales bookings declined by 12.5%, and that is mainly driven by the volatility in the market. The booking shortfall was concentrated in May with fewer signed contracts of course limiting to some extent the revenue growth.

Ad hoc demand remained volatile and continued to affect report net sales and quarterly earnings. That is mainly driven by uncertainties in the market, and we see that in many of those cases we don't have kind of a no to those projects, they are still in the pipeline, but have been some delays or moved out some of those ad hoc projects to later during this year or maybe even in some cases into next fiscal year.

The hard work we have done and some of the kind of goals we set up more than a year ago, close to 2 years now, to improve our earnings and cash flow, and one of those things is, of course, to have a cost base that is manageable based on our revenues. You can see that clearly in that adjusted EBITDA minus CapEx improved by 3.5 million to 1 -1.7 from -5.2.

Gross margin increased by 3.2 percentage point, and the operating cash flow was positive for the quarter of 1.5 1.2 million SEK. Some corporate events: the AGM reelected the chairman and foreman and other board members, but Eric Gustavsson declined reelection, he's not part of the board anymore.

CTO Jacob Kerford left to pursue new opportunities during the quarter. Overall, a strong quarter that really shows a proof of the strategy that we laid out now think 1.5, closer to 2 years ago, with a strong focus on recurring revenues, ARR, and also a cost control or strong cost base, but also much simplified operating business model.

The ARR growth shows very clearly in this picture from Q2 2025 up until now that we have had a strong growth and an larger and better retained ARR base. You also see that in the yearly ARR bookings that on the last 12 months we are keeping the same pace as we did for the fiscal year 2025.

You also see the volatility in the quarterly ARR bookings on the slides left lower parts, that it goes up and down and it is, in this case, very much dependent on one large contract. I'm happy with the development on the ARR growth, but of course we would like to build this ARR base to a larger part of our ongoing business in order to be able to mitigate for the volatility in our ad hoc business that is much more sensitive to macroeconomic impact.

On the next slide, this shows that the ARR growth is increasingly translating into an underlying subscription, and there is of course a certain delay and when we sign an ARR contract it takes some time before it shows up fully in our subscription revenues. To continue to build this will create a much more sustainable and predictable financial model and the business for us as a company.

Also from a client perspective, I think being a part of the client's ongoing business, and I will talk a little bit more about that towards the end of this presentation, gives a much more valid position for us in our relationships with our clients. With that said, I will hand over to Edvard to dig a little bit deeper into the financials.

Edvard.

Thank you, Anders. I will first walk you through the financial progress during our acceleration phase that we have started.

The first point is the shift towards scalable recurring revenue, and ARR increased by 16.4% year-on-year during the quarter. Here it's important to say that the extraordinary churn and contract phase-outs from late 2024 and early 2025 have now passed through the comparable ARR base.

The reported and the underlying ARR growth figures are therefore aligned again, which we are very happy with. Q2 is also the final quarter in which we present underlying revenue growth separately.

From next quarter, it will be reported only. The second point is our structurally lower cost base.

Operating expenses adjusted for items affecting comparability declined by approximately 14% year-on-year in the first half of the year. The cost programs completed during last year 2025 are now fully reflected in the cost base and numbers.

At the same time, we have retained capacity to support growth. Our priority is therefore to scale revenue approximately within the existing cost base rather than initiate further cost reductions.

This combination of recurring growth and a lower cost base is translating into improved margins and earnings. The gross margin in the quarter increased to 75.9% from 72.7% last year.

This was supported by improved project profitability, better data quality management that we have been working with over the past years, and a refined supplier strategy. Adjusted EBITDA less CapEx improved by 3.5 million year-on-year in the quarter.

Looking at the rolling 12-month period, adjusted EBITDA less CapEx was positive at 5.8 million. This is a significant improvement compared with the negative rolling 12-month result reported a year ago.

The lower chart also illustrates the remaining quarterly volatility. We delivered positive adjusted EBITDA less CapEx in Q3 and Q4 of 2025 and in Q1 2026, while Q2 now was a negative -1.7 million.

This mainly reflects the timing and size of some ad hoc projects and the sales of ad hoc projects rather than a change in the underlying recurring revenue trajectory. Our immediate priority is therefore commercial conversion.

We need to convert client interest into both recurring contracts and ad hoc projects faster and more consistently. That is the key step in translating our stronger recurring revenue base and lower cost structure into sustained profitability.

Let me now also walk you through the Q2 profit and loss in more detail. Subscription revenue was 34 million kronor, up 14% on an underlying basis, but down 4.2% as reported.

This is difference between the phased-out contracts and extraordinary churn was included in the comparable base last year. Ad hoc revenue from subscribers were broadly stable at 12 million and corresponding to an underlying growth of 0.4%, and ad hoc revenue from other clients declined by 4% to 6.8 million.

As a result, total net sales came in at 52.7 million. This represents underlying growth of 7.8% and a reported decline of 3.8%.

The underlying figure better reflects development of the current business after excluding these legacy contract phase-outs and extraordinary churn. As I said earlier, this will be the last quarter that we present the underlying figures.

Gross margin improved by 3.2 percentage points to 75.9%. Turning to operating costs, adjusted OPEX declined by approximately 6% in the quarter.

Personnel costs were down 12.8% year-on-year, and other external costs declined by 32.3%. Part of this reduction was due to items affecting comparability in 2025 during the cost-saving programs, and part of it was offset by FX-related items within other operating costs this quarter that had an unfavorable movement.

Depreciation and amortization amounted to 3.2 million. This is a non-cash expense primarily relating to historical investments in product development.

Current product development expenditure is recognized as an expense as incurred on the P&L, meaning that we are not building up new capitalized development assets on the balance sheet. Adjusted EBITDA less CapEx improved by 3.5 million to -1.7 from -5.2.

Cash generation also improved. Net cash flow was positive at 1.1 million in the quarter, a significant improvement from -18.9 million in Q2 last year, which also included dividend payment of 9.7 million.

The net cash position at the end of June was 17.3 million, and in addition to that, on the balance sheet date we had an undrawn credit facility of total 20 million. Overall, the quarter shows clear progress in underlying recurring growth, gross margin, and cost efficiency, and the remaining challenge is to improve commercial conversion and reduce the quarterly earnings volatility caused by the timing and size of ad hoc projects.

I will now hand over back to Anders to talk more about product development and our AI initiatives.

Great. This underlying changes of our tracking platform is definitely one of the key components to be much more lean and standardized and scalable.

We are rolling this out in a successful way internally, still not fully facing on the client side, but it will definitely simplify the technology stack and standardize delivery and improve scalability in a very clear way. It's also much more consistent way of delivering not only tracking, but other products.

Things that have been released already during this phase of our migration is of course new dashboards, new features. There are a lot of things that are already facing clients in a very positive way.

I think normally we talk about new business and sales and revenue, but I would like to give a very big applaud to our product team and our tech team that are doing a great job, and our operations team that are seeing all those possibilities to improve the client experience. This will also give us a much better platform to integrate our Trinity offering, to combine brand tracking, campaign evaluation, and marketing mix modeling in one unified platform that is the new standard for delivering marketing insights to the market, and will be.

It definitely links brand, creative, and media investments to commercial outcomes. We will build a bridge between brand and performance in a way that we have seen so far when we present this for clients is a new way and it's a very impressive way.

We have, since 1.5, closer to 2 years, used AI in different steps of our way of automating data collection and automating parts of our work of crunching the data, in quality management, and in reporting. We will continue to develop that, but also invisible features to our clients so they will be able to use AI and agents in their work of exploring the data and working with the data.

That will definitely free specialist capacity within Nepa to be a little bit deeper into advisory and client-facing work. We've already launched advanced marketing mix modeling through machine learning and automation, and we can see that in real client cases that will impact ROI on those clients' investments.

We just launched, I think a couple of weeks ago in Amsterdam, a creative AI tool that have already shown the potential for a 40% reduction in cost per acquisition for a named client, and you can read more about that on LinkedIn and in our material. That is a product that we're going to roll out across the board during the fall.

All this is based, of course, on the demand in the market. We know that marketers struggle to connect data with regards to brand building and performance.

We know that more than 70% of marketers struggle to prove their ROI, to have a very clear financial language to talk internally to their internal stakeholders. We will help them with that.

We know that close to 70% of marketers struggle to balance performance marketing and creative marketing and brand building. We help with our Trinity offer to build a bridge between those two sides in the marketing toolbox.

We know that more than 60% of marketers struggle to make sense of their data and use it to inform their marketing decisions. That is also a new take we have taken with our clients, that of course we have our own survey-based data, we have our own methods and models, but we also use client data and macroeconomic data to help to kind of paint the whole picture of their investments and how to use those investments in a much better way.

Combining brand tracking, marketing mix modeling, and campaign evaluation, we have created what we call the Trinity offer to our clients. This is the picture that I ended with last time and this picture makes me really excited because this shows that our traditional marketing insight tools combined then with the business data points from our clients, combine that with our platforms and our products, we have the opportunity to talk to the clients in a totally new way, to not just be a nice-to-have tool that they can present and use once, two, three times during the year.

This can be an ongoing platform that client can use in their ongoing marketing work internally in their businesses. This will also broaden our network within the client's organization, where traditionally talk to insights departments and insight managers, with the Trinity way of looking at their marketing data, our products, we can talk to much more stakeholders within the company, within the client's company.

We can also bridge, like I said before, between brand and performance, long- and short-term marketing investments. This is really the underlying engine to create kind of the growth that we are aiming to accomplish within Nepa.

For the outlook and priorities for the next upcoming 6 to 12 months, we enter H2 in 2026 from a strong position than in H1, with the growing recurring revenue base, and net revenue retention looks good and we, of course, continue to work with our clients to make sure that they stay, a good gross margin of about 75%, which also is a good kind of core component in our P&L. Of course, one goal is to sustain recurring growth and to maintain a positive ARR momentum and growth, and of course deepen our relationship with our priority clients.

That goes kind of both ways: with a strong ARR booking, strong ARR momentum, we do have the presence with our clients, and it makes it easy for us to kind of show the evidence that we need to stay with the clients, not for just one campaign or one ad hoc project, we need to stay with them for a longer time. Like Edvard said before, one other focus that we have been working with for quite some time now is, of course, improve commercial conversion, professionalize the way that we go to market, build our brand, work with sales, conversion, etc.

That is, of course, to convert client interest into recurring contracts and be very focused on that. Drive operating leverage: of course, components are to keep control of the costs, but also to build this new technical platform and launch bits and pieces to be able to move from just operating tech into client tech.

Scale Trinity and AI: that's number one priority for us in all our client discussions, and that is of course to accelerate the tracking platform rollouts, which we are on a good way to do, but also to integrate decision tools, like I said before, that already to some extent launched in new dashboards, but to continue to develop that and show that for our clients. Maintain resilience: that ad hoc demand remains sensitive, with a strong ARR base to make us less sensitive to the ad hoc volatility in the market and also to some extent to macroeconomic uncertainty in some of those decisions.

With that said, and with that summary, I would like to say that we have ended the quarter in a good way. We are going into the fall with all these kind of priorities and ambitions, and I looking forward to the next phase of this discussion to answer the questions that are coming in.

Please come in with questions, and we will be back in a couple of minutes.

We have received some questions in the chat that I will read out loud, we can take it question by question. First one: have there been any new signed CMMM bookings in Q2?

Yes, there has been.

Next one: you've had three consecutive quarters with NRR above 100%, and these levels are in line with 2021 to 2023. Should we view the current net revenue retention numbers as normal, or what do we expect without major churn going forward?

We have seen quite low churn, and that is of course to some extent or to a large extent driven by a lot of good work on our side. Then you also go into those cycles where there are RFPs out in the market, and we have seen some RFPs coming in over the summer and into the fall, there will of course be, which is good, but of course there's also a good chance to win some of those and to lose some of them.

I wouldn't say that we have a new normal, but I would say that the process of working with mitigating churn is fundamentally much stronger now than it has been before. There's always this kind of RFP movement going on in the market, it's hard to say it's the new normal, but of course we would like the new normal to be in these levels.

Has the departure of your VP of Sales affected the Q2 bookings?

No, I can't say that that's a hard question to answer because what's the chicken and what's the egg. Of course, is it market movements or is it just one person or two person?

I think what we are aiming for now and we have been aiming for that for the last say 8 to 12 months, is to have an ongoing recruitment of new business team member and sales people all along the way. I think we would like to even increase that a little bit more during the next upcoming 6 to 12 months, to invest a little bit more in having a bit of a kind of I wouldn't say overstaffed, but a little bit more people in our sales and new business department to be able to kind of handle churn and changes in that market, but also to be able to handle leads coming in and the market opportunities that we see in the market.

I wouldn't say that we see a direct impact of the departure of VP of Sales in the Q2 bookings, no.

Have you had enough sales capacity in Q2 to handle all inbound requests?

Yes.

How should we view the departure of your CTO and VP of Sales? Are departures like this cost savings in the short term, or does the recruitment process cost as much as the salary?

I wouldn't say that always when someone resigns or we do see changes in the position, there is an underlying, ongoing discussion in the organization all the time: how can we be better, how can we improve? Every time things like this happen, even before these things happen, we worked with the organization to see how we can improve.

At this point, we have such a strong team in product and tech, we don't have a recruitment process ongoing right now for a new CTO, for example, because we see that we have been handling that in a good way, but we are hiring other positions within those departments. I wouldn't say this is just a cost saving.

It's more of a reflection of how can we do things in a different way, how can we empower people within the organization, and how can we hire maybe a different type of talents in the future. That's a ongoing improvement process that reflects our way of kind of handling those if there is a resignation, for example.

Just a clarifying question here: you're currently hiring a VP of Sales. Does that mean that the VP of Sales who started in June has left Nepa already, or is it a different role you're hiring for?

He left over the summer. That was his decision, and he probably felt that he got maybe a better offer or something else, but I think this is, yes, we are hiring for a new VP of Sales.

Luckily, that decision was taken very quickly, we have a good chance with the recruitment process we had before that. Good names in that process and good names are coming in right now.

We will hopefully very quickly be up and running with a new VP of Sales. We also have a strong organization behind and underlying in the sales department in general and also in client success.

There is a strong backbone of people that can support in situations like this. He came in in June and he left in July, his impact was not very strong in that sense.

Luckily we can be able to kind of handle that very quickly.

Okay. Next question: your headcount did increase in Q2 compared to Q1.

What new roles were added? I can answer that one directly that this is a metric with full-time equivalents, the net marginal effect is basically from part-timers, parental leaves, and replacements starting earlier or leaving later.

It's no any net new additional roles added between the quarters. Next one is: what drove the improved cash flow?

Was the addition of customers who pay in advance a significant driver? Yes, part of it was advance payments, but also part of it was some larger supplier invoices with due dates after the quarter and that we last year received before the quarter end.

Next one is: you haven't talked about any medium- or long-term ambitions in a year. When do you think you will have enough predictability to start talking about future, and any update on when we can expect analyst coverage and the capital markets day?

I can answer that we are on track with analyst coverage to be initiated during the fall, and so hopefully we'll get some more texts and analysis out in the market for investors to read. Next question is: ad hoc sales came in weak in Q2.

How much spare capacity do you have? Do you still have capacity to handle between 25 to 30 million kronor in a quarter like Q2?

Yes, we have limited capacity maybe for the 25 to 30 million, but of course 20 to 25 million for sure. Of course we want to push the ARR.

Long term, I think moving to ARR is of course the way we want to go.

Same question and for ARR: would you be able to handle 10% higher ARR from core products without significant OPEX increases?

Some of those are replacement on the sales side and say more sales people, but also I don't know if you saw that today we had an ad for building out data science team, and I think a lot of the delivery teams that we do have today are also doing a lot of sales work. In general, investing more in sales and being much more structured when it comes to driving sales.

The work that we have done now for 1.5 years, just continue to do that in a professional and structured way, and you can also see that. One of the main reasons why we have been growing ARR significantly for the last 1.5 year is that we do have a very focused and structured way of approaching the sales process, and with the main focus of driving ARR and building the platform foundation with our clients.

Continue to invest, maybe like I said before, overinvest a little bit for some times in sales people and also marketing is of course our way to go because there is a fluctuation in the market and we need to manage that in a proper way.

Next question is: when did you release the new brand tracking platform, and where have the freed up resources post the release been deployed?

The full release, like I said before, is towards late or the beginning of 2026, that will be the full kind of operating platform. There are already bits and pieces that have been released in sort of the new platform, like new dashboards and other features.

Of course we are using, and we have already seen that we have released resources to go from kind of the old operating platform to developing new features like AI and different AI tools. We will continue to release bits and pieces underlying operational improvements and use those resources to develop more client tech.

Next question is: what is the reason behind the OPEX increase quarter-on-quarter? It's partly because of personnel costs varying due to different vacation schedules.

It's also because of the CTO departure, and the remaining OPEX are basically FX effects quarter-on-quarter. Next question is: what's your hiring plan for H2, and what's the view on pipeline ad conversion of that pipeline going into H2?

Maybe start with the hiring plans for H2. At

the hiring plan, like I said before, we're going to continue to build on the acceleration base, i.e., to invest more in marketing and a new business talent in the business, but also to build the fundament for continue to deliver high-end advisory, to really being able to launch the next generation of marketing tools. That is of course on the data science side and on delivery side.

We don't have any fixed numbers of these are the number of people we're going to hire, but these are kind of the focus areas of where we are looking for talent to really continue to grow the business.

Then we have a couple of questions related to each other, I think we'll take them together. It's on

Was there a second part to that first question?

I'm coming to it now.

It's

on the sales side. It's: you write that May was weak in terms of sales.

Do you have any more color on why as it also happened in March this year? Have you seen any stabilization since May?

Then clarify on pipeline conversion and what is done on the sales side to actually drive conversion going forward.

Driving conversion is of course a very kind of uniform standardized way of working to really make sure that you are measuring your pipeline in a proper way, you're honest to yourself when it comes to evaluate if this going to be a deal or not, setting the right expectations. I think we have for the last 1.5 year, we have been much better to kind of being disciplined when it comes to working with the pipeline.

The thing that we are seeing from those two specific period that was mentioned in the question is that we have seen that a majority of those cases were driven by delays and timing instead of a "no thank you, we don't want to go with you guys" or we lost it to someone else. In the early phase, I think it was in March, we had a couple of travel companies and companies that were highly impacted by the situation in the Middle East.

It's mostly timing in many of those cases. Some of those clients actually came back in June, we closed some of those deals in June that were actually kind of wait-and-see in early in the spring.

The majority of those deals are still in the pipeline. It's not because we are naive and think that they will just show up, but we have actually real evidence that we're still in the game with them and hopefully we can close some of them in Q3 and/or in Q4.

It's especially on the ad hoc side, and in some cases in the ARR side. This year and even to some extent last year, we have seen a lot of those kind of wait-and-see and timing due to uncertainty in the overall macroeconomic situation.

The good thing with the pipeline for the fall is that it looks strong, but it also looks strong in the background of the strategy that we are driving. There is a lot of ARR businesses in the pipeline, there is a lot of discussions that have went pretty far, and there are also some interesting RFPs in the mix.

In general, an evidence to the structured way of working, but also to focus on the recurring revenue types of deals. Any other questions?

I think we've covered most of it. There are very similar questions from several people, I think we've covered most of them and most of the themes.

At the moment, no more questions.

To wrap this up, I think thanks again for listening in, and to summarize from my perspective, I think we have been delivering on some of those kind of core promises that we made a couple of years ago actually, to work with the cost side, simplify our operating model, tweak and work in a much more efficient way in our marketing and sales work. I think on the product side, we are in a very strong position.

I think our message is going through, and we are being invited to RFPs on a size that is fairly large, that means that we have kind of sent a message that is very clear when it comes to especially our Trinity product or our Trinity offer. Good confidence, and thanks a lot to all the people in our company that have done a tremendous job of continue to transform and accelerate this business to the next phase.

Thank you all for listening in today, and all the shareholders for supporting us and believing in us. Thanks a lot and talk to you soon again.

Have a good day.