Operator
Welcome to Nepa Q4 2025 report presentation. For the first part of the presentation participants will be in listen-only mode.
During the questions and answers session participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on their telephone keypad. If you are listening to the presentation via webcast, you can ask written questions using the form below.
Now, I will hand the conference over to CEO Anders Dahl. Please go ahead.
Anders Dahl
Good morning and welcome to Nepa's year-end report 2025. I am Anders Dahl, the CEO of Nepa, and I will give you a short introduction to Nepa, what we do, and and then an overview of Q4.
We will do a financial summary, and then we will give you an out- out- outlook, and then we will end up with the Q&A. Together with me today, I have our VP of Finance, Edvard Hagman, who will step in and take some some part of the presentation as well.
Nepa is is one of the leading marketing intelligence companies in the world. We drive brand growth by insightful market analysis.
We track daily 7,500 brands and measure thousands of advertising campaigns annually across the globe in more than 50 markets. We deliver insights to CMOs, marketing teams, and insight departments of global consumer brands, and we also speak in many cases directly to the C-level executives of the companies to to justify and to build a solid foundation for marketers around the world to to kind of claim and and the marketing budget that is is appropriate to what they are going to accomplish when it comes to growth.
Our core offering offering include brand tracking, campaign evaluation, and MMM. Those are supported by brand advisory services by our consultants on a very high-end level.
This really gives the CMOs and insight departments a full 360-degrees view of what they do in marketing. I will come back to that a little bit more, what we call the Trinity offer, the combination of those three different pillars in in in our offer.
We combine market survey data with cutting-edge technology and and an excellent consultancy organization to deliver both recurring and ad hoc insights. We do have a strong presence when it comes to sale and and insight consultants in Northern Europe, and sales offices in the UK and US, and we also have an operations center in Mumbai.
Despite of that, we can work globally. We work with brands and we work with marketers in in in more or less like all markets around the world.
Even if we don't have people in that specific market, we can easily do the trackings and and analyze the survey data, but we can also do insight meetings and perform in that market in spite of not having an office even. We offer both subscription services and ad hoc projects, and the subscription stands for 60% roughly of our revenue, and the ad hoc projects projects stands for about 40%.
The main pillars in our subscription offerings is brand tracking, continued market marketing mix modeling, and ad tracking. Then we do consumer experience tracking, and also we have recurring data deliveries to some clients where we actually provide them into their dashboards directly into their environment.
We do ad hoc projects, and we have done more of them over time before, but we have now narrowed it down to more kind of or repeat scalable and repeatable ad hoc projects. We can really scale them as well.
Some of the biggest ones are are campaign evaluation and campaign pulse, and marketing mix modeling on an ad hoc basis, and brand touch and brand brand assets studies, and then we do category insights and some other key marketing insight projects. That has been kind of a mindful narrowness of projects in order to not be too broad when it comes to to really customize some of this, and really make sure that we have scalable and and precise offerings.
The fourth quarter in brief, we continue to see growth in sales bookings, close to 21% year-over-year. In in our numbers, you see a legacy churn that will distort the year-over-year comparisons, and we do also present underlying figures that you will see in this presentation, and you will also see that in the report.
We have a very strong underlying ARR trend, and and that is kind of one of our main focus areas, to build our AR- ARR business to to build a sustainable business over time. We have done that for the last two, three years, and you see a strong year-over-year growth in in the underlying ARR trend.
You also see see an underlying net sales that are more or less flat, but minus when it comes to reporting, because we have the underlying churn in that. The underlying subscription revenue is growing, and that is mainly driven by the ARR business.
Then the adjusted EBITDA-CapEx margin stands for 11.1 percentage in this quarter, which is the strongest margin we have had since since I think Q4 2021. This really shows that the strategy we implemented a couple of years ago is now really hitting hitting in in a very positive way.
The board has decided not to propose a dividend for 2025, and and more about that in the report. When it comes to sales bookings, we see a continued strong growth in sales bookings.
This this number shows the ARR bookings over the fiscal year and then on the fourth quarter, and you see it's a significant growth compared to to previous fiscal year, and it's a significant growth compared to to the previous Q4 of last year. This is the same numbers, but broken down into quarters, and you see that the trend is is is clear that we manage to keep clients, we manage to to expand the expand the contracts, and we manage to get new clients in into our business.
Those initiatives that we launched in 2024, or early 2024, and and our kind of part of our strategic strategic initiatives in our transformation strategy, see these are four of them, four of the four of the big ones when we work with resetting the revenue mix and and then the strategic shift towards recurring revenue. You see that very clearly in the numbers now.
It's completed, but it's also kind of an ongoing focus to make sure that we share the share of profitable recurring revenue is increasing, and and the legacy churn is more or less like throughout Q2 202- 2026, they will affect the numbers, but then they will be phased out. Cost base, we have right-sized the cost base, and we have also changed very much of the operating model, and and and it is it is completed, but we also continue, of course, to find new ways of being even more efficient when it comes to our operations.
You see clearly in the numbers that the commercial transformation and the revised go-to-market strategy is is really hitting hitting the market in a in a positive way. It's implemented, and we have seen a much strong- stronger pipeline, and we also with the with the reset in the organization, with the reset in in our ICP list, that is really paying off in a good way.
Our our work of of simplifying our tracking platform and and the tech consolidation we started up in in in '24, worked with during 2025, will now be is ongoing, well but will be fully implemented during the first half of 2026. This slide shows a little bit more about the new brand tracking platform that we have tested out and worked with most of our big clients during 2025, but we now will be fully rolled out in 2026.
That will give us the new the new platform with much lower maintenance needs and a much easier way to to to kind of reduce our custom custom configurations that over time have created so much kind of friction cost within the organization. It's it will also be a much better client experience with the new platform.
This is definitely one of the main drivers to to kind of shift the focus from not only working with internal efficiency, but being able to work with client deliveries and client satisfaction in a much better way, and innovation. The whole marketing mix modeling and the presentation of those numbers will be more client-tech driven, and it's a it's a it's an output, to say, of the of the much more kind of efficient way of delivering our brand tracking going forward.
We have platforms, but we have also strengthened up our teams, and and these are three of three of our newest recruits: Liz, Andreas, and Björn, who are kind of leading the the our our marketing acceleration group, and and especially when it comes to tie those different, the marketing mix modeling, brand tracking, and campaign evaluation together in in a good way. These the this the this team is definitely instrumental in doing that.
We all know that the world and the day-to-day work of marketers is not getting easier. We know that close to 70% of marketers are struggling to prove the ROI of their marketing efforts.
We also know that close to 70% of the marketers struggle to balance performance marketing and creative branding, and I think that's where we can come in and help with the brand tracker, with the campaign evaluation, and with the marketing mix modeling tool. We can help with pacing, we can help with channel optimization, we can help to find the right balance between brand advertising and performance advertising.
Some of the new clients that we presented during the fall are, in some cases, native digital brands, and we had a hard time to sell brand trackers to them before, but now with the balance or or with the full view of brand tracking, campaign evaluation, and marketing mix modeling, we can show the brand people within those companies and the performance people in those companies how those things are kind of working together in in the best possible way. We can prove short-term investments combined with long-term investments, and have that dialogue with the marketing team as well as with the C-level team.
This is the Q4 financial development, and I will hand over to Edvard to to walk you through those numbers.
Edvard Hagman
Thank you, Anders. Moving over to the financial development of the company in Q4.
Overall, Nepa delivered a quite solid performance across our key metrics in the fourth quarter. 2025 was a transformational year for the company, where we have seen gradual improvements through the second half of the year, ending with a robust final quarter.
Let me start with the top-line development. We entered the year with extraordinary churn and phase-out of low-margin contracts, and also highly customized contracts and tracking setups.
This will continue to impact our comparable growth figures until Q2 2026. Excluding these discontinued contracts, underlying net sales were essentially flat during the quarter, while reported net sales declined by 15%.
On the subscription side, the story is more positive. We've seen a clear improvement in our remaining subscription base, supported of course by all the solid ARR bookings throughout the year and a strong finish in Q4.
Underlying subscription revenues increased by 4.5%, while the reported ones declined by 21% because of the extraordinary churn and contract phase-outs that I just mentioned. On the ad hoc side with our existing subscription clients, we saw renewed confidence in the quarter.
Ad hoc revenue from subscribing clients grew 10.5% reported, and 12.5% underlying. This is in line with our strategy, that combining long-term tracking and continuous contracts with our professional services in MMM, campaign tests, and other one-off insight deliveries just like Anders mentioned previously.
Finally, ad hoc revenue from other clients declined by 20.6%, and that reflects our focus on deepening relationships with core subscription customers rather than chasing opportunistic one-offs that aren't scalable in the long run. Turning to our recent transformation and cost developments, we're quite pleased with the results from the transformation efforts during the year.
We've embedded a stronger business mindset across the organization, with incentives tied to both sales and product margins, and we now believe that this is truly reflected in the results. Gross margin is up 3.5 percentage points year-over-year.
When we also account for other product costs, such as delivery hours, we see a material increase in product margins over the past two years. All of this comes from more efficient workflows, better integration of global resources, and increased use of AI to amplify our processes.
On the cost side, the saving measures in the first half of the year, both in personnel and in other fixed costs, including the relocation of our headquarters, have had a significant impact on our results in the fourth quarter. Personnel costs are down 23% year-over-year, and other external costs are down 16%.
As a result of this, we can present an adjusted EBITDA-CapEx margin of 11.1% in the quarter. This is the highest margin, just like Anders mentioned, since Q4 2021.
We're happy to present that this quarter. Let me also move on to net cash flow and our financial position.
We started the period after Q3 with a net cash position of 12.4 million Swedish kronas. During a switch of banks in the second half of the year, we temporarily utilized about 10 million in credit by the end of Q3 to facilitate the transition and manage working capital fluctuation.
Total cash position ending Q3 was 22.6 million. This quarter, operating cash flow before changes in working capital was strong.
However, most of that was offset by negative working capital development, and I will touch a bit on that as well. Even though our total order intake in Q4 grew by almost 21%, we had not, by the last of December, collected all the cash for those invoices sent and booked.
As a result, trade receivables spiked compared to Q3 when we recognize some of the revenue. We haven't seen any deterioration in payment behavior, but this is rather a normal year-end pattern for us, given that Q4 is our most active sales period, and this reflects the typical client behavior of closing deals and closing purchases in the end of the year.
We also had a higher level of supplier payments in the fourth quarter versus previous quarters, which meant that overall working capital was a negative contributor to operating cash flow. Finally, back to the credit facility and cash structure, during Q4, we successfully migrated to a new bank and to a new global cash pool structure, which is much more flexible for our cash management than our previous setup.
We managed to repay the entire outstanding credit facility during the quarter, resulting, though, in a negative cash flow from financing activities of -10 million Swedish kronas, and total net cash flow of -8. If you look at the net cash position on this slide, it's evident that it has improved during the quarter, from 12.4 to 14.5 million Swedish kronas.
Just to summarize, despite the extraordinary churn and contract phase-out impacting reported growth this quarter, we believe that the quality of our revenue base, margins, and cash position has improved, and giving us a stronger platform going into 2026 and this year. Back to you, Anders.
Anders Dahl
Thanks a lot, Edvard. When it comes to outlook, we are now moving, or we continue, of course, to transform where we think we need to transform, but we are more moving into an acceleration phase, and we have already seen that in Q3 and Q4 of last year.
We continue to build on the current ARR momentum, and we foresee or see that there will be a continued growth in the ARR business during 2026, at least what we can see now from our pipeline, and strengthened ad hoc service segment with scalable advisory offerings, not like we have done before, offering a wide variety of different ad hoc solutions, but more scalable solutions where we know we can scale and grow in a profitable way. Like I said, we expect the positive ARR trend to continue in 2026.
When it comes to product innovation, renewed focus on product innovation in a large extent, but they're mostly connected to kind of the Trinity offer between brand and marketing mix modeling and campaign evaluation. That is to enable clients to track brand performance, optimize media, evaluate campaigns with the single modern suite of a tool box that they can use.
Of course, one of the main components that we must emphasize and have hard discipline is to have cost discipline and profitable growth focus going forward. We remain mindful of macroeconomic uncertainty and will maintain strict cost discipline and focus on value-added growth.
With that said, I would like to hand over to the Q&A session, and thanks a lot for listening to this part of the presentation.
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.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. There are no phone questions at this time.
I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.
Edvard Hagman
Thank you. We have received some written questions in the chat that I will read out loud.
Starting with the first one: In Q2 2024, you mentioned that 3 million Swedish krona of ARR bookings started in the following quarter, Q3, and was not included in the ARR number. Is there a similar effect in this quarter?
Let's say that whenever we close a deal, we always start recording the contract value on the start date of the contract. That will probably always be the case whenever we close a deal in the end of a quarter and the contract start date is in the following quarter.
I cannot comment on any specific levels or so, but that will always be the case.
Anders Dahl
That is a part of our business model with our clients, so that will continue to be that way.
Edvard Hagman
The next question is: During 2026, you have added some new open positions in the Nordics. If everything turns out as you expect, what positions do you want to add?
Anders Dahl
Like I stated in one of my bullet points, that we're looking at profitable growth. We are very cautious when it comes to expanding the organization.
We have been pretty early on when it comes to using AI, for example, we're using AI and automation in a lot of the different processes we have internally. The main growth areas for recruiting more people is like Liz and Björn and Andreas are good example of high-end consultants that gives a lot of value to our clients, especially in those Trinity projects, but, of course, also sales and marketing.
During the last year, we have invested more and more, carefully again, with really evaluating every dollar or krona or euro we spend, with a very clear ROI anticipation and also a very agile way of doing it. Sales, marketing, brand building, and high-end consultancy, and looking at how much of the traditional kind of processes we do, how much of that can we automate and infuse AI into.
Edvard Hagman
On the topic of AI, we have another question here: Given the fears that AI will destroy all software business or platforms out there, could you please elaborate how you see the AI threat, what you can do to defend against it, and if there are any certain elements in the business, for example, the human advisory part, that could make it difficult for AI solutions to offer the same value to your client as you are?
Anders Dahl
This is a really good question. I think we definitely see AI as an opportunity, maybe not so much as a threat, because we still see that there is a lot of need for kind of hand-holding and advice and advisory when it comes to the high-end consulting.
Yes, definitely a lot of our kind of basic processes are very data-driven and therefore prone for kind of putting in AI. We have already, since late 2024 or mid-2024, we have implemented AI processes in a lot of our delivery platforms, that we are kind of on the forefront when it comes to using AI, and we will continue to develop that going forward.
For us, it's more about how can we be more efficient in the traditional deliveries of the data, analyzing the data, to be able to move more of our investment and resources into the high-end consulting on a C-level in those companies where we work for. This is definitely a disruption of the industry, but I think we can use the disruption in a very good way to move more towards the higher value to the clients.
Edvard Hagman
Next question: Customers started to see the new functionalities that you have launched on the platform?
Anders Dahl
Yes, just before this meeting, we had a couple of client presentations where we kind of showed internally, and also for the client, how we use those new tools, the new dashboards, new way of presenting data, the new way of kind of bridging between brand tracking and MMM, how you can both look in the long term, but also in the short term, how your investments are paying off. For some clients, maybe market research and market insights have been very much of a kind of a nice-to-know, of a long-term way of using the knowledge about the market.
With our tools now that we have been launching now for the last two years, we can also prove that we can be in the day-to-day tactical part of the client's business, and we can show significant clear ROIs in the day-to-day business for our clients. These are big retailers, these are big brands, and we are sitting in to their meetings, their decision meetings, on a weekly and a monthly basis to help them make the decisions based on short-term or long-term impact of the brand advertising and the performance marketing.
Yes, we have rolled them out already, and of course we are developing them constantly, but they are definitely being seen and showed and used by our clients now for months.
Edvard Hagman
The next question is: What was the driver of higher net revenue retention in Q4? Basically a result of very good expansion sales on existing clients, where we increased the number of markets, categories, etc., on several clients, but also less contractions in terms of downgrading of tracking business, and more normalized churn levels.
That was the biggest contributors to a higher net revenue retention in this quarter. Next question is: Your five largest clients contributed approximately to 24% of revenue in 2025.
Can we expect the number to decline to less than 20% during 2026?
Anders Dahl
I think you that have been with us now for a while have seen that we are moving away from those Of course, we do like big clients, but we have been also more diverse when it comes to having smaller or mid-sized or challenging clients. With our change in focus when it comes to our ICP list, the impact of that will of course be that there will be a decline in the percentage of how those biggest clients will impact our total revenue.
There will be more clients with smaller amount, but a bigger size of diversification. Yes.
Edvard Hagman
With the current sales momentum, should we expect higher bookings versus last year in H1 2026?
Anders Dahl
We are not giving guidance of that, but like I said before, I think we expect ARR trend to continue into 2026.
Edvard Hagman
The sales team has clearly done a great job. What was the main driver behind the Q4 performance?
Was it internal changes or a shift in the market compared to 2024?
Anders Dahl
I think there are an underlying change in the market, a little bit more positive view on 2026 and onwards. I think without doing what we did when it comes to building up a new business team, total reorganization, the client success organization, I think we have missed a lot of those opportunities if we didn't have had that change in the organization.
That really helped us to kind of catch those opportunities that are out there in the market. It's a blend, but I think the work we have done internally is definitely one of the driving factors for us being able to capture new clients that normally don't go to companies like Nepa, for example, because some of them are very performance-driven, some of them are traditionally kind of buying from different types of vendors.
I think we have managed to break into a new segment that we weren't really active in before.
Edvard Hagman
The next question is: Does the Nordic region still dominate bookings, or were there other markets that performed well in terms of bookings?
Anders Dahl
I think Northern Europe is better to say, because we have clients that might have some kind of presence in the Nordic, but they're more like Northern Europe. We also see that some of the clients that are typically Nordic or Northern Europe, we are now growing with them in other markets, in Europe, Southern Europe, Central Europe, Southeast Asia, and also in North America.
Of course, we don't, like I said before, we don't have boots on the ground to that extent in more than Central Europe, and UK, and to some extent North America, but the word is out there, and with some of those clients, I think there will be more attention and an interest in using Nepa. If you take one of the big global brands in one category and that becomes publicly known, of course there are companies from South America or Southeast Asia that see that, can Nepa help them in the same way?
We have gotten quite a lot of those leads coming in through our website, for example, based on references to big brands that we have managed to win in some key categories. The
Edvard Hagman
next question is: Can you talk a little bit about why investors should look at adjusted EBITDA less CapEx instead of net profit? I can take that one.
I believe this metric provides a more accurate reflection of underlying operating profitability rather than looking at EBIT or net profit. This metric is more closely correlated with free cash flow, and also less affected by accruals.
The rationale here is that Nepa has historically capitalized intangible expenditures, which has resulted in ongoing amortization charges today that are non-cash in nature. The equivalent expenditures today are no longer capitalized on the balance sheet, but instead, thanks to shorter product and market cycles, etc., etc., they are expensed as incurred in the P&L.
To ensure a like-for-like comparison between historical and current figures, the most relevant measure is adjusted EBITDA less CapEx here. However, as we don't have any CapEx today, adjusted EBITDA without the less CapEx ending would also make sense to look at today, but we have kept the original metric for historical comparisons.
Of course, going further down the P&L, you also have net financial items and taxes in net profit. Other than tax, net financial items are mainly currency-related unrealized gains and losses on intra-group loans, which are also non-cash.
Basically, we believe that this metric, adjusted EBITDA less CapEx, provides a more accurate reflection of underlying profitability.
Anders Dahl
It also links into the previous questions about that if AI is killing SaaS companies and platforms, I think this also shows that we are now much more working with third-party solutions. We are much more of an orchestrator of AI agents and tools.
That means that there is more to kind of the core competence of what we can deliver to our clients that it actually is to develop software or develop specific first-party platforms. It's more about how to use those existing, especially AI agents, will be definitely one of the main topics going forward, to use that type of thinking in growing and building a sustainable and profitable business going forward.
Edvard Hagman
Good. Thank you.
I think that was all the questions we had from the chat, handing back to you, Anders, for some final remarks.
Anders Dahl
Thank you very much for listening in. Thanks, Edvard, for doing the financial presentation.
Again, I think this report is a statement to more or less like a financial inflection point, where we went on a journey in '24 to transform this company. We had a couple of bumps in the road during '25, or late '24, that impacted our '25 numbers.
I think now, going into the future and seeing what we have done in '25, shows that this strategy is working, the focus on ARR, the focus on our clients, how we work with our clients, how we set up the client relations internally, and also how to work with the clients. Our product portfolio is much sharper, more precise now than ever before.
Then we have kind of cleaned up a lot of the ad hoc business that was somewhat of a cost driver, especially in the long term, when the macroeconomic impact were a little bit volatile. Of course, people.
We have developed a lot of internal programs in order to develop our own internal organization, to be able to kind of go from that change to be more of a high-end client advisory solution than we have ever been before. Also recruiting new talent from the outside to be able to add on to the strong team we have internally.
This is very much of a teamwork, and I'm really proud of what we have accomplished in Q4, and the late part of 2025. Thanks a lot, all of you, and we will be back.
Thanks.
Edvard Hagman
Thank you.
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