Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call of Exasol AG, following the publication of the unaudited financial figures of Q1 2025. I am delighted to welcome Exasol's CFO, Jan-Dirk Henrich. He will speak in a moment and guide us through the presentation and the results. Please note that every participant is muted during the presentation. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your questions directly to Mr. Henrich. I would say, let's jump straight into the numbers, Mr. Henrich. The stage is yours. Thank you very much, Ingmar. Pleasure to be here, as usual, and welcome to everyone in the call to the Q1 2025 results call. My name is Jan-Dirk Henrich. I'm the CFO of Exasol. I'm alone here today. Joerg Tewes, our CEO, will not be joining us. That is due to a change in our approach to the webcasts that we've done. Joerg will, moving forward, join us for the full year call in February and the August call as well. In those calls, he will also give a more extensive update on strategy execution and business, whereas the Q1 and Q3 calls will be more focused on a current trading update and the financial results and will be handled by myself. I'm happy to guide you through today's agenda. Before we start, let me also thank every one of you for the flexibility in scheduling that you've shown. As you know, this webcast was originally scheduled for Monday, but due to a medical emergency I had in the family, we had to postpone that for two days. Thank you very much for your understanding and for joining us today. Today's call will consist of three parts. I will spend a few moments, after going through the executive summary, recapping the 2024 audited results. Our February call was based on preliminary figures, so I will highlight any differences that might have occurred and also look at where we came out in terms of our ARR performance. Second part, I will do a brief recap of the strategy focus or strategy reorientation exercise that we conducted at the end of last year with our new strategic focus field to set the stage for what we're trying to execute this year. Obviously, I will talk about the Q1 numbers and if and whether this has any impact on our outlook for this year. Without further ado, let's jump right in. This is our obligatory disclaimer, which I will not go through, but I feel you can peruse at your will in the downloadable version of this document in the document. What are the key points on Q1 2025? First of all, within the context of our new strategic focus, ARR growth in our focus areas has continued on a strong double-digit level with 14.6%. The share of those focus verticals has increased to now 61% compared to the 52% in the same quarter last year. ARR as a whole has slightly declined compared to the same quarter last year due to a negative development in the non-focus verticals, and I will talk more about that in a moment. P&L revenues have risen substantially by 25% compared to the same quarter last year, driven by, in particular, bundled deliveries of hardware and services to customers in our focus verticals, which were one-off revenues. This explains why the P&L revenue development was significantly stronger than the ARR development for that quarter. Overall, profitability in Q1 came in at EUR 1.3 million compared to EUR 300,000 same quarter last year, which is substantially higher, driven by various effects we're going to be talking about as well. This, in the end, then also led to a strong increase in liquidity in combination with the beginning-of-year seasonal effects to EUR 23.2 million of liquidity and liquid assets at the end of Q1, which is the highest level we've achieved since mid-2022, and which gives us the cushion and headroom to execute on the strategic shift that we've been talking about within our customer portfolio. Net income, similar to EBITDA, also came in strongly at EUR 1 million in the first quarter compared to a still negative net income in the same quarter last year. As a consequence, in summary, we can say that Q1 developed pretty much exactly as we expected when we made the plan for the year, including the decline of ARR in the first quarter that we anticipated. As a consequence, we confirm our guidance for the full year with mid-single-digit ARR and revenue growth and an EBITDA increase to EUR 3 million-EUR 4 million. Let me talk about all these things in a bit more detail in the following sections, but let me start with doing a very brief recap of the 2024 audited financials. Overall, there were almost no changes through the audit conducted by our auditors. All costs remain pretty much exactly where they were. If you look to the left-hand side of the chart, the only notable difference is a minor reclassification of non-recurring revenue to recurring revenue of EUR 200,000, which, however, did not affect gross profit or EBITDA in any way. We can confirm on an audited basis the EBITDA result of EUR 2 million and the positive net income of EUR 200,000. These results overall conclude a year for us that marked an important milestone. We turned the company profitable for the first time since IPO. EBITDA improved significantly, and we were also able to further improve our cost base by more than EUR 3 million, leading to the result that you've seen. That provides a very solid foundation to execute on the strategic refocus that we've started at the end of last year. If we look at our top line in hindsight, also just to set the stage for the discussions on Q1, EBITDA ARR growth came in at 4% with EUR 1.5 million, ending at EUR 42.3 million on the previous reference FX. As usual, at the beginning of the year, we're adjusting the FX rate to the current or the beginning-of-year FX rate, which will be held constant for ARR tracking for the rest of the year. Since we didn't have any major currency fluctuations last year, this is only a minor adjustment. The reference starting point in ARR tracking for 2025 is EUR 42.5 million. Now, if you look at the growth profile, that already gives you an indication of the strategic refocus. The EUR 7.6 million of total new business that we achieved last year were generated 70%-80% by the focus verticals, whereas most of the churn that we've seen that compensated the growth came from the non-focus verticals. As a consequence, we saw the rather flat growth profile, which is something we expect to happen in similar magnitude this year and which is characteristic of the shift that we're currently going through. Building on that, let's quickly recap what that shift is. I think Joerg shared with you in the beginning of the year that one of the key learnings of the past years was that it's very difficult for us to compete as a fully cloud-native data platform with players like Databricks and Snowflake, and that we, however, believe that there is a very sizable and still growing market where we have a clear sweet spot, where we have a clear performance and cost advantage. That is the market for on-premise or hybrid solutions where customers manage their infrastructure themselves and where topics like compliance and data security play a significant role, also driven in large parts through regulation or regulatory requirements. We decided to start focusing on those focus verticals for business development, which is mostly then the industries of financial services, healthcare, telecom, utilities, and public sector, mostly with a focus on our core market in EMEA and DACH. This is, in terms of the sales and go-to-market initiatives that we're focusing on this year, our clear priority and where we concentrate on and where we develop pipeline. Now, we see this market still growing. Overall, we estimate this obtainable serviceable market at EUR 3 billion, not EUR 3 million, across the regions that we are concentrating on, still growing. What we are actually seeing in the last couple of months is an increasing tailwind, which we believe will potentially increase the growth rate of this in the months to come, driven by the topics of data sovereignty and digital security that's imposed into the discussion by the general geopolitics and the general skepticism that is developing towards the dominance of the U.S. providers in the digital space and the data space. We're starting to see first inbound leads based on that motion, customers being interested in European-based or German or DACH-based software providers and tech providers. We believe that this is something to build on. It's actually one of the key topics in a key customer and partner event that we're hosting as of this minute in Berlin, the experience where we are discussing these topics at length and where we see a big resonance. We believe this market is there, and it's going to be growing, in particular at this side of the Atlantic. Overall, we've had great success already in the past couple of years in growing there. If you break down our growth of average 13% over the last three years, you can see that the non-focus verticals were rather stagnant on average in the recent years and this year also in decline, whereas we are generating significant double-digit growth in the focus verticals. This is what we're trying and will build on in 2025. With this recap, let's have a look on that basis on how Q1 developed. Overall, ARR in the first quarter came in at EUR 40 million, and the focus verticals continue to show strong double-digit growth year- on- year with 15%, whereas the non-focus verticals have seen a sharp decline over the past 12 months of - 21%. In aggregate, ARR year- on- year declined by 2.2% and by EUR 2.5 million compared to the beginning of the year, which I will talk about a little bit more in a moment. That brings the portfolio share of the focus verticals to 61% as of end of Q1. As discussed in our call in February, we expect that shift to continue and the non-focus verticals to reduce down to around about 30% by year-end. To get a sense of how this dynamic will evolve through the year, let's have a look at the quarterly development of ARR since the beginning of last year. Now, what you can see here is the typical seasonal development in our growth profile through the year. Last year, we saw a declining ARR in the first half of the year and then growth in the second half of the year. We expect the same to happen this year with two declining quarters in H1 and then two growth quarters in Q3 and Q4. The recline in Q1 this year was obviously more nuanced than it was last year, and this is mostly solely driven by a larger downsell with a major customer in a non-focus vertical who decided to transfer his data in a fully cloud-native platform a couple of years ago and is now executing on that transition. That was anticipated when we built our plans for this year. Overall, the ARR development in Q1 is on target with what we planned for the year. In the bubbles at the bottom of the chart, you see the analog or corresponding values of ARR development for the focus verticals. You can see here that, yes, business in the focus verticals also follows a similar seasonal pattern with slower business in the first half year and then the growth occurring in the second half of the year. In Q2 last year, we also had a brief reclining quarter in the second quarter due to one larger customer leaving us from that segment. Overall, we are seeing continuous growth in the focus verticals over the quarters. Now, to understand the difference of dynamics between the focus verticals and the non-focus verticals in a bit more detail, let's look at the classical subscription dynamics. This is, again, first the group portfolio combined. Here you see the year-on-year decline of 2% or EUR 1 million in ARR compared to the same quarter last year, with overall upselling, which is dominated by the focus verticals, being overcompensated by the churn or lost business in the non-focus verticals. This is a similar balance that we're going to continue to see with a continuously improved weighting between the two over the next couple of quarters. If you look at the same picture for the focus verticals, you can see that overall subscription dynamics are significantly healthier. You can see gross upsell rates at a healthy 120%. While this is below prior year level, one has to take into consideration that the prior year was still influenced by some migration to subscription effects in our contract structure, whereas the upsell motion over the past one and a half years is classical pure upsell in terms of scope increase and volume increase and not influenced by migration anymore. Churn came in over the past 12 months of 9%. That's slightly higher than the three-year average, and that was because of one particular FinTech customer in the U.K. who decided to insource his solution last year. This was not a move to the cloud or a loss to the cloud. It was an internal decision by the customer to insource the technology and not work with vendors anymore. If adjusted for that effect, churn would have been at 3%, which is in line with prior year. Overall, we expect churn in the focus verticals to come in at 5% at year-end, maintaining the very healthy level of the past three years and very strong gross revenue retention of 95%. This is the dynamic that we're seeing in the shift. With this ARR development, where does that leave us in terms of profitability and cash? Overall, in Q1, we continued our improvement path of EBITDA that we've seen over the last couple of quarters. EBITDA came in at EUR 1.3 million in Q1. I'm going to talk a little bit more about what drove this very strong performance in a moment and how much of that is underlying recurring and how much of that is one-off. Driven by that EBITDA performance, our cash flow performance also improved, where we were able to come in at EUR 23.2 million or an increase of EUR 8.2 million compared to beginning-of-year value, which is also a stronger increase than we've seen in the same period last year. The general trend of improved profitability continued. If we dive a little bit into where the root cause of that lay, and let's get to the P&L, you can see that the increase in profitability was driven by three key effects. First of all, despite the declining ARR in Q1, total ARR in absolute terms, as you have seen on the previous charts, still stood roughly at Q2-Q3 level, which ensured relatively stable recurring revenues. At the same time, full-year effects from saving measures that we implemented in 2024 further improved our cost base. You can see that our total costs Q1 on Q1 came down by EUR 500,000, and that is despite the obligatory or usual salary increase rounds that kicked in beginning of January. We were able to improve our cost base, quarterly cost base, by EUR 500,000 despite countervening factor cost effects. Those two things combined ensured a stable recurring profitability. This was aided in Q1 by additional revenues from bundled hardware and service sales to customers in the focus verticals, which came at additional gross margin. This is something that will not happen every quarter, but we do expect these types of hardware deals to occur more often also in the future, since customers in those focus verticals often request that from us. Basically, what happens is that we procure the hardware for them, we pre-install the software, and the customer gets a ready-to-run metal from us to deploy. This is what drove overall the strong EBITDA performance in Q1, which is a very healthy start towards our goal of reaching EUR 3 million-EUR 4 million EBITDA in 2025. With the results coming in, what does it mean for our outlook? As I mentioned before, what we've seen in Q1 is pretty much exactly what we expected when we planned the year. What also our guidance is based on, as a consequence, it won't surprise you, that we maintain our 2025 outlook, aiming for mid-single-digit growth both in terms of ARR and revenue. Now, on the ARR side, we are very confident that the new business development and pipeline build-up that we're seeing in the focus verticals will enable us to have that kind of growth profile in the second half of the year to get us to that result. In revenue growth, whereas we saw a very strong% growth in the first quarter, given that there still will be some one-off business, but not to the same amount, the revenue growth in the P&L will also level in at a mid-single-digit growth value. Both building then in combination with our improved cost base builds the foundation to reach the EBITDA improvement to EUR 3 million-EUR 4 million, which we're aiming for this year. In sum, what would I like you to take away? I've basically summed it up already. A, Q1 developed as expected with the reclining ARR, which we also expect in the second quarter with a recovery in the second half. The business development in our focus verticals is progressing, and we are seeing additional tailwind for our strategy that we chose end of last year with the overall market discussions around data sovereignty and digital security that are fueled by the current geopolitical discussions, which gives us confidence in the strategy that we've chosen. The sustained profitability that we've achieved and that we've continued gives us a very strong foundation to execute on that portfolio shift that we're seeing right now on a good and profitable basis. As a consequence, we maintain our full-year outlook that we provided in our February call. That would conclude my remarks for today. Thank you very much for listening so far, and I'm very happy to take your questions now. Yes, thank you very much for the presentation, the dive into your results and the outlook. We will now move on to the Q&A session. For a dynamic conversation, we kindly ask you to speak and ask the questions via the audio line. To do so, please push the raise your hand button. We have a participant with the first question, Mr. Van der Horst. You should be able to speak now. Hi everyone, thanks for taking my question. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi Robert, good to hear you. Hi JD. Good to hear you. I have a question about those one-time revenues you mentioned, the almost EUR 3 million. I think, I mean, looking at past years, this is quite a jump to what we've seen in the past. If you could help me understand what hardware and services you provide and how this usually works over the lifecycle of the customer. Is this to be expected whenever a new project kicks in, or should we expect to see those also just somewhat recurring? Not subscribed, of course, but somehow recurring. Would you still say that Q1 was particularly strong, or will this be kind of the normal share of non-recurring revenues? Yeah. Maybe starting with the last question first or giving general context. I think the high-level answer is I expect those kinds of deals to occur more regularly in the future than that you've seen it in the past because it fits with our strategy. That being said, the deal that affected the Q1 result was particularly large. Or the two deals were particularly large. Do not expect a similar size ex ante. I would not expect a similar size one-off deal to occur in any of the following quarters, but I would not exclude that there might be one or the other six-digit revenue with a customer. It is inherently not plannable, and it is not recurring in that sense. Let me still give you some notion of how these deals occur. If we have a customer who operates an on-premise data center, the hardware that he operates on has life cycles. Typical life cycles for a server are five years. Typically, every five years, you would renew the server. Even let's say if a customer operates a constant footprint with our software, after five years, we would typically see a renewal of hardware. Now, if the customer does that again with us, obviously, it is up for negotiation each time. Let's say for the installation that we've now provided, all else equal without increase in data volumes or change in use case, you would expect this customer to renew that in five years. Now, at the same time though, and this is how many of these deals are occurring, is let's say typically if you look at the full tech stack of a customer, we do not usually have a 100% share of wallet. Part of our growth with the customer in upselling is through migrating workloads that have been previously run on a different database technology to us. Often and sometimes that comes along with a hardware renewal. They would say, "Okay, we need to renew this analytic cluster in our data center. Let's use this opportunity to migrate to Exasol." While we're at it, let's also renew the servers. Basically what we're doing, and this is the service, I mean, we are not inherently a B2B cyber port. The reason why it makes sense to do this with us is that our customer service then also can pre-install the software and basically get the machine to the customer ready to run. It's not because we can sell the customer the hardware particularly cheap. I mean, we're not a hardware dealer, but it makes sense in the context of an overall software and services delivery. Okay. That makes perfect sense. Thanks. A quick follow-up question also on the show. You mentioned that one customer was downselling in Q1. Was this from, was it a retail customer or did it come from another vertical? No, that was a retail customer. Okay. Perfect. Fully in line with what we expected. Yes. Okay. Perfect. That's right. I'll go back to the queue. Thank you. Thank you, Robert. Yes. Thanks for the questions. We are waiting for some more participants to take the chance placing their questions. I'll wait a few moments. Please feel free and be invited to place your questions via the audio line, or if you're not able to speak freely, please use our chat box as well. Preferably, it's for a nice conversation via the audio line. I'll wait a few more moments. There are no more questions in the line. To all the participants and you, Mr. Henrich. Now we got one in our chat box. Oh, hi, Andrew. Did it out. My other participants could not see the question or you. Yeah. The question is, how is the company thinking about capital allocation with cash growing? At this stage, I am not thinking about capital allocation yet because obviously I am happy about the cash position that we have right now. I would say if our plans unfold fully as we expect them to for this year, I would still see a cash position of almost, let us say, EUR 18 milliom-EUR 20 million at year-end, EUR 18 milliom-EUR 20 million, without this being a guidance because cash is notoriously volatile at year-end. Obviously, your statement that our cash reserves are growing with the execution of our plans is correct. I think we have various options to do that at year-end. In the end, it depends on which dynamics we see in which fields. First of all, if we see proven growth tractions and accelerating growth traction in the focus verticals, I could envision us reinvesting some EBITDA into that within certain limits. Second option for us theoretically is thinking about a dividend, which we are now in a legal position to do. I think at the end of in the full-year call in February, I talked a little bit about the adjustment of equity structure and the neutralization of cumulated losses that we did towards with the full-year closing in the balance sheet, which puts us in a position to be able to pay a dividend moving forward. We have laid the groundwork for that. Obviously, if I have options to invest in growth and accelerate growth in a proven and reliable fashion, that would be the company's preference. We see which options are on the table for us towards the end of the year. M&A is always a theoretical possibility, although I have to say, even with EUR 20 million in the bank and with increased profitability and hence bankability, our ability to execute meaningful M&A in our markets is still limited. If you look at fields like AI and the valuations prevalent there, it's just going to be difficult to do. That does not mean it's not worth looking, but at best, it would be a smaller tech and team type of structure that you could look at. This is the theoretical solution field. At this stage, as I said, for us, it's theoretical. I think the point where we would start seriously thinking about that is when we're towards the end of the year and we fully hit our marks. Yes, thank you very much. I'll wait some more moments because in the meantime, we have received no further questions. There is one additional one. Is there a good way to think about dollar churn over the midterm 2026-2027 from a high level? Is 2025 peak churn? I think if you reflect on the portfolio structure and the different dynamics in the different portfolio elements and the low churn in the focus verticals and the high churn in the non-focus verticals, if you do the math, then if we get the non-focus verticals down to 30% by year-end, then almost by the law of weighted numbers, the churn rate will start to normalize eventually in 2026 and start to come down. Now, how exactly that unfolds obviously depends on the timing of some of the churn in the non-focus verticals. I would also say at this stage and with the general trends that I'm seeing, I would consider that some of the churn that we have been calculating with over the past months is not God-given anymore, given the rising skepticism towards cloud solutions and considerations of data sovereignty. My clear hope is that 2025 will be the peak of churn and that we will see normalizing rates. An exact prediction is very difficult at this stage. If you play out the portfolio dynamics that I've shown and if you overlay that with the geopolitical trends that I've talked about, I think this is definitely something we aim for. Great. Thank you. We'll wait for some more moments. In the meantime, we have received no further questions. That's not the case. Any other questions? Thank you for joining this lively conversation. We therefore come to the end of today's earnings call. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Stephanie Winkler from Investor Relations. A big thank you to Mr. Henrich for your presentation and the time you took to answer the questions. I wish you all a lovely remaining week. Stay healthy and safe. With this, I hand over again to Mr. Henrich for some final remarks. Yeah, I can only echo what you've said. Thank you very much for listening. Thanks for the good questions. Hope to see many of you at the Spring Forum in Frankfurt next week where we have a chance to catch up in person. I'll be there on Monday and Tuesday. If not, feel free to reach out if you have the need to discuss in more detail. Thanks very much. Enjoy the rest of your week and stay healthy. Stay safe. Bye-bye.