Good day and welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry for the delay from airtime side. Welcome to Exasol's nine month 2025 earnings call. The CFO, Jan-Dirk Henrich, will guide us through the presentation. Afterwards, we will move over to a Q&A session in which you have the possibility to place your questions via chat box and audio line. Having said this, I'm handing over to you, Mr. Henrich. Thank you very much, Judith. Also from my side, apologies for the delay, which was due to a technical problem we had, I hope we did not let you wait for too long. Welcome to today's call, which, as many of you might know, is already the second call on the nine month numbers. Most of you will have noticed that two weeks ago we corrected our guidance for this year, which I will run through again today, and conducted an impromptu webcast to give you the opportunity to answer any questions you might have. I will nevertheless run through all the information again in today's call. For those of you who have already attended two weeks ago, apologies for the repetition. Obviously, I will also go in a little bit more detail on some salient points on the business side, but also on the P&L result as of nine months ending. I will lead you through a call alone today, Jörg Tewes, our CEO, is not attending. However, if you have questions to him or me, feel free to reach out to us via our Investor Relations contacts, and we're happy to set something up outside the regular formats of our webcast calls. I'd like to point your attention, as usual, to our disclaimer with respect to forward-looking statements. I will not run through it, but please, as you review the information, have a look at it if you look through the downloadable presentation. What has happened in the first nine months of this year? I think from a strategy perspective, we've continued to see strong ARR growth in our focus verticals. As you recall, we have reworked our strategy earlier late last year, earlier this year, to hone in on some key industries for customers where we think our value proposition is biggest. We continue to see 25% year-on-year growth in those focus verticals. As a result, the share of these in ARR of these focus verticals has meantime increased to roughly 70% versus around 50% at the same time last year. That being said, this transformation and strategic refocus has led to a shift in our customer portfolio with the growth in the focus vertical on the one side, but also a significant churn in the non-focus verticals on the other, which has progressed at a higher rate than we initially expected for this year, leading to dampened growth on an aggregate level. In conjunction with some key projects in the focus verticals for new business that had shifted to next year, we came to the conclusion that we will no longer be able to achieve our original guidance and have adjusted it accordingly two weeks ago. However, we do not see negative impact on both P&L revenue and EBITDA, which I will run you through in more detail. What does that mean in terms of numbers? In terms of numbers, we ended nine months with EUR 31.7 million in revenue, which is up 9%, which already gives you a sense of the healthy revenue performance. ARR, however, on a twelve-month basis was down 4% to EUR 39 million caused by the accelerated churn in the non-focus verticals. On the EBITDA side, we ended nine months with EUR 3 million compared to EUR 1 million at the same time last year, which gives you a sense of the progress in terms of profitability that we've made over the past twelve months. Now, what matters? While this is obviously a dip in our growth development, we remain still, however, bullish for the future. Why? As said, we continue to see the strategy with focus on the focus verticals working out. In addition, our increased focus on closing meaningful partnerships, which give us reach in the market, has made progress in the form of MariaDB. Now, MariaDB, I will give some background on this collaboration. It's a database software provider in and by itself with a slightly different focus. And there's lots of synergies that we believe we can exploit in bringing an integrated offer to the market, which gives them increased monetization options of their large user base and us, obviously, an increased reach into the market. Overall, with this increased churn in the non-focus verticals, this, however, also means that we have a clearer visibility to a decreased churn dynamic in the non-focus verticals moving forward in 2026. Together with the shifted projects, we believe there's now a clear visibility back to accelerated growth in 2026, which MariaDB will also contribute to. Maybe elaborating on that a little bit. What is MariaDB? MariaDB is a database software company located in Silicon Valley and Ireland. They originated as an open-source database software with a focus on transactional data. As some of you might know, the data world is kind of divided into transactional data and analytical data, so OLTP and OLAP. Our focus as Exasol is on the analytical data. We're an analytics company, analytics database software, whereas they manage the huge amounts of transactional data that any organization shifts. Through their origins as an open-source company, they have an extremely large user base, so over 1 billion downloads of the original open-source software, which over the years they've been able to convert into 600+ enterprise customers. They were looking for opportunities to increase the value add of the offering and further leverage the unmonetized part of their user base and give them additional monetization options. One of those potential options, obviously, is to give them basic capabilities to also analyze the transactional data that they're managing with the software with analytics. That is where the idea of a joint OEM product came from. Basically, MariaDB will take our core database technology and integrate a basic version of it into their enterprise offering to a new offering called MariaDB Exa, which gives their customers the opportunity to do basic analytics on the large amount of transactional data that they're running, benefiting from the performance that is inherent in our technology and our USPs, and then also doing that in a cost-efficient way. That has several benefits for us as Exasol. For MariaDB, it's a win because they get an additional option to monetize their big open-source user base. For us, obviously, it solves a key problem that we had in the past of gaining visibility in the market and also global visibility in the market and also gaining visibility in the tech communities out there. This large open-source user base is a very good multiplier for us to gain visibility. The OEM offering that we are making gives us visibility as a brand. We're not like an invisible technology component embedded into their product, but we're going to market it as powered by Exasol, which then also gives the opportunity to interested customers who are using the MariaDB Exa product and now have an interest to upsell to a full-scale enterprise data analytical data warehouse solution to directly transact with us and convert that into non-OEM larger customers with upsell opportunity. There's basically two monetization paths into the MariaDB relationship. One is the royalties that we receive from MariaDB on the MariaDB Exa product plus potential upsell opportunities of customers who have then gained interest in our technology to upgrade into a full-scale analytical data warehouse house. Obviously, from a go-to-market efficiency side, it gives us wide access in the market with comparatively little invest ourselves. MariaDB is carrying the development cost for the collaboration themselves, and we're basically benefiting from their go-to-market organization and their customer relationships. This is a relationship that is ramping up, which they have a very high level of commitment to. Similarly, us, we ourselves. I think this commitment from their side is also expressed in a relatively large pre-commitment on the first-year royalties that they've made, which you will start seeing in our ARR in Q4. Yeah. They've put their money where their mouth is, so to say, and that is an expression of the big belief they have in the relationship. We expect kind of first customer conversions or first customer of theirs adapting the new product potentially already end of this year, early next year. You've probably seen the joint press statement that we've released. This is ramping up now. We're enabling their sales teams, and they're starting to drive the product into the market. Meanwhile, coming back to overall ARR development over the past quarters, you can see that Q3 has been a rather low-growth dynamic quarter for us, which is not unusual. The past Q3 quarters were not as dynamic either, but it's been slower than expected, partly because of the churn, partly because of some shifted projects. The little growth that we did see in Q3 was generated by the focus verticals, again. Those have risen to a total of EUR 26.9 million in overall ARR, which at this stage brings us to a share of these focus verticals of 70% versus 30% in the non-focus verticals, which is roughly the level which we would expect also towards the end of the year. Digging into this in a little bit more detail by the two different segments. If we look at the growth dynamics and subscription dynamics in the focus verticals, you can see that over the past 12 months, we were very successful in expanding our footprint with existing customers, had almost EUR 6 million of upsell. Compared to the overall churn rate, relatively low churn of 6%, which is kind of a best practice kind of churn level in the software industry. Where you can see where we are not where we had want to be is in terms of new customer ARR in the focus verticals, why we do see promising pipeline opportunities, which were evolving. I think what we've also found this year is that the nature of the customers we're dealing with here in regulated industries sometimes makes the sales cycles slower than, let's say, in an e-commerce or digital environment because you have to go through the appropriate enterprise checks and enterprise software approvals in the respective organizations. However, once the customer is converted, they do tend to be equipped with higher initial ARR rates and then also upsell potentials. Overall, we did see a gross upsell rate of 130% in the past 12 months and a churn of 6%, leading to a net revenue retention of 123%. Unsurprisingly, based on what I had already indicated in the non-focus verticals, the picture looks a little bit different. We had significant churn there in the past 12 months to the tune of 46% churn and a net decline of 36%. This is very much driven by two major retail customers that we've lost or have downsold in the past 12 months. Basically, these two customers already account for roughly half of what you see here, which is a hump in our customer portfolio transformation that we had to get over. As unpleasant as it was that it happened this year, it also means that we've digested this transformation now. As a consequence, we expect overall churn across the org to significantly decrease. If we look at the overall picture, if you bring these two pictures together, this leads to the -4% that I've alluded to in the executive summary with the majority or the whole growth that you see in this picture on the left-hand side in green coming from the focus verticals, whereas the downsell and lost customers are basically contributed by the non-focus verticals. For 2026, we expect this absolute churn volume of 10% that we've been seeing this year to half. We are going to see significantly reduced churn dynamics and normalizing churn rates, which makes the path back to net growth significantly easier if we continue to do our job on the focus vertical growth side and also then leveraging the opportunities that come with the collaboration with MariaDB. That is the update on the growth side. If we look at the bottom line and P&L, first of all, I think bottom line has continued to evolve very much to our satisfaction. We had EUR 1 million of EBITDA in Q3, then amounting to a total of EUR 3 million EBITDA year- to- date. This compares to EUR 1 million at the same time last year. I'll go a little bit through the dynamics within the P&L on the next page. Liquidity-wise, we ended the quarter roughly on the same level as the same quarter last year. You might wonder, why is that if you've made so much EBITDA or more EBITDA? This is mostly because we had some temporary effects at quarter end on the working capital side. We will talk about our one-off revenues in a moment. With customers in our focus verticals, we complemented our offering by also offering appliances or pre-installed appliances. We had some equipment in the books that is shipped now and has been shipped in October but was in our books at the end of the quarter. That made up EUR 1.3 million. Normalizing for that, we would have been rather at EUR 19 million liquidity and expect that to be the level where we end the year roughly as well. We are good on the EBITDA side. We are good on the liquidity side, especially if you compare it to the situation we went through in the past couple of years. If we look at this a little bit more in terms of P&L dynamics, on the revenue side, I have already commented we are up EUR 2.6 million or 9% compared to same time last year. What you can also see if you look at the revenue on a more structural level, that the recurring revenue is actually slightly down compared to same time last year, which is not a surprise if you look at the development of the ARR metric, yeah, that I've presented to you. We saw a 4% decline in ARR, and this translates in the end also into a declining recurring revenue in the P&L. At the same time, we have significantly more non-recurring revenue this year, which is the bundled offerings that we're making to customers in the focus verticals, where we've seen an increased demand of customers asking, "Hey, could you also offer the whole hardware appliance to us with your software and database software pre-installed?" If you want, you get a ready-to-run hardware stack, which is an additional service that we can also charge for. We have seen increased demand for that and increased opportunities, which we have leveraged. As a consequence, that has driven up revenues a bit. Obviously, gross margins on the one-off business are significantly lower than on software. This has not translated the same way into gross profit. The other thing that has led to gross profit actually being EUR 1.4 million lower this year compared to the same time last year was the fact that we received a, or let me start a bit more fundamentally there. For those who have not followed us over the past quarters, last year, we started applying for research grants from the German government. There are R&D funding options for projects in the data space, machine learning space, and data science space. We started applying for those last year retroactively for the years starting 2021. The grants that we received in 2024 were actually retrospective grants for three years. That is why they have been exceptionally high. In 2025, we have received those grants again, but only for the year 2024, which makes the level lower. That goes through other operating income, which goes into gross profit. That is why you see a slightly declined gross profit. That does not come from recurring business. It is basically the fact that we had a positive exceptional in 2024 in the form of retroactive grants being paid for the years 2021, 2022. On the cost side, we have made up for that. Personnel expense-wise, we are at EUR 2.4 million lower and are now kind of in an organizational shape, which I would consider appropriate. There is not going to be further restructurings or personnel reductions moving forward. We'd rather see, as we continue to be profitable, selective reinvestments, particularly in our R&D team, to maintain competitiveness of the technology. Marketing-wise, it's pretty stable. IT infrastructure has been lower, mostly because of optimized cloud spend, whereas other costs were largely stable. In total, this improved cost position has compensated the lower gross profit and brought us to an EBITDA, which is EUR 1.9 million higher compared to same time last year. What you can also see is that we overproportionally improved our net income as well. We are now at EUR 2.1 million net income at the end of Q3, which is up EUR 2.6 million compared to last year. This is mostly due to two factors. One is a continued decrease in depreciation. Those of you who have been following us for longer already know that we've stopped capitalizing R&D expenses a while ago. As a consequence, the depreciation on legacy capitalized R&D expenses is continuously decreasing. The second reason is that we are seeing significantly better financial interest income from the higher liquidity reserved in combination with the higher interest rates over the past 12 months, which are now normalizing a bit, but still allow us to earn to the tune of around EUR 400,000 of interest income on a 12-month perspective. All this together has led net income to significantly improve and to the picture that you see here on the screen. Now, adding all this together led us to a correction of the three guidance parameters that we have given out for this year. I have talked to you about the ARR growth, which we have corrected from the original mid-single-digit growth that we aimed for to an expected single-digit decline that we are now expecting. If you see the 12-month dynamics, I think that becomes clear. We, at this stage, do not believe that this can be compensated in the remaining time of the year. On the revenue growth side, we confirm our guidance to grow in the mid-single-digit% range, driven by the compensatory one-off revenue businesses that we were able to do, which helped us go through this transition phase on the ARR side. On the EBITDA side, at this stage, we feel comfortable in narrowing our guidance on the upper end and now believe that we will rather come in at EUR 3.5 million-EUR 4 million, at the upper end of our guidance. In summary and closing, what should you take away from today's call? First of all, we see our strategy with focusing on the focus verticals paying off. Yeah, and we see a good pipeline opportunity there. The MariaDB partnership gives us additional reach in the market, and we are all very bullish about that and are looking to close further partnerships. I think I already saw a question from the attendee round on the partnership with Adesso, which I will comment on in a moment in the Q&A section. Overall, what we're currently seeing is the short-term business trend of increased churn dynamics in the non-focus verticals, which kind of gets us over the hump quicker and, as a result, gives us a clearer visibility on a return to growth driven by the focus verticals in 2026, with the combined effect of lower churn, continued focus vertical growth, and the MariaDB partnership adding up to a good mix. With that, I would close my presentation remarks and open it up for Q&A. Thank you. Thank you very much for your presentation and your transparency, Mr. Henrich. Ladies and gentlemen, it is your turn now. For a dynamic conversation, we kindly ask you to ask questions in person via audio line. To do so, please click on the raise your hand button. You can also use our chat box as already done. I will start with the first question. During the last call, I was surprised that you would expect first customers for the MariaDB Exa already at the end of this year. This seems to be a very short lead time starting from the announcement in October. Could you shed some light on this? Yeah, I can. Actually, in the Q&A, I think, Philipp, you have raised three questions related to MariaDB, so I will try to address them all. You also asked what we believe is the share in the 700 MariaDB enterprise customers that could be interested in our solution and whether the partnership with MariaDB is exclusive. Let me maybe just answer that in one bundle, elaborating on the MariaDB partnership a little bit. Obviously, at this stage, it's difficult to predict on how many customers we'll already see at the end of this year. However, we've been discussing the collaboration, obviously, for a couple of months already before we formally announced it in October. As a ramp-up to that decision and signing of the agreement, they had already discussions with some of their enterprise customers on potential interest in the solution and received good feedback, which was also important kind of market diligence work for them to gear for them how much they put into this partnership and what they invest in the partnership. That gave them, at least what they transferred to us, a high level of confidence of being able to start marketing that quick. Now, obviously, it is up for us to see whether that turns out to be true. I do not expect huge amounts of business by the end of this year. However, as I said, MariaDB has pre-commit kind of a year's worth of expected royalties, which is kind of a low seven-digit amount, which you will gradually start seeing seeping into the P&L. In parallel, we will start ramp-up the customer solutions with them. The partnership is not exclusive, so we are free to partner with other companies out there on solutions. It is mutually non-exclusive, so to say. Yeah. We actually do consider such kind of OEM solutions a valid thrust in go-to-market. I mean, it has obvious advantages to a company our size and with the resources that we have. It is something that our director of partner management internally keeps exploring further. Building on that, you asked me about Adesso. Adesso is kind of a partner on two sides. First of all, we started collaborating with them in setting up a small R&D presence in India because what we have seen is that we have difficulties finding talent for our tech organization at an acceptable price point in kind of the European and also U.S. markets. We started exploring options on how to tap into the huge talent pool in India for tech talent in a way that does not create disproportionate administrative overhead for us. For that, we found a partner with Adesso who are basically acting as an employer of record for us. They are also setting up an office space for us and managing that. We basically have one contractual relationship with Adesso, and our whole India presence is contractually run through them, which makes it easy for me from a G&A perspective. It also keeps all the tax topics and salary and payroll topics away from us. Obviously, we pay them a fee for that, which is a markup on the actual salary cost. It is a very good kind of setup for us. We have seen a small but impactful team come together already. Now, at the same time, we've then also started discussing with Adesso options to collaborate on the go-to-market side. As you know, probably Adesso has a big IT integration consulting activity. They are similarly organized in terms of verticals. They have also teams focusing on these focus verticals that I talked about, like financial industry, telecoms, public clients. We are in initial stages of exploring whether we can jointly develop the market together. There is a partnership opportunity on the go-to-market side as well, which is evolving. I hope that answers all your questions on MariaDB and Adesso in a satisfactory way. Thank you very much. I will move on to the people with a hand-up, Ramon Huber. You were the first one. Would you like to unmute yourself and place your questions? We will have a look at your questions later, and I will go on to Felix Ellmann. You should be able to speak now. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes. Hello. Wonderful. Yeah, Felix Ellmann from Warburg Research. I have a question on the cooperation with MariaDB with regards to the company e ven though I'm in the sector for 30 years, I didn't hear about them before. A very simple one maybe. If I see about 1 billion open-source users they have, is this company on the long run, let's say for two, three years, good for 10%, 20% of business increase, or is it good for tripling the business? Where is the truth here in terms of numbers? What do you think this is good for? I would say if you look at our current ARR of EUR 40 million, and if I know, which is hard for me to guess right now, is the upsell opportunity. If I estimate the royalty opportunity over the next three years, I would say that has the potential to raise our ARR by a single-digit million amount. Yeah. Based on the ramp-up that they're projecting for the MariaDB Exa product, yeah, I think they're estimating kind of a low double-digit million amount, but then obviously, we only get a share of that in the form of royalty. I would say over the next three to four years, to be seen. Yeah, but it's not in the kind of Exasol triples its business kind of range, if you're asking me that. Yeah. It is a very healthy supporting relationship to get us from EUR 40 million-EUR 50 million, yeah, and contribute to that. Yeah. This is not the MariaDB, excuse the verbal pun, it's not the Hail Mary or the Hail Maria that lifts us to EUR 80 million. Yeah. It was difficult to estimate as I did not know the company. The only thing I read was the 1 billion users in your press release, and that was difficult to estimate. Thank you. I mean, I think what's interesting is that in particularly their paying customer base, which is kind of 600+ customers, they have a range of also financial institutions which use them for transactional data. That's obviously interesting thrust. If you go on their website, for example, they have DBS as a big client and also as a customer success case on their website, which is a big Singaporean bank, as you might know. They have several of these. I think Deutsche Bank is also a big customer of them, which are both not yet customers of ours. This gives you a little bit of a sense of kind of also the upsell potentials and visibility potentials that has also for our focus verticals. Although obviously, the MariaDB collaboration is per se sector agnostic. Yeah. MariaDB is not per se specialized on our focus verticals, but they do have a big presence and paying customer base in these key industries. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you very much for your questions, Mr. Ellmann. I have one question left in the chat box. Do you see the level of growth in the focus industry to proceed during the upcoming quarters? In principle, yes. I would answer that on a 12-month perspective because if you look at the dynamics, how they've played out over the past 12 months, it has not always been continuous quarter- to- quarter, but we also made some larger deals, very large deals in one quarter, and then followed by a calmer quarter in the next one. The general upsell potential and growth potential and also new logo potential, we remain very bullish about. Thank you very much. With that, we have received no further questions so far. Mr. Huber, you unmuted yourself. Yeah, I was about to say, I think Ramon raised his hand, so maybe. You can hear me or not? Yes, I can hear you. Sorry. Hi. On the non-focus and focus vertical, at the end, if you look at the new clients, you still have more new clients in non-focused and focused verticals. How is that to explain the new amount you got? Yeah, I would. I mean, as I said, we are not sending away customers in non-focused verticals. Yeah. If you look at the new customers that were gained in the non-focused verticals, they tend to be rather small and opportunistic, and not necessarily the result of dedicated go-to-market efforts. I mean, we still have our community edition, which can be upgraded. The community edition is a free version that you can download from our website, which is technically limited. If you then want to upgrade and use it in a bit more of a professional way, you can do that. Sometimes these customers approach us and then say, "I need a support package," and that is then like a EUR 10,000 upsell, and that is counted as a new customer. That does not really drive us forward. Yeah. Where we are going for the bigger bucks is in the focus vertical side. As I explained, the successes there are rarer, but when they come, bigger. Yeah. Obviously, again, I am not saying that the new logo dynamics in the new customer in the focus verticals is yet where it needs to be. We obviously want to see that grow over the next couple of quarters. This is kind of what explains that sometimes you might see actually two or three new customers in the non-focus side, which, however, do not have a meaningful ARR contribution. Yeah. The focus vertical customers evolving slower. Okay. The number of customers still did not increase, really? No, it did not. I am not going to dispute that. That is definitely something where the pipeline that we have built over the past nine months still has to translate. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ramon. Thank you very much for your questions, Mr. Huber. In the meantime, we have received no further questions so far. Let me have a look in our Q&A. No, no questions left, ladies and gentlemen. We therefore come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you for joining and your interest in Exasol AG. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Stefan Winkler from Investor Relations. A big thank you also to you, Mr. Henrich, for your presentation and the time you took to answer the questions. Sorry again for the technical delays. I wish you all a healthy autumn time, successful business. With this, I hand over back again to Mr. Henrich for some final remarks. Yes, thank you, Judith. Again, apologies from my side as well. Thanks for showing the interest in the company. Very healthy participation in today's call. Thank you for that. I'll be at the Eigenkapital Forum two weeks from now. I hope to see many of you in person there. In the meantime, if you have follow-up questions and will not see me there, feel free to reach out, and I'm sure we find a way to touch base. Stay healthy, stay interested in us. In case we don't talk, I wish you a good ending of the year and happy season greetings with your best ones. Bye-bye.