Hi, I am Haruo Amano, Director of HENNGE. Thank you for watching our financial results video. Today, our CFO, Ryo Kobayashi, will explain our financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2026 and the progress against our full year forecast. I will explain our growth strategy. Hi, I'm Ryo, CFO of HENNGE. First, let me explain the consolidated financial results for the third quarter of FY 2026. Our consolidated financial results for this quarter are progressing well against the full-year forecast, which was disclosed on November 7th, 2025. The net sales for HENNGE One business, which are recurring in nature, continued to grow steadily year-on-year. Gross profit also increased steadily year-on-year, with the gross profit margin maintaining a high level. Next, I will explain the breakdown of operating expenses. During this quarter, in conjunction with the launch of HENNGE One's new services October onwards, we proactively carried out marketing and branding activities to boost brand awareness. In addition, we started recognizing temporary expenses related to the headquarters relocation scheduled for April 2027. For the nine-month period, in accordance with our initial policy, we have been increasing headcount and taking active advertising initiatives in anticipation of future business expansion. Our quarterly trends for net sales and operating expenses are as presented on the slide. Next, I will explain the headcount trends. During this quarter, in addition to welcoming nine new graduates, there was a net increase of 40 employees compared to the end of the previous fiscal year, including sales personnel, which has been a key focus. Despite a challenging recruitment environment, we believe that the accumulated effect from various initiatives, such as strengthening the recruitment of young talent, has led to this result. To achieve our full-year target of a net increase of 45 employees, we will continue our initiatives to strengthen selling capabilities through organizational development and active recruitment efforts. Let's move on to business activities during this quarter. This is an overview of our business highlights. In April 2026, we hosted our own event, HENNGE Unveiled 2026, where we announced three new services for HENNGE One. These are HENNGE Mesh Network to address network access challenges, HENNGE Password Manager to further reinforce the authentication infrastructure, and HENNGE Domain Protection to tackle email-based threats. These are scheduled to be launched in October 2026 onward. Together with HENNGE Endpoint & Managed Security, which was launched in March 2026, we believe that adding these new services to the existing HENNGE One will provide the core foundation for our Zero Trust. Through these feature enhancements, HENNGE One's coverage area will expand across identity, devices, and networks. We will continue to pursue our corporate philosophy, liberation of technology, to meet the expanding market and evolving customer needs. As for major marketing and branding activities in the third quarter, in addition to hosting HENNGE Unveiled and events for resellers, we actively participated in and presented at various events of all scales, creating opportunities for diverse targets to understand the new value of HENNGE One. Our activity level remains high, particularly with a focus on in-person initiatives. Here, I would like to provide an update regarding our application for the market segment change to the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime Market. On June 25th, 2026, we applied for a market segment change to the TSE Prime Market. While we are not yet at the stage to share specific details, such as the approval date, we will make timely announcements as further updates become available. We would highly appreciate your continued support. Next, I would like to explain the results of our KPIs. The progress of HENNGE One KPIs compared with the end of the previous fiscal year is as presented on the slide. The year-on-year KPI results for HENNGE One are as presented on the slide. We believe the average monthly churn rate remains at a low level. Based on this, the theoretical average contract period is over 25 years. Regarding the number of contracted companies, the cumulative effect of various sales initiatives, along with the broadening of the market base, led to steady growth. In addition, the number of contracted users grew significantly, mainly due to acquiring around 10 new contracts from companies exceeding our main target segment of 300- 5,000 employees. As for ARPU, although both new and existing customers continued to adopt our top-tier plan, HENNGE One Pro ARPU decreased in this quarter. This has been largely impacted by multiple large new customers opting for single-featured plans. Among these factors, ARR for this quarter increased significantly, driven in particular by the substantial growth in the number of contracted users. HENNGE One Pro accounted for approximately 22% of total ARR as of the end of this quarter. Next, I will touch on our full-year outlook of FY 2026. As presented on the slide, in FY 2026, in pursuit of JPY 20 billion in ARR, we are focusing on strengthening our sales structure and accelerating new customer acquisition, along with enhancing additional service value. The historical trend in net sales by business and this quarter's progress against our full-year forecast are as presented on the slide. Results for this quarter are progressing well in line with the full-year forecast. Operating expenses for this quarter are also progressing in line with the full-year forecast. The total amount of full-year operating expenses remains unchanged from our initial outlook. Advertising expenses are expected to exceed the full-year forecast of JPY 1.15 billion. This is due to additional investments in branding during the fourth quarter. Timed with the launch of new services scheduled for October 2026 onward, we intend to raise awareness of our company and services and to strengthen our future talent acquisition capabilities. Operating expenses, excluding advertising expenses, are expected to be lower than the full-year forecast of JPY 9.62 billion. This is mainly due to a decrease in recruitment-related expenses compared to initial estimates. In addition, expenses related to the headquarters relocation scheduled for April 2027 have begun to be recognized from this quarter. We expect relocation-related expenses to continue to be incurred in the fourth quarter and into the next fiscal year. There are no changes to the consolidated full-year forecast disclosed on November 7th, 2025. Based on this, operating profit for the fourth quarter is expected to be around JPY 200 million. Finally, I would like to explain our growth strategy. Our corporate philosophy is liberation of technology. We believe in the power of technology, we love technology, and we strongly believe that technology will make our lives better. We want to deliver the power of technology to as many people as we can and to change the world to be a better place. We established HENNGE more than 25 years ago, and since then, we set our philosophy as liberation of technology, which we actually have demonstrated in various areas. From the experience we gained, we have come to believe that SaaS is the most fair and sophisticated approach to liberate technologies. This is one of the reasons why we're providing SaaS and why we want to support our customers' transformation through cloud utilization. The total amount of technology that we provide to customers and the total amount of liberated technology are the measures to prove our progress toward our philosophy, and this is expressed as LTV. LTV, or lifetime value, is the total value arising from the current contracts with the customers. Our growth strategy is to maximize this LTV. By maximizing LTV, that is, seeking to maximize the total gross profit earned over the future, we would like to build a solid business model that enables us to stably increase profits, even if we scale up the investments for further business growth. Currently, our average contract period and gross profit margin are already at high levels. Therefore, to maximize LTV, it is essential to maximize ARR. We will actively engage in initiatives with a high expected return on investment and focus on accumulating as much ARR as possible. ARR can be broken down into three factors: the number of contracted companies, the average number of users per contracted company, and average revenue per user. Among these, we currently aim to achieve ARR growth by focusing on increasing the number of contracted companies and ARPU. The progress on these KPIs for HENNGE One is as presented on the slide. Including our main service, HENNGE One, our group mainly operates a subscription model business. Barring any cancellations, the contracts secured this year will continue to generate sales and become the foundational sales from next year onward. The figures on this slide demonstrate the robust and stable growth of ARR of HENNGE One. We view FY 2026 as the beginning of a new value generation cycle, a vital preparation period for reaching our ARR target of JPY 20 billion. We have introduced various new services to meet the expanding market and evolving customer demands. Moving forward, we will continue to generate added value and further expand the total amount of liberation of technology that we deliver to our customers. While maintaining our core focus on driving growth within our current business lines, we will be taking on various challenges to generate additional value, including geographical expansion outside of Japan and pursuing M&A opportunities. By continuously evolving our value generation cycle through these initiatives, we will increase the certainty of achieving our future vision. Furthermore, rather than focusing excessively on short-term operating profit, we will proactively invest in maximizing future ARR to reinforce our business model that can deliver sustainable profit growth. We are committed to solidifying this robust business model to deliver sustainable growth and would sincerely appreciate your continued support from a mid to long-term perspective. This concludes our briefing on the third quarter of fiscal year 2026. Thank you very much for taking the time to watch our video.
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