Welcome to AcadeMedia Q1 earnings call for 2025-2026. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. During the Q&A session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key five on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers, CEO Marcus Strömberg, and CFO Petter Sylwan. Please go ahead. Thank you very much, and good morning to this report of AcadeMedia first quarter. The first quarter, it is a small quarter, but it is an important quarter in AcadeMedia. We are very pleased with the results of the first quarter. When we look at our numbers, a lot of students have attended our different schools. I will just start to make some updates, and then I will hand over to Petter Sylwan, and he will continue to go through the numbers. If we first look at the net sales, it is around 7% up, and most of it is organic. What we look a lot at is the number of students. Last year it was 7% up, and we continue with a good growth of 3.5%. Most of all, we are very pleased with the development when it comes to upper secondary, where we have a record result when it comes to the number of students. We also have this focus on quality and to act early. The focus on reading, the focus on quality has also resulted in these good numbers. We also have a proposal to the General Assembly of the Annual General Meeting from the Board of Directors to continue with this voluntary share redemption program of totally maximum SEK 400 million. We have also revised our financial targets. It is very small changes, but I will update you on that in a few slides. Please continue. This is something that we are really, really satisfied to talk more about, and it is our focus on reading. We have always had a lot of focus on this, but we have really increased our efforts. We have trained teachers. We have a lot of collaboration with different parts to improve the reading in early ages. If we look at this number, this is a way to look at how many of our students in year one are available to read according to the school authorities' systems. We are now at the level of 90%, and that is very pleased to see this. We, of course, want to achieve 100%, but this is a very good step in the right direction. If we continue to look at the next slide, please. This is when we talk about the revised and financial targets. This is something that we have done to clarify the development of AcadeMedia. If we look at the sales growth, we keep the target with 5%-7%, and we are now at that range. When it comes to profitability, we want to make a clarification that we will talk about EBITA instead of EBIT. That is why we are really a company that is growing through acquisitions. If we look at the companies that are working a lot with acquisitions, they have this target EBITA. The difference between the EBITA and EBIT in AcadeMedia is very small. We do not want to see this as decreasing our target. We are increasing the target, and we have a very strong pipeline when it comes to profitability. When it comes to the capital structure, we keep the target. Maybe Petter could also comment on that a little bit more. On this slide, you see the different changes in the profitability, and we look at the first quarter. If you look at the first quarter, you can see that we have improved the profitability compared with last year. You can also see the differences in these two measures. As I comment on, they are very, very small, and we will keep the target to be in the range of 7%-8%. If we continue to look at our historical development, we really like to look at this picture because it shows that we have continued to grow our EBIT year by year in a very good way. If you see this development, we want to keep it up through acquisitions and through improvement also in our mature market. We have a long-term record of improving the profitability and the EBIT in the company. One of our most important targets now is to continue the international development. During this quarter, we opened 500 new places in Germany. What is fantastic with these places is that they are almost full at once. The capacity utilization is 100%, almost in less than one year. If we look at what we did just before the summer, we continued with acquisitions both in the Netherlands and in Germany. For the moment, we have a quite strong pipeline where we want to continue with these international acquisitions. We also have power to do these acquisitions because we have a low debt. It is around 0.6%-0.7% of EBITDA. Petter will comment on that in the coming slides. Of course, in Sweden, we have this regulatory environment, and we are also moving into the election period in Sweden, where you get a lot of different proposals from different parties. We just want to comment on the three important acquisitions, three important proposals that are in Sweden for the moment. It is the profit inquiry, the school voucher inquiry, and also the principal of the public. It is about looking into the company in different ways. We think that there will be a proposal during the spring in 2026. They have these steps that we show in these pictures. If you want to have any more explanation around this, you can ask us questions when we have this session with questions. Thank you, Marcus, and good morning, everyone. Before I specifically inform about the Q1's financials, I would like to inform about that we, a couple of days ago, launched our new podcast, which has the purpose to engage Swedish investors and other stakeholders through short, focused episodes, delivering insights in just 10-15 minutes. It is AcadeMedia's Investor Pod. The podcast host is Charlotte Stjernengren, who is former editor-in-chief at EFN and analyst at DNB Carnegie in the past. This far, we released two episodes, which first is the initiation of AcadeMedia with me as a podcast guest, and the second is the behind-the-political statements with Henrik von Sydow, who is an external affairs strategist at DNB Carnegie and a former member of the Swedish Parliament. The purpose of the podcast is to offer transparent and accessible insight into AcadeMedia and helping investors to understand what are the opportunities and challenges for AcadeMedia going forward. Let's continue to the next slide. As Marcus outlined earlier, we achieved a good growth of 6.7% this quarter. It is important to emphasize that this first quarter is a seasonally low quarter for AcadeMedia. This is because part of the business is closed during the summer, which has an impact on net sales and profit. All segments, except the upper secondary school segment, contributed to the positive development. Additionally, our adjusted EBITA margin increased to 4.4% compared to last year's 4.3%, reaching SEK 182 million in absolute terms, up from SEK 166 million. The increase in profit has translated into higher free cash flow. Now, turn to page 10. The improved adjusted EBITA is evident across all segments, except the upper secondary school segment, as I mentioned. In the preschool and international segment, the increase of SEK 7 million is driven by positive contribution from the acquisition of YES in the Netherlands. In the compulsory school segment, it is up SEK 5 million year over year, and it is stable. The upper secondary school segment saw lower earnings of minus SEK 5 million due to higher costs following new reforms for the gymnasium, including increased costs for libraries. Some of these costs are expected to persist throughout the financial year. Adult education continues to report strong results, driven by high unemployment and, in particular, increased volumes in higher vocational education. Let's move on to the next slide and the 12-month rolling result. The net sales continue to grow and amount to SEK 19.3 billion. The rolling 12-month adjusted EBITA amounted to SEK 1.3 billion, corresponding to a margin of 6.9%, just below our profitability target of 7%-8%. We continue to have a solid free cash flow. Next slide. We can continue to the segments that the couple of slides had. That is the first year. Let's first look at the preschool and international segment. The number of children increased by 8%. Our growth was primarily driven by new preschool openings. As well as more school students in Germany, and the acquisitions of YES in the Netherlands. The international operations account for more than 30% of the growth total sales. The net sales increased by 9% year over year, and currency changes had a negative impact, minus 2%. The organic growth was 7.5%. Adjusted EBITA was zero. The improvement reflecting. The result reflects the segment's seasonal low. The positive effect came from the contribution from the acquisition of YES. On the 27th. Sorry, 25th of September, we announced the decision to establish over 500 new preschool places in Germany across seven new units. We now have a pipeline of 2,000-2,500 new preschool places over the coming three years. Okay, let's move on to compulsory school. We note a 2.5% increase in student numbers. Net sales rose by 5.1%, driven by an increased number of students and the positive impact of the annual school voucher provision. Adjusted EBITA grew by 11.4% year over year, reaching SEK 49 million, corresponding to an adjusted EBITA margin of 5.4%. We move on to the next page, an upper secondary school segment, and the number of students grew by 0.8%. We saw a stable growth in sales, while profitability was somewhat lower over the years, with an adjusted EBITA of SEK 65 million compared with SEK 70 million in the same period last year. The adjusted EBITA margin was 5.4%. As I mentioned earlier, the earnings were negatively affected by initially higher costs for teaching materials due to new reforms, the so-called GIY25, and libraries, and some of these are expected to persist throughout the financial year. Okay, and we continue to the next slide, and we there see a continuously strong performance from the adult education segment, with profitability now improving for the ninth consecutive quarter. Sales increased by 7.7% to SEK 421 million, and this was mainly attributed to higher volumes in higher vocational education and also from a revenue perspective, labor market services. Adjusted EBITA came in at SEK 79 million, up 12.9% year over year, and this resulted in a record high margin of 18.8%. During the quarter, the Swedish economy showed early signs of stabilization, although the recession persists and unemployment remains elevated. Okay, continue to the next page. One more page, and we are at the free cash flow and investments. Free cash flow for the last 12 months amounts to SEK 1.222 billion. The free cash flow as a percentage of EBITDA was 67%. Maintaining capex as a percentage of sales continues to decline. This is a consequence of fewer new openings and expansion units. Next, the financial position. Net debt, and you can move to the next page there. Yeah, we are right, thanks. Net debt excluding IFRS 16 decreased by SEK 222 million compared to last year, with a leverage ratio excluding IFRS 16 at 0.7. This is well below the financial target of less than 3. Even including property-related lease liabilities, the net debt is lower than last year. This is due to low indexation, low number of new entry contracts in the quarter, and FX. You can continue to the next. Finally, on page 21, our financial performance against targets. We are. For the last 12 months, organic growth, including small bottleneck positions, standing at 5.8% growth, and this is within the financial targets that we have of 5%-7%. Our adjusted EBITA margin of 6.9%, just short of our target range of 7%-8%, but we are slowly getting closer. The leverage ratio of 0.7 remains, which is well below the required threshold of 3. As Marcus mentioned, leaving further rooms for acquisitions when opportunities occur. With these words, I end the presentation, and we open up for questions. 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. The next question comes from Philip Eckengren from ABGSC. Please go ahead. Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Perhaps just start with a short elaboration on the rationale for the new targets and perhaps also a clarification on the new, what you call the new dividend policy. To me, it does not really sound like a change, but could you just clarify that slightly? Thank you. Yeah, we have done what we call, or Marcus called, small revisions, basically to either clarify what we find most important. EBITA, the fact that we are an acquisition-driven company, or with the dividend policy, reflecting what we are doing and what we continue to aim to do. If I explain that further for EBITA, as Marcus described, the difference between EBIT and EBITA is very little to AcadeMedia, 0.1% to 0.2%, depending on what time of measure. It's basically only that we find EBITA the absolute most used metrics for a company that is acquisition-driven at AcadeMedia, and therefore long-term we find that more relevant to follow. I think that would have been a greater difference in the change, then we also would have changed the target of 7-8%. Now the difference is so small, so it doesn't make any, it doesn't make it relevant to change it to 7.1%-8.1%, those kinds of minor adjustments. That's the reason behind that. For the dividend policy, we can conclude that we have basically only strikethrough a few sentences in the current policy. We have had the policy that we make dividends of 30%, and that distribution could also be done using share redemption or buybacks as part of fulfilling these 30%. In reality, for a number of years, we have always, or for a number of years now, done the dividends at 30% or something around that of profit. In addition to that, we have done the share redemptions for a couple of years. The total distribution we have done isn't reflecting what we say in the targets. By changing this, we change the language that we believe is common for most companies that do share buybacks or redemption programs, that you have a dividend expressing the financial distribution we aim to do with dividends, i.e., the 30% of the profit. Of course, the dividends are only made after we have secured the quality and after we have secured that we are having our maximum growth agenda fulfilled and financed. We continue as the same we have done now, that we make the distribution of the dividend, and if there's still after that excess capital available, then we will continue to do share redemptions or buyback programs. It's basically just reflecting what we have done the last year, which we aim to continue to do the years ahead. Thank you, Petter. Sounds more than reasonable. And then just to kind of touch on politics here for a bit, I think we all appreciate your kind of tie line of the proposals that are kind of set right now. But could you comment on what you're seeing in the sort of the start of the election year? We've seen the Liberals being out. Stating that they want to ban profits in schools. Could you just comment slightly on that, please? Thank you. If we start with the Liberal Party, of course, we are a little bit surprised by that because the Liberal Party has done very good things for the school system in Sweden. If we look at Jan Björklund, who was a very good Education Minister, made a lot of good things, and now they have one new proposal every day. We are a little bit surprised by that, that is maybe a part of the election year. We look at reality, and reality is what we believe that the TD parties will make some sort of agreement. They will come with a proposal next year. We think that it will be some tough regulations. It will be when it comes to this, what we call profit regulation. It is something that we are quite used to working with in Norway and Germany. We think it's possible to handle from our side, and we are well prepared to handle it. We think that the TD government will give some proposals in the spring 2026, according to the slide that we showed you. Sounds good. Finally, maybe coming back a bit to the operational side of things. In upper secondary school, I understood it as kind of the costs are up due to more supplies. Petter, if I got you correctly, that is set to continue throughout the year. Could you specify that a bit and perhaps give some guidance on how much it will impact the remaining of the year? We don't make specific forecasts, but what we want to clarify is that the cost, the reforms that now are in place, pretty much has started to have the effect from the start of this school year, meaning now this quarter. These are costs, for instance, for fulfilling the requirements on libraries, which means that you need to further develop libraries and hire personnel and similar. There are reforms for GI25, that is, the program for how you set the grades. All of this will require resources that will persist during the year. I mean, it will not have a dramatic cost effect overall, but it will mean that we don't, even if we would increase the efficiency in the upper secondary school, we don't think that will translate into further higher profitability during the year. We will be happy if we can try to defend or have a similar margin as last year. Just a few words about upper secondary because we had a fantastic year last year. As Petter mentioned, we may make some investments. Some of them are one-off. You could say the investment in the new course system is a sort of one-off. What you have to keep in mind when you look at upper secondary is that we have fantastic student numbers this August, and we are, in fact, at the all-time high level. Even if we invest a little bit more, we also have a lot of students. I think our strategy when it comes to upper secondary, our different brands, they are performing very well. We also see an increase in the number of students going to vocational programs, and that is also very positive. It is a lot sort of more investments, but we also see results of what we have done. Perfect. Thank you very much, guys. That was all for me. I'll get back into the queue. The next question comes from Lönnqvist Sundén from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead. Hi, Marcus and Petter. Thank you for taking my questions. First one from my side. It's a little bit of ducking into Felix's question earlier on the kind of new targets. Yes, just curious to hear, given your kind of new margin definition, the margin target definition, should we anticipate that PPA amortization should increase significantly ahead, i.e., that you will ramp up your M&A activity quite significantly compared to what we've seen over the last few years? You can say if we go back in history, we've made a lot of acquisitions. In recent years, we have done acquisitions, of course, but we have also had a lot of focus on organic growth when it comes to Germany and when it comes to Sweden, investing in campus and so on. What we see now is that we have a low real debt. We have a lot of firepower. We have a good pipeline of acquisitions. Of course, we would like to increase the acquisition pace. That is also a signal that we want to send. That is why we changed this from EBIT to EBITA. It is not about the numbers because the difference is, when it is small, it is more about the signal that we want to increase the pace when it comes to acquisition. When you look at the pipeline, give some color on kind of split between smaller bolt-on acquisitions versus bigger platforms, potential geographies. What do you want to do and what could be expected for us to see in the coming six months? What we would like to see is that we continue the growth in Germany when it comes to acquiring schools because we think that is the right thing to do in Germany. We will continue to open up new schools, but that is not the question you ask. More schools in Germany. We also see a very interesting development now in the Netherlands with a lot of different proposals that are coming to us. We also look at, I think we mentioned that before, that we look into Poland and we look into the U.K. The main focus, that is Germany and in the Netherlands. Of course, we also look in the countries that we have spoken about. We have also spent some time together with the bigger operators in Europe. Petter and I also spent a few days in the U.S. meeting some of the big operators over there. What we have learned is that AcadeMedia, in fact, has a very interesting position at the international education market with a low debt. The problem for a lot of our competitors is that they have high debt. We think that the opportunities that will open up now is really something for AcadeMedia. We will be in key positions. That is why we do these changes. Okay, sounds promising. You do not have any specific kind of target that you want to deploy X amount of your cash flow this year to acquisitions? No. Or something like that? No. Okay, cool. If we go to a few nitty-gritty questions, maybe best for Petter to answer. Q1 tends to be impacted by kind of calendar effects and vacation outtake. Is it possible to give some kind of comment on how that impacted Q1 and if that was a bigger headwind than normal this year and how to kind of think about that as a kind of reversal thing for the rest of the year? No. We didn't have any unusual distribution of vacation effects this quarter compared to last year. That's the reason why we haven't either talked about it in the report. Okay. Looking at the adult education business, now you're starting the year in a quite good way. You have earlier said that you should take on a little bit more cost in the adult education business during this year, which should give some headwind on the margin. What should be achievable this year, margin-wise? Maybe you were a little bit above trending last year, but if you continue to have a high number of short courses, the margin should be high, right? We would expect something lower than last year's margin. I mean, volume hopefully will increase in line with our growth target. And if we add some costs for quality work, the margin will be somewhat lower. Surely it could be a scenario where, if it continues as it has opened up now in the first quarter, it could be a scenario where the margin is slightly above the long-term margin we have between 9%-11%. I can't be more specific than that right now. It is kind of a range indication of expectation. Also, I mean, the little note we make that there are small positive signs, and you can read about them yourself, about a more positive development of unemployment rates the last week in Sweden, a few positive signs for quite a long time. I mean, that might be a start of a change of the unemployment rate. I wouldn't think, if it looks as it looks like now, I wouldn't think it has that much effect here and now this year. Within a year or so, this kind of, of course, has a major impact for the adult education. Makes sense. On preschools, where we have an uptick now in a quite small quarter, but you have this kind of improvement program in the Finnish platform acquisition, and the vouchers have been lagging for some time in both Germany and Norway. Where do you expect your margin to end up during this year? How much of an improvement could be kind of taken out? We aren't specific about that. I hope that we can reach our margin target for 7%-8% this year. That's a hope, at least. I think that the major positive contribution, if that will happen, then will come from the preschool and international. That will probably be a summary effect from several countries, improve margin in Germany, Norway, Finland, for various reasons, as you mentioned. Excellent. I think I covered my main topics here. I'll get back in line. Thank you. Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments. Thank you very much for your questions, and we wish you all a good day. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.