Good morning, and welcome to the Cint Interim Report Quarter Two conference call. My name is Carla, and I will be the Operator of today's call. If you would like to register a question for the Q&A portion of the call, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. When asking your question, please ensure your telephone is unmuted locally. To revoke a question, you can press star followed by two. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Giles Palmer, CEO, to begin. Please go ahead when you're ready. Thank you, Carla. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Q2 update, our Q2 announcements. This is my second. I started, took over on the 3rd of April, I'm, I think, now more than 100 days in, a 100 days plan tick, nailed, and here we are talking about our Q2 results. Next slide, please. Next slide, Olivier, please. Mixed results. The slide that I'd like us to be on right now has titled Mixed Results with some improvements over the first quarter. I've said here that, you know, there's an uncertain macro environment. I think that's fair. We have interest rates, uncertainty, we have demand uncertainty. I think my personal view is that we're beginning to come out of this. I would say over the last six months, for sure, that's been reasonably uncertain. That has definitely, we feel, affected our performance. We feel that the macro definitely plays a role in the demand side of our business, and maybe a bigger role than was expected previously. Difficult to say. We believe that to be true. Our Media Measurement business is growing very nicely. Congrats to the team on that. We're actually starting to increase our investment into this area of the business because we see, you know, huge upside and big potential here. On the less positive side, America or the Americas, have been weak in Q2. A little bit like Ipsos last night, actually, in a, in a, you know, related industry or very closely related organization. They saw more weakness in the U.S. than in EMEA on a YoY growth basis. Why is that? I'm not entirely sure, but I think U.S. companies are possibly quicker to react to macro uncertainty. They pull back spend maybe more quickly and then increase spend maybe more quickly when confidence grows. We've seen that in Q2. I'm gonna come back to reversals. It's something that was introduced, I would say, to the market on the Q4 2022 earnings call. Since then, I want to be extremely transparent about where we are as an organization, what we're doing about it. It's one of my top priorities. Along with the next point, which is product integration. Until we become efficient and unified with our platform, we will struggle to get to the levels of profitability that I think are inherent or underlying within the business. My mantra and my priority as I've come into this role, is to accelerate and really focus on product integration and customer migration, and I will come back to that again a little bit more. Next slide, please. Here are the figures. We're still not ahead of where we were in Q2 2022, we're still down year-on-year, but down less. At least that's one thing. If I did a physics degree, the differentiation curve is moving in the right direction. If, if we continue that forwards, we're not gonna give guidance today, but if we continue that forwards, we can see growth on the not-too-distant future. I said we're not gonna, we're not gonna give guidance, but we're moving in the right direction. Gross margin was good, we're happy with that. Adjusted EBITDA was. That's obviously something that's obviously incredibly important when it comes to managing cash flow, and Olivier will talk about that later. Reversals, we've been very transparent here. They were at 12% on, of revenue, less on a complete basis, less than 12%, but it's the revenue reversal which is the most important figure, so we're tracking it, you know, on a daily basis. Next slide, please. Let's talk about quality and reversals, that last point. It's at 12% in Q2, up from 9% last year. This hasn't gone from zero to 12. It was always a number. As I said in the last earnings report, a consultant did an analysis, a blind analysis, without us knowing about it, or an independent analysis of Cint and our two biggest competitors, which we don't know who they are, but because they didn't publish that, on quality and reversals. Cint, actually. This was in Q3 last year, again, not that different from today. Cint came out as the highest quality of the three, the lowest number of reversals. This is not something where we're out of step with the market, but that does not mean to say that I or anybody inside the organization is happy with this number. As I said a minute ago, this is a huge focus for me and the team. We have a large team, the biggest team in the industry, working on this, I would say, and I don't actually have all that data, but I'm pretty sure that's true. They are making really good progress. We have implemented some solutions and some mitigating technology over the last two weeks, and that looks like it's having a very positive effect. I'm optimistic that we're going to be moving into Q3, Q4, and this number will start to come down. We've said that our long-term target is 7%-8%. I'm hoping that, you know, internally, our target is, is better, is even tougher than that. We want to crack this nut. It's not an easy one to crack, but we have really good people on it, and it is a clear focus. This number, I'm reasonably confident will be coming down. Next slide, please. The other, as I said, the other high priority for me is making Cint into one efficient organization, and that means integrating the Cint, Lucid, GapFish, P2Sample platforms into one platform, which takes the best of each and creates a super platform that is going to be usable for all of our users, no matter what their particular needs. We are making really good progress on this. It's complicated, it's not just the technology platform that's then got to plug into backend systems like Salesforce and NetSuite. We need to be clear on where our customer records are. We need to be clear on our billing systems. We're doing this root and branch from back to front, we're gonna do it really, really well, but it is a lot of work. It's fully planned. The team are working extremely hard on making this happen, we've made real progress over the last five months. Again, congrats to the team working on this. I'm really proud of the work that they're doing. Of course, then we need to, or as we launch this unified platform, we migrate our customers from the existing platforms to the new one. This is gonna start in Q4 2023, so this year, with customers who, for whom Cint manages their experience. We don't need all of the functionality of the self-serve user interface for that, for that for us to be able to migrate those customers, because that, V1 of that is coming out in Q1. Version one of that self-serve UI is coming out in Q1 next year. That's when we'll be moving over the bulk of our customers after that in cohorts, taking a, you know, very risk-aware approach and making sure that we do it gently at first, slowly at first, and then as we make sure... As we iron out any issues, as we migrate customer data, train our customers, onboard them onto the new platform, we iron out any issues very quickly, and then we migrate swiftly. That's our plan. It is a very detailed plan, but I'm very confident in the team, this is obviously a core focus for us. Next slide, please. As I said last time around, my message to the organization is consolidate, standardize, and optimize. We consolidate our organization, we consolidate our platforms, we consolidate our technology, we standardize how we do things, and then we take out costs, and we take out our inefficient processes and get our organization to an efficient and highly profitable place, primed for growth. It isn't exactly a sequential thing. We're gonna be doing some stuff in parallel. We're gonna, like, for example, as I said earlier on, we're investing more in our Media Measurement business right now, but until we've fully consolidated, standardized, and optimized the business, we don't have. Well, during this process, this process will release funds for us to invest in our go-to-market and in our innovation team. This has been my core mantra to the team, my core focus to the organization, and I'm glad to say that it's going very well. That's it. It's kind of a short and sweet one from me. I'm no big changes, just core, clear focus, clear execution, and making sure that we move this business in the right direction. I'm glad to say, I think that's exactly what's going on. Olivier, over to you. Thank you. We should be on the slide number nine, Q2 financials. What you can see here is that our net sales for the second quarter are at EUR 67.8 million, which is down 7% compared to Q2 last year, and down 4.8% on a constant currency basis. Interestingly, our net sales are up 13% versus Q1, EUR 67.8 million versus EUR 59.9 million, which is a combination of the seasonality because Q2 is generally stronger than Q1 and also some improved momentum, as Giles mentioned earlier. In terms of gross profit, our gross profit was at EUR 42.6 million in Q2 versus EUR 46.2 million last year. Our gross margin is stable at 63% compared to Q2 last year and has improved significantly versus Q4 and Q1 of this year due to product mix. Generally speaking, what we observe is that our gross margin, depending on the product mix, would fluctuate between minimum 60% and maximum 63%. That's what we've seen very consistently since the acquisition of Lucid end of 2021. In terms of the Adjusted EBITDA, our Adjusted EBITDA is at EUR 9.2 million in Q2 this year versus EUR 13 million in Q2 last year. The margin is at 13.5% versus 17.7% last year. It's down due to the lower sales. A combination of the lower sales and the relatively fixed cost business. You will see that there is a strong improvement versus Q1, mainly due to the sales seasonality. As mentioned earlier, Q1 is a lower quarter in terms of revenue contribution. Moving to the next slide, please. With the net sales split. Here you can see like a breakdown of net sales, I mean, as we presented, like in the previous quarter, by business segment, by region and by customer type. In terms of business segment, what you can see here is that our Media Measurement were at EUR 11.3 million this year versus EUR 8.3 million in the same quarter last year. A very significant improvement, 36%, 38% like in constant currency, which is coming from higher volumes with existing clients and some new client gains. It's an activity, or it's a business that has been launched by legacy, we see a few years ago, and that has been growing consistently since then, as Giles mentioned earlier. In terms of marketplace, which is our core product, we've seen a decline of 13% QoQ, 10% in constant currency. Moving to the regional split of our net sales. America, North America is by some distance the largest part of our revenue, followed by EMEA and Asia Pacific. Americas net sales are at EUR 39.2 million versus EUR 43.2 million last year, which is a decline of 9%, 7% in constant currency. EMEA is down 2%, but +1% in constant currency, it's quite refreshing to see that EMEA is back to a slight modest growth, I would say. And APAC has been like more challenging with net sales down 17%, 10% in constant currency. More of a challenge in North America and a better situation in EMEA and there is like limited like industry data available, but the largest player published yesterday night, Ipsos, and are seeing the same trend in North America and in EMEA that we are seeing. It seems to be like an industry pattern. Moving to customer types, breakdown of net sales between tech-enabled and established players. What we can see here is that we have like a better performance with the tech-enabled companies than with the established insight companies, which is something that we have seen almost every single quarter since we are publishing this indicator. No changes here. Next slide, please. Adjusted EBITDA, as mentioned earlier, is at EUR 9.2 million versus EUR 13 million last year. A margin of 13.5% in the quarter versus 17.7% in the same quarter last year. A decline in absolute and relative terms due to lower sales volumes, combined with a relatively fixed OpEx base. Interestingly, what you will see here is that both our operating expenses and our Adjusted operating expenses are relatively flat versus prior year. Operating expenses are at EUR 42.5 versus EUR 42.7 last year, and Adjusted total net operating expenses at EUR 33.5 versus EUR 33.2 last year, which demonstrate like a solid cost control in the context of salary inflation and also hosting cost inflation. In terms of integration costs, we spent like EUR 4 million in the quarter versus EUR 5.5 million in the same quarter last year. Next slide, please. Now moving to the cash flows. In all companies, in market research, and Cint is no exception, H2 is a much stronger half than H1 in terms of revenue contribution, and even more in terms of profit. Operating expenses are steady, except for the payment of the annual bonuses that is happening in Q2, which is the reason why I've mentioned here that Q2 cash flow reflect seasonality. Additionally, they have been impacted, like in the quarter by some non-recurring items that are the payment of some retention bonuses related to the acquisition of Lucid in December 2021. We spent like, EUR 3.3 million related to these retention bonuses in the quarter, and we are done. There are no more like retention bonuses in the pipe. That's behind us now. Also we had to pay the remaining JAS Shares of, like, for EUR 2.5 million, and we are done in terms of in terms of shares for the for the for the time being. It will be like a non-recurring event that is behind us. If you add these two items, you come to EUR 5.8 million, so which explains substantial part of the net cash net negative cash flow in the quarter. Financial governance has been met in the quarter. Last but not least, I would like to say that our cash balance is expected to stabilize over the coming months as a result of this, like, increased reset, receipts from sales seasonality, and the fact that we are not forecasting any, like, non-recurring or one-off payments in the coming quarters. Next slide, please. We continue to focus on improving the working capital. We've taken some efficiency measures in Q3 last year, and our net working capital remains under control. We've seen, like, a small increase in the quarter, which is due to the payment of the retention bonuses that I talked about earlier. We had some successes, like, with accounts receivable. You will see that our accounts receivable are at EUR 87.7 million, an increase of 3% compared to the end of Q1, in the context of a sales increase of 13%, as I mentioned earlier. In relative terms, that's an improvement, and also compared to last year, EUR 99.8 million, that's a reduction of 12% versus end of June last year in terms of accounts receivable, in the context of a sales reduction of 7%, a relative improvement. There is still a lot of work ahead of us, and room left for further, like, improvements in terms of working capital, but things are moving in the right direction. Next slide, and over to you, Giles, for the summary. Thank you. Thank you. Go to the slide after summary. Sure, a few priorities. This is quite a boring report in some ways. I'm keeping very much to a simple script. This is reflecting what we're doing internally, integrate the products, create a consolidated platform, migrate our customers, standardize and automate our processes to create efficiencies, fix reversals with a very, very clear focus, as Olivier said, focus on our cash flow and cash management. The last point here is return to growth. Like, we're not there in Q2. We're better than Q1, we're not, we're not growing at the moment, obviously, that is a core ambition for us to get back to growth, consistent, growth, not just 1%, but more than 1% growth. These are our priorities, and we're working extremely hard to make them happen. That's it, guys, to be honest. We haven't got big announcements to make today. We are just very focused, very heads down on execution. Thank you very much for your time. Oh, yeah, finally, sorry, final slide. This is more about I said this at Q1, and this is why I took the job and why I'm optimistic about this company and why I'm, you know, working with the team so hard because the underlying thesis here is strong. We're a market-based business, choice and scale is really important in a market-based business. I believe that once we get through these challenges of integrating these companies, we're gonna be in a great position to grow and create value long into the future. Thank you very much for your time today. Look forward to seeing you on the next one. Are there questions? Actually, sorry, there are questions on there. Carla, are there any questions that have come through the app? Yes, we have questions. Okay, great. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. To revoke a question, please press star followed by two, and please ensure your phone is unmuted locally. Our first question comes from Fredrik Sylvan from Carnegie Bank. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Thank you, operator. This is Fredrik Sylvan from Carnegie, not Carnegie. First on free cash flow, it's negative this quarter, but you seem quite positive going forward. When you mentioned several one-time effects, you see some improvements in seasonality, temporary effects abating, overall. I think it's the first time you're quite explicit on being a bit bullish on cash generation at this stage. My question is really, do you expect your free cash flow generation to be positive in Q3 and Q4? Could you commit to such a thing? Because everything you talked about in this presentation sounds like it, at least. Yeah. I mean, that's really the expectation. I mean, we want to see like a stabilization of our, like, cash balances, followed by some improvements. In terms of seasonality, I mean, what we have seen that consistently in the last year is that Q2 is higher than Q1 in terms of sales. Q3 is slightly higher than Q2, and Q4 normally is our strongest quarter. We should see a progressive, like, improvement of our cash inflows in the coming months. Meanwhile, we don't have like, we don't have this one-off items that I mentioned earlier, that are like the retention bonuses. We don't have to buy any, like, minority shares. We don't have, like, any put and calls and things like this. We don't have, like, obviously, like, to pay any, like, annual bonuses in the second half of the year. The expectation is that we will see a stabilization of our cash balances, like, in the first term and followed by some some improvement like in the second term. That's really the expectation for the coming months. I mean. Okay. Uh, uh- sorry. Yeah. Okay. No, I think that's, I think that's clear. I think next one for you, Giles, if you could reason a little bit about you mentioned several things in with your integration work. You mentioned the confidence level in the company, it's improved quite a bit. If we just take a step back and look at Q1, I think you reflected quite a gloomy view of integration in terms of timeline. Sounds overall quite a bit more positive today. If you could reason a bit what has changed since then? Yeah, of course. It's interesting how you phrased that question, actually, because the timeline hasn't changed between Q1 and Q2, but what has changed is a belief in our ability to hit a timeline and some clarity on the timeline, in fact. What we said in Q1, what I said very clearly was, historically, we've said integrations on target for the end of 2023 or on plan or I can't remember the words that we used, but something of this complexity needs a very detailed and clear plan with very explicit dependency mapping and tracking, really good risk management, and great communication. That was lacking, right? We didn't have a clear plan. We didn't know exactly when we were migrating customers. We didn't like by cohorts. We didn't have all of the back-end systems, all the work to integrate back-end systems fully planned out with dependencies mapped. We had a very in-depth two-day offsite in Q1, where all of the leaders in the business got together, so it was my team, nine of us, got together and spent three days digging very deep on what would, what is required to integrate these companies. Out of that came much more explicit detailed plan with, as I said, clear dependency tracking and risk management. We've shared those internally, and we're sharing regularly, sort of traffic lights on where we are on each of those work streams across the entire company. That level of transparency, that level of detail, builds confidence. It builds a sense of people knowing where we're going, what we're doing, which leads to a sense of purpose, direction, and confidence. That's what we've done. Nothing has changed in terms of timelines. It's just really from Q1, which is we have more clarity. We've got more fidelity on what we're doing, when it's happening, who's doing it, and how it interacts with other things inside the company. This is complex work, and it's not easy. That's why it's taken a little while for me and the team to really get on top of it. There's still more work to be done. But levels of confidence are definitely, in my view, increasing, along with the sense of like, wow, there's a lot to do here. You know, that brings its own sort of anxiety and challenges. Okay, super. I appreciate the detail. It sounds as if you are in much better shape by the commentary. Another one, if we look at the YoY reversal rates, it is up. It's same as in Q1, but your like for like growth is only -5%. I guess the market predicted it to be worse than this. To me, it looks like a quite a clear QoQ improvement in terms of growth pace, and even that the market might have stabilized for you. Do you agree on this? I think you said some in the intro as well, shifting a little bit to the better, but it sounds quite decent going forward, don't you think? Well, it's not where I want it to be, but it's better than it was in Q1. Yeah, I agree with that. Super. just a final one on reversal rates. let's say they stay consistent at 12% and don't improve more. Does that need to be a headwind even going forward? please excuse my lack of understanding or misunderstanding, but wouldn't the buyer need, I mean, be able to mitigate this somehow with higher degrees of surveys, and then on your end, you know, you can hold off- Yeah, that's correct. Payments to panels. Yeah. unless you see, you know, where reversals land, investors just pay for accurate completes and so on. Does it have to be, I mean, even if we would shift to 15%, can you change your processes or contracts somehow that it actually doesn't need to be an issue for you? Yes, we can. I've actually spoken to the team about this. For me, it's more fundamental. Like, the experience of being a customer, having to go through the results and throw out 15%, it's not at that level right now, but it's horrific. Like, you know, we want to be a gold standard. We want to be the best. We wanna give our customers a, you know, a great experience, not an experience where they just are thinking: Oh God, the quality is not where I want it to be. In principle, from an economic perspective, yes, I don't disagree with you, but it's more fundamental than that for me. It's actually about confidence in our ability to do what we say we're gonna do and create the best platform in the industry. I would be deeply unhappy with that, with the outcome that you portrayed, even though, as you say, it might not be terrible from an economic perspective. Okay, very clear. Thank you very much. Thanks, Fred. Our next question is from Daniel Thorson, from ABG. The line is now open. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you very much, Giles and Olivier. My first question is on the gross margin. I mean, it looked pretty solid here in the quarter, flat this YoY up versus Q1, despite the higher reversal rates. What is actually driving that, and is this a sustainable level into the coming quarters as well? One thing I'll say is that reversal rates don't affect gross margin. Maybe there's a little bit of understanding there. Olivier, why don't you talk about gross margin? I mean, the gross margin is stable compared to what it was like in Q2 last year at about 63%. We've seen, like, an improvement versus, like, Q4 and Q1 this year. Q4 last year and Q1 this year, like, because it was at 60, now it's back at, like, 63%. As I've mentioned, like, earlier, like, in many occasions, we don't see likely, like, a seasonality or a pattern here. We have a gross margin that fluctuates between, like, 60% and 63%, depending, like, on the product mix, like, from the quarter to another. I cannot really say much more than that. Okay, fair enough. The expectation is that it should remain between this two numbers, 60%, minimum, and 63% maximum. Okay. Okay, fair enough. The second question on OpEx here. It was pretty flat this YoY, but I see that in Q2, you have added a couple of employees versus Q1. What type of roles have you added, and should we expect you to recruit a little bit and increase Adjusted OpEx here in the coming quarters? No. I mean, it's pretty steady here. I mean, we had, like, more vacant position at the beginning of the year than we had, like, in the first quarter than we had, like, in the second quarter, but we've not, like, increased our staff, like, in any part of the organization. If anything, we remain, like, tight, like, in terms of, like, cost control and not, like, creating, like, additional position or anything like this. No, it's really the fact that we are, like, more vacant position in Q1 than we are, like, in Q2. I mean, we see some reduced levels of attrition. Yeah. Yeah, I understand it. Yeah. Okay, cool. Last question is on the competitive landscape. I mean, it may be difficult for you to compare with a year or two years ago, but obviously the whole market has decelerated a bit here. Have you seen any change in the competitive landscape? Because now you are a very big player in this market, obviously. Is it anything on the sideline popping up? No. In fact, I was talking to one of our sales guys yesterday. He was saying that, if anything, we've seen a decrease in competitive narratives in the marketplace, where our customers are, you know, obviously, as all customers, all companies do, looking around at alternatives all the time. That's nothing new. They're saying that there's nothing that can really compete or compare with Cint, in terms of scale and breadth of offering. No is the short answer. Yeah. I hope those words don't come back to bite me at some point in time, but today, that's how I say. Yeah, okay. Sounds pretty promising. Thank you very much. Thanks, Daniel. Our next question is from Sara Ståhl, from SEB. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Sara, understand. Okay. Hi, everybody. Hi, Giles and Olivier. I just have a quick one for me, actually. I noticed you stopped giving the KPI number of customers or the number of customers because you're going through the definition of it. Is this something that you? Yeah ... working on more broadly on other KPIs as well? Should we expect, or could we hope for a more granular communication in this regard for the coming quarters? Yes. Yes and yes. Yeah. Maybe not next quarter. Okay, I would hope that the one after that, for sure. Could you give any kind of color on what sort of KPIs you're looking at to introduce? Not really. We'll come back to you on that. Number of customers, definitely. Once we've figured out how we actually count customers consistently across the business, and I've got a level of confidence I can believe in on the numbers. Yeah, for sure. In fact, it would be interesting to get, you know, maybe you can give us some feedback offline about what KPIs you'd like, and then we'll take those away and try and figure out how to deliver them. Okay, great. That sounds good. That was all from me. Thank you. Thanks, Sara. Our next question comes from Charles Brennan from Jefferies. Please go ahead when you're ready. Great. Thanks so much for taking my questions. I've got a couple, actually. Firstly, can you talk about what you think the market's been growing at? I'm just trying to get a sense of how much of the performance we're looking at is just market trends versus you potentially losing market share. And then just following up on the competition dynamics. In the statement, you're calling out pricing pressure across the marketplace. If the competitive narrative is easing, like, where are you getting that pricing pressure from? Is it coming from existing competitors? Is it coming from new competitors? Is it coming from your customers? I don't quite understand the market dynamics there. Thank you. Okay, well, I can take the second one. It's a marketplace, so the pricing comes from the supply and demand. Where the suppliers, the panel providers, are not seeing the demand that they are hoping for, they've staffed up for, that they're able to deliver against, then there's competition for the business. The marketplace is an efficient market for pricing. What we've seen is that numbers of completes are kind of flat year-on-year. The argument there, or the point there is that, well, suppliers have to, you know, fulfill their supply, and there's high competition, which is good for customers in the long run. You know, this is the nature of the marketplace. The The first point about the market, well, I personally can't really answer that question because I don't think that there is a clearly defined market or set of competitors to Cint, and certainly not one where they're published, public information. You probably have a better answer to that question than I do. Can I just follow up? you started out- Sure. -by suggesting that, in the Americas, they're perhaps maybe quicker to respond to macroeconomic conditions. You know, I would take that they're probably a leading indicator to what potentially happens in Europe. What gives you the confidence that you think that the business is stabilized, and why won't we see Europe follow the trends of the US? I mean, I get your point about quicker to react, but you could look at it as larger swings rather than necessarily faster and then Europe trailing. I would potentially think that actually there's just a bigger reaction, not necessarily sequence. It's difficult to say, right? I, you know, we've just seen it with Ipsos, we've seen it with ourselves. I, you know, there's a lot of... You look at technology companies, and some have suffered over the last kind of year with their stock falling and various other things. I don't think that there's a simple answer to this question, so I'm sort of gonna duck it in as much as I don't have a good answer that will probably help you. My focus is on creating a fantastic company and putting our best foot forward and then marketing it as, you know, increasingly, aggressively. You know, I control the stuff that I can control, rather than sort of trying to become a prediction engine. I don't really have a great answer to that question, I'm afraid. Okay, I'll do one last one if I can. On the whole customer migration program that starts in the fourth quarter, what are the risks associated with doing that? Is there a big data migration that's required? If it's going badly, does that equal more cost for you? If it goes badly, does it equal less revenue for you? How do we think about the risks of that project? We need more time than a few minutes to answer that question. It's a hugely risky project. You know, you're, you're taking thousands of customers, and you're changing the way that they interact with you. You know, from our point of view, we're trying to upgrade it, we're trying to make it more efficient, we're trying to get more of our customers to be able to do more things themselves. There's a whole underlying strategy behind this new platform and where we're taking it into the future. It, there's quite a long list of things. When it comes to risk, we're integrating supply, and the back-end systems around supply, and there's some risks there. There's some risks from a... you know, is the new platform robust enough from the back-end perspective to be able to take all of the traffic? There's risks from key men inside the organization who know or key people who know how the platforms work, and making sure that we look after them, and they are, you know, fit and well, and able to manage our existing platforms as we integrate. We're gonna be running multiple platforms simultaneously for a period of time. There's risks around that. There is a laundry list of stuff here, Daniel. It's like, it's not a simple project, which is why we've gone so deep in planning, which is why we talk about this every day, which is, you know, why we're so keen to make this happen, because the complexity that we're carrying as an organization right now is unnecessarily high compared to what it would be with a, with a single platform. There are very, you know, significant list of risks, and we are actively managing all of them. You know, if I go on, I could go on, and but I don't think that's a good use of everybody's time. Given these risks, why have you chosen the seasonally strongest quarter of the year to start the project? Well, the project was started way before I came in. If you're talking about starting customer migration, we're taking the customers for whom Cint manages their accounts. We are deliberately taking the lower risk customers first. Yes, Q4 is seasonally the highest, but we're not talking 70% of the revenue here. These are, you know, the final point is, the earlier we begin, the earlier we finish. The earlier we finish, the more we can move on to creating an efficient, optimized business for higher profitability and higher long-term growth. For all of those reasons. Perfect. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Viktor Högberg, from Danske Bank. Please go ahead when you're ready. Yeah, good morning. Could you say something about the pacing of growth and revenues throughout the second quarter? Did it improve? Was it on the same level? Just anything that could help us understand the dynamics in the quarter. It was as expected. We tend to see a little bit highest revenue in the last month of the quarter, and that was what we expected, and that's what happened. It was as expected. Mm-hmm. We were pretty accurate internally on calling Q2, and we were pretty happy with how, with where it came out. Yes. The comparable was slightly easier than in Q1, and it's gonna be materially easier in the second half. What we do know, well, what about the business environment? Can you say anything about things accelerating? You're talking about stabilization and growth in the not-too-distant future. Just some points to help us understand the confidence in that, other than the comparables getting easier. That would be very helpful. Not sure I can, to be honest. Mm. other than everything that we've said so far. Yeah, that we're not giving guidance, we're not predicting, we're not giving, like, detailed predictions on exactly when we expect things to happen. Yeah, with that in mind, I kind of like see above, if you like, in terms of what we're prepared to say. All of the work that we're doing. Well, as I said in the very last slide, is around integration and consolidation, moving customers across, focusing on reversals, and getting us into places back, you know, back to growth. I hope that the confidence level in the team that I've shown today, and that's hopefully coming through on this call, gives you a sense of like, okay, well, these guys are on top of the business, and that will result in better growth rates going into the future. We're not saying anything more than that today. Okay, fair enough. Just a follow-on question on the platform migration, would you expect it to be, or affecting growth? It sounded like in Q1, that you thought it was neutral to growth, over the longer term, positive to growth, doing this. Would you say that doing it will be neutral to the normal operations, or might it have a negative impact in the short term, if starting in the fourth quarter, that is? I didn't really understand that. Sorry. Can you say that again? Yeah, the platform migration, moving customers, if it would have a negative or neutral impact on operations and growth when you start doing it? It sounded like in Q1. Right. that you didn't see it, as a trade-off between growth and doing the migration, but as a positive on the long-term Yeah. growth potential, doing it. Yeah. Do you still stand by that? Yeah. Yeah, I do. I mean, moving customers onto a new platform, there's, as was discussed a minute ago, there's risks. We want to, we want to make sure that we take our customers on a good, well, it's not gonna be a fantastic journey, the migration, because we're asking them to do stuff that they didn't necessarily volunteer to do, but we're promising and we're expecting that the outcome, the place that they end up, will be better than where they are today. That's an ask of our customers, which we're very aware of, and we want to make that as painless and as seamless as possible. Our job is to run that process effectively, take our customers with us, and then lead them to a place or land them in a place that is better than the place that they're in today, which is the unified platform. Then we go to, you know, full-on innovation mode within the unified platform. It's a journey, and the first leg of that journey, the migration is risky. It's risky for the customers, it's risky for us, and our job is to manage that risk and try and mitigate as much as we can. If you're looking at it from a purely financial perspective, then yeah, there's revenue risk, and that's something that we're very aware of. But in the long term, we and our customers will benefit. Okay. Last question. On the Media Measurement, you said that you will increase your investments there. It's the fastest growing segment, not the largest. Mm-hmm. What are you? Yeah ... in terms of increasing investments? What does that entail in terms of costs and actually what you're doing, day-to-day? We're adding engineering teams and product people. We're adding innovation and, you know, not tens of people, but not one person, you know? Like a small team or two to accelerate that business. The commercial leaders in that business and the product leads in that business have got a laundry list of things that they want to do to improve it. We are total believers in them and in that business sector segment. Subject to clear focus on cash management, my view is that we start to allocate resources reasonably soon, well, now, to high potential growth areas. As I was saying in the presentation earlier on, the core focus is consolidate, standardize, and optimize, but that doesn't and then move into a much more, you know, growth-orientated phase. That doesn't mean that we're not gonna be doing something to parallel an investment in the Media Measurement business, and the data solutions is one area. Okay. final follow-up on that one. I think I recall that the gross margin in the audience, in the Media Measurement business is higher than for the group, and this is growing faster. Wouldn't this have an upwards pressure on gross margin over time above the 63%? You previously mentioned that's the roof on gross margin. Is that a short-term comment, and the long-term potential is higher than that, or is the long-term potential still just 63%, given a mix change over time? Well, I mean, look, you know, the margin is higher and if the growth rates continue as they are today, then for sure, the blended margin will go up. We're not giving sort of 2024 guidance. We need to go into a full budgeting cycle for 2024, you know, which we've actually already started. You know, when we get through that and start thinking about longer-term stuff, then, you know, maybe we can add a comment. Right now, that's not something that we're commenting on. Okay. Thank you very much. That's all for me. We have no further questions at this time, so I'll now hand back to the management team for final remarks. Oh, great! That's me. Thank you, everybody. I was, I expected this one to be a short one, actually, because I didn't think that we had a ton of stuff to announce, but I really appreciate all of your questions and your engagement. Thanks again to my team who are supporting me a lot. Thank you, and working extremely hard, and we will look forward to seeing you in three months' time. Enjoy the rest of your summer. This concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.