Welcome to Nepa Q1 2026 report presentation. For the first part of the presentation, participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions- and- answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key five on their telephone keypad. If you are listening to the presentation via webcast, you can ask written questions using the form below. Now, I will hand the conference over to CEO Anders Dahl. Please go ahead. Thank you, good morning to Nepa's Q1 2026 report prese ntation. I'm Anders Dahl, and I'm the CEO of Nepa, and with me today, I have Edvard Hagman, who is the VP of Finance for Nepa. The agenda today, I'm gonna make a short introduction to Nepa, and then highlight the high points of the first quarter, and some words about our sales development. We're gonna run through a financial summary of the quarter. Since we've been in kind of transformation mode for the last 12 to 14 months, we're also gonna talk a little bit about acceleration and what's ahead of us. Some final words about outlook and priorities, and then, as always, questions and answers towards the end. Short introduction to Nepa. We are a leading marketing intelligence and insight company. We're driving brand growth by insightful market analysis. We track brand health for more than 7,500 brands across the globe daily and measure thousands of advertising campaigns annually across more than 50+ markets. We deliver insights to CMOs, marketing teams, and insight departments of global consumer brands, and we are also now, with our Nepa Trinity suite, moving into C-level executives and helping them as well to make insightful decisions around their marketing spend. Our core offerings include Brand Tracking, Campaign Evaluation, and Marketing Mix Modelling, supported by brand advisory services. We combine the market survey data from real people around the world with cutting-edge technology on our own platforms and strong consultancy to deliver both recurring and ad hoc insights. We have a strong presence in Northern Europe, sales offices in the U.K. and U.S., and an operations center in Mumbai, India. As you have seen from our other presentations, we have two parts of our revenue streams. One is from subscriptions, the other one is from ad hoc projects. On the subscription side, we have Brand Tracking as our kind of our core product. We have a continuous Marketing Mix Modelling that we launched a little bit more than a year ago. We also have ad tracking on an ongoing basis and consumer experience tracking. In some cases, we also deliver recurring data to our clients for them to use internally in their organizations. Ad hoc projects normally tend to be more active and then more intense towards the end of the year because that normally follows our clients' activities on their side. Campaign evaluation is one of the biggest ones with Campaign Pulse. We have Marketing Mix Modelling as a standalone ad hoc project. We also do Brand Touch, which is an extension of our Brand Tracking activities. We also measure the assets or the brand assets for our clients. We do Category Insights for clients as well across the globe that normally leads to a Brand Tracking or an ARR subscription product. That is a good complement to our subscription products. That stands for about 40% of our revenue in ad hoc projects. Looking into the first quarter of 2026, that is normally; it is the cycle of our business, that the first quarter of the year is normally our weakest quarter. That is mainly driven by, like I said before, our clients' activities. We have a lot of consumer brands that are spending most of the campaign money and media investments in Q3 and Q4, and also have their revenues mostly allocated towards the end of the year. Our ad hoc business is very dependent on that activity level from our clients. Strong quarter with continued growth in our recurring business. ARR bookings are up 86.3% year-over-year to SEK 8.6 million. ARR towards the end of the quarter is SEK 135.8 million, with an underlying growth of 13.9% year-over-year. We do see a softer ad hoc market, especially in the month of March when we saw some macroeconomic impact, especially since with the war in the Middle East. We have, or we had at that point, a couple of contracts that we were on the way to sign from travel and international tourism clients. Of course, they were a little bit hesitant to go into these types of activities due to the war. None of those contracts are nixed, but they're actually still in the works, and hopefully we can close them towards the end of the year or later on during this year. Total sales bookings were therefore down by 15.6%, that is mainly, or that is driven solely by the lower ad hoc bookings. We saw an increased caution from our client base for the ad hoc work, like I said before. That is driven by geopolitical events and increased economic uncertainty, mainly towards the month of March, towards the end of the month of March. Preliminary April trading shows a strong rebound in ad hoc bookings, which is great to see. Also, of course, a little bit more of a stable market. January to April are now in line with the same period as last year, which is a very good sign. We do see significantly improved results year-over-year, where adjusted EBITDA less CapEx is SEK 7.2 million better from last quarter or from the quarter, the first quarter of 2025. That gives us a SEK 0.5 million second positive margin for the first quarter of this year. OpEx is down by 21.1% year-over-year; that is, we now have a cost situation that is more in line with the business that we run at the moment. AI or AI- first is definitely a thing that is moving across our business and has been doing that for the last years. We have launched during 2025 a lot of internal initiatives to increase efficiency with the help of AI, but also client-facing products with that are AI- supported. Integrated marketing intelligence platform is on track. Our Brand Tracking movement, I would talk a little bit more about that later on. We also deployed AI in data collection, quality, and reporting. A lot of those efforts are driving down cost and increasing efficiency. But we also see that in client deliveries, it helps us to create better products than before with the help of AI. During the quarter, we also announced that the CTO, our CTO, Jacob, will step down and depart, and we are now in the middle of searching for a successor, and that is initiated. It has absolutely no impact on our roadmap when it comes to moving our brand tracker or tracking platform into new technology, and also pushing a lot of the old technology development into client-facing tech products and solutions. This picture shows our strong underlying ARR growth, which is 13.9% year-over-year in Q1 of 2026, quarter by quarter. It also shows this on the yearly ARR bookings and on the quarterly ARR bookings. As you have seen from our previous presentations, even if we sign an ARR deal in one quarter, it normally takes some time before this shows up in our revenue. And this is a good statement to show that it now also pays out in our revenue that you see growth in our revenues quarter-over-quarter based on our three last years' last quarter of profitability. With that said, I would hand over to Edvard to go a little bit deeper into our financial results for the first quarter of 2026. Thank you, Anders. I will start by highlighting a bit of the operational transformation that we have undergone during the past one or two years, which we can now call completed with three profitable quarters in a row, and that we are back in positive territory on a rolling 12-month basis as well. That's something that we are really happy about in the work that we've done over the past two years. We have taken several decisive steps to get here. First, we reset the revenue base. We phased out low-margin ARR contracts and absorbed some extraordinary churn in 2024 and 2025. This effect will flow through our reported growth figures until Q2 2026. That is why we also present underlying metrics alongside our reported numbers to give you a clearer picture of how the business is actually performing. Second, we also right-sized the cost base and have simplified the operating model quite a lot over the past year. The cost-saving programs we initiated in 2025 and also completed during the year are fully reflected in the results, with operating expenses down 21% year-over-year. This impacted both personnel and other external costs. We see that gross margins remain stable at 76.3%, and we have significantly improved project margins as well. It's both thanks to the work of AI, but also that we have increased the role of our Mumbai operations center in the value chains. Of course, this allows our client-facing teams in the Nordics and elsewhere to spend more of their time with client-facing work, the thing that matters the most. Lastly, we have also revised our go-to-market strategy and defined a clear ideal customer profile, something that we see now are translating into our actual bookings and the deal pipeline. We've also rebuilt our marketing approach from the ground up. The result now is that we're seeing underlying recurring revenue growth, which actually takes me to the next slide, where we will dig down a bit deeper into the Q1 numbers. Underlying net sales was +2.3% in the quarter, while reported net sales declined by 9.8%. This is, of course, the effect done from the extraordinary churn and phased- out low-margin ARR contracts. The key revenue segments are driving the underlying growth. It's subscription revenue and other revenue from subscribers. These are also the segments where we see the highest long-term value creation. We did, however, as Anders said, see softer ad hoc activity during the quarter with some geopolitical uncertainty that led to more cautious client spending. Several project launches were postponed, impacting revenue and delivered work, but also deal conversations were paused, therefore less deals and less work to actually recognize. Because ad hoc work has a much shorter cycle from order to revenue recognition compared to our subscription revenue, we saw this impact quite immediately in the quarter. As Anders said as well, we have seen a good rebound in the sales numbers in April, with total sales bookings for January to April being back to the same level we were in last year in the same period. On the profitability side, we improved the gross margin by 0.2 percentage points. Operating expenses, adjusted for some items affecting comparability in 2025, refer to the cost restructuring program we did back then. OpEx is down 21% when adjusting for this. We now see that we delivered significantly higher product margins, which is both showing in the numbers but also really showing the increased internal efficiency that we have worked so hard for in the past year. Depreciation and amortization impact operating profits this quarter by SEK 3.2 million. I just want to highlight that this is a non-cash expense. It relates to the historical investments we've made in product development. We now treat current similar expenses as an expense, a direct expense on the P&L. Comparability over time is easier to look at when you measure adjusted EBITDA less CapEx. Coming to that metric, adjusted EBITDA less CapEx improved by SEK 7.2 million in the quarter to SEK 500,000 at a 1% margin, a quite big improvement from the first quarter in 2025. Operating cash flow was SEK +1.6 million. Our net cash position at the end of the quarter stood at SEK 16.1 million. That was all for the financial numbers, so heading back to you, Anders. Great. Thanks a lot, Edvard. As I said before, the tech transformation is going on according to plan. The launch of the new Brand Tracking platform is underway, and that is definitely one of our major steps for our business model to be more competitive and scalable. Also, being able to focus much more on client tech than just developing for internal efficiency. Continue to shift from separate products to an integrated marketing intelligence platform, that is also a move from just being a one-trick pony and only having the Brand Tracking platform. Now we have the continuous Marketing Mix Modelling and campaign evaluation as a Nepa Trinity offer, as we call it, which is a totally different holistic view that the marketer can look at his or hers entire kind of marketing activities across the different channels. AI, as I said before, is definitely kind of an AI-first approach, and it definitely increases and is now embedded in all parts of our operations. With automated data collection, quality management, and reporting, and definitely frees up a lot of capacity and also gives us a different speed to market that will help us to launch POCs, but also full-blown kind of platforms to our clients much faster than we could do before, with vibe coding and full out-of-the-box AI solutions. Development of AI-powered insights is also a product that we have launched, part of the existing product, but also new AI insight tools for our clients to use. That would definitely move the needle from just being a reporting and nice-to-have to a need-to-have insight recommendation company. Also, to advance the Marketing Mix Modelling with machine learning, and automation, and AI to meet demand for measurable marketing ROIs. We all know that several brands and marketers around the world struggle to use data, especially for strategic decisions, but also for tactic decision, or to see the combination of tactical and strategic, short and long-term investments. We know that 70% of marketers around the world struggle to prove the ROI of the marketing efforts, externally and internally, that is always if we can help marketeers around the world to bridge between their side of the business to the C-suite and make sure that they can invest accordingly or appropriately to what they need in order to keep market shares or to grow the market shares in the market. 68% of marketers struggle to balance performance marketing and creative branding. That is also what we think that with our Nepa Trinity offer, with the Marketing Mix Modelling, Brand Tracking, and Campaign Evaluation can give the marketers a really holistic view of their activities. We also know that 65% of marketers struggle to make sense of their data and use it to inform their marketing decisions, and also inform other parts of the organization. This is a way of working that really makes me excited, and we have already seen that in client interactions that with our core, this is our kind of platform and machine to turn complex marketing into clear business decisions across brand, creatives, and media investments. With our core products, Brand Tracking, Campaign evaluation, and Marketing Mix Modelling, that in many cases are fueled by survey data from real people. If we add sales data, media investments, and also clients' internal information and external information, we will have this holistic view where you can see how your brand, how your campaigns, and how your media is performing. That will give a good insight in the brand's strength, position, and also when you work with the targeting of your brand, both in the short and the long term. You can evaluate your campaigns not only in the short term, but also in the long term. You can also evaluate your campaigns, the content of your campaigns, the creatives, and the assets in your campaign, how it fits with the audience, and how it fits in with your brand platform. Also very exciting to be able to participate on an ongoing basis with our client when it comes to media allocating, pacing, and in-channel optimization. We have seen several examples of this, especially when our new marketing acceleration team is working very closely, more or less like in-house, with our clients. This is really a big step forward to kind of really have this full, holistic view, what we call the Nepa Trinity platform, to our clients. Traditionally, we have talked to CMOs and marketing leaders and insight leaders in the organization, so that is a natural if you look at the right side of this slide. Now we can also help agencies, and we can help with media planning, above the line planning for media. We can also talk to the performance marketing team and understand their needs, their short-term needs, but also to kind of balance that with the long-term needs of brand building. I think the most exciting part is that we can talk, and we have a language and a currency to really talk to P&L owners, to talk to the C-suite, to engage the CFO and the CEO in the marketing decisions, and have a currency and a language and numbers and KPIs that jive with the overall discussion of a company's financial health. This is a really big step into to be able to kind of take a much broader approach to our clients' marketing world, and it also helps us create stickiness. It helps us to create a, kind of a much broader engagement within the client's organization. This is a big step, and we see, like I said before, good results from this during the fall and also now going into 2026. We have had seminars, and we have had activities with clients to show this holistic view of the Nepa Trinity platform. Final words about the outlook and our priorities is of course, like I've mentioned before, that a large portion of our revenue, 40%, comes from ad hoc projects. They are more sensitive to short-term changes, macroeconomic changes like we have seen, the war in the Middle East. Also, as I said before, the Q1 is normally, and it is the weakest season because our clients are normally spending less money on marketing activities in Q1. Most of them are very heavily dependent on Q3 and Q4, some of our clients have 60%, 70% of their revenue, marketing activities, and profit happening in the fourth quarter. Good sign, like both Edvard and I have stated, is that preliminary April trading shows a strong rebound in ad hoc booking, which is a good sign. I think it's partly driven by a little bit more stable macroeconomic situation, but of course also all the hard work that we put in all hands on deck in our organization of all the employees, and the client success sales organization, and our insights consultants. We see a continued growth in our ARR bookings. Total sales bookings for January to April are now in line with the same period last year. With a strong ARR base, that will, of course, make the business much more sustainable, much more stable, and much more predictable, and it will also help out to even out some of those seasonal fluctuations and, in some cases, macroeconomic fluctuations in our ad hoc business. Our focus is, like before, for 2026, and has been that for the last one and a half to two years, to sustain the positive ARR momentum and, of course, to drive further margin improvement with the smart people we have in the organization, with new technology, with AI, to make sure that that is an AI-first mindset that goes across the entire organization. Of course, accelerate the development of our integrated marketing intelligence offering and our AI capabilities. With that said, I will hand over to the question- and- answer section, and thanks. Thank you all for listening in to this first part of the presentation. If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. There are no phone questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions or closing comments. Thank you, operator. We'll read some of the questions that we have received in the chat. The first one is, can you talk a little about your ARR bookings? Was it primarily Brand Tracking contracts, or did it include new CMM contractors as well? It's a combination of both. I think the basis of our business has always been brand tracking. That is normally the ground foundation, but we have seen a good and healthy mix of new CMM deals as well. That is a good sign. The next question, with Jacob done restructuring or structuring your existing tech infrastructure, what do you expect to be the main focus of your next CTO? The next focus of the next CTO, and I would say the entire tech organization, and also combined with the client success organization, is to develop more client-facing, more client technology solutions, and embed tech into our client offerings. I think this is probably a very exciting time to be in this data, very data-intense business because we have access to AI tools and AI platforms that make it much quicker to go from a good idea. We have the data, we have especially this very strong domain knowledge to develop AI tools and client-facing solutions and tools with the help of AI. The focus is, going forward, is of course moving more into the client layer and client-facing activities, and continue to do what we have done successfully now for the last 12 to 18 months, to also use technology to improve our own operations in an efficient way. I think this leads into the next question as well. Will the close down of your legacy Brand Tracking platform lead to cost reductions? It has already led to cost reductions, but we have moved some of them we have taken as cost reductions, and so we have also moved talent and investments into client tech already. We have done that for the last six to eight months. We can't really see that there's any predicted cost reductions that we have planned in our P&L, but there is definitely more room to do more on the client side that we can develop, again, both to reduce efficiency and cost on the client side, but also to drive new revenues with new products on the client side. Turning to the sales side, your churn was around 3.3%. Was it driven by a single large customer or multiple smaller ones? Since we changed and started to working with a more balanced ICP and ideal client profile, customer profile- based, we have been able to kind of gain a much broader customer base. That also reflects now in when we do see churn, it's normally a good and healthy mix and mostly kind of a variation of all the smaller ones. That is mainly driven by that we have now been able to kind of even that out and have a much better mix of small and big ones. It's a smaller, multiple smaller ones. Is it correct that Q1 is the period with the highest ARR contract renewals, and that the quarter due to that has high churn risk? Historically, it had been like that, and it's still like that. I think with the very successful bookings and sales activities and marketing activities that we have done over the last 12 to 18 months, we do sign more contracts alongside the entire part of the year. That will change over time. Right now, yes, that is the most intense season. Have you found a new VP of Sales? Yes, we have found a new VP of Sales, and we will make that public in a couple of weeks. Your other external costs were lower than expected, and your personnel cost was higher than expected. Are the Q1 levels representative for your current cost base? Yes, OpEx is at a far better level now than it was a year ago. We have made a lot of cost reductions and are now with a satisfactory cost base for the current the current revenue levels and growth trajectories that we set. With Liberation Day in last year's numbers in April 2025, is it fair to think that the macro environment impact on that by Q2 2026 will be around the same levels as last year? I don't really know what Liberation Day is, but I think it is probably if it could be Easter or some of those big holidays that are happening in March and April. I don't see that some of those, especially in Q1 and Q2, we don't really have that big of an impact on the special kind of holidays. I think it's more about what we saw now in March, for example, was definitely more of a macroeconomic, not so much of a holiday season, more about Liberation Day. I think they mean the Middle East war. Of course, yeah. Oh, okay, I see the question now. I understand. The macroeconomic impact in Q2 might be at the same level as last year, yes, if nothing else happens in the macroeconomic environment. It's very hard for me to say if there will be any new impacts on tariffs or any new wars or anything else that might impact our clients, because most of our clients are fairly sensitive to macroeconomic changes. It's hard for me to speculate on that, honestly. Next question. With three great NRR or Net Revenue Retention quarters in a row, is it reasonable to think that the organization's aim in 2026 now is above 100% in Net Revenue Retention? Yes, of course. That is always the aim to be even better on that. I think with the new client success organization and the way that we work with our clients and truly connect in many different parts of the client's organization, that will definitely help us to maintain a healthy level on NRR. It is also a kind of a good testament to, and I think that will show even more further in our numbers that with the Nepa Trinity offer, that will make increase the stickiness, and we will have much more connection points. Traditionally, as I said before, it was normally the CMOs, or the marketing or the insight directors. Now we have broadened our kind of presence in the client's organization. We talk to the CMOs and the marketing people and the insight people, of course, but we also talk to performance and above the line media investors, but also the performance team, and then in some cases also the board of directors and CEOs and CFOs. Of course, that helps us to really understand if there are things that will impact churn and other things within the client's organization that we can help to mitigate early on. Yes, our aim is, and our goal is, of course, to be above 100%. The next question is, your ARR bookings of SEK 16 million in Q4, are all of those revenues in your ARR number by the end of Q1? Yes, it should be 99% of it, at least. There might be some deals that have been postponed on the start date, but the vast majority of it is. Can you provide some color on your CMM offering and sales? Has it gained traction, and is it starting to match your expectations in terms of sales? It's definitely matching our expectations in terms of sales, and it's also matching our expectations in terms of share of voice. I can call it because that normally gets so much attention when we talk about. With our new marketing acceleration team and the way that they approach a client to talk about CMM, to talk about the holistic view on the client's data sources, and what we can add on with our survey data, and what we can add on with our insights. It's a, it's a very important tool to use in order to kind of lead to the Nepa Trinity offer with the Brand Tracking and the Campaign Evaluation platform. In some cases, it might be that they might have a CMM or an MMM within the clients or within the prospect's organization. For us to being able to show the CMM at that point, in many cases, leads to that we can do an ad hoc deal to start with, maybe a Category Insight, for example. Hopefully that, with the aim to lead it into Brand Tracking and then to the Campaign evaluation and then CMM, and then we have the full Nepa Trinity set up within the client's organization. Yes, it leads into, it leads to great discussion, it leads to sales, and it's definitely a good move to take a little bit of a different position in the market than we have had before. We have two questions on the headcount. The first one is that, "Headcount has dropped from 194 in Q4 to 186 in Q1. What is driving this?" We have had some turnover in our Mumbai office, and did not replace as many as we had to in Q1, and also some maternity and paternity leaves in Q1 as well. Nothing out of the ordinary, I would say. We can also comment on that, Edvard, to say that with our kind of AI-first approach, every time we see that there is a vacancy in our organization, there's always a question of can we do something with AI in order to replace some of those processes. Of course, it's a new way of thinking with an AI-first approach, and it's not the aim to kind of over time reduce staff if that staff is needed. Of course, the aim is to be able to grow significantly with the business, but keep the same headcount, but then replace some of those manual processes with AI and be able to serve the clients in the same way, more efficiently, but with a low headcount or relatively lower headcount compared to the combination with revenue. Our goal is with this headcount to be able to grow the business significantly without having to add more headcount. To the headcount question, number two: "How many salespeople did you have going into 2026, and how many do you expect to have going out of 2026?" We have around, let's say 20, around 20 salespeople, mixed between new sales, maybe 25% of those, and 75% in account management. Anders, do you wanna cover the expectation for going out of 2026? We take it step by step. I think we have talked before about profitable growth, and I think we are looking carefully at our own KPIs and ROIs. Of course, we are growing sales headcounts when we see that the lead flow and efficiency is also increasing. We have actually pushed now in Q1 already and now going into Q2 with our marketing spend in order to push in times like this, and that will of course lead to, hopefully, and we already see some signs of that, to a higher lead flow. A higher lead flow will also lead to that we need more salespeople. The goal is, of course, to continue to grow the business and especially the ARR business. If that leads to that, we will hire more people to be able to take care of those leads. Yes, of course, we would love to end the year with more salespeople because that's, that will have a pretty short-term payoff, again, based on the lead flow. Do you expect a stronger 2026 in the campaign evaluation segment because of the Swedish elections? I think that normally I don't have the pure data to compare the last election section. It normally drives other marketing activities, not during the specific election period, but before and after, because most companies don't wanna go in too actively when there are so many political marketing activities or campaigns. Again, Q3 and Q4 are our strongest quarters, so we haven't really counted on any election effect in Q3 and Q4 due to the Swedish election, no. Can you give a short update on the sales efforts in the U.S.? The sales efforts in the U.S. are selective and normally driven by existing clients that we do have and trying to expand within their networks. They've been done from the people we have in the U.S., but also from people in Europe. Normally, clients that do have some connection to Europe, some connection to already existing clients. Still on a fairly low level and with the same idea as I said before, that we try to scale it in a way that we can see some ROI early on before taking investment that we can't really count into profitability in the short term. The goal is to continue to grow with existing clients, and of course, we have a lot of clients in Europe that are expanding into, and they already are in the U.S., but if they expand, of course, we follow them into the U.S. market as well and add our products, if that is campaign evaluation or CMMs, also for the U.S. market. I think that was the final question. Thank you all in the chat for inputting your questions. That was really, really good to see. Thank you all. Back to you, Anders. The final words is that I'm really proud of the organization that we did such a strong Q1, and we've continued to see ARR growth. We continue to keep our eyes on the cost side to deliver profitability, which I think is great, even in a seasonally normally, fairly weak first quarter of the year. A comment to the international expansion, of course, U.S. is always an interesting market, but we also see possibilities in other European markets. We have strong client presence in Germany and Central Europe, and that is, of course, always a possibility, an opportunity to see how we can kind of piggyback on those clients and ride into other markets in Europe. Without having to open up a lot of new offices, but I've actually do that from Stockholm or together with the clients in these markets. Thank you all for listening in to this presentation and all my set of questions. Thanks a lot for the good questions in the chat. See you in a couple of months again for the next quarterly update. Thanks a lot. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.