q.beyond AG

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and I warmly welcome you to today's earnings call of the Qiont AG following the publication of the Q1 figures of 2025. With me today is CEO Thies Rixen and CFO Nora Wolters. So the management board will speak shortly and guide us through the presentation and the results. And after the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your questions directly to them. And having said this, Mr. Rickson, I hand over to you.

Yeah, thank you, moderator. Hello, everybody. We both are very happy to announce Q1 figures to you. Headline is growth, earnings, and financial strengths. Overall, the Q1 is for us, is delivered as we planned, more or less. We are quite happy with this. We are on the way to have a positive group income this year. the first one since 2018. If I'm not mistaken and we do it as always, Nora will guide you through the figures and I will give an outlook later in the presentation. So I will hand over to Nora now.

Thank you, Thies. A warm welcome to the financial figures. I'm very proud to announce that 2025 is an ongoing success story of QBeyond. We are very proud that we reached a further milestone. The milestone for 2025 is a positive, consolidated net income. And Q1 is the next step for our goal. Thank you. Thank you. To say it with the words of Robert Collier, success is a sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out. And as you see in our key earning figures, we have a significant growth, significant improvement in all key earning figures. Our gross profit went to 8.5%, up to 8.9 million. We increased the EBITDA by 15% and the consolidated net income nearly goes to a positive value. Our strategy 2025 and 2025 plus is very effective. looking at our key financial figures. First of all, we look to the revenue. Our resilient business model ensures a good start in Q1. In the last year, we concentrated on profitable solutions and services. That means we show you an adjusted revenue, which had a growth of 2% compared to the last quarter. To say it in other words, our focus is increasing on our profitability And this is also shown in the revenue. We have a solid order book with constant share of recurring revenues. Our order book means we have up to 15% new orders. That is a great value if you look to the actual environment, the challenging geopolitical situations. And so we are very confident and going on in the next quarters. We report to you two segments. One is managed service and the second is consulting. As you see, we have selectively disposed our low margin contracts. We have a constant success factor with 22% and a significant contribution to our mission of being a service leader in IT. The high profit growth of 22% is the work of efficiency, investment, AI, automatization, and of course, our customer satisfaction. As you see, consulting has significantly increased gross profit. From 8 to 14% means 75% of difference. We have a measurable sales focus, clear successes through competence building. As you remember, we built the QBeyond Academy in the last year. which means we skill up, we get new competences in the company, new interesting projects, and of course, the needed skills, which are important for the future of QBeyond. Additionally, we have a good increase in capacity utilization, which gets to the really good results in the segment consulting. How did we do this? Additionally, we reorganized the segment so we get further efficiency and consulting and development is a really important part of the value chain of the complete company. Looking at our P&L. We have a clear goal for 2025. This is a positive consolidated net income. We significantly improved all key earning figures. The EBITDA margin increased by 1% to 5% and every development in our figures goes like we planned it. Unfortunately, we cannot plan everything, and we have a special factor, as you see on the slide. It's the individual value adjustment means that we had a customer insolvency, so we lost 0.3 million EBITDA. But we are already tracking the situation. We follow our invoices and have a clear management in these. So concerning our revenue, it's really a little part that we lost in Q1 compared to the whole revenue we have. Revenue makes you work. Profit makes us happy. So we have, how do we get this? We have a really committed team and executive. We're really working successfully in all areas and like cock wheels together. So we get a profitable value chain in the whole company. Additionally, we have high impacts of the nearshore ratio. As we told you in former calls, 5% nearshore ratio means 2% of staff costs. So we raise the nearshore ratio up to 16%, which means we have an effect of staff cost of 1.5%. look to the sickness rate and the turnover ratio. It's very important that you have a committed team because we make people business and therefore a committed team, a healthy team is a factor of success for us. Our sickness rate is below 1.3% of the annual value of the statutory health insurance. And the turnover ratio is below 2.2% of the IT benchmark of 10.9%. So we are very happy and very proud to have such a great company, such great employees and executives to go on with our service leadership mission. A very important factor is the cash. We are continuously increasing our cash positions. To say it clear, profitability overgrowth and consistent management. Another positive aspect for you to know, we are looking for 5 million liquidity in Q3, which are the results of the Plusnet deal in 2029. Therefore, we waited for the notice from the tax office for the years 27 to 2019. So we already received them and at the moment we are on to get the money. QBeyond is a healthy and a solid company, which has clear goals and a consistent management. And we are very proud of our satisfied customers and our rising share price. As you may have noticed, we go up to 92% and we are really looking forward to go on. And now we come to the most exciting part of the financial figures, the guidance. My message for you is very clear. We deliver. That means every month, every quarter, every year, we deliver what we promised to you. As you see it in the key figures, up to 5% adjusted revenue, an increase of 14% to 42% EBITDA, and finally, as Thies already said in the beginning, a positive consolidated net income, which is one of the requirements for paying you a dividend. And with this perspective, I give back to Thies.

Thank you, Nora. Now a little outlook on the strategy. As we said in the beginning of the year, we will not stop. The overall goal is to have at least 10% EBITDA margin. So how do we get there? We choose that we want to be the service leader, though they have the best IT services in the industry. And I'd like to explain the three main pillars to you a little bit. So one is that we concentrate on not only technology expertise, we put industry expertise on top. This will mainly be built on external growth like M&A. So if we hire new teams or buy new companies with new expertise, this will help us to boost the margin even more. then we will build the now we are only in Germany more or less. So yes, we have 15, 16% of our people outside Germany, but only 1, 2% of our business. So we will grow this to 15% in the midterm. And then QVH is more European company as a German company. And the other, the third thing is boosting team competencies. Nora elaborated a little bit on that or explained that, that we believe that skill and competence is very the, let's say, the factor for the future to beat the competition and to convince the customers to stay with us or come to us. This is what we called our 2025 plus CLG. So this will be boosted by AI. As you may have seen, we launched our own private AI service. So out of our own data center, we have built up a platform for our customers where they can work with their data on their AI model to automate or to boost their business. There we think in this quite decoupling world right now, when we offer our clients and sovereign services, our iServices, as we have sovereign cloud services as well, This will help them and this will help us. So this is there. We sell this over several use cases. I will show two of them. One is for retail e-commerce. So where they can automate the service test to boost service efficiency and to be, let's say, 24-7 there with low cost. This will help our retail clients. The other one is logistic. where there's often manual work to do. And also in this tariff chaos, let's say, where we have a solution where we can very flexible react on certain requirements and help the customer to automate their processes, their data processes. There we have very good feedback. There are others already, let's say, in the sales process and more to come. And with this, we hope to boost AI, which we already use inside the company. So this we do, as you know, not only in Germany. You see the black dots in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Ulm, our data centers. And then we have the already known near-shore centers in Latvia, India, and Spain. And we have our first sales office for the logistic business in Charlotte, North Carolina. And we aim for the, at least for the first market entry in Europe this year also. So this will help us to boost the margin up to 10% in the midterm. We said 2027, 2028. We will be there. Let's see how fast we are. And therefore, we are convinced that our share is a very attractive investment opportunity. as you may know already. So, the strategy is clear and we, Nora and myself, execute on this 10% margin is at least our goal. AI, near-show, off-show, will help us on the cost side. We are debt-free. End of the year, I think it's more like $50 million cash instead of $40 million. And our business model, at least in these circumstances, shows a greater resilience because of, let's say, two-thirds of the current revenue we have in such a business model. Having said that, I'd like to thank you for your attention and we're happy to take your questions. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Mr. Rickson and Mrs. Wolters for your presentation and the dive into your first quarter. So ladies and gentlemen, now we would be happy to take your question. And if you would like to speak directly to the management board, just raise up your virtual hand. And if you've dialed in by phone, you can use the key combination star key nine to enter the queue, followed by pressing star key six to unmute yourself. And if you're not able to speak freely today, you can also submit your questions in our chat box and we will read them out for you. And having said this, let's take a quick look to the line. But by now we have no questions. so let's wait so maybe a question shows up or you explained everything so well that there are no open topics but it seems everybody is happy so far no even better even better so Dear participants, maybe further questions, shows up at a later time. Please feel free to contact Anatole from Investor Relations and M&A. And yeah, then this is it for today. So thank you very much for your shown interest in the QBeyond AG. And a big thank you also to you, Mr. Rickson and Mrs. Walters for your time. And yeah, from my side, I wish you all a lovely remaining week. And we say thank you and goodbye.

Goodbye.