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.