Exasol AG

So the earnings call of Exasol AG regarding the financial half-year figures of 2026. The CEO Jörg Theves and CFO Jan-Dirk Henrich will guide you through the presentation and the figures shortly, followed by a Q&A session via audio line and chat. And with that, I am handing over to you, Mr. Theves.

Thank you, Judith. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining our investor call. So we're going to today talk about the figures, the unordered figures for the first half of 2026. And as usual, I will walk you through the high-level numbers. some strategic updates, and my colleague, JD, our CFO, will provide more insight to the details, financial details. And then at the end, we're going to do a question and answer session. So we're looking forward to your questions and feedback. So, as I said, we're going to start with a business update, current trading update, an outlook and summary, and then questions and answers. So this is our standard disclaimer. Now let me start with the update for what happened in the first half of 2026 for XSO. So overall, here are the key figures. Let me speak to this and I'll provide some, like I said, high level overview and we will dive into more details later in the presentation. So, we have the year-over-year recurring revenue is slightly up, driven by substantial churn reduction. So, we actually have a significant less churn in the first half of 2026 than we had last year. So, the churn rate decreased to about 10%. Last year, we had 24%. So, and we expect that ratio to continue also for the remainder of the year. Our revenue and EBITDA year over year comparison is affected by non-recurring items in FY25. So last year, for those of you who have been with us for a longer time, we had a large one-time hardware deal with one of our largest customers in the financial services space. So that brought in 2.9 million Euro of ARR with roughly a margin of 900K. So that in fact, we didn't see this year. So therefore we have an revenue impact of the aforementioned 2.9 million euro and also an EBITDA impact because we didn't get the margin from this one time deal. So that basically explains the difference between the, on the revenue side. So you see here on the top left revenue, 19 million euro versus the 21.5 million euro. we had in 2025. It's worthwhile saying that we also had some smaller one-time revenue as well in July and July this year, but not at the size of what we had last year. So the total ARR is close to where it was last year. And so at the end of 2025, we had 38.1. Now we have 37.9. In our outlook, you will see that we are projecting ARR growth to be in the range of minus two to plus two. So that's basically less than what we had guided previously. and therefore we have provided an updated ARR outlook in our press release last week and we will share some more updates on where we think this is going to play out. So on the new business performance, we were able to secure 11 new customers. I'll share a little bit more detail on the next slide on those. leveraging our key messaging around data sovereignty and agentic AI. So one of our key challenges is that we've been seeing existing customers have been postponing expected and planned expansion investments in their data infrastructure, which had a negative effect on ARR. So we actually had two larger deals in the plan for the first half of 2026 that did not materialize and therefore we're basically short of these deals that we had initially planned. We also had some positive upside, so we closed one deal with a financial services customer and we were able to avoid a larger term. So that compensated to a certain degree, but I think the key element here on growth, we were not able to bring in these two larger deals. One particular, I think, has to do with our expansion strategy for the Lagos Turbo product that did not materialize. That was roughly 800 to a million euro. And then there was one other customer who basically didn't expand the system because of cost factor, both on access or license cost, but also, as pointed out here, increasing hardware costs in the market.

So the positive effect from new customer acquisition and term reduction didn't offset the weak investment behaviors among our existing customers.