F Secure Oyj

A warm welcome to everybody to F-Secure's quarter four and 2025 results session. Good to have you with us. I will this time around start by introducing a couple of our very recent leadership team nominations. I will start with our new chief strategy officer, please. He is Jyrki Tulokas. who rejoined F-Secure on Monday this week. So he has started work now. He joins us from Verkkokauppa. And as said, in terms of being responsible for strategy, he will be driving our internal strategy process naturally. He's got our IT, our chief information security officer. He has our transformation programs and also M&A activities. So that's in short, that's Jyrki. And then we have an upcoming nomination. So you may have seen that our current chief financial officer Sari Sommerkallio will be focusing on board assignments in the future. and we have a new Chief Financial Officer Robin Pulkkinen joining us. At this time we expect it to be around beginning of May. As our new Chief Financial Officer he's currently with Revenio, which is a Finnish stock listed company and he's a very seasoned CFO, knows the ropes of how to work within a stock listed company and has also been active in international business operations, in M&A, financing and so forth. So we're looking forward to having you Robin in the team in roughly three months. Thank you. So now into our regular programming. So the header for our financial statements review this time around is that strategic partners and AI innovations are accelerating our growth prospects. We've been working for a few years now since our demerger with our sister company, our brothers and sisters at Widsecure, on to growth. And it's been an investment that we've been systematically carrying out in the past years. And now we see that we're starting to make good progress on that front. But more about that a bit later. So if we look at quarter four, it was a disappointment from financial point of view. There is no two ways about it. We were looking for growth, but instead we were roughly stable, slightly negative, both in currency neutral, as well as reported revenue. Our adjusted EBITDA was 12 million, slightly up from last year. 33.6% of revenue, which was a reasonable feat. We had set our target in terms of revenue higher for quarter four, and even though we didn't miss our own internal target, we were still able to run good cost control and we were able to come up with a good adjusted EBITDA. Sari will be talking more about that in a moment. I would say that the most important thing in our quarter four was that we were making good progress towards our strategic journey to be the trusted service provider and the provider of choice of consumer cybersecurity to the biggest communication service providers in the world. So we announced deals on this front. I will get back to those also in a moment. So that was good. These were a long time coming. In some cases, three to five quarters later than what these partners had been indicating to us. But here we go. In terms of consumer sentiment, it's not a wave to ride on. I would say that it's not outright pessimistic, but people are careful. The financial environment and personal economics right now for people are a bit unpredictable, so people are treading with care. That doesn't necessarily help us. Then, as said, business execution faced delays, particularly with tier one partners. So deals and service launches were suffering from postponements and slower progress than indicated or expected. Then we've been very, very busy last year, setting up relatively small guerrilla teams, I would say, of cross-functional capabilities into teams that have been building completely new propositions for us. I will talk a bit more about this later. We call those Horizon and Halo. Horizon being our scalable business partner platform ecosystem and Halo being our new mobile centric, mobile first scam protection product with a completely new kind of user experience. And naturally we were proud to receive for the second year in a row an award at the Finnish AI Gala for the best AI growth initiative of the year with our scam image scanner. So that's a high level update. 2025 in brief. So first of all, we were stable. We were looking for growth. We were stable in revenue. So that was not what we had planned for. We started seeing certain softening of the outlook in the second quarter of the year, which made us also tread carefully with regards to costs. So that allowed us to still come with an adjusted EBITDA that was relatively good. I mean, if you look at any other company, this would be very, very good. If you look at F-Secure, we could have done slightly better. But still, thanks to good cost control, we were able to come with 50.2 million of adjusted EBITDA. So we continued laser-like focus in driving all the capabilities, maturity, offering and commercial activities that are related to winning and serving Tier 1 partners. We did major developments, clear market developments in our operational excellence, for instance, which have to do with delivery capabilities, service maturity, having an excellent cyber risk management in place and so on and so forth. So we took strides forward on that front. That work is still ongoing. As we're naturally signing new deals, there are all the time some new requirements from these partners. And then with regards to our product portfolio, especially our embedded security portfolio, which was already very strong at the end of 2020. four is now you know I can I can say without a moment's hesitation is by far the most extensive in the market which serves as a good good bedrock for us to win business with tier one partners and expand our footprint in that market the same thing applies to our operational excellence the kind of activities we've been carrying out in 25 and which we will carry out in 26 to a certain degree will definitely serve all the upcoming business opportunities that we will be targeting in the future. So if we come back to some of these deals that we've been signing in quarter four. So on December 9th we announced that we've signed a contract with a tier one who is serving over 100 million customers as consumer customers. This is an embedded security deal once again and we have already started the service delivery project and we expect the service to be going live around end of quarter two, beginning of quarter three. It's a three-year contract with automatic renewal unless terminated. A very, very exciting partner who sees that they want to up their game in security in a meaningful way and turn that into part of their core proposition and brand proposition. a very exciting partnership. This starts from having zero customers for the service to begin with, and it will stack over time as it has traction amongst customers. Then on the left, we are describing who are we going after. So that is our target market in a way. So we're looking for top 20 service providers in the world who have typically a very, very large base of customers, tens and tens of millions, if not over 100 million. and relatively high average revenue per user. And we are naturally prioritizing those who are looking to not only sell security as a value added service, but bundle it and form part of their core proposition with security. These kind of partners are typically looking for something which is unique to them. their branding, their customer experience, their language to describe the value proposition and then naturally they can generate high margin and definitely as we all know CSP markets are relatively mature so everybody wants to work on churn reduction and have the kind of services that not only provide high margin but also improve retention. And then these players, typically when they are serious about something, they also invest more heavily and they have not only maintenance power, but go to market power. Naturally, we need to mobilize that power of that massive partner so that they actually not only create a product that is looking for customers, but they mobilize fully their product marketing, marketing and sales organizations to promote these services. Now with regards to deals, the first one which is listed on the right, we have not made a press release on that, so this I would say is news news from us. So we made a significant expansion agreement with an existing tier one partner, this time around for what we call financial monitoring service. So these are capabilities that we have never before provided to anyone else. It is embedded security powered. and this is a very interesting domain. I mean it depends very much country by country where these kind of services are popular but this is another cornerstone in the proposition for this partner and we expect the service to go live by the end of quarter one and this deal does include a minimum guaranteed revenue. So from day one we will start generating revenue from this service. The second one that I'm listing on the right there is a deal which we announced on the 20th of November as a stock exchange release which gives you a hint that this is of significant value and includes a minimum guaranteed revenue, we were expecting the deal to be closed by the end of the year. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. The agreement negotiations are ongoing on a positive note, but it has just drawn out longer in time than what our partner was indicating and what we were expecting. But no changes in the expectation. that the service launch should happen in quarter two as before. And that's also an embedded security deal that we're working on here. So good progress with these two already signed deals and the final one, which is now under final stage negotiations. These are the kinds of steps and leaps that we have really wanted to see for a long time. I've mentioned several times in our quarterly sessions that we have a strong pipeline. These are the kinds of deals that we've had in the pipeline and then some. So this is definitely not the end of it. There's more that we're working on. So on this one, we have our strategic priorities that we listed for 25 when we started the year to continue to transform the company to accelerate growth with a primary growth driver being these kinds of targets that we have there around the globe. Just talked about those to a certain extent. Then the second one to establish our position as the market leader in scam protection, which is undoubtedly the biggest theme that was out there on everybody's lips in 2025. And then finally to innovate and utilize data and AI for the betterment of our services, our protection and care for customers, as well as our own operations. So if we go point by point, so in terms of the tier one partner segment and growth, we've signed an extension to the total service, even in the major partner sector in the US. to include scam protection. We have a new major partner in Asia-Pacific region, very sizable player. Average revenue per user in the Asia-Pacific region is below what we can see in Europe and North America. But being a very sizable partner, we have high hopes that this will be a good revenue generator for us in the future. And then we extended an agreement that we already had in place with a Nordic banking partner to also include scam protection. This has been a typical trend for us in the past year and a half that partners that we've had have been expanding their offering with scam protection, which naturally improves our average revenue per user. So we've been deepening relationships with key partners and very much on the back of scam protection. Now, why do we say that scam protection is a relevant thing? Now, I've referred to Global Anti-Scam Alliance before. Their most recent survey from last year covering 42 countries, not all of the world, but 42 countries within those $442 billion were reported lost in scams. So last year there was a number which was 1 trillion. That was the whole world. Now they have narrowed it down to 42 countries. Scams is a massive problem and on the right side, we have always talked about how we want to lead in providing an excellent experience to security services. Complexity, 77% of people worry about their online security and 71% find security too complex. Now that's a good indication for us that we're on the right track when we're focusing on better experience with not only with Total but also with new kind of services like Halo. Now the scam threat landscape has really leaped in 25 in this dawn of the age of AI. Agentic browsers are coming out. AI agentic lethal trifecta is what we call the combination or the perfect storm or imperfect storm of agents having access to private data being able to communicate externally and then even potentially trust content that it shouldn't trust so the agentic ai environment is going to be actually potentially a massive exposure risk for individuals as well as businesses of course to cyber threats and then the rise of scams in social media it seems that the social media behemoths they don't care that much you know how deeply rooted different kinds of scam methods and channels have been embedded into their platforms because they make tons of money from all of these services and for instance Meta reportedly makes roughly 10% of its revenue from fraudulent ads and scams pretty creepy I would say but just another data point which is interesting right there in the middle bottom is that search volume forecast to drop 25% by 2026 we see this everywhere so you know people making searches there is the AI summary in the beginning people don't care to go and look at the search results anymore they don't click those So AI is in a way making websites and search engine optimization in its known form out of date. And now we need to go into AI-powered search optimization, which is a new kind of genre. And how do we build security into that ecosystem is yet another opportunity for us to embark on. uh in terms of awards and recognition you know if our financials don't look precisely as we wanted it to look like we never saw this amount of success come our way we've won practically anything and everything that is out there in terms of av tests av comparatives av labs and other recognitions in different kinds of I'd say that maybe the one that I'm most proud of on behalf of F-Secure is what we have in the lower right hand corner is that we're recognized as the leader in the telco or ISP or communication service provider market segment by multiple different players who are really having a vast understanding and insights in this space. Now, if we look at our vision, where are we going towards? What's our North Star in terms of what kind of services we want to develop? So instead of just, you know, I was almost going to say old fashioned protection, but I won't. I will say that the value proposition that we want to have is about helping prevent, protect and recover from cyber risks and threats. So not only setting up walls and saying that this is good or that's bad, We want to be much more of a, you know, feeling like care to people and go for trust. Trust is the business where we want to be in, and that is provided with more contextual relevance, depending on what people are doing, having emotional resonance that it talks to me in a language I can understand and it is proactively helpful. So from protection to resilience, So the longer use our services, we hope that people are becoming more resilient to cyber threats, and from security to trust. And that is a big, that is a step change. And you will see that in our upcoming product releases for sure. Now, We had a party over here, you won't see it online, but we had a party over here in this very space yesterday, where we were cheering the success of Horizon, which is our done for you security business platform to F-Secure partners. So this is a new kind of business environment that we've built to ensure that we can actually serve on board and serve thousands of partners across the world who are able to promote our services to their customers, activate them, drive growth and support them all within the service. And this is all built with AI and agentic AI capabilities. And it runs fully on AI and agentic technology. So this is a new kind of an environment. And I've often used as a, in a way, metaphor that If you want to do business with AWS that has certainly tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of customers across the world, you do not pick up the phone and call AWS to do business with them. You go on the web and you sign up. There's tutorials, there's a way to improve your operations. There's all kinds of tutorials. There's everything practically that you need to be an AWS partner is over there. With Horizon we will go even further, naturally, because we are wanting Horizon to act as a platform to sell Total. We start the Horizon business by fully promoting Total. So our partners will be able to, in very easy steps, start providing the services to their customers And while we've been focusing heavily on the tier ones, major partners, and then the next level of commercial partners, now we go any size of partner. So this is definitely a growth opportunity for us. We started our early access program in December. That was successful. We have onboarded our first partners and yesterday we made our public launch. And now, you know, the ramp up of our marketing efforts to recruit new resellers and partners for F-Secure is getting started. Then I promised to say a few words about Halo. So in terms of how it looks like, We will be starting to demo it from April onwards. We've done demos inside the company already naturally, but from April onwards, hopefully we'll be able to start showing demos latest May and its user centric experience that we have really wanted to exercise. It looks completely different. It feels completely different to whatever you're used to in consumer cybersecurity. It truly engages. This is consumer first. So we're looking at this initially as a direct to consumer business product where we are testing, learning, incorporating insights quickly into the Halo product and naturally then as a next step into the wider portfolio. And our public launch of Halo is is planned for the brief but beautiful Finnish summer. And everything that we've done, precisely like with Horizon, the whole building process, the skills, the methods, the tools that we've used or are using to build Halo, it's all agentic AI powered. And this product is aimed to provide the best scan protection experience out of any product out there in the market. And then I won't be dwelling on this too much, but we are working on many different levels in the way of working and becoming an AI powered company. The key things are to increase the agility and speed of our business and we want to reimagine how we're doing our business and processes, not just move from ways of working today into AI supported. We want to rethink how would we do this better, more agile, more innovatively in an AI powered world. So this is ongoing and we have our lead programs ongoing and have been ongoing for quite some time already. And I would just say that as an example, we have every single person in our technology organization, cloud code, skilled and we are now in the very process of having all of our leadership and managers also cloud code capable so that we understand how to apply agentic AI and also implement personal and team and function based capabilities powered by agents. So we're serious about this in turning this from individual exercises and team specific exercises into a company wide effect. Wrong way. So that's all from me. Now I'd like to hand over to Saris Omerkallio, our Chief Financial Officer. Here we go.

Thank you, Timo. Yeah, so you've heard the news about me leaving F-Secure, but this is not yet the last time. So you will hear me talking still in Q1. And also after that, I will not disappear anywhere overnight as I'm not going into a new operative job. So I will be supporting Robin as we see necessary, but I'm sure that he is also very, very capable of jumping on board very soon with his background. Now let's go into the financials of Q4. Timo already mentioned some of the key numbers, but let's dig a little bit deeper into those. I'll be focusing on, when we talk about revenue, on the currency neutral numbers. Both yen and dollar were against us, so the reported numbers are weaker. I've continued to feel that it's the currency neutral numbers that tell about the development of the actual business. So when we look at the partner business first, it was basically flat during Q4 but again a very mixed bag. Security suite is of course the biggest of our businesses and there it was clearly negative, minus 1.7. was a decline of the business. We continue to see very good development in Sweden and Finland. DAH as a region does well, but the Germany problem that we have talked about for such a long time, so it continues being weak and it will also continue burden during this year. So nothing has changed there. We have a connection with the customer, but nothing Nothing will change within short term. Then on the embedded side, which is of course the area where we see the biggest growth potential. So there it's nice that we are able to report good growth. So 8% is a nice growth. And yeah, by the way, this is the area where we didn't have the currency neutral numbers last time. So we made an effort and ensure that we can report all numbers in the same way because it tells more about the business. And here within embedded, so growth in Japan has continued and in the US also there is positive development. Then, when we look at the direct business, so story is very similar to what we have seen previously. We have not been doing paid acquisition, so this is the end result you would expect. Actually, you can say that this minus 7.5% is better than we internally expected. So we are doing things to work on higher retention levels and higher ARPU and that's working well, but it's clear that we don't get new customers when we don't do marketing. And a new data point that we provided is that in the US the decline has been bigger than in other areas. Our US business indirect is mostly based on the Lookout Life legacy and there it is like a legacy product that we have not been focusing on with Halo that Timo talked about. So there are expectations to turn the situation but that's burdening the decline more than the European markets. When we look at the geographies, similar picture to what we've seen before, but all numbers are slightly lower as the quarter was so low in terms of revenue. So Nordic countries continue to grow well, driven by Finland and Sweden. Rest of Europe is burdened by Germany. There are also other areas. So we can say that we have a good total conversion. We have ARPU growing thanks to that in most places, but then there are some exceptions where we have made some changes to the pricing with the customer. So it's not maybe as clear picture as previously. North America now positive numbers but this is like really a mixed bag. There we have the direct business which is declining, the security suite business in the US is also negative and then the embedded part is growing in the US. So three totally different components in North America. And the rest of the world, which is mainly Japan, continues to grow, not quite as fast as previously, but still continues to grow. Now, of course, it is getting a bit bigger and we face bigger comparison values, but it's a good market where we have a lot of activity continuously. Then turning to the cost side, so the costs were clearly lower in our P&L, declining by more than 10%, by more than 2 million, but here also there are many things happening, you see that admin costs are higher, than previously, and especially as a percentage of revenue. And there are some one-off items in this quarter that burden that, that we should not see going forward. And in R&D, the number is really significantly lower, but there the activity level is even higher than previously, but now we have done more CapEx work related to to projects and also developing our architecture and basically our platform. So more CapEx and that's why you see less in the P&L. Then the profitability as a sum of the revenues and costs. On gross margin side, nothing special to report this quarter. Actually happy to see that gross margin is slightly higher than in Q3 as still the embedded business has been growing. There are some timing issues but also some efficiency that we have managed to do. But the rule of thumb that we have said that Embedded has a lower gross margin than Security Suite, so that still applies and is also included in the guidance for 26. Then in terms of the EBITA margin, I think in these circumstances 33.6% is a good achievement. We are a scalable business and we need growth, so this was a good result even as we've been focusing on investing in our capabilities and we have collected a lot of cost during the past couple of years. So this was a good result in these circumstances, the 12 million. Very briefly about the full year, just our guidance was low single digit growth, currency neutral growth and we see 0.6% so that just rounds up to 1% and which was our interpretation of the lower end. So of course we are not happy with that and this was also after the profit warning in the summer. So we openly admit that this is far from what we wanted to achieve. And like Timo said, the full year result, so it is lower than last year, both in terms of percentages and euros. And we've done the investments for the growth, so the cost is there. And when the top line is not there, this is the outcome. and definitely not what we want to see, and we are fully aware of this being a disappointment. It's likewise for us. About cash flow, nothing special to report about the fourth quarter. In general, we can say that this year the cash conversion was more stable than in 2024, but There can always be differences between the quarters, so could not say that this is a trend. It's always a combination of a lot of things. What we can say is that even if on average this is now similar level to 24, if we look at years before that when CapEx was on a lower level, so of course using more CapEx has had an impact on the cash conversion. For 26, we expect CapEx to be a bit higher than in 25, but as a proportion from revenue, it is a smaller percent, so we can expect something similar or maybe better for next year. Dividend, the basic policy says that we want to have around or above 50% as a dividend, but in this situation where our leverage is higher, so also based on the policy, so here we want to focus on getting the leverage down, so we go with the same 4 cents per share as last year. and it is about 31% of the earnings per share. Then the outlook for 26. We expect a mid to high single digit currency neutral growth. It is a very broad range. We are aware of that, but I'm sure that you have learned like we have learned that there are a lot of things where the timing is very difficult to estimate. So that's why the range is also broad. The outcome depends totally on when big things go live and how they ramp up and so on. So then during the year when we are confident enough we can narrow that into something less broad but this is how we now start. I want to tell that we see that there is a lot of potential, but all the things are not in our own hands and we are doing everything to get things done. The earlier the better. And the EBITDA, of course, they're also a big range from 44 to 50 million euros. which is yeah maximum is at the same level as 25 and also this outcome will depend a lot on what kind of growth we then at the end achieve but the fact is that we have collected certain cost base and we need the growth to get into the profitability that we want to see And about the assumptions here, a lot of text on the right hand side, very similar items that we have talked about also during 2025, where the first bullet says that we expect the market to grow and we see that we can grow faster than the market. Second bullet is about this embedded security, which is really the growth driver. And here it's important to see that this, even if the guidance is given for the full year, so we don't expect the quarters to be all the same. But as we have Timo talked about, especially three more important tier one deals. So how they, when they go live and how they develop, So that's a huge impact. So we could say that H2 will be more growth and better and profitability follows. So more profit than in H1. But actually it's possible that Q2 is already much better. So that's why we didn't include language of the half years. But it is gradually during the year when these new services are launched because they are so big that they actually have an impact. direct business similar strategy as as before no change is there gross margin also very similar comment to what we've said before so with bigger embedded so it's expected to come down but there also there are differences between the different different agreements with the customers so depends a little bit on how on the final outcome of that mix and of course we are working also on efficiency on those and even in the gross margin level so the growth has an impact so there is pricing that is volume dependent so with bigger volumes so also we get more efficiency into the gross margin And on cost side, so we made investments, we continue to make investments and partly they are about new products, partly they are about these actual deliveries to the customers and then there are things also on our own infrastructure which we are developing. And some of this is CapEx, so CapEx is also dependent on some of these customer deliveries but also other things. We will, of course, go into the details during the year, but the expectation is that things will improve throughout the year. Then, of course, you will ask what's included in the guidance, and Timo went through the details of these two releases, the stock exchange release in November and the press release in December. And these are exactly the kind of deals that we refer to when in also in our growth target where we talk about additional significant upside. So it's this kind of deals that we talk about. And the press release one, of course, already the header press release says that it's not so big in short term, but that has also potential to become much bigger, like Timo explained, that we have there a user base of more than 100 million. So if we can expand there, it will definitely become bigger. At this point it was just a press release and we continue to be in a scalable business so profitability will follow from these. You have seen this picture, I think we introduced this in the investor day some time ago. I have seen that you are also using this. So it makes it easier to explain the different business models and just wanted to also explain how these two cases where we had the releases, how they go on this map. So the November stock exchange release case, when we sign it and launch it, there is this minimum guarantee, which means that it will immediately start generating from the day when it's introduced. and that the contract has still like per user pricing so when the user number is higher than a certain number when it goes above the commitment minimum commitment so it can grow so it will not stay on that level but our expectations are definitely to go bigger And then this press release case, so that has an NRE fee component. It was mentioned in the report that the deferred revenue number has increased during the quarter. So this is one of the reasons which is explaining that from revenue point of view, not significant for a single month as it's accrued over three years. So it will take time before that's... reported as revenue. And this is like new service ramp up case. It will start from zero. So the success will then be, we will see over time. Of course we have a business case with certain numbers, but here as there is no minimum commitment or anything like that. So time will show how it goes. And of course we will then report in general how these go and you will see this then in the embedded business numbers. And about the values, also repeating a little bit, last summer we issued a new disclosure policy, so maybe just repeating some of this. This is where you can see the difference, whether it is a stock exchange release or press release. These are the threshold values. either 7% of F-Secure revenue or then 15% of three years revenue, which are the threshold values. And it is like discounted value. So if something in the third year is 7% of this year, so it will be discounted into something smaller. And of course how we discount, so if it's a minimum commitment then we just look at the time value of the money, but if it's a ramp-up case based on just business estimates and business cases, so then we discount more. Because as we have also said that you then never know how things go. but this is how we go and then with this case where we've had the stock exchange release when it's signed we will tell more about the amount and with the press release case so time will tell how it goes but this I hope helps you in making your assumptions and this was the financials and now we are with Timo happy to answer any questions that you have

Hi, it's a couple of questions. I'll take them one by one. Some years ago when the split was made, I think your communication that the next couple of years looking from the history were kind of being investment years and then normal operating leverage would take place when you have basically made those and then tier one and embedded services would be kind of growing and you would get the kind of profitability increasing from that. Now when you communicated that this was not done yet, so you continue to make those investments, how long should we expect that they are running? Is it for this year only or should we expect that they just continue to be burdening on your operating leverage also in 27 and perhaps onwards?