LINK Mobility Group Holding ASA

Hi, and welcome to Link Mobility's first quarter 2026 presentation. With me today, I have our CEO, Thomas Berge, and our CFO, Morten Edvardsen, who will present the Q&A results. You can post questions online at any time during the presentation. With that, I leave the word over to you, Thomas.

Thank you for the introduction, Christian, and good morning to everyone listening in. We will start as normal with a brief introduction to Link Mobility and the platform we have built over the past years. Link is today the leading CPaaS provider in Europe, serving enterprises with critical customer communication across channels such as SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, email and voice. Through our platform, businesses can communicate securely, efficiently and at scale with their end users across both transactional and marketing related use cases. Over time, LinkedIn built a strong market position through a combination of organic expansion, technology investments, and disciplined M&A execution. Since 2014, the company has completed more than 35 acquisitions, which together have strengthened our geographical footprint, customer base, and product capabilities. Today, we serve 66,000 customers and delivered around 40 billion messages over the last 12 months. Link currently employs around 700 people across 30 offices with operations spanning in 21 countries in Europe, South Africa and Latin America. This local presence remains an important differentiator, allowing us to combine scale and tech capabilities with strong local customer relationships and connectivity. In the center of the slide, you can see Link's product portfolio and the breadth of the MyLink platform. The platform enables clients to manage customer communication, engagement, authentication, payment, automation across multiple channels through both software applications and APIs. We continue to strengthen these capabilities, particularly within higher-value CPI solutions such as WhatsApp RCS, Informational messaging and AI-supported communication workflows. Leak's broad geographical footprint and strong local market position combined with our scalable platform and growing CPaaS capabilities provide a strong foundation for continued organic growth and long-term value creation. The UA represents a step in the right direction and supports our view that Link remains on track to organic growth after a weak fourth quarter. While overall performance remained negatively impacted by a specific number of isolated customer declines, the underlying business continues to perform and early growth indicators are strengthened in the quarter. Organic gross profit growth improved quarter over quarter by 3 percentage points and ended at negative 1% in Q1, in line with our expectations. Isolated decliners continue to impact gross profit negatively by 20 million, primarily within the global messaging segment. The broader customer base nearly offset these effects through stable underlying developments. As illustrated in the graph on the right-hand side, the impact from these isolated decliners will normalize in Q3, with easier comps for the second quarter versus current quarter. Looking at commercial momentum, we continue to see encouraging development. Contract wins during the quarter amounted to 48 million. At the higher end of expectations, on an LTM basis, signed contract increased by 8% for SMS and 32% for CPAS. corresponding to 17% total growth across signed contracts. This development supports improving growth visibility as signed contracts are implemented and ramped up over the coming quarters. We also continue to see strong growth within higher margin CPAS solutions, particularly within RCS and WhatsApp, where billable volumes increase by more than 100% year-over-year. This remains strategically important, has EPAS solutions, carries significant higher margin than traditional SMS, and therefore supports both growth and profitability over time. Net retention improved in the quarter, increasing from 92% to 96% sequentially. We still have 9 isolated customers negatively impacting NRR by approximately 7 percentage points. Excluding these customers, underlying retention levels continue to develop positively and support our confidence in returning to normalised growth. Adjusted EBITDA development is closely linked to gross profit trends due to LINK's scalable business model. Underlying OPEX growth is low at 3%. As gross profit growth improves, the expected adjusted EBITDA development to recover accordingly, returning to growth. Finally, capital allocation remains an important focus area for LINK. M&A continues to be a core pillar of our medium-term strategy. Current valuation conditions mean we are prioritizing share buybacks and targeted bolt-on acquisitions. During the share buyback program, Link repurchased approximately 13 million shares for around 300 million. Link proposes cancellations of 21 million shares, corresponding to 7% of total shares, at the General Assembly end of May. We also announced the bolt-on acquisition of SMS in Romania, further strengthening our footprint and scale in the Romanian market. This slide highlights two of the most important drivers supporting our expectations of accelerated growth going forward, improving commercial momentum and the continued shift towards higher-margin SEPA solutions. Starting on the left-hand side, we continue to see strong momentum with close-to-money contracts across both SMS and CPAS. On an LPN basis, estimated gross profit on signed contracts increased by 8% for SMS and 32% for CPAS, a total growth of 17% on new contracts. This development reflects improving commercial activity across the business, and supports stronger growth visibility over the coming quarters as new contracts are implemented and ramped up. The momentum within CPaaS continues to strengthen. The current quarter is the second strongest quarter ever for CPaaS contracts with. We observe growing customer demand for conversational solutions and digital engagement products. CPaaS gross profit has increased significantly over the past year, corresponding to a CAGR of 37%. Gross profit margins are roughly two times higher for CPAS products versus traditional SMS products. This trend is documented in the growth of all the T-volumes. Available RCS volumes increased by 104% year-over-year, while WhatsApp volumes increased by 151%, illustrating the ongoing transition to richer and more value-added communications. This development is strategically important for Link. The company is not only seeing improved commercial momentum and stronger contract activity, but also an increasingly favorable product mix, where a larger share of growth comes from higher-margin SIPA solutions, supporting both future growth and profitability. Total contract wins in Q1 amounted to 48 million in expected gross profit, at the higher end of expectations. The development continues to be increasingly driven by CPAS, related contracts, and OTT solutions, which represented 40% of total cost of one contract. There is typically a lag between signing new contracts and full commercial ramp-up. Historically, approximately 75% of gross profit from these contracts are realized within 12 months following signing. meaning their current commercial activity supports improving growth visibility going forward. The charts at the bottom of the slide document the continued acceleration within CPAS and OTT solution. Gross profit from new CPAS contracts increased by approximately 27% year-over-year, supported by strong momentum across payment chatbots, AI agents, and engaged solutions. We continue to see particularly strong commercial momentum within the sectors technology and software, telecommunication and government-related customer, which remains key contributors to recent contract wins and future growth opportunities. Overall, we believe the strong commercial momentum, combined with accelerating adoption of higher-margin SIPA solutions, position links for improving organic growth and profitability going forward. We believe AI represents a meaningful opportunity for Link, both from a growth and a profitability perspective, while at the same time reinforcing the strategic value of our infrastructure and market position. We observe AI strengthening Link's competitive position within the CPaaS ecosystem. While AI lowers the barrier to create communication content and workflows, The importance of trusted infrastructure, operator connectivity, compliance and secure message delivery continues to increase. Link has spent many years building direct operator integrations and strong local market positions across Europe, creating infrastructure that is difficult to replicate and highly relevant in an AI-driven communication landscape. Link's role as a trusted gatekeeper for channel owners and trusted advisors for enterprise clients are increasingly important as conversational communication volumes rise and enterprises place greater emphasis on conversational quality and end-user engagement as well as security and compliance. Turning to the right-hand side of the slide, we see AI as a natural extension of NIC's existing software and CPaaS capabilities. AI enables more intelligent communication workflows, better customer engagement, and increased automation across the platform. This includes areas such as advanced channel orchestration, where AI can optimize communication timing, channel selection, and customer journey across channels. Selecting the right channel, timing, and format can significantly improve deliveries, engagement, and customer outcomes. We also see significant opportunities within two-way communication and conversational messaging. AI-powered interactions will improve customer engagement, increase response rates, and support faster and more efficient customer service processes. Combined with analytics and ROI dashboards, this allows customers to gain more real-time insight into campaign performance, customer behavior, and measurable business outcomes. Importantly, many of these capabilities are software-driven and less dependent on messaging volumes alone. Over time, we believe this will support increased customer stickiness, higher customer value, and potential higher margin recurring revenue streams on top of Link's existing communication platform. We view AI as both an enabler of future growth and a reinforcement of Link's strategic positioning. AI is expected to improve customer value, support scalability, increase end-user engagement, and strengthen our relationship with our customers. Acquisitions remain a core pillar of Link's long-term strategy and an important driver of long-term value creation. Over the past decade, Link has built the leading European CPaaS platform through a combination of organic growth and disciplined M&A execution. completing more than 35 acquisitions since 2014, and establishing strong local market positions, broad operator connectivity, and scalable product capabilities. Our medium-term M&A strategy remains unchanged. We continue to see a strong pipeline of attractive opportunities across existing and new markets, and we believe scale, local market presence, and product breadth remain important competitive advantages within the CPaaS industry. In addition, Link has demonstrated a strong track record of disciplined execution and successful integration of acquired businesses. At the same time, we are currently adapting our short-term capital allocation priorities to reflect prevailing market conditions and valuation levels. As highlighted in the lower section, we are prioritizing share buybacks and targeted bolt-on acquisitions over larger transactions. We believe this is the most attractive capital allocation approach. This allows us to maintain strategic flexibility while continuing to allocate capital in a disciplined and value-accretive manner. We continuously evaluate M&A opportunities and capital allocation alternatives and stand ready to act as market conditions and valuation change. As mentioned, targeted Bolton acquisitions remain an important part of Link's capital allocation strategy Leak announced the Bolton acquisition of Web2SMS in Romania for an enterprise value of approximately 4 million euros, corresponding to 5.8 times LPM adjusted EBITDA. The transaction strengthened our local footprint and customer position in an attractive market. During SMS Portal, we remain highly confident in the long-term growth outlook for the business. SMS Portal holds a leading market position within A2P messaging in South Africa, supported by a strong local customer base, a scalable technology platform, and attractive underlying market fundamentals. Starting with the financial development at the center of the slide, gross profit increased by 2% year-over-year in Q1, negatively impacted by elevated comparables from the same quarter last year. As highlighted on the right-hand side, Q125 benefited from temporary multi-part messaging errors with a few customers, which positively impacted messaging volumes with 4% of total volumes during that period. As a result, reported growth in Q1 affects unusually high comparables rather than deterioration in the underlying business. We also observed high comparables in April and partly June. All other months have normalized comparables. The underlying commercial momentum within SMS Portal remains strong. The company continues to see healthy organic volume development from existing customers, combined with continued new customer additions across multiple verticals. SMS Portal has built a strong commercial pipeline with signed contracts representing approximately 1.2 billion analyzed messaging volumes expected to enter implementation during Q2 2026. This corresponds to approximately 7.5% of SMS Portal's LTM messaging volumes. As illustrated in the lower chart, management expects approximately 60% ramp-up run rate realization by the end of the second quarter, with full annualized run rate effect during H2, as contracts continue to ramp up following the implementation. This supports confidence in high growth momentum over the coming quarters. We also continue to see encouraging progress within LTT-related solutions. particularly WhatsApp, where positive proof-of-concept testing is currently ongoing with selected customers. Overall, we believe the slow growth in Q1 is temporary in nature, while the underlying business development, commercial momentum, and implementation pipeline continue to support a strengthened growth outlook for SMS Portal going forward. Our ambition remains to deliver high single-digit gross profit growth over time. We see the underlying growth drivers across the business remain intact, supported by increasing B2C messaging volumes per capita, continuous CPaaS adoption, and AI-driven communication workflows acting as a long-term structural tailwind. We expect growth momentum to gradually strengthen as isolated customer-related declines normalize, combined with stable growth momentum from the rest of the customers and high contract backlog from recently signed new contracts. We state that we expect gross profit growth to return to positive in Q2 and meet the high single-digit growth in H2. Link's business model remains highly scalable with significant operational leverage. As gross profit growth improves, we expect adjusted EBITDA growth to develop faster than organic gross profit growth over time. This is supported by stable underlying OPEX development and the scalability of our platform. M&A remains Link's first priority over the medium term and continues to represent an important driver of long-term value creation. At the same time, we remain disciplined and flexible in our capital allocation approach, continuously evaluating opportunities across both acquisitions and shareholder distributions depending on market conditions, valuation levels and strategic opportunities. Overall, we believe Link is well positioned to capitalize on the structural growth opportunities within CEPA's market through a combination of improving organic growth Scalable profitability and disciplined capital allocation. With that, I will hand over to Morten, who will take us through the financial performance for the quarter in more detail.

Thank you, Thomas, and good morning to everyone on the call. I will start my section by touching on Lynx customer and industry dollar specifications. which we believe remains an important strength of the business model and supports the resilience of the underlying gross profit base. The contribution from Link's top 10 customers has remained stable over several years at around 15% of total gross profit. This demonstrates that Link does not rely on any single customer for overall profitability. The remaining approximately 85% of gross profit is generated from a broad and diversified customer base across multiple markets and industries. Lynx gross profit exposure is also well diversified across industries. Banking and insurance, technology and software platforms, telecommunications, and retail and e-commerce represent the largest verticals, but no individual industry accounts for a dominant share of total gross profit. This diversification supports resilience across varying macroeconomic conditions and customer spending environments. Importantly, several of the industries where Link has strong exposure continue to benefit from structural digitalization trends and increasing demand for enterprise communication, customer engagement, and automation solutions, which supports long-term growth opportunities. Finally, our commercial strategy remains focused on driving sustainable growth through increased wallet share with existing customers, continued new customer additions, and further diversification across industries, products, use cases, and geographies. To sum up, we believe Lynx's diversified customer base and industry exposure provide a strong foundation for stable long-term growth and profitability. Turning to revenue development for the quarter. Reported revenue increased by 21% year-over-year to 2 million for the quarter, primarily driven by contributions from recently completed acquisitions. In stable currency, organic revenue remained stable year-over-year as improving enterprise revenue growth offset the decline within global messaging. Closed and consolidated acquisitions contributed 372 million, of revenue during the first quarter related to the consolidation of acquired businesses in the UK and South Africa. In the enterprise segment, organic revenue growth improved quarter-by-quarter by 2 percentage points to 4% in stable currency during the quarter. The improvement was primarily driven by stronger growth momentum across Central Europe combined with continued growth within OTT and CPAS-related solutions. Importantly, new OTT contract wins continue to support the quality of revenue growth, given the higher value and more sticky nature of these solutions. Within global messaging, revenue declined 12% year-over-year, mainly driven by lower traffic volumes from poor large share of wallet customers. At the same time, the broader underlying customer base within global messaging continued to develop positively and grew 14% in the quarter. The bridge chart in the lower section further illustrates the quarterly development. The positive enterprise contribution of 49 million year-over-year was offset by a 48 million decline within global messaging, resulting in stable organic revenue development in fixed currency. Foreign exchange had a negative impact of 19 million, while acquisitions contributed 372 million to reported revenue growth of 21%. Overall, the quarter reflected stabilization in organic revenue development, with improving enterprise momentum offsetting isolated declines within global messaging. While growing contributions from higher-value SIPAs and LTT-related solutions continue to strengthen the quality and resilience of the revenue base. Looking at revenue net retention and churn development, This slide illustrates the continued improvement in Lynx's net retention rate as the impact from isolated customer-related declines gradually fades out. Enterprise churn declines slightly quarter over quarter to 2.9%, and the elevated enterprise churn level primarily reflects the previous communicative loss of a high-volume SMS customer since last quarter. Importantly, underlying customer stickiness within enterprise remains strong, particularly within OTT and CPaaS-related solutions, where deeper integrations and broader product adoption support higher retention levels over time. Within global messaging, churn increased to 2% during the quarter, primarily related to the loss of a very volatile and low-value aggregated customer. Importantly, the impact on gross profit was close to being immaterial, given the very low margins. As highlighted previously, the isolated decline in customers continued to negatively impact Net retention rate by approximately 7 percentage points in the quarter. Excluding these isolated customers, the underlying retention development across the broader customer base remains healthy and continues to improve. Management continues to expect a gradual normalization toward a median term net retention rate target level of approximately 105% over time. Then over to gross profit development. reported gross profit increased by 20% year-over-year to 492 million, primarily driven by contributions from recently completed acquisitions as aligned with revenue development. Organic gross profit in stable currency declined 1% year-over-year. Enterprise contributed positively with 7 million of organic gross profit growth, supported by continuous strong OTT and CPAS momentum. In particular, RCS volumes, increased by 104% year-over-year, while WhatsApp volumes increased by 161%, continuing to support both growth and underlying margin improvements. Within global messaging, gross profit declined 19% year-over-year, corresponding to 12 million during the quarter. The decline was related to reduced wallet share from four larger customers, representing 15 million of gross profit impact during the quarter. Grewing these customers, the underlying global messaging business continued to develop positively and grew 6% from growth on other existing customers. Current effects had a negative impact of 6 million, but acquisitions contributed 94 million to reported gross profit growth, mainly driven by the acquisition of SMS Portal with 83 million. Moving to the margin bridge below, Enterprise gross margin impacted total margin negatively by 0.3 percentage points, primarily driven by growth from larger, lower margin clients, which diluted the margin mix the other year. At the same time, continued growth within higher margin LTP and CTAS solutions contributed positively to overall margin by 0.7 percentage points and partly offset the dilution effect from client mix. Currency effects reduced reported gross margin by 0.2 percentage points during the quarter, but was offset by a contribution from acquisitions and mainly from the higher margin level in SMS portal. Overall, the quarter reflected stabilization in underlying gross profit development, with overall organic gross profit growth improving 3 percentage points quarter over quarter. This was despite a negative year-over-year impact of 20 million from isolated decliners, mainly within global messaging. As the impact from these isolated declines has paid off, the improved underlying growth momentum supports improved gross profit growth over the coming quarters. Turning to the adjusted EBITDA. Reported adjusted EBITDA increased by 34% year-over-year to 265 million, primarily driven by contributions from the completed acquisitions, including SMS portals. Organic adjusted EBITDA declined 6% year-over-year in stable currency, corresponding to 11 million. This development largely reflected the software organic gross profit development during the quarter. 5 million of the decline was related to lower organic gross profit, while underlying OPEX growth remained controlled at around 3% year-over-year, corresponding to 6 million, and primarily driven by inflation in salaries, but also by supporting hosting and license costs. This development illustrates the operating leverage inherent in this business model. With a scalable business model, weaker gross profit development will naturally have a more visible short-term impact on adjusted EBITDA growth. At the same time, this dynamic also works in the opposite direction, meaning that as organic gross profit growth improves, management expects adjusted EBITDA growth to recover and improve at a faster pace than gross profit over time. Closed and consolidated acquisitions contributed 81 million to reported adjusted EBITDA growth, primarily related to the acquisition of SMS Portal with 72 million. Looking at the lower chart, reported adjusted EBITDA margin increased from 12% in Q125 to 13.2% this quarter, while organic adjusted EBITDA margin declined to 11.2%, reflecting the lower gross margin as explained. and increased OPEX sales from stable organic toplines and OPEX growth. Acquisitions contributed positively to reported margins, with SMS portal being the largest contributor given its strong margin level compared to the rest of the group. Now to the profit and loss statement. As we already covered the development down to adjusted EBITDA in detail, I will focus on the remaining items in the P&L statement. Non-recurring items amounted to $24 million during the quarter. This mainly consists of M&A-related costs of $24 million, whereof $9 million related to SMS portals, including a two-year retention program with $6 million recognized in the quarter, which is recurring until end of 2027. Restructuring costs of $5 million was partly offset by a $5 million reversal of option-related Social Security tax expenses. Depreciation and amortization amounted to 128 million during the quarter. The largest components were 69 million related to acquisition-related PPA amortizations and 53 million related to amortization of software solutions, including R&D assets. As previously communicated, the PPA-related amortization is non-cash in nature and does not impact cash flow generation or dividend capacity. Net financials were positive 2 million during the quarter compared to negative 35 million in the same quarter last year. Year-on-year improvement was mainly driven by a positive currency effect of 42 million related to NOX strengthening versus especially euro. Partly offset by net interest expenses of 40 million consisting of 31 million in bond interest and net impact of 9 million related to cross-currency swap between euro and SAI. Post-tax reported net profit for the period increased to 85 million for the quarter, compared to 39 million in the same quarter last year. Finally, adjusted net profit for the period, excluding PPA amortizations, increased to 154 million in Q1, compared to 98 million in the same period last year. We believe adjusted net profit provides a more representative view of the dividend capacity by excluding non-cash PPA-related amortization effects. Then onto the balance sheet. Link continues to maintain a solid financial position with ample capacity to support future inorganic growth and shareholder distributions. Non-current assets increased yearly primarily from completed acquisition with 1.7 billion, impacted mainly by SMS portal of 1.5 billion. Other movements relate mainly to FX and amortization effects. Receivables were lower compared to the same period last year, M&A and S currency contributed a net 162 million, increased while underlying decrease was related to normal working capital fluctuations. Cash and cash equivalents amounted to more than 800 million at the end of the quarter. The reduction year-over-year primarily reflects debt repayments, share buybacks, and completed acquisitions, including SMS portal, with 1 billion in cash considerations. Equity amounted to 5.4 billion at quarter end, corresponding to an equity ratio of 53%, which continues to reflect a strong balance sheet position. Payables increased the area driven by M&A and FX effect to 143 million, while the remaining increase was related to normal working capital movements. Turning to financing, long-term borrowings mainly consist of two outstanding bonds, loans totaling to €255 million, carrying an average interest of €3 plus 2.53%. Net interest-bearing debt amounted to €1.8 billion at the end of the quarter. Reported leverage increased quarter-over-quarter to 1.7 times adjusted EBITDA, primarily reflecting the share buyback program and option-related tax payments of €97 million in the quarter. Adjusted for these items, underlying leverage remains stable quarter-over-quarter at 1.5 times and continues to remain comfortably below LINK's target leverage range of 2 to 2.5 times adjusted EBITDA. LINK continues to maintain significant financial flexibility and balance sheet capacity to support both future M&A activity and shareholder distributions going forward. Moving on to my final slide, where I will briefly cover cash flow development and the company's liquidity position. LINK generated net cash flow from operating activities of 109 million in the quarter. All adjusted cash flow from operations amounts to 238 million for the quarter and 775 million on an LTM basis. Working capital had a temporary negative impact in Q1 from normal fluctuations. while it remained fairly neutral on an LPM basis. Taxes paid were affected by a regular biannual SMS port tax payment of 32 million covering the period from September 2025 to February 2026. After adjusting for non-recurring M&A-related costs, adjusted EBITDA cash conversion amounted to 62% in the quarter, below normal levels primarily due to temporary working capital attacks and elevated tax payments.