Dynavox Group Ab

Good morning everyone and welcome to this earnings call where we will mainly cover the fourth quarter 2024 summarizing our business in October, November and December. And we will of course comment regarding the full year of 2024. And click for the next slide. My name is Fredrik Rubin. I am the CEO of Dynavox Group.

And I'm Lida Tijbring. I'm the CFO of Dynavox Group and I will cover the financials at the end.

Great. So for those of you who have participated in these calls before, you will be familiar with that. We will start by doing a quick recap about what Dynavox Group is about, and then we will summarize the main takeaways from the quarter and the year. We will dive deeper into the financials and thereafter we will have a Q&A session. And as participants here, you can submit your questions during these live sessions here in the chat function in Teams. And we, of course, always welcome offline questions if you send them by email to Linda's email address, which is linda.tyvring at dynavoxgroup.com. So, but again, starting with a brief overview of Dynavox Group. First and foremost, it's important to reiterate our mission and our vision, which I know is very dear, not only to the roughly 800 plus colleagues around the world, but also to our ecosystem of partners and investors. And our vision is a world where everyone can communicate. We contribute to this via focusing on our mission, which reads to empower people with disabilities to do what they once did or never thought possible. And this also summarizes two of our main user stories. And if we start with do what you once did that may refer to the piece person who led a normal life until a diagnosis such as ALS, which rendered her unable to control the body or communicate like before the other story, they never thought possible can refer to the child. diagnosed at an early age with a condition such as autism cerebral palsy and more where thanks to our solutions he can do much more than the world around him ever thought possible and we have a picture here to the right on christopher or chris he's from california in the us and he's one of our amazing young users diagnosed with non-verbal autism and he's a super good example of this The market that we service is hugely underserved, estimating some 50 million people have a condition so grave they cannot communicate unless they have a solution like ours. And every year, about 2 million people are being diagnosed, and yet we estimate only some 2% of those are actually being helped, and the rest remain silent. The main reason for this spells lack of awareness. So among the professionals and the prescribers that are tasked to assist with these users and combine them with the poor healthcare reimbursement system around the world. We operate with a global footprint. So today some three quarters of our business stems out of the US and largely because of a reasonably well functioning funding system established some 20, 30 years ago. But our products are actually sold in about 65 markets around the world of which the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and now most recently adding Australia and New Zealand are markets where we sell directly while the other markets are served by a network of a hundred plus reseller partners. Our own staff is distributed in a similar way as the revenue. So that means that some 70 plus percent of our staff are also based in North America with our US headquarters in Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. And then our second largest office is our headquarters here in Stockholm. But we have branch offices in several European countries as well as in Suzhou in China. And as of today, we are over 800 employees in total. With prior acquisitions, we established or increased our presence specifically in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Denmark, and most recently then in Australia and New Zealand. Yeah, but I'll come back to that. We provide what we call comprehensive solutions, and it's a portfolio that ranges from, if you go on the left of this picture, the content and the language system, such as the world leading library of communication symbols are called PCS. and the leading solutions of off-the-shelf or custom-made synthetic voices of the highest quality and with a large diversity in terms of languages, ages, and ethnicities. Moving on, we have highly sophisticated communication software, which is tailored to the type of user, and that can, of course, vary greatly based on the need of that user. Moving on, we develop and design devices with cutting edge technology and medically certified durability that includes communication aids that you can control via eye tracking or accessories such as the ReHadapt mounts. We have also a services portfolio to help our users through the complexity of obtaining and getting funding for the solutions. And then last but not least, we're there to help users, therapists, caregivers through our global teams of support resources. We operate this model globally, and it's important to note that each piece here is critically important and also significant differentiator for us, making us absolutely unique. Our go-to-market model is predominantly as prescribed age, which then means that some 90% of our revenue comes from either public or private insurance providers. And this also means that we have a solid paying customer base, but also we've always been resilient towards changes in the overall economic climate. All right. But now we will go back on focusing on the main topic of today, namely our earnings report for the fourth quarter 2024. so looking at the highlights we had another solid quarter when it comes to revenue growth the growth compared to the same quarter previous year sums up to 22 percent if we adjust for two percentage points positive currency effect and this basically continues the trend that we have now seen for the past 10 consecutive quarters The products that we launched in September continued to generate highly favorable response in the market, and with the bulk of orders that originally were slated for recognition as revenue in the third quarter, they were also delivered now before the end of the year in the fourth quarter. We continue to improve our portfolio of products and services, and the latest set of launches solidifies our already strong offering. Our work to improve the awareness and competence continues, specifically among prescribers and professionals in our space. We see that the North American market continues to show strong growth, and it's by far our largest and most influential market, both for us and for our industry. But we also see strong momentum among the younger user base to continue. Often that is children with autism that rely on our symbol communication solutions and in particular a software called the TD Snap. And the non eye tracking touch controlled communication devices portfolio that supports these user groups. Our OPEX levels increase, but this is a consequence of investment to secure future growth and building the foundation for a much bigger company in the future. So we continue to invest in our staff, mainly within sales and marketing, but also in backend systems and tools. We also continue to improve our profitability at an even faster pace compared to revenue and our operating profits increased by 47% in the quarter. On October 1, we closed the acquisition of Link Assistive, which is our longstanding reseller partner in Australia and New Zealand. And in November, we announced that we will consolidate our product development organization, which includes product management, hardware, software development, etc. And we focus these efforts to our Stockholm headquarters. We enhance our innovation capacity while also improving the ability to provide hardware and software that is much more seamlessly integrated and better aligned with the entire customer journey. If we then instead look at the full year 2024, we can conclude that it was solid regarding our top line growth. In local currencies, the growth was 23%. Our profitability improved significantly in the full year. EBIT grew by 48% and earnings per share grew by 40%. So this really, to me, proves the case that our business is now really starting to scale quite well. The fundamental factor behind this is, again, the hugely underserved potential in the market that we address. Our attractive customer offering, which we continue to strengthen through significant product launches, was also a key growth driver as well as successful acquisitions such as the one in Australia and New Zealand, Link Assistive. One more factor behind our growth, but also as an important factor to ensure that growth is sustainable, are our continued and significant investments within our sales and marketing organizations. but also in systems, tools, and processes to secure future scaling. Now I hand over to you, Linda, to take us deeper into the financials.