Dynavox Group Ab

Okay, good morning and welcome to this earnings call where we will cover the third quarter summarizing our business from July, August and September of this year. And I'm Fredrik Rubin. I am the CEO of Dynavox Group.

Hello, I'm Linda Theinbrink. I'm the CFO of Dynavox and I will cover the financials later on.

Great. So for those of you who have been participating in these calls before, you will be familiar with that. We will start by a quick recap about what Dynavox Group is about. And then we will summarize the main takeaways from the quarter. We will then dive deeper into the financials. And thereafter, there will be a Q&A session. And you can submit your questions during this call in the function here in Teams, in the chat function. Or you can ask them live if you have asked or if you've been given prior notice to our team. We, of course, always welcome offline questions sent over email to the above email address, linda.tybing at dynavoxgroup.com. But 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 to not only our over 1,000 colleagues around the world, but also to our ecosystem of partners and investors. And our vision is a world where everyone can communicate, and we contribute to this by 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. The first one, the do what you once did, that may refer to a person who led a normal life until a diagnosis such as ALS, which rendered her then unable to control the body and communicate like before. And the other, the never thought possible, can refer to the child diagnosed at an early age with a condition such as autism cerebral palsy or so where thanks to our solutions, he can now do much more than the world around him ever thought possible. On the picture here to the right, we see Elaine from Lawrenceburg in Kentucky. She is one of our amazing users diagnosed with cerebral palsy and is a great example of this. The market that we service is hugely underserved. Some 50 million people have a condition so grave that they simply cannot communicate unless they have a solution like ours. And every year, we estimate some 2 million people are being diagnosed, and yet only some 2% of those are actually being helped, and the rest remain silent. And the main reason for this spells lack of awareness, and also among the professionals and the prescribers who are tasked to assist these users and a poor healthcare reimbursement system. We operate this with a global footprint. Today, some three quarters of our business stems out of the US, and that's largely because of a reasonably well-functioning funding system established some 20, 30 years ago. But our products are sold in some 65 markets around the world, of which the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, and France, most recently Germany, are markets where we sell directly. while the others are served by a network of some hundred plus resellers. Our staff is distributed in a similar way as the revenue. That means some 60% of our staff are based in North America with our US headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And our second largest office is here, our headquarters in Stockholm. But we have branch offices in several European countries, as well as in Suzhou in China, Adelaide, Australia. As of today, we are about 1,000 employees in total. We provide a comprehensive portfolio of solutions that ranges from, if you start from the left, the content and the language system, such as the world's leading library of communication symbols 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, ethnicities. We then offer highly sophisticated communication software, which is tailored to the type of user. which can vary greatly based on the needs. We then develop and design devices with cutting edge technology and medically certified durability. And that includes communication aids controlled via eye tracking and accessories such as the ReHadapt mounts. We have a services portfolio to help our users through the complexity of obtaining and getting funding for the solutions. And last but not least, we're there to help our users, the therapist and the caregivers through our global teams and support resources. We operate this model globally, and it's important to note that each piece here is critically important and also a significant differentiator for us, making us absolutely unique. Our go-to-market model is predominantly as prescribed aids. And that means that some 90% of our revenue comes from public or private insurance providers. And this also means that we have solid paying customers and have always been resilient towards changes in the overall economic climate. But now I will go back at focusing on the main topic of today, namely the earnings report for the third quarter 2025. So if I look at the highlights, we had another strong quarter when it comes to revenue growth. The growth compared to the same quarter previous year sums up to over 35% after adjusting for currency effects. And this marks a further acceleration of the already strong trajectory over the past three years. The demand for our solutions remains high, proving the solidity of our underlying business, and we see robust growth across all markets. In this quarter, a particular highlight is the outstanding performance in our direct presence markets outside of North America. We continue seeing increased growth in our touch control product portfolio, and they are typically serving younger users with autism. However, in this quarter, we also saw very good traction in the eye gaze controlled solution area, serving users with more complex needs. Our investments in systems, infrastructure, and organization to support our long-term ambitions continue according to plan, and I will come back to that shortly. EBIT came in at 64 million SEK in the quarter, but this includes non-recurring costs of some 26 million SEK in this quarter, implying then a strong underlying profitability. And on September 1, we completed the previously announced acquisition of our long-standing German reselling partner RehaMedia. Coming back to our investments. So strategic investments are an important part of our growth strategy and a way for us to scale and build an efficient and resilient company. So in 2025, we expect to invest approximately 100 million SEK in total of non-recurring nature in two main projects that are progressing well and according to plan. The first one is the rollout of a new ERP system in North America and an establishment and a consolidated product and development hub here in Stockholm. The ERP successfully launched on July 1, and despite almost a week-long freeze period, we have been able to keep up deliveries and even deliver more voices to our customers than in Q2. And during Q3, the non-recurring spend totaled some 9 million SEK, or 40 million SEK spent year-to-date on that. The second topic, the consolidation of our product and development organization into a central hub in Stockholm, continues according to plan. All managers are in place since a while back and the majority of all functions have been recruited and have started. And since April of this year, all new product releases have been handled from the Stockholm Hub. During Q3, the non-recurring spend totaled 14 million SEK on this with a 33 million SEK spent year to date. But now I will hand it over to you, Linda, to take us deeper into the financials.

Thank you, Fredrik. So let's talk Q3 financials. Revenue for the third quarter came in at 606 million SEK, a 35% year-on-year growth after adjusting for currency effects. Recent acquisition contributed with 3% and the organic growth was a solid 33%. This marks another chapter in our three-year strike of robust growth and consistent execution. Currency fluctuations had 10% negative impact on our revenue. Sales continue to grow across all markets. However, this quarter, our direct markets outside North America delivered outstanding performance, exceeding already high expectations. As we've talked about in prior quarters, we continue to see growth among younger users with autism. At the same time, there is a good traction in eye gaze control solutions, serving users with more complex needs. The gross margin ended up at 70%, an increase of 0.8 percentage point. The margin was improved by increased sales, also by further strengthening in addition to having more direct markets contributed to an extra layer of gross margin. Gross margin also have slightly help from currency this quarter. we had some negative impact of increased cost of freight. And this is mainly related to using air freight, which has been driven by strong sales momentum. And we wanted to ensure that we are delivering on time. EBIT for the quarter was 64 million SEK and the EBIT margin was 10.6%. It was negatively affected by non-recurring costs totaling some 26 million SEK in the quarter. lowering the profit margin temporarily by 4.3 percentage points. Our OPEX increased by 30% organically. The OPEX increase was affected by factors such as continued investment in staff, increases in mainly sales and marketing. In total, we added more than 200 FDI, including M&E. Of course, also adding normal salary adjustments. During the quarter, we continue to invest in new systems and tools to strengthen scalability. The total non-recurring spend related to this in the quarter was 9 million SEK. As of July 1st, we are live with our new ERP in our largest market, North America. Operate expenses was also affected by non-recurring costs related to our restructuring costs in the product and development organization. The total non-recurring spend in the quarter was 14 million SEK. Both these two investments are according to a strategic plan. The recent strong development of the Dynavox Group share price has rendered an increased cost for employee long-term incentive program of 3 million SEK compared to the third quarter last year. All in all, non-recurring cost in the quarter sums up to 26 million SEK. In addition, EBIT was negatively impacted by currency of 6 million SEK in the quarter. Net R&D cost increased by 23 million SEK. 10 million SEK of these relates to non-recurring restructuring costs within the research and development organization. If we look at the basic earnings per share, it totalled to 0.36 SEK per share, compared with last year's 0.43 SEK per share. For the quarter, cash flow after continuous investment was positive with 20 million SEK, Cash at the end of the quarter was 172 million SEK. And net debt was 924 million SEK. The total use credit facility and term loan at the end of the quarter was 900 million SEK. The net debt after the last 12 months EBITDA was 2.0 times. And also note that during the quarter, Dynavox signed a new refinance agreement with Swedbank totaling to 1.2 billion SEK. And this is classified as a social loan as our prior agreement. And this agreement reflects our continued commitment to advancing sustainable social initiatives that have a positive impact on society. The credit facility includes a 900 million term loan and a 300 million revolving credit facility, which can be used for both working capital and strategic acquisitions. facility has a three-year term with two optional one-year extensions per end of september we have unused revolving credit facility of 300 million sec so back to you frederick to conclude the earnings call thank you linda so before we open up for questions i'd like to reiterate the main takeaways from the third quarter

So first of all, we continue our strong growth trajectory, a trend that started in the early spring of 2022 and just keeps accelerating. We grew revenue by 35% adjusted for currency. Sales continue to grow across all markets, but with direct presence markets outside of North America exceeding expectations in this quarter. We continue to see growing adoption among young users with autism, but at the same time, we also see really good traction in the eye gaze controlled solutions area that serves users with more complex needs. Our profitability was negatively affected by non-recurring costs totaling some 26 million sex or 4.3 percentage points related to these long-term investments focused on building a more robust company. Uh, the current uncertainties in the macro economic climate or policy changes has not had any direct effects on our business, but we experienced some indirect effects through elevated freight costs, uh, in the aftermath of various tariffs announcements. The currently ongoing us government shutdown poses no immediate execution risk, but we are monitoring the development here closely. Given the continued and sustainable growth, we continue to grow in term the team while investing in systems and tools to enable future business growth that is much bigger than today. Our financial targets are expressed where, and they were communicated in February, 2024 with a time horizon of three to four years. And the first target was to on average grow revenue by 20% per year. adjusted for currency effects, and that includes contributions from acquisitions. And in local currencies, the third quarter growth was 35%, which means that we have found a revenue growth momentum to build on. The market we serve remains hugely underserved. And with the example of growth levers such as sales teams expansion, adding direct markets and operational excellence, we continue to build on our growth journey. The second target is to deliver an annual EBIT margin that reaches and exceeds 15%. We feel that we have proven to build a strong growth with incremental improvements in profitability. We need to continue to invest in future growth with improvements in scale, but the recipe is rather simple. We want to maintain continued revenue growth, high and stable gross margins, and then total operating expenses that increase at the lower pace. our revenue growth and as a consequence we see good opportunity to further leverage how revenue growth translates to reaching and exceeding an ebit margin of 15 percent lastly we have a dividends policy we feel that we have an attractive cash flow profile and given the growth opportunities we need to maintain a capital structure that enables strategic flexibility to pursue growth investments including then acquisitions but It's still expected to over time generate excess cash and our policies therefore to distribute at least 40% of the available net profits to shareholders via dividends, share repurchases or similar programs when time so allows and it's deemed the right prioritization for us. With that said, I am taking a step to the left and I invite Elisabeth Mansi, our Corporate Communications Director, who will help to moderate and enable us to take questions from the audience. Elisabeth. Yes.

Well, thank you. We have a lot of questions here today. So I will start with a question from Daniel Jurby, who is asking about the non-recurring outlook for ERP and R&D for 2026.

You want to start?

Yeah, I can start. So, I mean, our goal when it comes to our product and development organization is that it should be completed by the end of the year and that we are geared for starting to execute in 2026. When it comes to ERP, we are still in the transition of getting all our legal entity over into the new ERP. And our goal is that we will be completed somewhere during next year.

Yeah, but and to the last point, I mean, we North America represents some three quarters of our business, and that's what we started with. It's obviously the most complex area and also by far the most costly area. So we definitely see that that's going to gradually decrease over the next year.

So following up on the North America and the US situation, Daniel is also asking if there are any hiccups. to the funding systems or to Medicare organizations due to this shutdown? And also, is the Nairobi protocol still valid?

The short answer to your first question, Daniel, is no. We have no current impact on our ability to get paid, basically, in North America. That might change, and we don't know exactly what's going to happen in the future. But as of today, no. Our assessment on the Nairobi protocol is that there are no suggestions or paths where the tariff-free import on our types of products will be changed just because of recent announcements. So the best guess right now is that it will remain in force.

Good. And then I do believe that we also have someone calling in. So let's see if we have Ramil on the line. So please, can you unmute star six and ask your question?

Let's see if we have Ramil.

Hello, guys. Can you hear me?

Hey. Yes, we can.

Hey, guys. Hey, wonderful. Thank you, Elizabeth and Linda, for allowing us the opportunity to ask voiceover questions as well. I tend to prefer it this way, so I appreciate it. I have a bunch of questions, actually. I'll try to contain myself, but maybe if you start on the progression you've made throughout 2025 with younger users within autism. It sounds very much like a TD Navio type of sort of use case. So do you think that the launch of TD Navio in mid slash late 2024 was sort of the driving element behind sort of the organic growth acceleration in this year?

It's a good question. And the answer is yes and no. What is actually the main product that is benefiting that customer group is a software called TD Snap. And that's a software we had in our portfolio for quite some year, but it's obviously been refined over time. That software is the software that you run on TD Navio. So with the launch of the TD Navio, which is simply a better version of a very similar product that we had prior to that, that was what we can see that has sparked a really strong growth momentum. But as such, it's the software that actually makes the bigger difference. TD Navio is the can that holds a very good soup, if I would use that analogy.

Yeah, it makes sense, Fredrik. Thank you. And then on the topic of direct sales outside of North America improving, could you, because you've acquired several distributors in the last say two years. Could you elaborate a little bit on what markets you are seeing the pickup in and if that pertains to the newer acquisitions, France, Germany or older ones?

It's actually quite a strong growth across the board. So there isn't one country that kind of stands for the majority of the growth. It's a very strong growth across many markets, but one clear trend that we see is the markets where we have no middle layer no middleman where we go directly and those obviously includes the markets that we recently acquired but we should also remember that we were already direct in a number of other markets prior to that but those if we see some sort of trend of the of the kind of across the board growth it's definitely those markets that are in the lead okay makes sense and then um

I can see the notion of margin expansion being visible ahead as per your financial targets, but if you take Q3 isolated, organic growth in OPEX is 31%, so just one percentage point lower than organic growth on top line. The phasing of margin expansion, how should we think of that, say for Q4 and into 2026 perhaps?

Do you want to address that? First of all, you need to consider the significant investments that we are doing this year. Both the restructuring cost is impacting our organic OPEX increase and that we will not see in next year. Over time, that means also our R&D spend will go down in relation to revenue over time. So you will have that kind of improvement. We will also start to see gross margin. You will slightly see some improvement when we go direct in more markets. And then over time, the more efficient we will get with the systems that we are now implementing, we don't need to invest as significant to actually continue our growth journey. So you talk about the crocodile sometimes. So we will gradually see an improvement of OPEX slowing down growth and revenue continue.

We want to spend as much money as we see reasonable in sales and marketing because that really drives growth, whereas we want to see a very moderate increase in all other OPEX areas.

Very good. Well, thank you so much.

Can I just one final one perhaps on like Outlook as well? I mean, in connection with Q2, you said that the first and the last week of Q2 were

equally strong could you could you shed any light on how q3 progressed throughout the quarter yeah i think you're absolutely right so just to reiterate we said both in q1 and q2 that the first week of q1 or q2 was as good as the last week of q1 and q2 that was actually not the case in this quarter because we had a planned how should i put it stand still in the very first week or so in north america due to the erp change so there was a little bit more of a catch-up effect which could argue that we had an accelerating growth throughout this quarter. But on the other hand, that was a little bit kind of artificial because we kind of we created that problem, I should say ourselves. So good momentum is probably the short answer.

OK, thank you so much, guys.

Thank you so much. And actually, both Jessica and Daniel also had questions relating to the Q4. And if if we could see any seasonality outlook for Q4?

Without being too detailed, we should just remember that we have a fairly consistent seasonality effect in our business, where Q1 is the weakest, Q2 a little bit better, Q3 a little bit better, and Q4 is our best quarter, both in terms of absolute top line revenue, but obviously spreading out the larger top line over almost the same optics will hopefully have a bigger kind of drop through. We see no difference here. The reason for this is that a lot of our clients and customers have a big incentive to get their order shipped and delivered before New Year's Eve, before the so-called co-pays or deductibles in insurance systems resets on January 1. So no change.

Good. So let's continue with some questions, more questions from Jessica Gunnivald at Red Eye. She's asking, if you could walk us through the working capital build-up and how you see it developing going forward, particularly with the increased share of direct sales.

Yeah. So what happened when we get more direct sales is also, of course, then that we need to build up more inventory because we get an extra addition layer of the inventory. So now we've seen in the last couple of quarters, one is related to Toby that we have increased inventory, but also the second part is that we go direct in more markets, which means that we are building up more inventory. But over time, we will balance this and we'll be able to get more release. Also part of us that we have grown this year, we needed to adjust because making sure it's more important for us at the moment to make sure that we deliver on time than to build up slightly higher inventory. But over time, we will see a release of that. Also in this quarter, we should also know what Fredrik mentioned that we also saw some of the sales coming in in the later part of the quarter, which means we build up some of the accounts as well.

And last question from Jessica here. She's asking, what are your expectations regarding the RehaMedia acquisition? and the market dynamics in Germany.

We should just remember that these acquisitions, when we acquire our resource, they're quite small in the grand scheme of things. With that said, Germany is one of the most exciting and interesting markets, not just in terms of share size or funding system. It's also a market where we believe that there is a lot of growth potential. So having our own feet on the ground in Germany is going to be instrumental for the slightly longer run. And we feel it's off to a very good start.

And Germany funding is actually very similar to the US. Right.

Good. So Oscar from SCB is asking if you can elaborate on the increased freight cost and how many basis points that would be pressure on the gross margin.

It's very small effect on the gross margin, but that is of course related to that we needed to get inventory in the warehouse as soon as possible because we saw the need from a sales perspective. Over time that will go down and we will be able to ship much more with both because we are able to balance the sales momentum that we have.

Yes, I would say it's more of an opportunity of actually improving it going forward when we are We can plan a little bit more ahead. I think it's fair to say that these announcements of tariffs and new policies that come out specifically from the US have an actually profound effect on supply chains and freight chains across the world because it's quite bumpy.

Good. And a follow up question on the performance and North America. We said that markets outside of North America was performing very well. So what about North America? Did they underperform the expectations in Q3? Any color would be helpful.

Okay, I will provide color. North America did fantastic. And some of those markets outside of North America did amazing. That's the amount of color I can provide. It's hard when everybody's performing personal best to say that someone didn't perform. It was very strong across the board, but was simply even better out in those direct markets outside of North America.

But I think it's also a strength from us that it's not one country or one product. We are actually across the board growing our company.

And this was actually the same question as Mikael at DNB Carnegie had. So we will move on to bringing in another voice. So I'll ask Filip from SBF to join. Please press star six to unmute and ask your question.

Good morning. Can you hear me?

Yes. Good morning.

Good morning. Perfect. Perfect. So you mentioned in the report that you witnessed good traction in touch control devices during the quarter. What is the sales split between touch control and eye gaze devices? The split?

It's around, I would say touch is today probably slightly over 50 and eye tracking slightly below, but we should also remember the ESP, so from a quantity perspective, touch is significantly higher than eye tracking.

It's almost, it's an ASP difference of two. So an eye tracking device costs twice as much as a touch device.

And do you anticipate it to be kind of this seamless split going forward?

I think past performance is a good predictor of future performance. That's how much we can say right now.

All right, all right. And I remember you mentioning, I don't know if it was at the end of last year or in the beginning of this year, that around 10,000 prescribers have ever prescribed a Dynavox device. Has that number increased during the year or how should we think about that?

I don't have that number is my honest answer, but we can definitely look into it. My gut feeling says that it's increased slightly, but what I do believe is that the prescribers that prescribe four or more that has a little bit more traction, that group has grown quite strong.

What measures do you do to increase the revenue for prescribers for those people?

So what kind of measures we take to increase that?

Why do you see that the people that prescribe several devices increase their prescribing

The simple answer is because it's one of our focus areas. We believe that it's better to spend our time on taking the ones who have done something and make them become more self-sufficient and better at the jobs rather than just trying to pull more new prescribers into the loop. But it's a balancing act.

All right, perfect. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much. And follow up on that last conversation here then on the eye gaze controlled solutions. Could you describe what's driving that momentum?

And I believe it's Daniel, or was it Mikael again? Yeah. It's a very good question, Mikael. I think that there is a combination of where the market had focused quite a lot on what was then a year ago, a new device, the touch devices and the Navio device. Um, that is, uh, you know, that's now yesterday's news and, uh, we could potentially see that it's normalizing a little bit, so it, it might be almost like an, an internal effect, but, uh, it's hard to say.

Good. Uh, and then let's see if we have another one here from Matt, uh, does your strategic investment currently holding back reported margin span into 2026? the market seems to focus on the lower than expected U.S. sales. Any worries for 2026 U.S. organic development? No. That was short. Good. So let me just double check here. There was a little bit of follow up from Daniel as well on the freight cost and the impact on gross margin in Q3 and if this will turn substantially tougher ahead.

Quite the contrary. I think we are in a position now where there is less eruption, less uncertainty, and we obviously feel quite confident with momentum, which will enable us to not necessarily get lower freight costs. We can choose freight by sea, for example, which is significantly cheaper. We have a better ability to plan right now.

Good. I believe that was everything.

All right. Fantastic. I'm happy to see that the technology work with some of the call-ins. That's great. But also thank you everybody who participated and submitted questions in the chat. We are looking forward to seeing you all back again on February 5th. So next year we will summarize the business for the full year of 2025. Thank you very much. Thank you.