4C Group AB (publ)

Good morning and welcome to 4C Strategies Q2 earnings report. As we mark the end of the half year, we've gathered here in Stockholm today to give you a presentation of the quarterly numbers and a little bit of an outlook. And I'm joined here today by our CFO, Veronica Wallin.

Thank you, Jonas. And great to be here. I look forward to go through the Q2 numbers together with you.

and great to have you on board on the team as well. So what we'll take you through this morning is a bit of a highlight section first. I'll go through both some business highlights, some operational highlights, but also then looking into the numbers. We will then take you through the different segments around the world And then we're going to do a bit of a more of a deep dive into the actual numbers, which Veronica will lead on with a bit of commentary. And then we'll end with some comments on the outlook and how we're moving forward. So a packed agenda. And again, thank you, everyone, for joining. I know it's in the middle of the summer season here in Sweden. So really great to see people taking the time of that to come and listen to our report. So in terms of Q2 highlights for 4C, we've had quite a busy quarter. It's been quite a high turmoil, as everybody's obviously aware of, but we have done a number of... strategic participation in key events and exercises. So we've supported in our defense business 15 and more actually major exercises across the world. Some of them really substantial and notable like the Mediterranean Strike 25 and also now started Talisman Sabre and the lead up to that. in the Asia-Pacific region. Now, these are obviously the core of what we do here at 4C in terms of that global training and exercise management tool and that delivery to the armed forces. So to be able to participate in those exercises and showcase our capabilities around the world is really, really important. And we've had a very busy season in the first half and especially during the second quarter of 2025. We've also here in Sweden, we were participating in the Almedalen event, which were at the end of June, where you can see on the picture, we had really good discussions with both the head of the Swedish Armed Forces and also the Civil Contingencies Agency. And I think that event for me as well this year really cemented where we're going as where Sweden is going as a nation, how we will be able to participate in that as a company and really putting a focus on the key areas where we operate and where we have been operating for a long time within both the capability development within armed forces, but also in terms of resilience and the wider resilience requirements that's coming throughout society. So really positive discussions during that week. And I think we'll see a lot more interesting events taking place during the second half of 2025. If we then focus on our defence expansion, obviously for 4C, our defence business area is the largest revenue generating one. And we're seeing a growth continuously within that area. Now, it's important to make the point as well, and we'll come back to it again later, that we have yet to see a full convergence of the political promises and everybody's discussions around spending and how that's taking place. But we have During Q2, we have signed a new additional NATO country as a customer. We've continued on our COTS journey in the US defence space, which is key to our future growth and is also progressing well. We've also had another contract, as stated on here, but with the Swedish armed forces to develop additional capabilities together with them. And we have used our defense product in terms of training and exercise management to win a counterterrorism contract within the APAC region, which is, and I'll come back to that later as well. In addition to all of this, which has kept us quite busy, we've also really been pushing the AI first strategy, which we're implementing throughout the organization. So we are integrating AI actually into all of our products, both in the defense and the resilience space. We've announced a chief AI officer internally to make sure that we push that progress and that we continue to implement and to sort of insert AI into all parts of the organization. We have also conducted a live war game with our own products, our 4C AI assistant in a NATO country where we actually ran the full war game and saw the benefits of being able to utilize that within a live war gaming scenario. And we've made significant internal advancements on both the engineering, but also on sales and delivery about how we can harness these new technologies. So quite a busy quarter and really, I think, a lot of really good progress in terms of where we are going and how we're progressing towards our strategic objectives. If we focus in on the actual numbers, so 4C in brief for the quarter, we had yet another quarter where we achieved the highest rolling or last 12 months of sales ever for 4C, so 373 million. In Q2, that amounted to 75.6 in net sales. We saw a stable ARR between Q1 and Q2, and we also remained relatively stable when it comes to the software revenue percentage. We had a negative result of approximately 16% on the EBIT margin and that's comparative to minus 54% last year. So a significant improvement and still a positive EBIT if you're looking at it from a 12 months perspective in the LTM. What I think also is interesting, as you can see on the screen, is we've seen a continuous uptake in the interest in what we do, not only in the macro trends on the market, but also in the interest in 4C as a company being traded on the market. So you can see the shareholders are continuing to rise in numbers, which we obviously are very proud of. as well. So those are the numbers. We'll come back to them in more detail in a little bit. Veronica is going to guide you through that. But just before we do that, I'll take you on a whistle stop tour around the world with a little bit more information about our different segments. So starting in EMEA, as I mentioned, we've signed a new NATO country as a customer within the training and defence, we're in training and access management within defence. We're really excited about this one. It's an initial stage contract, which we believe will grow. It's our second additional contract within the space in the year. And we've got two additional European countries that we are right now negotiating with and looking to close within the year. So we can really start to see that the initiatives that are coming throughout Europe and the rearmament and the rebuild up in Europe is starting now to trickle through into the training and exercise domain as well. So more to follow on this. I mentioned we had a new contract just at the end of the quarter with the Swedish Armed Forces, where we will continue to support them and looking forward to also enhancing that support as we move forward. But a good call off from our framework agreement there. And as I mentioned as well, we've had a very busy quarter when it comes to deploying our tools and our tool sets on these major exercises around the world. The ones mentioned here was on an Italian aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean where the British the Royal Navy strike group which is now deployed to Asia Pacific and as part of their exercise in Australia were going through their certification and all of this was run through the products that we are providing something that we're obviously really really proud of and it also provides a significantly good shopping window to other potential customers. Shifting then to APAC Predominantly, Australia is still our main business area. We did sign, as I mentioned, an agreement with the Australia New Zealand Counterterrorism Committee. This is for our defense product in terms of running exercises and evaluating exercises. It's our first really big or significant contract with a counterterrorism unit. And I think this opens up opportunities for the future as well, but also cements our position within the public space in Australia. So really a good opportunity to further break into that area. We've talked about Talisman Sabre. That exercise is now, as we speak, ongoing. It's been a busy lead-up phase, but it gives us a good opportunity and we're looking forward to what's going to be on the follow-on from that. and also seeing a growing exercise market at large in Asia Pacific, predominantly in Australia and New Zealand. If we move to North America, we've talked a lot about over the last couple of quarters about our COTS, so our commercial off-the-shelf offering that aligns well with the sort of the macro winds which are blowing in America at the moment with a new US administration looking to buy things that is proven and that's already working. And we are seeing good opportunities coming from that. We've extended contracts with our current COTS customers. And we're also looking towards the both third and fourth quarter of 2025 to continually grow that market. And I think we're in a good position to be able to do that from a Q2 perspective. We aligned a lot of opportunities. There was still a bit of uncertainty and some challenges in decision making. in terms of the sort of the turmoil with are they going to pass the big beautiful bill or not? Now that is done and we're moving forward with that. We're also seeing a lot of the same within the resilience space. But I think now if we look forward, we used Q2 quite heavily to put us in a good position to be able to capitalize on opportunities moving forward. Finally then, in our expert services, very busy, a lot going on. We've signed contracts with the Swedish Transport Administration for a multi-year commitment in terms of helping out with business continuity and war planning. We have signed a number of new contracts at the end of the quarter as well. We've got a significant order backlog and an order book for the remainder of the year. And I think also very positively is that we're seeing quite a substantial continued increase in our average chargeout rate on our expert services. So that has grown over 20% compared to the 12 months in Q2 last year. we would have had an even stronger quarter within the expert services domain had it not been for some challenges when it comes to recruitment and to refill some of the positions which has turned over over the last year. So positive development within expert services. And really looking forward to seeing that business area grow as it is a key component in terms of continuing both what we do within that specific field, but also as a complement to our resilience product predominantly and how we expand that and extend that into further market areas. So busy area all around, a lot going on during the quarter and a lot to come as we move forward as well. So moving into the financials, and I'll hand over to Veronica, and I'll let you take us through some more details on that slides.

Thank you, Jonas. So let's get on with the numbers. The chart on the left side illustrates the net sales by segment along with adjusted EBIT margin over the last 12 months. We can see that the revenue growth has recovered over the past quarters, particularly during 2025 with a 27 percentage growth year on year. Global Expert Services and EMEA continues to provide a stable base, while North America has shown a significant upswing over the last two quarters. If we go into the adjusted EBIT margin, represented by the green line, bottom up in early 2024, but has since then gradually improved the cost adjustments and operational efficiencies have taken effect. If we focus a little bit more on the defense segment on the right side, the trend is very clear. As Jonas mentioned before, after the dip in Q2 2024, growth has rebounded strongly with three in a row quarters of solid performance. Net sales reached the highest level in Q2 2025, with nearly 300 million in the latest 12 months, with the year-on-year growth rate above 50%. The number of active defence customers has also increased from 19 to 28 over the last year, which confirms a continued demand and a growing presence in the defence sector.

Yeah, and I think it's important to say here as well, when it comes to our defence customers, these are obviously not individual nations that we're talking about here necessarily, or defence forces. It is also the opportunity, which I've mentioned historically about multidimensional growth within a specific customer base, such as the UK Ministry of Defence, for example, where we grow both within our base army customer, but also into the Air Force, into the Navy, and then also growing within those with new projects and opportunities, which provides a significant opportunity for the future and future growth as we continue to progress. I think also looking at EMEA and expert services providing a very stable foundation, yes, I think some people might wonder why is EMEA not growing faster at the moment, given everything that we're seeing in Europe, especially on the defence side. As I mentioned a couple of times historically, we are not the first or the second wave when it comes to defence procurement. We're starting to see the investments and the political will and the change in landscape trickle into training and exercising. So we're in a really good position for that going forward, but we have yet to see actually a really good turnaround or flow through of those opportunities. So there's more to come here, which is why we can see a reasonably flat line in the MEA over the past couple of quarters, but I'm expecting that to take off as we move forward. We can also see obviously that APAC is quite small during this quarter, which we are aware, you know, it's part of the standard seasonality in that business area. It's still a small team down on the ground. And we have the key opportunities coming up in the second half of the year to take that back to where it was earlier as well. So looking forward to that.

So if we look into cash and contract assets, we can start with the contract assets in orange. We can observe a consistent upward trend with a sharp increase the latest three quarters. This reflects a stronger productivity and revenue recognition tied to ongoing contracts. We can also look at cash and cash has shown the downward trend over the past quarters. However, with a strong pipeline of contract assets, we expect to convert a big part of that in cash over the coming year. We expect also a positive trend in cash flow during the second half of the year.

Yeah, and I think it's obviously we see an increase in contract assets that comes from multi-year commitments with some customers as well. And I think it's worth mentioning as well that the type of customers that we have that these contract assets sits with who are who are on contract as we move forward, provides a very, very low risk when it comes to them actually paying what's on the books, so to speak. So from that perspective, we are not concerned. We are obviously working to increase our cash conversion and also looking at revenue recognition models as we move forward. So more to follow on this, but we're looking towards a positive contract conversion during H2.

If we look at the order intake and order book then we can see that Q2 2025 shows a lower quarterly order intake compared to previous quarters but the latest 12 months total still reach a new all-time high of 544 million. This is driven by strong early quarters and highlights the underlying momentum heading into the second half of the year. If we instead look at the order book, then we can see that it's continued to develop positively in Q2 2025, ending up at 298 million. It's a slight decline from the record high in Q1, but still well above previous quarters.

Yeah, and I think also the slide or the chart on the left with the bar charts there shows the seasonality in the 4C business, even if you take a slightly longer perspective as well than just the past two or three quarters where we had a really strong Q4. last year in Q1 in 2025. But we will continue to see this seasonality when it comes to order intake, where we are expecting some quarters to be really strong. And then it does take time to develop these opportunities, especially in the defence space. So that's going to continue to fluctuate. But obviously, the fact that we have an order intake of above 500 million over the last 12 months is something that we're very, very proud of and look forward to continue to increase that.

So if we continue with ARR and the average annual devalue, if we look on the left side, you can see that ARR continue to grow steadily and reach 181 million in Q2 2025, and that's in line with Q1. The increase is primarily driven by strong growth in the defense segment, as we talked about before, which now represents the main part of our recurring revenue. If we go to the right side instead, then you can see that the average annual deal value for defense software remained stable at 7.9 million in Q2 2025, and also with a record high 23 new contracts signed over the last 12 months. If we instead go and look at the resilience software, there we can see that it's increased slightly to half a million in Q2 2025, with 15 new contracts signed over the last 12 months.

Yeah, and I mean, some of these, you will see that these are new slides compared to our previous earnings reports and quarterly reports. And we're pushing now to be able to expand and continue to show more KPIs and more quantitative numbers. For me, both the fact that, you know, what is the average annual contract value with a customer or deal value, but also how many are we signing and we can see that that's growing. If you look at the resilience side of the house, obviously significantly smaller deal value per customer. But on the other hand, the addressable market is so much bigger. So from a longer term perspective, we see that as a significant growth area and a really good opportunity to continue to grow. It's going to take time to build that but it's positive to see that it's growing and I think we have a good opportunity there for the future. Just in terms of summarizing then where we are, if we look at the last 12 months, we've had around 29% growth, which is obviously very positive against our target of 20. We have that continuously as a really strong focus. We are pushing to continue to grow our base and we believe that there is much more to take. So we're continuing to really focus on sales growth. We are tracking around 66% software revenue. We're expecting that to be a little bit higher as we move forward. And then on the 11% EBIT margin, well, as Veronica has mentioned as well, we have done optimization projects. We are continuously looking at our OPEX and making sure that we're spending the right amount of money in the right place, and we will continue to push that. There is a challenge, obviously, with rising prices around the world. We are also seeing some challenges in the FX situation whereby both the US dollar, the euro and the pound has significantly weakened against the SEC. And that continues to provide a bit of volatility on the bottom line. But all in all, we're tracking reasonably well and we'll continue, obviously, to focus on this as we move forward. And speaking of moving forward, where we are right now, 2025, the end of the year and beyond, really three key focus areas, as I mentioned initially, and as sort of going through the whole presentation as well, is that we are very, very focused on cementing our position within the defence base, pushing forward as the de facto standard for training and exercise and readiness management when it comes to force generation within NATO and allied partners. and continue to push our product out to the market and being ready to deliver these tools that are so much required when it comes to now actually rebuilding and rearming large parts of the world. On the right-hand side within our resilience space, we are focusing a lot on how we continue to really slimline our product, make sure that we have the right go-to-market strategies, that we're selling the right product to the right customer profiles, and that we are pushing this really hard within the Nordic region from Stockholm, within the UK, out of London, and then also continuing to expand in North America where there is a continued high requirement and demand for resilience product and doing this supported by our expert services predominantly here in the Nordics and in the UK, but also branching out with support to implementation projects and SME activity in North America. And then in the middle representing our AI push. For me, looking at where we are as a company, looking at where the market is, looking at the radical advancements that are happening with this new technology in terms of how you can build software, how you can create prototypes, how you can scope things, how you can show concepts and how you can drive sales. It's a revolution like something we haven't seen in a really long time. So it is a very big focus for us. I would say that we are quite far advanced compared with the market. We have tools that are being deployed. We are actively being used in quite restricted environments. And I think that this is going to give us a continued edge as we move forward. It's a big focus area, one that's really exciting, and I hope that it will drive both productivity, customer quality or quality in our products, but also efficiencies internally, which will be able to get us to a position where we can deliver even better products faster to our end users at a time when they really, really need it. With all that, thank you very much for this part of the presentation. We've had the chat open, obviously, for questions and we will continue to do that now for a little bit. So I'm happy and Veronica is here with me as well. So we're happy to take whatever questions you may have at this point.

We can see that we have received a couple of questions. So should we start with a question about AI? So I think it's good if you answered that one. You mentioned that AI is important and that you work a lot with it. Can you provide a concrete example of how AI is already being applied in your products or internal operations and how this is expected to drive growth and efficiency gains?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And thanks for everyone sending in questions. As I mentioned just here at the back end, I mean, it is, I think it is key critical in terms of where we are as a company and where we're going and how we're going to transition and continue to grow. In terms of concrete, we have built in AI support into our tool set. So we're using it to make the planning processes, the exploitation of data more efficient and also using it as an, as I mentioned, as an AI assistant. So really trying to, especially, well, I mean, I think we're seeing it in both areas, but in the defense space, there are a lot of mundane tasks that just needs to be done when it comes to planning exercises and how you deal with that. And all the people that we're talking to within our customer base are saying that they now have they have a lot to do and not a lot of people to do it and not a lot of time to do it. So that's where we're really focusing in and trying to make sure that we can help them become more efficient and generate more value through that. So we have taken the capabilities that exist, we've air gapped them and deployed them within controlled environments. And we're receiving really positive feedback in terms of our customer engagements on these sites, I would say. So more to come, and I hope we'll be able to announce more specific details during the autumn. But I would say we're pushing ahead quite hard on this and that it's making good progress.

Thank you. So if we take the next question, you raised 55 million earlier this year and cash at the end of Q2 was approximately 20 million. How secure is your cash position? So I can start with that question. As we mentioned in our presentation, we have significant contract assets that we expect to convert during the remainder of the year, or at least a big part of it. In addition, we also have strong expectations, as we mentioned, for a solid second half, both in terms of activity and profitability.

I mean, it's obviously an area we're monitoring very closely, but we're looking towards a positive uptake during H2, I would say.

Yes, I think we have one more question here. Is it correct perception that you forecast stronger margins during the second quarter 2025 than during the second quarter 2024? We are well positioned to continue growing with improved profitability.

Yeah, and I think the last part, there is a quote from the CEO comment. So, yes, I believe we are, from where we are right now, how the outlook that we have towards H2, I would cautiously say that it's looking like we're in a good position. The second half of the year is historically the stronger half for 4C. We see a high activity in North America during Q3 and then here in Europe during Q4 as well. So I believe we're in a good position to be able to both continue to grow and to continue to grow profitable. Q3, Q4 last year were really strong quarters. But I do believe that the outlook that we have right now is positive. And I'm really hopeful around some of the key opportunities that we're pushing. And the fact, as I mentioned, I think a couple of times, the fact that we're seeing a stable growing business in all the regions. I think that gives us a good position. So all in all, I would say that we have a positive outlook towards H2. We're hoping that the macroeconomic situation will stabilize a little bit and that the promises that have been made by governments and organizations around the world in terms of investments, that that will now start to flow through in terms of our business areas as well. I would say that we're in a good position to deliver a strong second half of the year from where we are right now. With that, I think we will call it a day and just say thank you to everyone for joining. I hope that people have a bit of a well-deserved leave over the summer period. I hope that the weather up here in Sweden will continue in the same fashion as it is right now but thank you very much for joining and and follow us and keep track of what we're doing and we'll be hopefully be sharing a lot more with you over the coming months and quarters so thank you everyone for joining and and have a great weekend