4C Group AB (publ)

Good morning and welcome to 4C Strategies year end report for 2025. My name is Jonas Johnson. I'm the CEO of 4C and with me today, I have Veronica Wallin, who's our CFO.

Hi everyone.

We're going to guide you through this presentation today with a bit of deep dive into what's been going on during the fourth quarter. And also looking into the details around numbers and KPIs about our performance at the back end of last year. And also at the end, we'll give you a bit of an outlook in terms of where we're going with 2026. So as an introduction in terms of what was the fourth quarter for 4C and how did the year sort of end, it was a busy quarter. The fourth quarter is always a busy quarter for us and a lot of good progress. As we announced in the previous earnings call back in the Q3 report, we focused a lot during the fourth quarter in terms of our refocus and reset of our resilience business. where we did quite substantial reorganizations and optimizations efforts. We did this whilst at the same time obviously then focusing those efforts towards our defense space and making sure that we could really enhance our business in that area and work together with both existing customers and potential new customers to really push forward our offering in the defense space. When it comes to the resilience, and I'll come back to this in a little bit more detail, but it was a significant change for the company and we did quite a lot of reductions and really tighten the team in to focus on ensuring that we could deliver to our existing customers and look at the pipeline, but do that with a substantially less and smaller footprint than what we had invested previously. During the quarter, there was also quite a lot of challenges in the US with the government being shut down for a substantial period of time. That led to a lot of delays. But whilst this was, it did affect us, at the same time, we managed to close out quite a lot of deals and I'll come back to more details in this area. But we also managed to grow our presence, I would say, through a lot of targeted customer engagements. We were present at the major trade shows within the defense space. And we've we've increased and built our pipeline for the future, which is super important. And I should also say that both in the expert services space and in the resilience space, we managed to close out the quarter on a really strong, strong performance. And we'll come back to that as well. So all in all, when we look at Q4 and we look at the 2025 as a whole, it didn't necessarily get quite as far as we were hoping we had. challenges through the year, which we've been addressing continuously and are continuing to address as we move forward. But I think in terms of how we ended it, I'm still proud of the team and that we managed to pull together in the final months of the year to deliver a profitable result at the back end of the year. So when we look at the numbers, how did we perform? So interestingly enough, we managed a top line result, which is pretty much exactly the same as the comparative quarter previous year. So 113 million SEC in net sales. We had a 74% software component in that, which is above our targets and obviously very positive. And when you look at the EBITDA and EBIT, you can see that it was also quite a profitable quarter. And Q4 is traditionally a strong quarter for 4C. So we'll go into more details around the numbers, but I'll just also mention that we continue to see a strong increase in our ARR up to 215 million. And looking at the whole of the year, then we closed out for 2025 on 352.4 million top line, which is an increase compared to 2024. Not necessarily as much of a growth as we were forecasting and hoping for at the start of the year. But I think we did a strong recovery during the fourth quarter compared to some challenges earlier in the year. Going into a bit more detail around the world in the segments then, when we look at defense, as I mentioned, the fourth quarter, especially in Europe, is a strong quarter in terms of those, a lot of organizations having the same calendar year as their financial year as well, which means that there are opportunities at the back end of the year. We had an order intake in defense of approximately 110 million SEC in new sales. And they came from a number of different strategically important contracts. It's also a big quarter when it comes to pipeline growth and customer engagement. So we worked a lot with our customers around the world to identify new opportunities, to make sure that all of our customers are aware of our products and the opportunities that sits with those products as they now continue to ramp up. in their growth phase when it comes to defense rearmament and defense spending so i think we had a we had a good good quarter in terms of outreach we've had a lot of new deals coming in uh both as close deals uh but also as opportunities for 2026. we are continuing to build that pipeline as we now focus uh most of our energy towards the defense segment within 4c and i would mention some q4 highlights we did sign despite of the extended shutdown in the us government we did sign new customers in the us at the back end of the year with a with a new organization within the department of war that we haven't worked with in the past We've expanded even more our presence in Norway and in the UK. And we've signed a couple of key deals in the APAC region at the back end of the year, which we were forecasting throughout the year and continued to grow and cement our presence with NATO, which is obviously a key critical customer for us as we move forward. All in all, a good quarter within defense. We had some of our opportunities and deals that slipped into 2026, which we're now actively working to convert. And some of them have already been closed out, as you would have seen in the press releases. And we're continuing to see a stable growth in terms of demand within the defense space. So lots of exciting opportunities that we're working on around the world. Shifting focus then into our resilience space, as I mentioned, we did a strategic shift in our sort of our presence within the resilience space during the fourth quarter. We reduced our footprint to free up resources. We are looking at a reduction, total cost reduction of approximately 40 million, and those will be fully implemented by the end of Q1 2026. So in a few months time. with that done and that executed we will be focusing on on a selective growth path for this segment as i mentioned before where we were obviously looking at taking care of our current customers some of which are key names around the world and some of which also sit on very long-term contracts so we're we're happy with those and and we are aiming for a positive cash flow within the resilience space during 2026 and it to be a positive EBIT contribution, potentially as early as 2026, but definitely in 2027. Interestingly enough, when you look at Q4 highlights, back end of the year, we actually signed more contracts in the resilience space than we did during the previous quarters in 2025. So we signed, and I'll mention two of them because I think they're important as part of our strategy, and that is to deliver our resilience space in close proximity and linked to our defense so that we continue to position ourselves as a company that works in defense and total defense also within our resilience space. So one, we sold a BCM solution, business continuity management software solution to NATO as an organization, helping them streamline their operations and become more robust in what they do. And also we sold an incident reporting tool for a European defense organization, which is a really exciting opportunity with a long-term commitment from them that we're looking to grow. well as we move forward so showing that our resilience basis or resilience products are also relevant within defense space and selling those directly to defense customers not necessarily then being applied as defense tools so to speak finally then looking at our expert services offering which is strongly centered around our nordic business here in stockholm and also in our out of our london office in the uk When you look at expert services, they did a really strong recovery during H2 of 2025. And as a whole on the year, they grew by about 10%. And they delivered that with above 20%, as you can see on the screen, with above 20% of EBITDA. And which I think is really, really good for our expert services, which is a consultancy offering, right? We had a positive increase when it came to the hiring situation during Q4, which was a bit of a challenge to us earlier in the year. where we saw more of an outflux than an influx of delivery consultants, which is a challenge, obviously, in an expert services business. But that changed during Q4 and we're now in a very positive place when it comes to talent actually seeking themselves to us. wanting to be part of this journey. So we're entering 2026 with a really strong order book. We have above 46 million SAC in signed contracts to be delivered during 2026. And that's a comparison to a total revenue in 2025 of 65 million. So we are in a good position. And as a highlight, just to mention, and we press release this as well, but we did win and became the prime delivery partner on a two year framework together with the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority, which is in the first assessment valued up until approximately 48 million SEC, but has call off options additionally up to a total of 100 million. Great opportunity and a great contract to use our expert services to deliver a more robust society here in Sweden, which is obviously a core part of what we aim to do as a company. So a really good strong end to the year in expert services, building the foundation for the future. And all in all, I would say around our three business areas, we managed to close out the year in a positive way. We'll go into more of the details now in a second. So I will hand over to Veronica to give you a little bit more uptake on the financials and the KPIs.

Thank you, Jonas. So I think I will repeat some things. But if we start to look at Q4 and net sales, as Jonas mentioned, we came in at 113 as last year. Even though we delivered a strong quarter, we did not see the uptake that we actually mentioned before. This was still impacted by the instability that we have seen in the US and also the shutdown almost half of the quarter. For the latest 12 months, you can see that net sales reached 352 million compared to 343 last year. That is an increase of approximately 9 million and a 3% growth. Overall, this reflects a more stable net sales trend on a full year basis, while short-term momentum has continued to be influenced by external conditions and mainly in the US. If we look at the EBIT margins, the adjusted EBIT margin in Q4 was 21% compared to 23% last year. For the latest 12 months, the adjusted EBIT margin improved 2% from minus 2% last year. During the quarter, we have also taken approximately half of the reorganization costs that we communicated last quarter. As previously communicated, we have not seen any effects from the reorganization yet. We expect those effects becoming visible towards the end of the quarter, as Jonas mentioned before. And we have also mentioned that we have increased our focus on the defense. And however, in Q4, we, as Jonas mentioned, we saw several large resilience contracts signed. And we have also worked, of course, with them for a long time. But we can see that when we look on the right side, that defense is going down a little bit in Q4.

Yeah, no, I think that's a good summary. And I think also it's important to note, if you look at the left-hand side of the slide with the graph there, we can see that we had a good quarter in APAC, which we've talked about. So that's increasing and that's in line with their seasonality and as expected in APAC and also reasonably strong quarter in North America, despite the challenges that we saw. There are positive indications here, obviously not quite reaching where we were hoping for, but then opportunities shifted into the future. So we're continuing to push those.

Yes, so if we talk a little bit about the financial position in contract assets and how that has developed during the period. We have not yet managed to reverse the negative cash trend. As you can see, contract assets and working capital increased mainly due to contract structure and timing effects. We have already mentioned that as well, but I mean, it's mainly the delays is mainly because of the US and the cash by the end of the year was 11.5 million. Our focus still remains on improving contract assets conversion and to strengthen the link between earnings and cash. Given the current situation, we are still, of course, closely monitoring our cash position and we prioritize to continue the reduction of contract assets in order to convert them into cash going forward. One thing that I also want to mention is that our revenue is often invoiced in other currencies than Swedish SEK, so mainly in USD and pound. But our cost is mainly in the Swedish SEC. And because of the weakening of the US dollar against SEC during the year, we can also see a negative impact on the company and also, of course, of the cash.

Yeah. And I mean, that has an impact on the financial results for the year as well, where we see a significant impact on the SEC USD change, which is approximately 20% where the the Swedish krona has increased in value against the US dollar during the year. I think maybe just one quick comment on the when we look at the contract assets because it's quite obvious here on the on the slide as well that our contract as and we do get questions on this that the contract assets has has increased significantly over the past years and are continuing to rise a little bit. We are working as best we can to look at structures with deals and contracts and customers in terms of how to to reverse this trend. Obviously, we don't want to have a continuing rise in contract assets, but the fundamental underlying reason for this is that we've signed a number of large multi-year contracts with predominantly defense customers, but also some in resilience now, where basically the licenses are handed over to the customer for a longer time period. And those are then converted to cash on a year by year basis, which means that the long term contract assets increase. And then we're trying to convert those as quickly as we possibly can. So it's a bit about deal structure. It's also about how we you know, how we look at this revenue from an audit perspective and revenue recognition perspective. So we are actively working to decrease our contract assets as we move forward. But we also are in a position where we have good visibility of these contract assets. And for a vast majority of them, there is no additional performance required on our side in terms of actually delivering on these assets before they are invoiceable. It's just a matter of timings. And I think that's important to mention as well.

Yes. So if we go into the order intake and order book, there you can see on the left side that the quarterly order intake continues to show volatility, which is natural because of the size and timing of larger contracts. In Q4, you can also see that the order intake amounted to 185 million. If we look at the rolling 12 months, in that case, order intake increased to 501 million, up almost 32% compared to 379 million last year. This also shows a structurally stronger underlying demand and a solid pipeline conversion over time, as mentioned before. So if we look at the individual quarter, or specifically if we look at all quarters, you can see that it goes up and down during the quarters. And if you then look at the latest 12 months, that demonstrates a more clear and strengthening in order intake. And that also improves our visibility going forward. If you look at the right side there you can see that the order book has increased significantly compared to 2024 with a particularly strong development in 2025 and Q4 reached 332 million and that's reflecting a solid demand and improved momentum and we The increase was almost 50% and we expect to deliver 50% off the order book during 2026.

And the final point there is obviously really important that that gives us visibility for 2026 and the conversion of those assets. So strong improvement.

Yes, and this is the last slide I will go through. So here I mainly want to mention the ARR, as Jonas talked about before. And you can here see that the ARR continues to grow steadily, and we reached 250 million in Q4, and that is up from 164 million last year. We can see the defense remaining to be a dominant contributor and that accounts approximately 70% of the growth during the quarter.

Thank you very much, Veronica. Great run through. And obviously we look forward to any questions on this in the Q&A in just a few minutes. So I should have mentioned that from the start, but we are obviously open for questions. So take those as those pop up from now on then. If I look at 2026 then and the future outlook, I mean, as I mentioned, it's a turbulent situation around the world, which And the underlying fundamentals actually provide a good business position for us from a demand perspective. But it provides some challenges in the execution of those contracts and and actually converting our customers. We have a lot of situations where our customers are. in high need of what we deliver. But the problem right now is that they are so stressed to deliver themselves that they are struggling a little bit to implement new processes. But we're working to help them with this and simplify everything that we do in terms of how we can help them. So for the year, as I've mentioned a number of times now, it is a very strong focus on the defense side of the house. We are looking at how do we help our partners and customers here in Europe? How do we continue to expand our presence in the US to become more of a name brand that everybody knows and associates with exercise and training management? And I think from a 2026 perspective, it will be a very high focus on growth in Europe, while at the same time continuing to penetrate the US and APAC. But the European market is now growing and they are coming to the later cycles of the defense rearmament process where our time to execute is now. And we're working really hard to make sure that we are getting on that wave and that we are working both here in Sweden with our long-term relationship with the Swedish Armed Forces, the Norwegians in continental Europe, and obviously then growing in the UK as well. We are going to focus a lot on delivering on our order book and converting our contract assets, as mentioned, so that we make sure that we get the best possible products out to our customers during the year. And we can convert a lot of those contract assets that we have to reduce those numbers and then invest that into continued growth and make sure that we harvest the position that we have on the market. And while doing this, we are also continuing, Veronica and I, to look at how do we optimize our operations, making sure that we invest in the right areas, that we have an investment level, which is the right level for the size of the company that we are. As I've mentioned a number of times since I took this job, I've reduced quite a lot in a lot of areas and we are now at a level which I think is a reasonably good level, but we are continuing to look at how do we optimize and how do we make sure that we're spending our money in the right place and that we're really pushing the investments at the right place. So driving throughout the organization, a growth mindset, but to do that in a profitable and very much customer focused way. So I'm really looking forward to the outlook for 2026. And obviously, we're a couple of weeks into the year already, so And there's a lot going on. And as you would have seen, we've already released a number of press releases on successful deals as we've started off the year. So that's where we are as of today. And looking forward to your questions in the Q&A session. So we'll move over to to live questions and see what we've got from from from you guys. All right, let's go into some questions then. Thank you, everyone. We've got a number of questions come in during the presentation. So starting, we've got a question here from regarding as a As mentioned in the report, strengthening our position in large procurement processes, should we, one, expect closing of large contracts during 2026? Well, I mean, with the defense procurement cycles, we are in a number of processes around the world, ranging from the US through Europe and into APAC. And obviously, we are expecting those to move forward during the year. The timing of these things is always a challenge. But yes, there are there are larger deals being procured both directly that we're bidding for, but also as part of consortiums and teams around the world. So we've got some really exciting opportunities, exact timing of those, and the outcome is obviously still not revealed, but we do have some key opportunities that we are forecasting for in 2026, which we'll hopefully be able to share exciting news about in the future. There are definitely large opportunities on the horizon. Right, let's see what else we've got here. We've got a question on savings and OPEX, Veronica. Given the SEC 40 million in savings, do you expect total OPEX to decrease in 2026 compared to 2025 or will most of the personnel be redeployed to other parts of the business?

Yeah, I can go into that one. So no, it will be actual savings compared to last year. But it's not only OPEX, as we mentioned last report. It's maybe 30 million in OPEX and then 10 million in COPEX. We have moved some stuff, but that is not included in that number.

And I think maybe an additional comment here. When you look at this, and we are forecasting growth in 2026 in a lot of areas, one of the main areas for growth, not main areas, but one area for growth is within our expert services where we will need to hire more people. So I think percentage-wise, you will see a lower OPEX moving forward. If you look at absolute numbers going out of 2025 and out of 2026, you shouldn't necessarily expect them to be 40 million lower by December 26 than what they are. But in terms of comparison versus top line, yes, then we are expecting a reduction in OPEX. And we have already concluded, as I mentioned, we have concluded the transformation on almost all of these parts in terms of making the change to resilience. So we are in a better position moving forward as well. Let's see. We've got a question here. What level of visibility do you have regarding contract asset conversion in 2026? Do you continue to expect most of these to convert in the first half of the year? Well, so we have approximately half of our contract assets to be converted during the next 12 months. And we're obviously working hard on delivering all of that. And then we are looking at models to reduce our increase of contract assets as we move forward but this is quite dependent on the structure of the deal together with the customer and a lot of our customers they sign long-term agreements with on-prem deployments and of licensing within their own environments so we are looking at models for this but out of the out of the contract assets approximately half i would say if you want to

Yeah, a little bit more than half. You can see it in the balance sheet. So I think it's 160 short term. So that's within 12 months. And then the rest 113 is long term. Yeah. And then we got more questions about the same thing. So it's mainly, I mean, it's both because of the US, but some of it has been moved, but also because of the long term agreements. So that would be there for a couple of years.

Yeah. So we have one question regarding also with the delivery of contractual obligations and so on. And as we mentioned, we've seen a bit of a shift and fluctuation in actually being able to get to convert the contract assets. And this has been in North America, in the US market, where we were expecting things to move forward faster during the back end of last year. As I mentioned, for Q4, we had a government that was shut down for approximately half of the quarter. That means that everything from the contracting people to the people who are issuing payments and so on are not allowed to work. So that did put some spanners in the works in terms of delays and being able to push things through. As I've said in both the CEO comment and today as well, we are looking at hopefully now a more stable situation when the budget has been approved and moving forward in the US. It is a key important market for us with the massive opportunities that we see out there, but it is also We also have a situation now where we are focusing a lot in the European market and with our NATO customer as well in terms of balancing that as well. So hopefully that will provide a bit more stability as we move forward.

Can you say something about the part of order intake of SEC 185, which was not press released in Q4 around 100 million, I think? What kind of deals are those?

Well, I mentioned some of them. Sorry. Can you say something about the part of order intake of SEC 185, which was not press released in Q4? What kind of deals are those? Well, it's a combination of extensions of smaller contracts where we've been working with customers for a long time. SSA agreements that come to an extension and some customers where we're not allowed to make formal announcements as well with defense customers. But as we said, approximately 110 out of the 185 was in the defense space. And a large majority of that, I think somewhere around 80 something was in the software part of that. So contracts with our existing customers and also smaller contracts spread over multitude of different accounts around the world. So no major deals that we haven't announced, but some that are slightly more sensitive to talk about than others.

I think I can take the first one there. No, it was not. So the question was, what level of visibility do you have regarding content? No, it was not. I disappeared. Sorry. Yeah, here it is. If you're planning to reduce costs by 30 to 40 million in 2026, I was expecting one time items in Q4. I cannot see any, but perhaps there are. And yes, it was. We took almost half of the cost, approximately 4 million in Q4. The total is approximately 9 million. And it is mainly for staff. So it's staff that is still working for us.

Yeah. Let's see what else we've got here. Similar questions from different parts of the world, which is good.

Do you have any plans on start giving guidance for the full year? That was one of the early questions that came in. We're looking at how to simplify the outlook for 4C. We currently don't give any financial guidance in terms of our expected full year results and how we're looking. where we haven't updated any new financial targets compared to what we went out with in the in the IPO. Obviously, we can you know, everybody can see that we haven't we haven't delivered on those as of yet. We're still working, working hard on that. We are looking at updating our guidance during the year. And we will hopefully be able to share a bit more news on that later during 2026. I think what one can say, and as we mentioned earlier, is obviously we didn't get to where we were expecting by the back end of Q4 and the full year result, although slightly better than the previous year. uh wasn't was also not what we were sort of targeting during the mid-year of last year and those deals were delayed uh not not lost so obviously working really hard now to convert those into 2026 and see what we can do now um what else should we

I think that's most of the questions.

That's most of it covered off.

In that case, I think we just say thank you everyone for your attention this morning. and hope that you continue to follow 4C and track our journey as we move forward. And thanks Veronica for the presentation this morning. And we hope to see you everybody around the Hussars in the future. So thank you very much for your attention and have a great weekend when you get to it.