Checkin.Com Group AB (publ)

Hello, and welcome to today's webcast with CheckingIn.com group. We have the CEO, Krista Karlsson, and CFO, Martin Boymel, presenting. After the presentation, we'll open up for a Q&A. And with that said, please go ahead with your presentation.

Thank you and good morning and welcome to today's webcast. As I just mentioned, my name is Christian Karlsson and I'm the CEO of Check-in.com Group. And I have with me today as well our CFO, Martin Boimel. And we will walk you through our report for the first quarter of 2025. I hope you also had a chance to review the report before our webcast. The plan is that I will walk through the company's general development, followed by Martin, who will go through the numbers. And after a brief summary, we open up for Q&A. During the first quarter, we saw a 10% growth compared to the previous quarter. In the combination with that, we're maintaining a strict cost control to make the most out of all of our investments. In the first quarter, we reversed the downward trend we saw during 2024, and our net revenue amounted to 18.8 million Swedish kronors. With that, we are back to quarter-over-quarter growth again. and adjusted for the RingCentral partnership. This is our best quarter since Q4 23. And I will follow up on that a little bit later in the presentation as well. So even though we grew 10% from the previous quarter, we saw a decline of 12% compared to last year. As previously mentioned, we used to have revenues of 3.2 million Swedish kronor per quarter from the RingCentral partnership. However, this revenue was tied to cost at the same level. When we completed the integration of DataCorps software into the check-in platform, we chose to end that partnership. Adjusted for that, our growth was 4% year over year. Our main focus going forward is to continue to find a way to grow organically and expanding in a quite competitive and increasingly market. In line with this, we have continued to invest in marketing and sales. We are seeing a major technical shift, especially when it comes to the travel vertical. We will see that in the coming years, this will completely reshape the playing field, with especially a focus on biometrics and facial recognition for travelers. In the previous report, in a Q4 report, we also mentioned that we have launched a new product as part of a software called Base Check-in. This went live now in the beginning of the year. And for the first quarter, this biometric login product accounted for 9% of the revenue in quarter one. At the beginning of the year, we allocated more resources to our sales and marketing units. We really believe that our software have now reached the level required to work with the largest companies in each industry. Our mission in sales and marketing is now to create conditions to reach companies globally on a much larger scale than before. If I, for example, take the telecom sector, we see a huge demand in the eSIM market for virtual SIM cards, and it's expected to grow around 10% annually. With more increasing regulation, we believe it's a lot of exciting opportunities together with this development. And I can also mention that the agreement we recently were doing with Oredo, which is one of the largest telecom operators in the world, They are like a first mover in their industry in general. So we believe this type of partnerships will not just be interesting because of the new region where we target in the Middle East, but also we know that a lot of other telecom operators around the world look into what Oredo is doing, basically. So we are really excited about that partnership. In the iGaming vertical, stake.com has been a customer for nearly nine months. Still, we see that we have not reached the enormous potential to unlock in this partnership. For those of you who's not really familiar with stake, it's one of the world's largest and fastest growing iGaming operators. We're now working really closely with them to expand the use of our software across markets all over the world. We see as well it's a strong, continuously demand of our products in more regulated iGaming markets. We see some new requirements coming up, for example, in Belgium and Serbia now from first of June. For us to be really successful globally over a longer period, it's really important that we continue to work with strong partnerships. I just want to mention, for example, Creatio, which we announced last year, which is a world-leading CRM platform. These partnerships enable us to reach a much broader base of customers across various types of industries and regions. The upside with this is that we can accelerate both the sales and integration processes, and we can also enter markets and industries where we previously had a low share of revenue in. So we will continue to focus on more type of similar partnerships, and we think that will be part of the success in the future. For those of you who have followed the news over the past month, there has been a lot of discussions about the upcoming changes that will affect travelers and travel experience going forward in the upcoming years. Especially like paperless system will rely heavily on biometrics and facial recognition. We already see that different types of systems will be implemented in different types of regions, meaning that it will be various entry points depending on the service you can offer as a service provider. Our partnerships, which for example Ryanair and WestJet, position us really well to be part of this development going forward. We are as well, of course, in discussions with additional companies in this industry, not just particularly only to airlines, but like the whole, obviously the whole travel industry. But this industry compared to others has been a little bit slower in general with sales process and similar. So we believe that we are in a good spot and we are quite convinced that we will be part of this technology shift that will apply in the coming years. For those of you who looked at our last report, we mentioned the new software product called Phase Check-in. Phase Check-in went live in January and already accounted for 9% of the revenue for the entire quarter. The technology is partly based on the acquired software from our previous purchase of DataCorp, but we have refined and made it adaptable over time to suit the customers of Checkin.com. We are seeing particularly strong interest in the product from industry that are subject to regulations, either on industry-wide or specific certain countries. For those of you who have followed us since before, you know that our ambition is to reach 80% over time of this classic SAS metric rule of 40. The target is to maximize the sum of the revenue growth per share and EBITDA margin with an ambition level to reach over 80% over time. The target still remains long-term, but we know, of course, it will be a major challenge to achieve this for the full year of 2025 in case we not see a larger acceleration of growth in the coming quarters. And with that, I will leave over the floor to CFO Martin Bäumel to sum up the financials.

Thanks, Christian. As we've done this previously, the report itself is packed with a lot of numbers. So I'm just going to go through the high level figures and then we can leave some time for Q&A in the end. So net revenue decreased by 12% compared to the same quarter last year and landed at 18.8 million kroner. But compared to Q4 2024, we're up 10%. Then we've also added a new figure here where we show the growth using constant exchange rates. And then the growth was minus 10% compared to last year. The gross margin was 70% in the quarter, lower than what we've previously delivered. I'll get back to this on a specific slide later. EBITDA amounted to 2.3 million kroner with a margin of 12%. and cash flow from operating activities ended up plus just over 4 million. And we ended a quarter with a cash position of 24 and a half million kroner and an equity ratio of 88%. So if we go into the net revenues here, as Christian mentioned, we're down a bit compared to the same quarter last year, as you can see in the graph, but we've also turned around sequentially compared to Q4, 2024. So revenues landed at 18.8 million kroner for the quarter, down 12%, but up 10% compared to Q4 then. And the decrease from last year was mainly driven by the contract with RingCentral as Christian already mentioned shortly. And that contract was terminated in the summer and RingCentral contributed around 3 million kronor in revenue in Q1 last year. So adjusting for that, we actually grew 4% compared to Q1 2024. Looking at gross profit, the gross profit decreased to 13.2 million in the quarter. It's driven by falling revenues, but also the margin of 70% is lower than what we've delivered previously. We've discussed this a little bit in previous report as well, that it's partly driven by the investments we've made in increased capacity to be able to handle higher volumes, especially in servers, server capacity and similar. But we also saw in Q1 now, a further effect from our increasing exposure to the iGaming market in South America, where we generally see slightly lower margins compared to the rest of the business. Going into sales and marketing, we have spent around 4 million kroner per quarter in the last couple of quarters, and we continue to do that and spend More specifically, 3.9 million in Q1 2025. And that corresponds to 21% of the revenue in the quarter. Looking at EBITDA, we're down compared to last year. EBITDA landed at 2.3 million kroner in the quarter, and that corresponds to a margin of 12%. And the decrease in EBITDA is driven by lower revenues combined with lower gross margins, but partially offset by lower operational costs. And to conclude, we ended the quarter with a cash position of 24.5 million kroner. And if you adjust for our net interest-bearing loans, the net cash was just over 17 million kronor. And the equity ratio at the end of the quarter was 88%. And with that, I'll hand it back to Christian for some final remarks and Q&A.

Thank you for that, Martin. So just to summarize quarter one, we were growing 10% quarter over quarter. We are down like 12% year over year, but adjusted for the RingCentral partnership, we are up 4% compared to last year. Our main internal focus remains on growth and strict cost control. We are therefore continuing our investment in sales and marketing. We see a huge technical shift underway in the travel vertical. And we had a strong start of the year for a newly launched software called Phase Check-in. And with that, I will hand over to Finnvarie Martin and the Q&A.

Thank you very much for the presentation. Yes, let's open up the Q&A section. Starting with the first question. You have a return to positive growth. Congratulations. What are the main drivers behind this development?

Yeah, thank you. It's a combination of a few different type of factors, but we saw positive signs in the travel vertical in the first quarter, also the iGaming vertical. We see it continue to grow again in a combination with a new product, a phase check-in. So it's a combination of a few different types of things that helped us to find positive growth again quarter over quarter.

And can you tell us more about the current efforts in marketing and in sales?

Yeah. So it's crucial for us that we continue to invest in marketing and sales. And we have expanded, I would say, even the focus on the marketing function even further. We know that the market for biometric and face recognition solutions are growing with very high speed right now. It's really important that we are part of that market. But at the same time, we would like those companies globally to find us when they are interested in this type of services and that we should be the number one choice to shows.

Thank you for that answer. Can you tell us more about how you plan to be part of the paperless systems in aviation?

Yes, we mentioned that in the presentation already a bit, but I would say the coming five years, the reshape of the whole travel industry will change and biometric and facial recognition will grow. we see that our software can solve many pieces as part of this puzzle with for example paperless systems and so on but we also believe like different regions could also adapt different type of solutions so We are already live with some airlines, major airlines with this type of systems. And so we believe that we are in a really good spot and have a very good opportunity going forward over the coming years in the way our software has been built.

When can we expect check-in to show growth figures that are comparable to your financial targets?

Yeah, it's very difficult for me to comment, but I can promise that we're doing everything we can to get back on that level and even higher. But I can't really set a specific timeline for when that might happen, even if we have very high ambitions internally.

Thank you for that answer. And when do you think we will see positive financial effects of the WestJet deal?

Yeah. We have communicated about that before that we don't believe that we will see any major like increasingly amount of revenue in the coming quarters from this partnership. Though we believe long term we We believe this has a huge potential financial. But we know historically with similar size of companies and industry we've been working with, it takes its time to get up and running in the level we want. So I don't expect in the coming quarters to see any major positive financial effect.

Are there any new regulations underway in various industries that you think will help drive business?

Yeah. We, for example, have seen these eSIM markets like virtual SIM cards, which is growing globally at a very high speed. So, for example, the partnership we made with Oredo is is basically leading the way um we see that it is continued to to uh getting more and more regulated markets in the argument vertical and we're also seeing that the framework and the requirements in some already regulated markets is getting a little bit tougher for the operators and you need to know more about your customers already from the registration process I just mentioned like Belgium and Serbia, for example, from 1st of June will implement a new framework for registration and verification of customers on sign up that we will be part of. We also see a regulation shift coming up more in Latin America. And I believe it will continue to happen. That is the trend everywhere right now. So we are very well positioned for this.

Has the face checking product grown faster than you expected? After all, it wasn't too long ago since it was launched.

Yeah, it's a good question. No, but it has become an important product for us in a short time. At the same time, we know that it's a very good market fit. especially for newly and upcoming regulations. So I don't know if we should be going fast, but I'm really happy to see the feedback we're getting from existing and potential new customers about the product. So I think we should have quite high expectations for it going forward.

Looking at the gross margin, it has fallen to 70%. What would you say are the reasons behind that?

I can jump in and take that one since I covered that on the financial slides. The direct costs that drives the gross margin is, as I mentioned, driven by kind of semi-fixed expenses, especially for servers and third-party services. That includes kind of capacity, server capacity that we need to pay for in order to handle the peaks and also some annual fixed price license fees that also doesn't grow with our revenues. So when revenues goes down, the direct costs kind of remains the same, which makes the margin go down. And additionally for this quarter, we've also seen slightly lower margins in the South American iGaming market compared to the rest of the business. So those are the two main explanations behind the gross margin.

Okay. Thank you, Martin, for clarifying that. What else can you tell us about the collaboration with Oredo and how do you see the telecom industry going forward?

Yeah, we've been talking about that in the presentation a bit already, but Orido is one of the world's largest telecom companies. And I would say they are attracted as one of the first movers in their industry. I think they were the first one with 5G and so on. This whole eSIM market or virtual SIM card market is growing really quickly. So it's very, very exciting that we were able to get this partnership together. So we believe that they probably will go live in the end of May with the product. It's a really exciting project that we hope could also expand our reach in this whole industry as well, just outside the Oredo partnerships as well.

Okay, we'll take one final question here before wrapping up the Q&A section. Face check-in already accounts for 9% of the business in Q1. how much of that is new business and how much is cannibalizing previous volumes from the same customers?

Yeah. So the phishing product, like it's a total new revenue stream, uh, So obviously the new revenue is coming from existing customers that has started to use the product. And we've also been able to sell this to some new customers basically. So it's basically a mix of customers that already customer chose and decided to like expand the use of our software even further. and that we have been able to sign some new deals because of this.

Thank you very much, Christian and Martin, for presenting today and answering all of our questions. And also thank everyone who followed this presentation with Checkin.com group. And I wish you all a great rest of the day. Thank you very much. Thank you.