Cint Group AB (publ)

Well, good morning. My name is Patrick Comer. I am the CEO of Sint Group AB. Thank you for your patience as we work through some challenges getting this up and going this morning. But now we will jump right into the Q1 2026 results presentation. As a reminder of Sint and our primary business, which is the world's largest survey exchange, We are the platform that matches millions of respondents to the demand side or the customer side of millions of surveys on a global basis. We also have a rapidly growing and important measurement business offering brand lift to our customers' ad campaigns. In review of the first quarter, we had net sales of 34 million, gross profit of 29.4, OPEX of 24.8, and EBITDA of 4.6. What I find important as well is the overall constant currency growth rate of 2.6%. Now, the reason we focus on constant currency is the vast majority of our revenue is in U.S. dollars, particularly the measurement business, which is almost completely in U.S. dollars. So currency fluctuations have a material impact on reported rates of return. So in this scenario, we look at the constant currency and the overall headline from our perspective is this is the first constant currency growth quarter in quite some time. And we're pleased with the progress we've made so far against that. Additionally, in terms of greater depth of detail there, we can look at the. As I said, the return to growth for it does say in the first time in two years, which is important to us. But particularly looking at the sequential improvement for the cent exchange. If you recall, the third quarter, we had a very challenging cent exchange quarter, mainly because of the challenges with migration. And we were able to sequentially improve that both in the fourth quarter and now in the first quarter as well. So what we're seeing is the stabilization and strengthening of our cent exchange business as we work through the remaining parts of the migration story. Additionally, we see the measurement accelerating with an over 22% constant currency growth rate in the first quarter. What's important from our perspective is that historically the measurement business has grown at the plus 10, plus 20 rate. We had a few quarters last year that were the below 10, and it's good to see we're re-achieving the growth rates that we would expect to see in the measurement business. Obviously, throughout, we continue to remain in a cost control scenario to maintain our profitability. And what we've seen both in the fourth quarter and on the first quarter is a strong balance sheet and improvement on the overall cash flow position. In terms of the overall story of Scent 2.0, as we launch and migrate customers to the new platform, we want to talk about where we are with that. Now, if you recall, back in the third quarter, we launched the new platform at the very end of June in 2025 and had operational challenges with our customers moving to the platform in the third quarter. Part of the outcome or the response to this, of course, was to give our customers more time, which was a huge benefit to them and to us. What's critical now to understand is that we've reached complete parity in terms of features and capabilities of the new Synth Exchange with our legacy platform. What that means is that our customers have no functional or process-related issue in terms of their migration to the new platform, and the remaining customers we look to be able to cross over at pace. Now, of course, we've spoken about the legacy Lucid customers, and this is more of an upgrade process that we've started last year and we continue this year, and we expect to give our customers plenty of time. The difference is they're not essentially changing an entire platform, but upgrading from an existing set of features that they understand to the newest version. We've started this gradually in 2026, and we are taking our time operationally with our customers in order to reduce the opportunity for revenue challenges in that transition. Obviously, every quarter we focus on innovation and capabilities that have improved. We continue to talk about quality at Scent. Last quarter, we were able to bring on new quality partners like RepData and had one of the best quality quarters in quite some time. In the first quarter, we had continued improvement in the overall quality story with an almost 25% improvement in our quality scoring within that quarter. What that has meant is that more customers are talking to us about our improved quality, and it's well known within the industry today that Scent is very much on an upward trajectory in terms of overall quality of our capabilities and products. Now, of course, the overall story with AI across the industry is one of expected disruption and change, which we understand quite well. But an early story within the overall sense industry is that there's a new class of interviews and customers called AI moderated interviews. And these are scaling quite rapidly. So this is the capability of using AI within focus groups, whether through voice or video. And Synth is uniquely set up in order to scale with these customers. And what we're seeing is that one of the early signals within our industry is AI demand versus just AI disruption. And finally, as you well know, we have our new product within the measurement business, which is Outcomes, which takes the sales lift capability and adds it to Brand Lift so that customers can understand the impact of their advertising onto direct sales outcomes based upon those campaigns. We are launching, of course, this product in 2026. We pulled forward that capability from our Ascent 2.0 plan from 2027 because of early excitement from our customers. And we're happy to announce that we are in closed beta. And we have a number of customers that have already lined up to test and work with us to flesh out the remaining parts of that product. We look for constructive feedback from our customers. We feel like this Q1 has been important from a quality, stabilization of the exchange, reacceleration of our measurement business, and preparation for products both in AI and in brand sales lift that will be able to compel the business forward throughout 2026. So with that, I will pass the conch to our CFO. Niels, thank you very much.

Thank you and hello everyone. Financial update. So I will start with repeating our financial targets that we announced actually a year ago in the same spot over here. The main ones, organic growth of 10% and EBITDA margin of 25%. And the others also have not changed, of course. So I will move on to the numbers. So as already mentioned by Patrick, it's really good that we have growth again, right? So we have the 2.6% growth in constant currency. I will focus on that as well throughout my part of the presentation. So it increased a little bit overall, but then that's because of SynthExchange improving. So it's still a decline, but improving compared to Q3 and Q4 and acceleration of media measurement. Then on the gross profit side, that's kind of a mathematical consequence of lower sales, but still relatively good in terms of margin. Also, we need to remember that Q1 is always the seasonality-wise weakest quarter, and therefore we have a bit lower gross profit margin. Same on the EBITDA compared to the other quarters. Talking about EBITDA, so you see there an improvement as well. both absolute as well as margin-wise, which is quite good, of course, given that we had lower sales, right? So overall, we're quite happy and satisfied with this. And looking at the segments, so we already discussed Sint exchange. So minus 5%, which is compared to minus 10 and minus 23 from top of mind from the previous two quarters, of course, much better position. And we're looking also forward to see more of this going into the right direction. And then medium measurement accelerating growth to almost 23% in constant currency. And when you look at the regional splits, Americas is always held by media measurements. So that one was going up by 5%. APAC was also going up by 7%. EMEA going down by 4% still. And moving on to the full P&L. So here we already touched upon the sales part and the gross profit part. You see a split of the costs in here. So we had lower OPEX of 25 million compared to 28 million last year. One million of that was due to FX effect. That's what you see there. In other operating expenses, about one million was last year negatively affecting profitability, and we did not have that this year. But other than that, also G&A expenses were in particular lower and also R&D. So we have tight cost control, I would say, still across all buckets. And another thing to point out would be the amortization, which is only 3.8 million compared to 7.4 last year. And this is due to the impairment that we did at the end of Q4, basically. So this is the new normal, I would say, from here onwards. Moving on to cash flow. So cash flow, we're also quite happy with. So you can see overall that it was a good quarter also from a cash flow perspective. We have to point out that last year there were some one-off positive effects. So on the one and the rights issue, of course. So that's what you see in financing cash flow. That was 54 million in euro. And then also on the investing cash flow there, we had the sale of a minority investment of 7 million. So combined, it's 61 million roughly of positive cash that we had last year that we didn't have this year, of course. Investing cash flow has to do with software capitalization, and that is quite similar compared to last year if you would adjust for this minority investment sale. And the financing one is the repayment of the loan that we have, which is 5 million USD every quarter. So that's also comparable with previous quarters here. So overall, we still have a net cash position and that actually improved compared to the end of December, which is quite good as well. And yeah, I think that's what I wanted to say here. Of course, the leverage ratio is therefore negative as well, right? So well below our target of 2.5x by definition. Moving on to working capital. So working capital also reached another low point, so it's the lowest since Q2 2024. You can see it is driven by accounts receivable going down by another 7 million compared to the end of last year, so the last quarter. And yeah, that's the main driver here. So overall, we're also satisfied with what we see here, but at the same time, we want to continue pushing this and reduce it even more, of course. Other than that, I think that's actually the main thing to say from this one. So let's go back to perfect questions.

Well, as you well know, this is the first quarter of 2026. A year ago, we announced our SENT 2.0 strategy. Obviously, with a challenging third quarter, but we've well recovered in terms of our overall expectations, and we are on plan in terms of our own understanding of how the SENT 2.0 plan develops over a number of years. So welcome, Rich Schnittlich, to the stage as we move to Q&A.

Wonderful. Good morning, everyone. Before we get started today, I think there is a few comments that our board chair, Anna Belfrog, would like to make. So I will pass off to her and hopefully she will join us on the line in just a moment. Can you hear me? Yes, indeed. There we have you, Anna. Here you are. Okay. Okay, fantastic.

I just want to remind the participants at this meeting that Patrick will not, he cannot, reply to any questions regarding the bid presently on the market. Any such questions should be directed to me, and we are, of course, very happy to provide an opportunity for you to ask any such queries, and we will set up such an opportunity should it be required. But in this meeting, please concentrate your questions to be related to the earnings report. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Anna. Okay, so we're going to start with calls that have come in, and I will pass off to our tech team to start running them through.

If you wish to ask a question, please dial star 5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star 5 again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Victor Hogberg from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.

Good morning. So a question to Anna then, if Patrick can't answer it, if that's okay. So the board retrates the medium-term targets. They imply margin expansion from 2027 and onwards. However, the bid consortium write about substantial investments needed that will put pressure on margins in the near term. And the board recommends the offer. So how does one square these two comments? Start with that.

Thank you. Okay. So actually the purpose of this call is not really to answer any questions regarding the bid, but fine, I will do a little exception. In essence, the board actually agrees with the assessment the consortium has made about needing to front load certain investments. We have plans in our SIN 2.0 strategy, which includes certain investments at a certain pace. But we are seeing that particularly when it comes to AI, we're going to need to do substantial forward-moving exercises with our investments, which will impact profitability in the short term negatively and also sort of be required from a cash perspective to be relatively sizable. So in that aspect, we actually agree with them. Also, I would like to point out that the fact that we recommend the bid is based on numerous valuation exercises that have been performed by our advisors. And we feel that we have reached an adequate bid level after a very long process.

Okay, thank you. I'll follow up on that if that's okay. So what's the definition here on the near term, given that the medium-term targets, which when they were put out a year ago,

said that they were to be reached on a profitability and growth level from 2027 and onwards what does the near term mean here in terms of the substantial investments that would put pressure on margins then i would say that the consequences is that while we have not changed our midterm targets if you think it's important to keep them they are probably moved into the future by a year or so definitely so so we have a skewering of the of the timeline which essentially began already with the Q3 yourself, that is moving our expectations of meeting our midterm targets forward into the future.

Okay. That was news to me, the timeline. So, okay. Maybe a question to Patrick then, if that's okay. A question on the operations, not about the bid. Q1 indicates that Exchange is on track with the growth turnaround. You said that you will prioritize revenue retention over speed. What does that mean in terms of timing for the full and complete migration? When are you going to be fully done with the consolidation and migration of the platforms?

That's a great question. And Victor, it's good to hear your voice again. In terms of the migration timeline, as we've said before, we expect that to be completed this year. We feel that that pace will be completed in this given year, especially given that the feature parity and capabilities of the platform are at par. There's no longer any technology or feature capability that would keep a customer back from the migration story. So we expect that to be completed in 2026. Thank you.

Is it okay for a third question?

From my perspective, you've had a few. If you would like to stay on and come back for another one, I think that's great, but I think we have other people waiting on the line as well. No worries. I'll get back to the line. Thank you. Thank you, Victor.

Do we have any more questions that are... No more questions on audio. Excuse me. Oh, you have them on the web. Excuse me. Unfortunately, the web questions that we have coming in are actually, so far, all related to the offer. I understand. With zero questions coming in actually about performance. Understood.

So... Victor again. Yeah, sure. We love operational questions.

The next question comes from Victor Hogberg from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.

Okay, perfect. Media measurement. Accelerated growth now again in Q1. Could you help us with the drivers? What do you expect from here given the momentum that is re-found again? The product launches and also the EC comparable now in Q3. What do you expect for the full year? What kind of momentum is possible in media measurement now that it's re-found again?

Correct. Obviously, we're not going to give guidance for growth for the year. Well, we can look back to the fourth quarter. We launched two key capabilities within the measurement business. This would be deterministic social, but also forced exposure, which are small expansions of features and capabilities that our customers are interested in. The big one that we announced last year was our data partnership with Affinity Data. They have the retail credit cards that allow us to understand the sales implication of the actual ad campaigns. That product is at pace of being built. As we said, we are in early beta with a number of customers right now, and we look to fully launch that product in 2026. That, of course, is increasing the excitement and interest from our customer base. as sales lift is incredibly important to be able to tell that story of how advertising is actually impacting sales and therefore potentially revenue as well for our customers. So one of the key areas is adding these new capabilities and new innovations are the key underpinning of growth for the measurement business.

Thank you. Thank you. And a cost question, if that's OK. The question is basically the plan for OPEX once the migration is complete. You previously talked about being able to reallocate resources, and you have been very mindful with costs over the past two years. What's the plan here? And also, what is the plan in terms of the near-term investments that were announced basically?

The 2.0 plan for cost structure, particularly around engineering and R&D, which is, I think, what we spoke mostly about. For the past few years, our engineering and R&D teams have been focused on building the new Synth Exchange and bringing on those features and capabilities that our customers need and want. We talk about the ability, starting in the third quarter of this year, for those teams and those individuals to be moving towards the innovation story versus the build of the Sint Exchange story. That has taken longer than we would like because of some of the migration issues, but we are seeing in Q4 and Q1 the transition of more and more of our R&D capacity from build to innovation. From a cost perspective, what that means is we expect to hold that R&D cost constant on a go-forward basis as we move from build to innovation for new products and features that will underpin growth, and only for the measurement business, but also for the exchange business in the future.

Perfect. Thank you so much. First, just checking out, are there any additional questions coming from the phone? No, and unfortunately, we'll take a couple of minutes here. If there's anybody who has any additional questions that are unrelated to the bid offer, please feel free to send them in. At the moment, it looks like everything is basically related to that. So once again, I'll remind you if you have questions related to the bid, we refer them to our chair, Anna. Excuse me. Refer them to our chair, Anna. As no additional questions are coming in, I'm going to pass the mic back to Patrick.

Well, thank you all for your time and attention today. It's obvious, of course, why questions would be bid-related versus operational. We understand that. Of course, given the context, it would be inappropriate to dive, the three of us, into those issues today. So thank you for your patience on that. Look forward to hearing from you. We have our AGM later today. If you're going to be present, look forward to saying hello. Until next time, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.