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.