Storytel AB (publ)

Good morning and welcome everyone. I'm Bård-Ledersson Torp, the CEO of Storytel Group and together with me here today is of course our Group CFO, Stefan Ward. We are happy to deliver record strong Q4 and full year for Storytel with good financial and operational performances across both our streaming and publishing segments. We conclude 2025 with record high profitability and a strong cashflow generation. And we can say that we are in a good shape to continue our progress in 2026. So here comes some of our strong highlights. for 2025 and Q4. Our Q4 highlights includes continuous strong top-line growth with improved profitability and a strong cash flow generation. Our streaming business delivered subscriber growth of 9%, reaching 2.7 million paying subscribers at the end of 2025. Our subscriber growth was strong across all our core markets in Q4 and also for the full year 2025. And the churn continued lower throughout the whole year, while ARPU levels in local markets remained stable. And this is, of course, a good indicator of the value that we bring to our book lovers. Our publishing business continued to deliver very good performance as well, with external revenue growth of 18% in constant currency, also with high expanding profitability. In publishing, we had a strong list of new releases, also in Q4, such as, for example, the August prize winner and the best-selling title, Vitran, with Bea Usma. And we have also today announced that we during Q4 started the process to transfer our listing to Nasdaq in Stockholm market, main market. And it's expected to be complete in 2026. So now over to our financial performance in the quarter. We delivered sales growth of 12% in constant currencies and EBITDA growth of 15% in the quarter. Our gross margin was at the new all-time high level, while our EBITDA margin was at the 20% level for a second quarter in a row. So our net profit of 300 million was boosted also by a one-off positive tax impact of 195 million. And Stefan will come back and talk a little bit more about assets as well. Cash flow was solid and we ended the year with a net cash position. So we are very satisfied with the performance in Q4. We continue to see improved internal efficiencies. While at the same time, our product development has been intensified during the year. So this is also more that will come, I would say. We crossed 4 billion in sales for the full year 2025. Our full year EBITDA grew by an impressive 26% in 2025 over 2024. Our EBITDA margin for the year reached 18.8%. This is keeping us well on track to meet our midterm 2028 targets, as we announced last year at CMB in May. So over to you Stefan and the numbers of our two business segments.

Thank you, Bodil. We had another solid quarter in our streaming business, adding close to 50,000 new paying subscribers during the quarter and well over 200,000 for the full year. In the Nordics, we added 16,000 in Q4 and 57,000 in 2025. So a relatively strong intake in the Nordics where we have a good or high market share position. In Sweden, we had positive intake both in Q4 and for the full year. Outside the Nordics, we added 32,000 subs during the quarter and 152,000 during 2025. Our strongest market in terms of net intake was Poland. with a total increase of over 50 000 for the full year other markets with strong subscriber growth include the bulgaria the netherlands turkey and germany at the end of q4 our nordic and non-nordic subscriber bases were roughly evenly split at 1.34 million each As a consequence, we continue to see a decline in the average ARPU, as our Nordic ARPU is typically higher than ARPU levels outside the Nordics. This trend will continue. However, it is important to note that the ARPU levels in local markets remain stable to positive in constant currencies. Over the past few years, we have seen a significant decrease in churn levels, and churn continues to move lower also in 2025, ending the year at the new all time low level. Looking at streaming financial, we delivered sales growth of 10% in constant currencies and 5% in reported. Streaming gross margin was 43.6% while the EBITDA margin was 15.3% for a total EBITDA growth of 8% year on year. Our EBIT in streaming improved by 21%. We're on track to cross 1 billion in quarterly revenues from streaming during the second half of 2026. In our publishing segment, we delivered another strong quarter with 11% year-on-year revenue growth and external publishing revenue growth of 21%. Publishing EBITDA margin expanded to 32.2%, enabling EBITDA growth of 19% year-on-year, while EBIT grew by 20%. Storyside is our in-house publisher that has been fundamental for us to build and develop the audiobook market both in the Nordics and throughout most of our non-Nordic footprint. It remains the biggest profit engine of our publishers and had a very good year. Other publishers that delivered strong results during the year are Linden Co., Norstedts and Bokfabriken. Bookfabriken was acquired early in 2025 and has rapidly improved to become one of the key profit contributors in our publishing business. It has exceeded our expectations for 2025 and prospects are promising also for next year. In terms of cash flow, it remained strong both in Q4 and for the full year. Cash flow from operations before changes in working capital in Q4 was 217 million, up 10% on a comparable basis. That means adjusting for the copy suite amount of 34 million that was included in Q4 last year. Cash flow from operations for the full year amounted to 647 million, up 26% year on year. We had some tailwind from working capital in the quarter, but it was less than anticipated. The reason for this is that we have tied up a little bit of unnecessary working capital during the year and had a negative impact from working capital of 75 million. These are due to some... unfortunate internal issues that has been resolved so our best estimate for working capital development in 2026 is to have a neutral impact for the full year cash flow from investing activities was 55 million in the quarter and 252 million for the full year of which 160 million relates to capex Cash flow from financing was minus 12 in the quarter and minus 235 for the full year, including debt repayments of 100 million and last year's dividend of one krona per share of close to 100 million. On the next slide, we can see the balance sheet. And in here, you can both have a look at the cash and equivalents position of 686 million. that we had at the end of the year. You can also see that we have recognized the deferred tax asset of 195 million relating to previously unrecognized tax losses carried forward. This is now deemed as highly probable to be able to utilize and therefore moved on the balance sheet included in the non-current financial assets. We concluded our refinance agreement in January, where for our interest-bearing debt of 550 million was by year end, it was moved from non-current liabilities to current. But as we have concluded the refinancing early this year, it will be moved back to non-current in the Q1 results. Our equity to assets ratio continues to improve and is currently at 53%. On the next slide, we can see our net debt position was 136 million at the end of the year. The strengthening of our balance sheet reflected the new terms of our financing. It provides us with plenty of flexibility to pursue both organic and M&A growth strategies going forward. In addition to strong operating profitability, we also expect to see lower cost of financing and for the tax rate to remain low for the next several years. With that, I hand back to Bodie.

Thank you, Stefan. And to deliver strong financial performance, we need to also deliver strong customer value. And I just would like to take some minutes to highlight what's going on during 2025 where we have increased our efforts for increased customer experience. We have a market-leading position across most of the markets in our footprint, and we are proud of that. And our strategy to defend that is the position that we have built for our two pillars, a world-class user experience and the strongest content catalog. We cater our book-lover segment where reading books is a natural part of daily lives. So since I joined in October 2024, reigniting our industry leading product expertise has been moved up to the top of our strategic agenda during last year and it will stay there. We will be in the front of the evolution of book consumption across all formats. And over the past year, last year, we launched several strong new features. And I will also highlight that there is more to come here. We will continue to intensify our investments in the local relevant content, but also, of course, in the user experience. That is extremely important for us. so that will continue to improve both engagement and satisfaction for our book lovers of today and tomorrow that is building our resilience so one of the most common specific feature that has been requested from our customer is actually sync listening and reading This enabling our users to read along as they are listening or just jump between read and listening. And that's a fantastic feature that many of our customer loves. Sync listening is currently enabled on almost 50,000 books in our catalog. And this is expanding as we speak. Another feature is story art recently launched that shows art pictures connected to a specific timeline in the book. Story art with all the visuals now becomes a natural part of the listening experience optimized in the player. This adds a new immersive layer to the story, driving engagement again and connection with the story. So pilots are launched with Pottermore, Harry Potter in Netherlands, and we have also launched it together with Bia Usmans, title that that also was the swedish august price winner last year so this is very exciting and here we will soon see many more titles coming up also in the children's segments i will say where we see that where we have some demands uh the sleep timer is also very uh Yeah, it's a function that really many of our users use every night. It's used by 300,000 users every night. And we recently launched sleep timer recaps. where we use generative AI to reach the rewind options and to enable a better recap and understanding of the story. Also, when you fell asleep and fall asleep and you don't really know where did you lost the story. So it's easier for you to actually find where you were sleeping in the story. So it's easier to recap and follow up where you start to listen again. This is some of our new features and with this, it's important for us to highlight that we have more exciting features to come in pipeline and this is a strategic important objective for us to increase our customer experience in the player. And over to the last slide here to recap our messages for Q4. We have delivered on our 2025 targets with record profitability and strong cash flow generation, making this a successful year. Our streaming subscribers hit 2.67 million with churn rates consistently moving lower, while ARPU levels remain stable in local currencies. Our publishing segment delivered record external revenue growth, cash flow generation continues to increase, and we closed the year with a net cash position. We remain on track to reach our 2028 mid-term targets. Our firm targets for this year, 2026, is to deliver at least 870 million in EBITDA. We also propose a dividend of SEC 150 up from one krona last year. We see room to increase our dividend by a similar amount also in 2027 and 2028. We are ready to take our business to the next level and one step is also to change listening to the main market in 2026. So with this, I would say, stay tuned. And now we're ready to take your answers. No, to take your questions so we can answer your questions. So please go ahead.

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Joachim Gunnell from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. So the new market listing here should provide some more capital allocation flexibility. And I noted here that you already had some one-off charges related to this list changing in Q4. So can you comment on a bit on when you expect this to be completed? And if you think that buybacks is one tool for shareholder remuneration already in 2026.

Well, we aim to move the chain, or what we have communicated is that it will take place during 2026. We will try to keep it a speedy process, and hopefully we will be done by mid-2026, but that is not a firm promise at this stage. It allows us to have a broader set of tools for shareholder strategies, absolutely, but I can't comment any further than that.

Great. And in light of, yet again, strong cash flows and the strong balance sheet that you now have, can you provide just some reflections on your appetite for non Nordic Comfort acquisitions for 2026 and the pipeline you envision there?

Yes, we have communicated that before that we have an active M&A agenda and the appetite is high. I would say, and we have a high activity ongoing on different markets. So that is what we can say for the moment. And we have also communicated that we are into both streaming and publishing, preferably publishing to roll out our business model that has been proven in the Nordics to more markets. So we are on track on having a lot of meetings for the moment. That's what we can say.

High activity on the M&A agenda, and we look to broaden our publishing base in our core markets outside the Nordics.

That sounds encouraging. And you comment here with regards to, we see strong ARP development on an organic basis, gross margin is strong here, and the churn trends continue to to be supportive, I think, contrary to some competitive vows out in the market. Can you comment just a bit on whether you've seen any sort of impact from heightened competitive activity in Sweden?

Well, in Sweden we grew our subscriber base in Q4 and we grew it for the full year. So we have net additions in 2025 and the competitive environment is challenging, but it's not more challenging in Q4 than it was in Q3 really. But there's a new entrant and I mean it's some uncertainty on what to expect going forward but so far it has been business as usual from our side. Perfect, may I just squeeze in one question also?

Perfect, just one question since Bodil, you commented a bit about the the user experience enhancements that we have seen in in this year but also that you now provide some some a la carte titles in english through through the penguin random house partnership here so so just help us here since strong local content slate this is a key competitive advantage whereas Should we interpret this partnership with Penguin Random House investing that you're seeing some shift in how your customers consume content? Is younger consumer cohorts increasingly preferring English language titles? Is this some sort of trend that you see?

No, I wouldn't say that we change the focus. The local knowledge and the local content is still extremely important for us. We know that uh, over 85 percent of the consumption in the audiobooks and ebooks are in local language so that is it we won't leave that focus that is super important uh but i mean paper book and also the english catalog it's of course one way of adding value to our customers that also want to have those titles and also the english content so so i it's more like expanding our value to the customer. It's not about changing focus. The local perspective is super important still. And regarding the features and then customer experience in the app, it's also a high priority for us now to actually increase the customer experience and the customer value to actually also be the front runner when it comes to listening and reading books, regardless format, I would say. But I think the company has been in a very intense years for a turnaround, and we didn't see that many feature launched a couple or three years ago. So I think this is super important to build our resilience, increased engagement and loyalty as it comes to our customers. So we need to be the best payer when it comes to audiobooks and ebooks. So this is I'm really proud of our product and tech team that also launched. We had like seven features during end autumn last year, and we are on a good pace now. So you would see more to come when it comes to that. That's also uh important for for the resilience and and to be the front runner so to say great thank you thank you the next question comes from georg atling from pareto securities please go ahead

Morning Bodil and Stefan. I have a couple of questions, starting with the impact from Spotify. So, I mean, it's quite clear in your Nordic numbers here in Q4 that they aren't much affected. But I saw comments from your competitor BookBeats who said that the churn to Spotify has eased in early 2026. So I'm just wondering if that's something you see as well, that the churn to Spotify is easing off a bit here in early 2026.

Yeah, we haven't seen any increase in our churn in neither of the markets where Spotify has launched in the Nordics. We assume that consumption is growing for them, but it looks to be rather from new sort of non-existing audiobook consumers. So new people in the market would be our best guess.

Yeah, that's clear. The second question on the guidance here for 26. So I'm just wondering, one, how much margin expansion you baked into this? And second, how much of that 870 that is licensing revenue from Spotify?

We can definitely not comment on what is licensing revenue from Spotify in that guidance. But the guidance is based on our existing model. It's pure organic. It's based on our subscriber growth estimates and our best view of what we can get from the publishing business. Yeah.

But it sounds like if you're going to reach one billion in quarterly streaming sales in the second half of 26, it's quite a lot of growth in that top line as well. It's not solely margin expansion, so to say.

No, certainly not. The guidance gave us a firm commitment for you, the external viewers of the company, a firm commitment to what to expect from us. But it also leaves us some flexibility to prioritize. If we see that we can drive growth, then we can do that without being limited by a margin range so to speak and vice versa if we don't see those opportunities or get good returns on our marketing spend then we will reach that number through other strategies but i i would say that expect us to to try to to grow uh top line as much as possible while protecting our uh satisfactory profitability at current level but we're not seeking sort of to maximize the margins in 2026 it's it's a it's a combination yep

Just final question here on the ARPU in non-Nordic core, quite strong here in Q4 if you compare it to prior quarters in the years. I'm just wondering what's driving this? Is it a mixed shift in countries or is it any price changes in those markets?

Well, it's a little bit of both, but we're growing in markets where we have relatively good output levels. And we try to increase prices where we feel that that is motivated.

That's all I have. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Martin Wallstrom from SB1 Markets. Please go ahead.

Yes, hello, good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. Starting off, I noted a while back that Spotify introduced a new feature where you could kind of shift within physical and e-books, the page match feature, and also that they introduced kind of resetting of physical books on their page. Are you surprised by their ambition in this space and kind of the turn that they're turning into?

Yeah, I would say we have high ambitions regarding not only what Spotify is doing, but it's more about our own agenda to actually increase and enhance the value to the customer. And I think we have delivered on that in a good way during the six months when it comes to the features. So we are on a really good track here and there will be more to come. That is what I can say for the moment. But it's on a high, it's on the top of our strategic agenda, of course.

Yeah, sorry, my question might have been a bit vague, but I'm looking for, looking at Spotify's ambition, kind of the features they seem to be introducing and rolling out and involving their offering. Kind of, is this, level of ambition in line with what you could expect from them or are you surprised in any way?

I think I mean they are good and

um they we know that they are good in in driving innovation and features when it comes to the music industry so so that's um we're not really surprised i mean uh it was uh fairly anticipated that they were entering the market and that they will have a have a competitive offering it's also expected so i wouldn't say that we're surprised by any of the the features that they've launched or any parts of their offering really. When it comes to physical book sales, it's in market that are not outside of the Nordics and for English speaking titles. So that is not usually important for us at this stage when it relates to physical book sales.

Okay, great. And then I was just wondering if we could get any comments on the impact from the Klana partnership that was announced during the fall.

Yeah, we are. I mean, it's a big partnership and still a bit early to comment on that. We are in collaboration in 14 markets with Klarna and increasing also our efforts in that partnership. So I have nothing really now to comment on that partnership that's in line with our expectations for the moment.

Yep, right. And then kind of looking at your churn trends, they're, of course, very encouraging as they're turning lower, but kind of how do you balance with kind of new customer intake and driving down churn? I mean, are you a bit too cautious on new customer intake? Or kind of how should we do that?

I wouldn't say that we are too cautious, but we're mindful of getting good returns on our marketing investments. Sharn Trends is more explained by that our subscriber base, as it grows, it also becomes a larger part of our base has been customers for a very long time and they basically don't churn and that helps us move the churn trend lower. Then when we go into new markets, we still have high churn rates in the beginning and a lot of churn for new customers in the early months. That is nothing that has changed, but the portion of loyal long-time customers is steadily increasing in the base and that helps bringing churn down over time.

great and then just one final question here on the gross margin which was up now again year over year kind of how should we view this going forward should flatten out here or it seems it's continuously drifting a bit upwards

Yeah, in the streaming, we are growing our business outside. We're growing in the core markets outside the Nordics. And in those markets, we typically have a higher gross margin than streaming in general, especially compared with the Nordics. And that trend is expected to continue. So we will have some support for improving gross margins in the streaming mix. On publishing, it's more in effect that we had a very strong year in publishing in 2025 and especially with a very strong finish also with the Nobel Prize winner and this August Prize winning titles and that helps to boost the gross margins in publishing. That is a little bit less certain how our gross margin in publishing will evolve going forward. But I think what you should expect from us is to have a gross margin above 45%. I don't think it's reasonable to expect it to expand from 47%. That is a range, 45 to 47 is a range where we are quite satisfied. I understand that there's some surprises between quarters, but it's the nature of our business, especially when looking at the publishing side of it.

Yep, great. That was all I had. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Derek Laliberte from ABG Sundahl Collier. Please go ahead.

Good morning Bodil and Stefan. I wanted to ask about, and apologies if this has been covered somewhere, but I just noted that operating expenses were up by quite a bit in Q4, both sequentially year-on-year, and you mentioned the marketing spend here to drive growth, but what else is it that sort of results in the higher OPEX?

No, it's mainly an increase in marketing. And we also flagged that in the Q3 call that in Q3, it was a little bit too low. So we saw that increase in Q4. Other than that, there's no real significant explanations. It's relating to us growing, growing top line, basically. So I don't have any better answer than that, Eric.

I'm happy with that, thank you. And on the marketing spend there, can you give any comment about where you've increased spend the most and also when you expect to see an effect on the subscriber base from that?

Well, the biggest part of our marketing budget is still the Nordics, but we don't increase that. The increase in marketing spend is more related to growth outside the Nordics, which is also visible in how the subscriber intake is divided. That's the best answer I can give you.

Perfect. That's great. Sorry if you covered this as well, but you got a question there about the ARPU in the non-Nordic segment, which looks really good there up sequentially. Did you say where have you made price adjustments, if any?

We don't comment on the local markets. You can look at the different websites for granularity, but we are trying to work with price where we find it motivated, and then we're growing more in markets where we have a good or higher ARPU levels. That helps also. So it's both a mix change and a price effect.

Okay, perfect. Thank you.

Thank you, Derek.

There are no more phone questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

Okay, so we have a few written questions. First one is, churn level in the non-Nordics core is not as good as the other markets. What is the reason for that divergence? So churn in non-Nordic core is lower than in the Nordics. And that has to do with a little bit of a maturity profile that we drive a stronger subscriber intake in these non-Nordic core markets. And that is also when we grow fast, that also increases the churn somewhat. So it was the same when we were more aggressive in the Nordics, back in the days when we sort of built the Nordic market, we had a strong subscriber intake and the churn levels were at the high level. So that's the most or the best answer I can give to that question. And then Bodil, we have a question about the Storytel Reader, any news about Reader?

yeah uh any news about that yes uh um i know that i've said that we are into to also relaunch the reader and and there's a lot of customers waiting for that so i i will um say that we are quite nearby to to launching in and test it in some of the markets not all of the markets, but some markets that we think that we have the best fit into where we see the demand from the customers. So I will come back to that quite soon again. We will also do it in a cost efficient way. That's super important. That's why it takes some time.

Yes. Then we have a question relating to any thoughts on the impact for Storytel on Spotify entering the Nordic markets. And what we have said there is that so far we are satisfied with the churn rates in those markets where Spotify has launched. So in this very short period where they have been in the market, we haven't really seen any negative impact on our side. We don't expect that to be forever. I mean, we view them as a serious competitor, but we hope that they help develop the markets in those markets where we coexist and that they will help us build the audiobook market. And that could be something that both consumers and providers benefit from. Then I have a question regarding the unfortunate internal working capital impacts referred to in Q4. Please expand what these were and what should normal working capital performance look like? Okay, so the headwind or the unfortunate impact of working capital relates to the full year. We actually had a tailwind of 14 million from working capital in Q4. What we... can say there is that we have shortened the the period the number of days that we pay our payables um a little bit too much unnecessary too much and we will have altered that back so that should reverse i would estimate that the impact to be around 35 5 million and then normal normal um working capital is the guidance that we mentioned earlier in the call that we expect the neutral impact on working capital for 2026. And then we have a final question relating to our dividend policy for the upcoming years. And what we have communicated there is that we increase the dividend this year. I know that it wasn't formulated as an ordinary dividend last year, but from going forward, it should be viewed as we started with one krona, raise it to 150. What we have said is that we expect to be able to increase it by a similar amount also for 27 and 28. And that fits into our mid-term targets and provides some visibility on what to expect. So far we see that we generate so much cash flow that we are able to pursue our growth strategies while also rewarding shareholders through other strategies. And we expect this to continue over the mid-term. if there will be any changes to that it should be in our sort of when we update the midterm targets but but it it looks promising so hopefully that clears the picture okay do we have any final questions nothing more okay then we conclude the call and thank you for your interest in our company looking forward to to see you at our next quarterly update

Thank you very much for all the good questions and participation today. We're really looking forward to next quarter. Thank you.