Softwareone Holding Stock

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SoftwareOne H1 2026 Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Matilda, the Chorus Call operator. The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Kjell Arne Hansen, Head of Investor Relations at SoftwareOne. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining SoftwareOne's H1 '26 presentation. My name is Kjell Arne Hansen, Head of Investor Relations at SoftwareOne. Joining me today are CEO, Raphael Erb; and CFO, Hanspeter Schraner. In terms of agenda, Raphael will start with an overview of the H1 '26 business performance. Hanspeter will then take us through our detailed financial performance. And finally, Raphael will present the outlook for '26 and share his closing remarks. Before handing over, please let me draw your attention to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements and non-IFRS measures on Slides 2 and 3. With that, I will hand it over to Raphael.

Thank you, Kjell Arne, and a warm welcome to everyone joining the call. I'm proud of our performance in the first half of 2026. On a combined like-for-like basis, we delivered 11.6% year-on-year revenue growth. We also delivered a 24.9% adjusted EBITDA margin, a 4.5 percentage point improvement versus the prior year with our profitability translating into a cash conversion ratio of 69% over the last 12 months. We achieved CHF 100 million of run rate cost synergies, delivering the top end of the announced target 6 months ahead of the original schedule.

Integration is now substantially completed with the company's focus shifting fully to commercial execution and customer value creation. Now let's take a closer look at the financial results. I will mainly focus on the like-for-like performance as this best illustrates the results of the combined business. Q2 '26 maintained a strong momentum from Q1 with revenue growing 10.4% year-on-year. As a result, H1 '26 revenue increased 11.6% year-on-year with all regions and business lines contributing to growth. As already mentioned, in H1 2026, we delivered an adjusted EBITDA margin of 24.9%, an improvement of 4.5 percentage points versus the prior year period.

Q2 '26 was particularly strong with adjusted EBITDA margin reaching 28.9%, up 5.4 percentage points year-on-year. I would also like to highlight that our reported EBITDA margin for the first half of 2026 was 22.7%. This is an increase of 5.2 percentage points compared to SoftwareOne's stand-alone reported EBITDA in H1 '25, reflecting well-executed integration and synergy realization. Overall, our results illustrate the strength of our business model and confirm the strategic rationale of the merger we closed a year ago. Now let's look at the business line performance on a combined like-for-like basis.

In H1 '26, all business lines showed positive growth with channel and services showing an exceptional 35.6% and 17.4% growth at constant currency, respectively. Software & Cloud Direct grew 1.5% in H1, driven by EA to CSP conversion. This continued in Q2. However, growth declined 1.8% as the comparative period benefited from several larger deals. We expect direct to return to growth in H2 '26. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the first half of 2026 ended at 50.8% at the same level as last year.

Our Channel business had an exceptional first half of the year, growing 35.6% with an adjusted EBITDA margin ending at 57.2%, an increase of 9.3 percentage points versus prior period. This clearly proves the key message from our CMD. This is a very scalable business model. The growth in H1 '26 was led by the CSP business as well as strong growth from other ISVs with AWS at the forefront. In addition, the expansion of CloudIQ to new countries further contributed to Q2 '26 performance.

Performance in our services business was also strong in the period, led by CSP-related services. In addition, cloud services, especially in AWS and Google, data and AI and cybersecurity continued to deliver strong performance. Profitability in services business also improved, and our adjusted EBITDA margin ended at 8.5% for H1 '26, a significant increase from 3.3% in H1 '25. Growth in H1 '26 was broad-based across all our regions, and I'd like to walk you through key highlights for each region.

DACH grew 6.8%. Microsoft-related growth remained strong, driven mainly by continued EA to CSP conversion, which also drove double-digit growth in our services business. Western Europe grew 11.7%, driven by strong double-digit growth in services and over 50% growth in channel, supported by continued EA to CSP acceleration in direct. The Nordics delivered particularly strong growth of 26%. Our services business, which amounts to over half of the regional revenue grew close to 20%. Direct delivered double-digit growth and channel grew more than 50%.

I'm very pleased with our progress in North America, which delivered its second consecutive quarter of growth, up 8.6% for H1 '26. This was driven by channel, which nearly doubled year-over-year alongside strong services growth from CSP and AWS cloud services. APAC was our fastest-growing region, up 23% for H1 '26 and accelerating to 27% in Q2. Growth was broad-based with particular strength in Australia and New Zealand, India, Southeast Asia and North China. The service business remains the primary growth engine, led by cloud services and cybersecurity.

LATAM grew 6.9% to CHF 49.3 million, led by services, cybersecurity, data and AI and AWS with direct stable year-over-year. Brazil and Mexico both contributed positively. And lastly, CEE grew 16.7% to CHF 42 million, with strong performance across all business lines, particularly in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Let me now share a great example of how SoftwareOne moves from project execution to strategic engagement. What started as a cloud migration project has become a strategic partnership.

Together with Allianz Ayudhya, the Thailand-based subsidiary of Allianz, a leading global insurance and asset management company, we successfully migrated over 500 servers to AWS, reduced infrastructure operational run cost by 24% and accelerated their cloud transformation journey. Today, we are supporting broader modernization and innovation initiatives such as development of an app that would modernize Allianz Ayudhya's life and health claims process, demonstrating how our business model and offering coupled with successful execution creates opportunities for deeper customer relationships. And with that, I will hand it over to our CFO, Hanspeter Schraner, who will take you through the financial details of the first half of '26.

Thank you, Raphael, and welcome from my side as well. I will now take you through the IFRS income statement. As a reminder, the '26 income statement includes Crayon, which has been consolidated since 1st of July '25 and therefore, significantly impacts year-over-year comparisons. Revenue grew 68.2% to CHF 818.3 million in H1 '26. The performance also reflects tailwinds from multiyear CSP contracts and early renewals triggered by Microsoft price increases in July '26, consistent with the trends we saw in Q1.

Reported EBITDA increased to CHF 185.4 million, corresponding to a margin of 22.7%, a significant improvement of 5.2 percentage points versus the prior year, driven by strong revenue growth, synergy realization and disciplined cost control. Depreciation and amortization includes CHF 20.5 million of amortization associated with acquisition-related intangible assets arising from the purchase price allocation. The net financial results mainly reflect higher debt levels following the Crayon acquisition, whereas the prior year period benefited from positive fair value adjustments on SoftwareOne's pre-existing investments in Crayon.

H1 '26 effective tax rate was impacted by noncapitalized tax losses and nontax deductible expenses. And as a result, net profit for H1 '26 amounted to CHF 54.3 million. Let me now turn to the bridge from the reported EBITDA to adjusted EBITDA. Adjustments remain low and continue to be largely driven by the Crayon integration activities. In H1 '26, CHF 60.9 million of the total of CHF 18.4 million EBITDA adjustments related to Crayon integration costs.

Since the start of the integration in '25, cumulative Crayon integration expenses have reached CHF 42.3 million as of H1 '26. We now expect total cumulative integration costs by the end of '27 to be in the range of CHF 75 million to CHF 85 million below the initial estimate of CHF 80 million to CHF 100 million. Looking ahead, we anticipate realizing a further CHF 5 million to CHF 10 million of cost synergies by the end of '26, with approximately CHF 20 million of integration expenses expected in H2 '26, around CHF 20 million of integration costs remain to be incurred in '27. This slide summarizes OpEx development on a combined like-for-like basis. OpEx remained broadly flat year-over-year at CHF 632.9 million.

Cost discipline remains intact. Realized incremental in-year cost synergies of CHF 37 million were largely offset by PEX inflation, performance-related compensation, growth investments and higher third-party delivery costs linked to revenue growth. FX further reduced OpEx. EBITDA adjustments also reduced from CHF 33 million to CHF 18.4 million, reflecting the improvement from reported to underlying profitability. Turning to the balance sheet. As of June '26, net debt stood at CHF 408 million, up from CHF 369.3 million at year-end '25.

Gross debt primarily consists of the CHF 550 million term loan and CHF 200 million drawn on the revolving credit facility. As planned, the bridge facility was fully repaid in January '26. Comparison to June '25 should be viewed with some caution as the June '25 balance sheet reflects the pre-closing structure. At that time, we had both the bridge facility drawdown and the Crayon shares recorded as financial assets prior to settlement of the transaction. Net working capital after factoring improved to negative CHF 509.2 million as of June '26 compared to negative CHF 216.6 million a year ago.

This improvement mainly reflects the structurally attractive and acquired working capital profile of Crayon. Intangible assets increased substantially following the acquisition and now include the goodwill and acquired intangible assets recognized as part of the purchase price allocation. I would also like to note that we have now finalized the purchase price allocation for the Crayon acquisition. As a result of this final valuation work, goodwill was adjusted by CHF 22.5 million respectively as of the acquisition date.

Importantly, this is a balance sheet remeasurement. There's no impact on SoftwareOne's cash flow, underlying operating performance or previously communicated synergy expectations. Overall, equity increased to CHF 992.7 million, almost doubling versus June last year, reflecting the capital increase related to the Crayon acquisition and the profit for the period, partially offset by dividend paid and currency translation adjustments over the period. Turning to working capital, which remains a key management focus. On a like-for-like basis and looking at the last 12-month period to June '26, net working capital before factoring improved by CHF 46 million.

This improvement came even as we reduced our utilization of short-term factoring by CHF 12 million. So after factoring, the net improvement was CHF 34 million. I would like to emphasize that we delivered strong growth across the combined business while keeping net working capital broadly stable. This reflects continued discipline in working capital management and ongoing improvements in our underlying processes, which remains a priority going forward. At our Capital Market Day, we introduced a cash conversion target above 60% throughout '26 to 2030 period.

On a last 12-month basis, we delivered a 69% cash conversion, excluding the impact of factoring. Last 12 months, operating cash flow was CHF 271.6 million, primarily driven by profitability. Adjusting for the CHF 12 million reduction in factoring utilization, operating cash flow was CHF 283.6 million. After CapEx of CHF 71.9 million, free cash flow amounted to CHF 211.7 million. Against last 12 months reported EBITDA of CHF 308 million, this translates into a cash conversion rate of 69%, well above the target.

Last 12-month CapEx of CHF 71.9 million was primarily related to internal IT investments, followed by platform investments with services and other investments accounting for the remainder. As outlined at the Capital Market Day, we expect CapEx to increase modestly during '27 and '28 as we accelerate investments in platforms, internal IT and ERP initiatives. During this period, CapEx is expected to represent approximately 7% to 8% of revenue before normalizing towards around 5% from '29 onwards.

Regarding cash conversion, we continue to expect a meaningful tailwind from net working capital improvements over the first 3 years of the plan period, with benefits moderating thereafter. The exact phasing will naturally depend on the pace at which we execute further working capital improvements across the combined business. Turning to the H1 '26 cash flow statement. We generated operating cash flow of CHF 90.1 million, up slightly from CHF 87.1 million in the prior year period, supported by stronger profitability. Profit for the period increased significantly from CHF 9.1 million to CHF 54.3 million.

This benefit was largely offset by working capital movements, which resulted in CHF 72.1 million cash outflow in H1 '26 compared to a cash inflow of CHF 81.8 million in the prior year. The prior year period benefited from the introduction of our new nonrecourse factoring program. Investing cash flow amounted to an outflow of CHF 34 million, primarily reflecting CHF 36.5 million CapEx, broadly in line with the prior period and focused on internal IT and platform investments. This compares to an outflow of CHF 64.7 million in H1 '25, which included the settlement of the swap agreement related to the Crayon investment.

Financing cash flow was outflow of CHF 102.4 million compared to an inflow of CHF 369.3 million in the prior year. This year's figure was negatively impacted by the acquisition of Crayon minority interest. The prior year's figure by contrast, benefited from CHF 424.2 million drawdown of the Crayon acquisition bridge facility. As a result, cash and cash equivalents were CHF 382.8 million at the end of June '26 compared with CHF 419.1 million at the beginning of the year. Let me conclude with the development of net debt over the last 12 months. As of June '26, net debt stood at CHF 408 million with a leverage ratio of 1.1x.

Compared to the net cash position of CHF 36.2 million in June '25, the increase was mainly driven by the acquisition of Crayon. Beyond the acquisition itself, the key cash outflows were income taxes and interest paid, capital expenditure and Crayon transaction and integration expenses. This concludes the H1 financial review. With that, I will hand over to Raphael for his closing remarks.

Thank you, Hanspeter. We are tracking well towards delivering against all targets. Looking at the numbers. FY '25 revenue growth was 1.4%, and on an LTM basis to June '26, that's now at 8.9% growth. Our '26 guidance remains mid- to high-single-digit revenue growth. H2 2026 growth is expected to moderate as the benefits from accelerated EA to CSP conversion and early renewals, which supported H1, don't repeat at the same pace, compounded by a tougher comparison base in H2 '25. On EBITDA margin, FY 2025 was 20.9% on an adjusted basis, with LTM now at 23.2%. We continue to guide to above 23% adjusted margin for 2026.

Our dividend payout policy remains 30% to 50% of adjusted profit for 2026, moving to 30% to 50% of reported profit as we look forward 2030. And lastly, our cash conversion outlook for 2026 is above 60%. We wanted to use today's update as an opportunity to give you a bit more detail on what's driving the path to our 2030 margin ambition we laid out at the Capital Markets Day in June. As a reminder, we are targeting an EBITDA margin above 28% by 2030, a 5 percentage point improvement compared to the '26 outlook, which we expect to phase roughly linearly over the period. The largest contributor, around 3 percentage points comes from AI and automation efficiencies and further embedding that across our own internal processes.

A further 1 percentage point comes from scaling our Channel business. Margin expands faster than growth as we scale within our existing footprint and as we expand into new markets. The final percentage point comes from our Services business as AI drives a more scalable delivery model through, for example, central platforms that allow us to leverage expertise globally and standardize some delivery alongside continued SG&A efficiency. We expect this to improve margin with no dilution effect. And last but not least, as we have already said this during the CMD, sharpening our Services portfolio is something that will contribute to the margin expansion.

All 3 of these build on the foundation we have already delivered, our CHF 100 million cost synergy program completed in H1 '26 and continued benefits from the more efficient operating model that the program put in place. Underpinning all of this is continuous cost discipline across the group. And now I'm pleased to present our evolved Executive Board effective from 1st September. These changes mark the next phase of SoftwareOne's development, increasing regional representation at the Executive Board level and bringing customers, partners and markets closer to decision-making.

Regina Manfredi will assume responsibility for the full Americas region, expanding her current mandate for North America to include LATAM. Regina led Crayon's North America business ahead of the merger and has served as President of North America since July 2025. Rico Andreoli will lead the full EMEA region, broadening his responsibilities beyond Western Europe to include the Nordics, DACH and CEE. Rico brings nearly 2 decades of experience at SoftwareOne, having joined in 2009 and most recently serving as Regional President, Western Europe.

Varun Paliwal will continue to lead APAC, a region he has led since January 2025 after more than a decade in senior roles at SoftwareOne. Lastly, Gu mundur A alsteinsson has been appointed Chief Channel and Ecosystems Officer. Gu mundur recently served as Chief Partner and Sales Officer and brings more than 25 years in the software and cloud industry, including a decade at Crayon in senior commercial leadership roles. Combined, the new structure strengthens accountability and supports faster execution.

I would also like to mention that our Chief Operating Officer, Oliver Berchtold, has decided to leave the company. Let me close with a few key takeaways. With integration substantially complete and synergies of CHF 100 million achieved, our focus is now shifting fully from integration to commercial execution and customer value creation. We remain on track to deliver on our 2026 financial targets across growth, margin and cash conversion. And we continue to focus on sustainable working capital improvements to further strengthen our cash generation. Taken together, this sets a clear foundation for how we execute against our ambition going forward. And with that, we will now move to the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Nooshin Nejati from Deutsche Bank.

Congrats on the quarter. I have a couple of questions on margin. Given how strong margin has been in H1, why are you only reiterating the guide for 2026? I guess my question is, what are you expecting to weigh on margin in H2? And on 2030 margin bridge, and thanks for the color, very useful. The biggest piece is from AI and automation efficiencies. How much investments do you need to achieve this? And where exactly do you see those coming from? Is it internal processes, SG&A or delivery productivity? And if I may, also on the linearity of that expansion, do you also expect the contribution from AI to be linear? Or is that more back-end loaded?

Thank you very much for the question. Maybe first of all, on the EBITDA margin target. I think the lower -- look, the lower end of the range would require a scenario where several things, I would say, would move against us at once. We are not seeing evidence of that today. The range as guided reflects a realistic band of outcomes. But based on the underlying growth trajectory, the momentum in Services and Channel and the trends across our regions, we are comfortable that we will land in the range, and we are from an EBITDA margin positive that we will not land at the bottom of the 23%.

I hope this clarifies your question on the EBITDA margin. Then I think you had a point related to the AI efficiencies. We mentioned before on the trajectory to reach the 28% plus target for 2030 on EBITDA margin that we see this linearly improving. Now for AI related, for sure, we see some more of the effects probably '28 onwards.

Right. And sorry, how much investment you need to achieve this?

I mean this is what we have communicated at the Capital Market Day. CapEx will increase in '27, '28 to we said also today 7% to 12% (sic) [ 8% ] of revenue, funding these investments in AI and automation and the funding will come from the release of net working capital. So it should be in a way cash neutral. So we will have heavy investments in the next 2 years and then benefiting the years beyond.

The next question comes from the line of Florian Treisch from Kepler Cheuvreux.

I have basically 2 questions around the EA to CSP shift. The first is, can you simply -- can you kind of quantify the tailwinds you have seen in H1 and what you expect to happen in H2? Or can we argue that higher pricing at Microsoft can compensate for the higher comparison base in H2? And the second one is like you flagged that the CSP shift has also positively impacted your services margin. Can you talk a bit about the sustainability in that segment if you look into the coming quarters, if it's fair to assume a 10% plus margin also in the quarters to come?

Thank you very much, Florian. We mentioned during the call that -- the EA to CSP conversion was a bit accelerated in H1 due to early renewals also due to the fact of the price increases of Microsoft as per July. And that clearly gave us certain tailwinds in H1. And we mentioned that the tailwind is around 4 percentage points overall. And this will then also have an impact on H2, where we see a bit of decelerated growth compared to H1.

The second point, it's absolutely true that the EA to CSP conversion has an impact not only on our direct or channel business, but also on our services business line. It has a positive impact because -- we sell CSP always as a bundle, which consists of the license plus a service wrapped around. Typically, this is -- there is various support packages which we offer to our customers. But there is always a service wrapped around. And obviously, that then also helps us accelerate our Services business and contributes to the growth, which we have achieved in H1 and will also contribute to the growth which we see in H2.

Marc B rgi from Finanz und Wirtschaft.

Actually, my questions were already asked. Yes, I was interested about the tailwinds that you get due to the early renewals, could you already clarified that.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Christopher Tong from UBS.

Maybe just one from my side. On Microsoft 2027 incentive changes. I was just wondering what your thoughts were on the introduction of gross margins and the change of channel partner incentive changes?

Thank you very much, Christopher. I mean we think, broadly speaking, on the FY '27 incentive framework, the focus is increasingly on growth basically and partners which grow fast, they can, I would say, benefit, right? As for Microsoft announced, they announced this 5% margin reduction from October '26 on products such as 365 E1, E3, OneDrive, SharePoint.

Based on our discussions with Microsoft and also our assessment, it suggests that we would not expect a meaningful impact overall. Any reduction on these products should largely be balanced by other incentive opportunity. Also, these products make up only a small part of our overall CSP business. And therefore, I would expect there is no -- there is absolutely no material impact for us on the incentive changes. We see them as very neutral.

We now have a question from the line of Christian Bader from Z rcher Kantonalbank.

I have a question regarding taxes. Your IFRS reported tax rate was 42% in the first 6 months. However, in terms of cash taxes, the cash effective tax rate was only 20%. So I was wondering, can you maybe provide some color what we should model for the full year tax rate?

For '26, you can assume a more normalized tax rate in the range of 30%.

And is this a good run rate for the coming -- for the years thereafter?

Of course, the ambition is to further reduce. But for '26, given where we stand with integration, it's a reasonable rate for.

[Operator Instructions] We have a follow-up question from the line of Marc B rgi from Finanz und Wirtschaft.

Could you maybe explain the logic behind the reorganization? Why did you decide to streamline it and reduce the number of regions?

Thank you, Marc. I mean we have mentioned we go now into the next phase, right, from integration towards customer focus and execution. That's really the key. And I think with that, it's very vital that we make sure that within the Executive Board, we really have the representation, which is close to the customers and close to our markets. And therefore, elevating some of the regions into the Executive Board makes a lot of sense. And that's what we have done now. We have 3 overarching regions with EMEA, Americas and APAC, focusing exactly on this.

And then also, last but not least, very importantly, is the channel representation and our vendor partnership representation in the Executive Board with Gu mundur joining -- we mentioned the channel business, which is part of 2030 strategy and plan, the fastest-growing business line, also a very margin accretive business line. And we have that now represented in the Executive Board. And yes, that's why basically, we are very confident that -- and I'm personally honestly very excited to work with this newly structured Executive Board moving forward.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Kjell Arne Hansen for any closing remarks.

Thank you, and thank you, everyone, for joining. And as always, please don't hesitate to reach out to the IR team if you have any follow-up questions. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

So good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to SoftwareOne's 2026 Capital Market Day. My name is Kjell Arne Hansen. I'm the Head of Investor Relations for the company. I'm very happy to see so many of you joining us here in Zurich today, and also a warm welcome to everyone joining us online. The Capital Market Day we have today marks a milestone for us in our investor and analyst engagement, close to a year after the combination with Crayon.

Today, we will give you the opportunity to learn more about our combined capabilities and the significant value creation opportunities that we have today in a market that is becoming increasingly more complex for our customers. You will hear this story directly from several of our members from the management team. You will also hear it from our customers. You will also hear it from our channel partners. And last but not least, you will hear about our strategic partnership with Microsoft and Nicole Dezen.

Before we start, I would just like to draw your attention to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements and non-IFRS measures. But we have a very exciting day ahead of us, so I suggest we just get started. And I would like to introduce our co-CEOs, Melissa Mulholland and Raphael Erb on stage.

Thank you. Welcome. It's truly a pleasure to be here with you today, seeing so many people that have been by our side as shareholders, analysts, employees, making this combination come true. We are so grateful for all of your support. And building on that, many of you kept asking us, when can you do a Capital Markets Day? And here we are. Our objective is to provide further clarity and confidence in how we are planning to evolve as a company and build lasting shareholder value.

Our internal ethos that we always talk about is, walk the talk, and we are very committed to deliver on what we present today. At SoftwareOne, we have a long-standing tradition of starting each meeting with our core values, which spell out the word impact and focusing on one that best illustrates the purpose of the content.

For today's event, it's all about momentum. We are on a true trajectory as a company, building on our strong Q4 and Q1 performance and most importantly, our long-standing business model of being a trusted adviser to our customers. 2025 was an intense year, but our focus remained committed to the business and success of the integration of Crayon. And we're so grateful to be here today to take you through that in further detail.

Thank you, Melissa. Good afternoon, everyone. A warm welcome also from my end. It's great to see so many investors, analysts, media in the room today. The room is packed. So we are very thankful to all of you for taking the time. Let me start by providing you an update on where we are with our most significant integration in the history of the company, bringing Crayon and SoftwareOne together as one. We are very pleased with the progress, which is already tracking clearly ahead of schedule.

As of end of May, we have realized CHF 86 million of run rate cost synergies. This means we are already in the range of our CHF 80 million to CHF 100 million cost synergy commitment. Based on our forecast, we see a very good chance to already deliver the CHF 100 million in cost synergies by Q2 with our result announcement. And with that, close the chapter of integration.

Our revenue synergy pipeline is strong and above our internal targets. Our results with the last two quarters delivering double-digit growth underline this. Execution is firmly on course. And while there is still work to do, we can clearly say that we operate as one organization. Importantly, the scale and reach of the combined business are strengthening our customers and our vendor relationships. With continued consolidation across the industry, this underscores the strategic logic of the combination.

Crayon and SoftwareOne has created a business of unmatched scale, reach and expertise. 12,000 employees are operating in 70-plus countries worldwide. We are servicing 70,000-plus customers directly. And this is very important, another 200,000-plus customers indirectly through our 12,000 channel partners. In total, we, therefore, reached more than 270,000 customers directly or indirectly via our channel partner network. As of year-end 2025, our gross sales on a combined like-for-like basis reached CHF 18 billion.

Cloud consumption has been growing ongoing over the years, reaching CHF 9 billion, means half of our total gross sales is cloud consumption-based contracts. Throughout the day, you will -- we will obviously elaborate more about the AI era and our role in that era. But you can imagine that with AI, we foresee cloud consumption to further massively increase over the next years.

Furthermore, CHF 4 billion of our gross sales globally is digitally transacted, means automated run rate through our platforms. Looking at our vendor relationships, we are deeply embedded across 10,000-plus vendors with more than 12,000 certifications across the hyperscalers and other ISVs.

Last but not least, Gartner and IDC recognize us as the global leader in software asset management services, which refers to our IT asset management, to our cost management portfolio, which is really the core of what we do. We help our customers optimize the software and cloud and AI spend. This is the platform we are building from. And today, we'll show you what we intend to do with it and why we are convinced that the AI era actually plays to our cards and creating a powerful tailwind for SoftwareOne.

SoftwareOne is the leading global software and cloud solution provider that helps customers optimize modernize and operate their technology estate. First, we help customers optimize their software, cloud and AI costs through our IT cost management as well as software and cloud sourcing services. Second, through our cloud services and data and AI portfolio, we help customers modernize and innovate their environment. Finally, we help to operate and secure these environments through our managed services portfolio, creating ongoing customer engagement and generating new cross and upsell opportunities to optimize and to innovate again.

This is the flywheel approach which we are having. This creates a recurring customer life cycle, optimize costs, reinvest savings into transformation and then operate the new environment efficiently. Our portfolio is built around that life cycle, combining advisory, implementation and managed services with deep relationships across the software and cloud ecosystem.

As you can see on the right side of the slide, we are operating our business across three business lines: Software and Cloud Direct, Software and Cloud channel, Software and Cloud Services.

Software & Cloud Direct and Channel represents our sourcing or in other words, our reselling business of our portfolio. Software & Cloud Services is across IT cost optimization, cloud services as well as data and AI solutions. Let's move now from what we do to who we serve. We bring our portfolio to market through three customer segments. In SME, we predominantly provide standardized and scalable solutions that allow customers to access enterprise-grade technology with simplicity and speed.

In corporate and enterprise, we combine software, cloud and services to help these organizations accelerate transformation while controlling cost and complexity. In public sector, we serve government agencies, education institutions, and health care organizations. It's a distinct go-to-market motion for us because it has slightly unique and different buying behaviors, procurement processes, funding mechanisms and licensing models compared to commercial enterprises. It's a very important segment for us as we are seeing good growth momentum and sustainable strong growth in that segment in the future.

Finally, our channel business significantly extends our reach by enabling partners to leverage SoftwareOne, the platform, services and expertise, creating additional scale and market access. SoftwareOne mainly acquired the channel business through Crayon, and this has been one of the key strategic rationale for the acquisition. Today, we operate our channel business in 25 countries, and we want to obviously further scaled it out across the globe, across our 70 markets we operate in. The channel business is very resilient with high partner retention rates, consistent recurring revenue streams, and it delivers our highest EBITDA margin across the three business lines.

Furthermore, it's our fastest-growing business line. Overall, our combination of life cycle-driven portfolio and large diversified customer coverage together with our channel partners is very unique. One of our most important indicators of the strength of our business is the performance of customers that engage with both our transactional and services capabilities. Today, 20% of customers generate 66% of revenue with a retention rate of 91%. This demonstrates the power of our flywheel, optimize to innovate.

When customers move beyond transactional relationship and engage SoftwareOne across the life cycle, they become larger, more strategic and more loyal customers. As a result, one of our biggest growth opportunity and key focus areas is not simply acquiring new customers. It is increasing wallet share through service attach or in other words, expanding transactional relationships into life cycle partnerships.

Everything you just heard and how to screen recording will hear throughout the day around our strategy and the opportunity we see ahead of us comes obviously down to execution and accountability. To deliver on our ambitions, we have a leadership team that combines deep industry expertise, strong operational capabilities and a shared commitment to customer success and value creation. It was important for us to introduce you today not only the Executive Board, but really our extended leadership team. This is the team where ultimately all our employees report into. This is the team who has been leading over the last 12 months throughout a successful integration of Crayon plus SoftwareOne. We are obviously very proud and thankful to this team. Many of them are here with us, and they will contribute to the presentations. They will come up on stage, so you will get a flavor of the team and looking forward to the ongoing dialogue.

With that, I hand over now back to you, Melissa.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Now that you've met our leaders, I would like to spend a few minutes discussing our approach to ESG. as we see this as an important competitive advantage for us in how we go to market and attract and retain talent, which is our most important asset in the business that we serve.

ESG is embedded in our business, and we deliver it through our cost optimization service, which we often call Software Asset Management, or ITAM, but specifically in the ESG category, we call it GreenOps, a practice that helps customers reduce carbon emissions across cloud and AI environments. We see this as a driver of both growth and resilience. It helps our customers achieve their sustainability goals. And in fact, in most RFPs, customers expect this. It helps us be able to deliver higher-valued services and strengthens the business by reducing risk and improving future readiness.

In 2026, we will continue to scale GreenOps, improve our climate disclosures, advance our DEIB initiatives and further enhance our information security and resilience capabilities. From an AI perspective, we have incorporated ethical AI into our framework to ensure we have the necessary guardrails in place with the solutions we build for our customers. Now speaking of AI, it's clear that the pace is accelerating. If you look at tech spend, by 2030, it's expected to reach $4.8 trillion. The opportunity is immense. Underlying the tech spend, the growth overall is 9% on a compound annual growth rate over the midterm, strongly driven by AI.

Across our addressable market, we expect 6% growth in the transactional business and 9% in services. Both revenue pools are supported by AI-driven demand with services benefiting the most, driven by our core capabilities in ITAM and FinOps, as well as emerging areas such as AI spend management. The new word is tokenomics. And for us, this momentum is not new. We are used to change. In fact, we thrive in it.

To illustrate this further, let me take you back in our history journey as a company. In the 2000 era, the focus in technology was all about software licensing. Customers wanted the benefits of software, but were confused by all of the complexities around licensing rules and product use rights. Vendors such as Microsoft, created their own software asset management teams that were known to raise questions about compliance, which often resulted in higher costs and triggered audits. I was one of those people.

I worked at Microsoft, leading software asset management out of the U.S., and we always called our peers and colleagues the PhDs of licensing. We thrived on increasing costs. That's why companies like Crayon and SoftwareOne had to develop software asset management capability to advise those customers around audit, compliance, spend management. This is core to who we are as a company. It's what we do. But the complexity continued thereafter. It expanded into the areas of cloud.

Everyone knows the cloud journey. But sometimes we forget the fear, the uncertainty that existed back then from data being stored in basements and data centers to being moved into the cloud and the fear of what does that mean? Will there be risk, security? How will all of this be managed? That still exists. That complexity, that fear exists in many parts of the world. Most companies still don't have everything fully migrated to the cloud. And then while vendors are pushing customers to go all in, customers are increasingly becoming more wary of what cloud partner they should actually put their data in? This is all very confusing. This raises more and more questions in a cloud-based era, but the journey is not over.

Then came SaaS applications and subscription services. So moving from seats to cloud consumption, it was no longer about having a license to a particular use of software, but how do you manage consumption, adoption, again rising costs. Then there's GDPR, security, privacy, risk, how do we navigate all of this? The opportunities in the cloud were so diverse that every single customer -- almost every single customer I speak to, and you'll meet today, actually have their cloud environments across multiple cloud players.

Now we are in the AI era, the industrial revolution of technology. Each phase of this technology journey creates complexity. And each phase we support our customers in today. So when you ask us, is AI a threat? We actually see it as an opportunity because each phase of this is required to be AI ready to be able to actually manage the tail spend, be able to manage all of these things is something that we know best. AI moves from experimentation to enterprise scale and adoption and the ability to outpace it and governance becomes increasingly complex. This leads to uncontrolled costs, greater vendor complexity, which model do I use, regulatory challenges, sovereign cloud, limited visibility on outcomes, how do I make return on investment?

We all know that the opportunity is there, but how do we really turn that into tangible outcomes. This is precisely where SoftwareOne plays. We support customers in managing complexity and cost optimization to deliver optimal return on investment. The scale of the opportunity is clear. Gartner expects AI-driven demand to grow at 33% CAGR over the midterm with precisely AI data spend increasing sevenfold over the same period.

Now why would customers choose us in this AI era? First and foremost, global reach. Raffi described this earlier, operating across 70 countries, but we have local expertise with strong capabilities across SMB, mid-market, backed by over 25 years of proprietary licensing intelligence across millions of transactions. We provide vendor-agnostic advice. We are independent, combining strong partnerships with Microsoft, AWS, Google and other hyperscalers, operating over 10,000 publishers. We are also globally recognized as leading in cost optimization with provide unparalleled visibility into IT spend, which is confirmed by $1 billion in cost reductions over the last two years that we've achieved with our customers.

Vendor ecosystems are consolidating around partners that can deliver scale, reach and customer impact. We help those vendors grow their established portfolios while expanding into the next generation of technologies and AI. We are the only partner in the world connecting vendors to the full customer spectrum across enterprise, mid-market, SMB, across direct channel over 70 countries around the world. And critically, we are independent. We are truly that trusted adviser. We can benchmark all of these vendors, data, prices, which gives us a unique perspective that is unparalleled and most importantly, gives us trust with our customers.

Now speaking of scale, -- we have a platform. In fact, we have two platforms: marketplace, servicing mid-market up to enterprise customers as well as Cloud IQ servicing our channel partners. The platform itself provides access to automated purchasing, renewals, billing with software licensing, which is vital to providing digital access to software and cloud services. In today's digital era, this is a must. AI is redefining how customers buy, raising the bar for self-service and vendor execution speed. And we will include AI into the platform that we serve so that we have better insights, capabilities to serve our customers and our partners.

We are improving the platform, bringing this together with a unified capability connecting our customers, vendors, and partners across the full life cycle, enabling faster productivity, insight, management of their software spend to operate their business needs. This is an evolution of a proven platform, providing more reach and scale to our customers and our partners. Now AI is embedded in everything we do. For us to deliver this to customers, we also need to internalize AI.

As I said at the beginning, our motto is walk the talk. That goes for you, that also goes for us and our customers. It's becoming integral in how we operate and deliver value. We approach it through a clear AI-first framework. First, we have AI as a solution. This brings our AI customers through our dedicated well-established offering. To give some context around that, we are not new to this. We've been doing it for 10 years. We were AI Partner of the Year in 2019 for Microsoft and are proud of that. It's opened up the doors for AWS and Google. We have deep expertise across the globe. But second, there is an integrated AI, which embeds AI across our customer-facing solutions to enhance productivity and outcomes. Think agents, how do we scale that available to our customers.

And third, internal AI. We are embedding this across our internal operations. This is a key focus area for us as we continue to integrate AI into how we work to deliver and make decisions across the organization. Of course, this is about efficiency, but it's also about helping our sellers, and our people be able to actually get more customer insights so that we can service them even better. This is already driving higher productivity, greater consistency and faster execution, and supports our ability to scale and create efficiency over time. All of this is built on our strong foundation of expertise that we've learned through throughout the years. And you'll hear more about this later on in the presentation.

We have five structural advantages that are hard to replicate as we deepen and scale. Our proprietary IP through our platform and solution capability is essential. Vendor breadth across 10,000 providers, giving us a rich data insight across global software and cloud services providers so that we could truly benchmark and categorize that whole pricing and cost capability and also insights to better support our customers. Lastly, leading services and of course, our domain expertise from our incredible talent pool across our employee organization. Millions of transactions give us pricing and licensing intelligence to create a higher barrier to entry, which no competitor can match. These are not just moats for today, each one compounds as AI makes data and proprietary IP increasingly valuable.

Now let me transition and brief you into our midterm guidance with all of this said. Hanspeter will cover this in further detail. We are uniquely positioned to deliver sustainable, profitable growth. On revenue, we target high single-digit CAGR with clear momentum across all our business lines. On profitability, we expect consistent margin expansion throughout the midterm above 28% EBITDA margin by 2030.

Cash. It is so important in terms of our balance sheet, our liquidity overall. Our cash flow, our ambition is greater than 60% cash conversion. Furthermore, we confirm our commitment to our dividend policy with a target payout of 30% to 50% of net profit.

Now let me conclude. We are the global leader in structurally growing market. Complexity is our tailwind. We thrive in supporting our customers navigating this complex IT landscape. And AI and cloud accelerates that, yielding to a competitive advantage. The combined group is built for scale with an unmatched reach and platform to win with extremely high barriers to entry. And lastly, we have a visible path to our 2030 ambitions. Thank you.

Now to go further into this detail, I'm going to invite Oliver Berchtold to the stage to take you through this.

Thank you, Melissa. Also a very warm welcome from my side. I'm Oliver Berchtold, and I am the Chief Operating Officer for SoftwareOne. So in the next 30 minutes, Alex Waldhaus, our VP for Data and AI, will walk you through our business model in greater detail. Let me start with this slide. You have already seen it, and it's a very important slide for our business model. Technology has never moved faster. This has a great opportunity for SoftwareOne. Why?

Because for customers, the speed means complexity and complexity costs money, but it also makes money. Too much uncontrolled cost, too many vendors, too many regulations, too little on what actually the business results are. Our business model is to build to change exactly that, helping customers to take back control, make decisions based on insights and turning technology truly into business outcomes. You have heard it, we call it our flywheel, a cycle, a life cycle with the customer. So let me show you how we do that step by step.

Our business model works in two ways. We have the external part where we are aligning the flywheel across the entire customer journey. Our portfolio is structured to meet the customer where they are today and expand with them throughout the entire life cycle they're going through. Internally, we have the exact same model, but we focus on our internal operations on scaling what works as well as organizing our capabilities and aligning the execution across the entire business of SoftwareOne. So this is not just a go-to-market motion. This is how we operate and how we manage the business on a daily basis.

The commercial pressure is growing with all the cloud and AI investment that have to be monetized. This needs a connected end-to-end model, and that is exactly our flywheel, the life cycle from optimization to innovation.

We start with the first phase with the IT Cost Management. This is where we bring control back to the customer, create visibility, governance as well as cost discipline. The second phase is the Software & Cloud Sourcing, buying to simplify how software and cloud decisions through our licensing expertise, our vendor insights and our support in the procurement process can be done. Next is the Cloud Services. Here is where we enable customers to migrate, to modernize, to secure and manage the hybrid and multi-cloud environment that they're running. And last but not least, our fourth phase of the flywheel is our Data & AI, where we truly turn data and AI ambitions into practical, scalable solutions that measure outcomes.

Each step of that life cycle, our flywheel strengthens the next optimization funds innovation. Better sourcing reduces complexity, stronger infrastructure and platform enables better foundation for a more and bigger data AI outcome. To give you a little bit more tangible analogy from the airport and travel. Some of you have traveled here. We are the fly planner ensuring resources are efficiently used, whatever it's human capital or technology capital.

We're a travel agency selecting the right route as well as the right partners for the customers. Then we also the ground crew because we keep operations stable and securely. And we are the air traffic controller, very important because we're bringing order into the entire complexity of the flywheel and the life cycle to guiding the customer safely to the destination where they want to get to. So this is how we provide value to the customer in one connected journey.

If we now combine the flywheel with our portfolio, -- we see that the portfolio here is covered with a flywheel. And the areas that our strategic portfolio entails all four phases. We not only operate a global go-to-market that serves all the customers across all industry segmentations, but we also embed AI in everything we offer and deliver.

Our less strategic portfolio that you can see on the right side, our offerings that are available based on local opportunities only, for example, our SAP business. This is built and has to support the core, which is part of the strategic portfolio. If something locally doesn't pay into the core, the strategic portfolio, it's not something that we want to do anymore, and we will be phasing it out.

A strategic portfolio for us is very, very critical because it ensures we focus our investment where it matters the most for us, where it moves the needle instead of trying to be everything for everyone, which ultimately destroys not only focus but also margins. We clearly define and productize our offering, the strategic portfolio. We move from one-off very high effort-driven workload to scalable and repeatable solutions with AI injected. And that allows us to grow revenue faster than cost, which will improve the margins.

The first phase of our life cycle is the IT Cost Management. Back to the storm of pressure that customers are facing today. It's hitting them from all different dimensions. First, you have the cloud and AI cost is becoming very unpredictable. Consumption is scaling fast. You have pricing usage-based and many simple don't have the visibility and actually worse, the control.

Second, you have pricing models, which become more and more complex because of the combination of licensing constantly involving. -- contracts are harder to navigate and costs are less transparent. Remember, complexity makes money.

Third, spend is fragmented. Different teams are buying from different vendors across multiple clouds, vendors and often without centralized view or governance. But each of these challenges is an opportunity for SoftwareOne to bring in clarity, structure, and confidence into managing everything that is software related. And this is truly how we optimize. We help customers to take back control around software, cloud and AI through our advisory services, ITSM management and FinOps. We bring that full transparency and visibility into the spend and the usage and make inefficiency clearly visible for them. We don't only stop there.

With our experience for over 20 years in software management and optimization, we help the customer to execute our learned best practices across all these customers, and you have heard it 2,000 projects a year to truly free up money as well as resources. Again, human capital or technology resources. As the global #1 in Gartner's Software Asset Management Magic Quadrant, we implement this for customers so they can reduce up to 30% in their software and cloud spend, but also reduce the risk of service cost by 200%, as Gartner states.

So let me show you what this means in a real customer example. Imagine you can invest $1 and you get $4 back. Wouldn't we all love this? And that's exactly what we have achieved for Vestas. They're managing 5,000 applications across 45,000 devices with limited visibility, no SAM governance and tooling underutilized. The result, they faced with overlicensing, cost leakage, and growing security risks because of all the applications. We stepped in. We defined software management strategy and governance model. And not only that, we created an end-to-end visibility into the licensing as well as the actual usage to give the customer for the first time, a fact-based view on where they spend the money and verse where they're wasting it. We reduced that waste, we streamlined the applications, we improved how they procured and did the vendor management.

The result, a staggering CHF 3.4 million in total savings till year-to-date. We have driven this cost savings through IT and cloud work mainly, but the sourcing still has a lot of potential. As a result, we now have a seat at the table with the customer to talk about the next level of unlocking saving potential for Software & Cloud Sourcing. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the magic of our flywheel, one step to the next, which is in the second phase, our Software & Cloud Sourcing.

Once the customer has this transparency and this control, the next challenge they always face is how do we make the right choices in an increasing complex licensing market. Customers are dealing with vendor lock-in with fragmented environments with different standards as well as high system integration costs into the different vendor ecosystems like ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce and other platforms. At the same time, buying itself has become very, very complex. You got different marketplaces, you have private offers, you have different rules, you have different incentive programs and operations. And you can also buy direct and indirect. So tell me what to do best. And even beyond that, the licensing rules are continuously increasing.

You have now with AI, the tokens, consumption-based, frequent changes and also, this is the worst for customer, multiple license metrics, which creates unclear pricing, leading to constant surprises and who likes surprises, absolutely nobody. In short, too many options, too many providers, and too much complexity that you could actually plan your cost or predict what it will look like down the road. And our role is here to simplify exactly that.

We provide access to software to cloud as well through the -- across the global multi-vendor ecosystem through our sourcing services, reselling capabilities and channel business, all with decades of experience on how to do it best for our customers. We help them find the right options. We secure the best commercial terms, and we make sure every decision fits the outcome they want to achieve today and tomorrow. And that's how we reduce complexity in Software & Cloud Sourcing as well as improving the cost control, as you saw in Phase 1, setting the foundation really for the customer what comes next, that it's a solid foundation.

Let me introduce you to my friend, my coworker, our AI sourcing companion. This is a concrete example how we have also used AI internally to drive efficiency in the operations of Software & Cloud Sourcing. We are augmenting our licensing operations to drive faster workflows and reduce manual efforts of our people when it comes to quoting. What makes this very powerful is not the AI technology. It's the data that we have.

We're sitting on over 20 years of proprietary intelligence, in this case, 41 million price points that we have, which is something that nobody can easily or at all replicate. What this now means to our team. This means they get actually an analysis from my friend here, the sourcing agent to basically what does this quote mean as well as what are the recommendations for the next best sourcing actions. We have rolled this out a couple of weeks ago, and we already have over 30% adoption, and we reduced the time to quote by 20%. In the next stage, we're bringing it up to 60% of all quotes to be automated and be helped, which we're predicting a 50% reduction in effort just around quoting.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to drive a self-service going into the platform that you heard before, where customers can do this directly, faster quotes, fewer manual work, which means for us more scale and also better margins. And our people can actually focus on sales activities rather than creating quotes.

Third phase of our flywheel is the Cloud Services. When customers move to the cloud, they never start from 0. They always carry years of legacy. And on the top of that, every time they move to the cloud, they introduce migration and security risk. Worse always has to happen fast without breaking the system and worse with all the regulations, not exposing data. And there is the reality of the skills gap as well as the fragmented operations because of that.

Again, you see the same pattern, complexity, risk, and fragmentation hitting the customer all at once. So we help customers to not only build but modernize, manage, and secure their environment across a hybrid and multi-cloud landscape. And with that, with the prior steps that you have seen, the flywheel with IT cost management and software and cloud sourcing, we never keep the commercial terms and the cost saving out of sight for our customers, which is a true differentiator. Our role is clear to keep operations stable, secure, and continuously improving so the customer is always ready for the next step, which is often Data & AI on top of the Cloud Services.

Let me introduce you to a customer, a college in the U.K., Barton Peveril. We often talk now about the end-to-end value, our life cycle, our flywheel. We're managing and optimizing their IT spend. We already found savings around licensing more than 10%, and we run in the cloud as well. We're helping them to turn AI into tangible business impact here for students and faculty. So with Barton Parallel, we really bring our full flywheel to life. So let's take a look what this means in practice.

[ presentation ]

So you have heard many things here, the entire flywheel, all the cycles that we have done as well as what we did advisory, professional services as well as managed services. The last piece that is missing of our flywheel is the Data & AI, which I will now introduce Alex Waldhaus to stage, our VP for Data & AI, who will walk you through that phase. Alex, over to you.

Thank you, Oliver. So, ladies and gentlemen, every company out there is asking the same question. It's not whether to invest into Data & AI. That chip has said the decision was made. But it's actually who do you trust to make things actually work. And that is what SoftwareOne is becoming, the AI operating partner for the enterprise. And over the next 10 minutes, I will show you what that means within our products, in our customer stories and last but not least, inside our own operations. Oliver just explained our strategic priorities. And this shows how data and AI sits within that story. AI transformation has a funding problem. Every CFO is asking where does the budget actually come from? And here at SoftwareOne, our response to that is actually built into our model. We find the savings first. cost optimization, smarter procurement and rigorous FinOps discipline. You heard Oliver, optimize to innovate. And for that reason, the customer does not need to choose between efficiency or transformation. We do both simultaneously, and the market opportunity is not subtle. The media and AI spend is going up from $7.6 million in 2024 to $16.6 million in 2026. That's Gartner.

But every customer we talk to sits somewhere on that curve. And every one of them is running into the same problem. They are asking, how do I actually adapt to that? How do I manage the increasing architectural complexity? How do I govern all of this responsibly? And how do I scale my operations effectively? And here is now what surprises most of those people. The hard part is actually not about the model. Models almost became a commodity. We have enough models available. The hard part is the operating layer. It's about running your data and AI estate reliably at scale. It's about running your data and AI estate in complex environments, controlling the cost, and most companies underestimate this.

Vendors are not built for this, but we are, and we have been building for this exactly moment. So we operate across three layers. The foundation layer where you find AI advisory, data platform architecture, governance frameworks, how do I license my AI estate. And last but not least, our SAM practice to govern all of this. The second layer, you see bespoke design and implementation, custom AI solutions built for specific customer context, not templates, not off the shelf, built for the clients' data, the clients' workflow and the client's individual risk profile. But on the third layer, that's where SoftwareOne is genuinely different. proprietary IP built on data assets that no competitor sold just to bring up again the 41 million price points we heard earlier about.

Let me give you one example. Our AI agent, Aura, our upsell and renewal agent. This technology combines Microsoft propensity data and our transactional historical data to guide our sales force to the right customer at the right point in time to unlock meaningful conversations. We initially launched this across 150 sellers within our indirect channel business. And early signals were so strong that we decided to scale this tenfold. In the beginning, we focused on Microsoft Copilot for Business. Now we are expanding to Agent 365, Fabric and Foundry. And scaling tenfold is no pilot anymore. It became a strategic bet. And that is only the beginning.

We are now moving into the next wave where we will give access to that technologies to our channel partners to achieve even a higher degree of scale. Commoditizing excellence, accelerating time to value, and defensible advantage at scale.

Let me show you how that would actually look like on the ground. Sagrada Família, Barcelona, a UNESCO World Heritage site under active construction for over 140 years. Now imagine this, somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, there is a stonemason carving a stone into a precise shape and form, up to the weight of 2 tons. Once the mason is done, it gets loaded to a truck, the truck drives to the construction site in Barcelona, a crane lifts everything up slowly, carefully. And I'll picture this, the stone does not fit. A deviation of 2 millimeters.

On that specific construction site, you need to know each of stone has a designated spot where it needs to go. So every stone is made to order. That was the reality before SoftwareOne because the consequences get the stone back down, back on the truck, back to the stonemason and now either fix it or start from scratch.

With SoftwareOne, the reality looks like this. We deployed 3D scanning technology plus highly trained and customized AI models across three stone masonry sites. Each and every stone gets quality checked prior to its shipping. So we identify the problem at the root cause, at the source, and not up in the air on the crane.

Now I want to be transparent with you. That is not mass scale deployment. It's highly bespoke, actually matching that specific project. And it was built for one of the most famous and complex construction projects in the world. But it's also a testament to what AI advisory capabilities can lead to. You sit down with the client, understand their specific business challenge and find a pragmatic way to solve it to maybe even solve problems that are unique and have not been solved before. In cases like this, build trust. Trust opens doors, and open doors lead to scalable, repeatable business.

As example, I use that story with every customer in manufacturing and visual quality inspection cases I can. It's every time. But let me show you how this actually leads to potential follow-up business. So now this matters for how you think about us as an investment. We don't just do this to our customers. We do this to ourselves. AI in everything we do in services and licensing operation. That is not a tagline. It is a commitment we are actively delivering on.

Two examples, both live, both measured. Our EULA and IT contract analyzer, picture the modern enterprise dealing with thousands of documents that talk about licensing rules, terms of use, product use rights. High stakes if things get missed. We took our services practice and built it into our AI agent. We implemented 80 specific control criteria and automated the analysis process, guiding our consultants and folks to -- where to pay attention to and what step to take next with 99% accuracy, and 22% time saved per contract analyzed.

The second example, let's take a look at automated billing CSP. As you maybe know, CSP billing is a complicated and difficult process. It is prone to errors if you do it manually. Here, we introduced a high degree of automation that allowed us to reduce the amount of people involved by 50%, but at the same time, gave us the ability to invoice faster. That is margin and customer experience simultaneously.

By now, we have more than 7,000 AI agents live across our entire workforce based on Copilot Studio, but also the entire technology stack. Out of our AI use case funnel, we identified 179 use cases that are of such magnitude and impact to our business that they are now centrally sponsored, centrally developed and will be centrally deployed.

Out of that, 7 cases are already live, 36 in development or active POC stage and 68 validated and ready for development. That is hundreds of people raising their hand. Hundreds of people saying, I know how AI can make my work better. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is cultural change. And cultural change is the hardest thing to actually replicate. So let me leave you with the market context that makes everything I've just shown you, not just relevant, but also urgent, and also presents an amazing opportunity for us. 60% of organizations already report unauthorized AI use inside their own walls.

Complexity and governance are not future problems. They are happening right now. 50% of organizations are actively buying new AI tools and platforms right now. Software sourcing and licensing, the core of what SoftwareOne has been doing for 25 years, just got significantly harder, but also significantly more valuable. And AI infrastructure is growing at 29.2% annually throughout 2029. Every percentage point of that growth means more cloud complexity, more cost management needs, more migration and management demand. And all of that will land in our flywheel.

AI services will reach $516 billion by 2029, a consulting CAGR of 17%. The demand wave is not slowing down. It's accelerating. AI does not disrupt SoftwareOne's model. AI accelerates it. The AI operating partner for the enterprise. That is what we are building. Oliver?

Thank you, Alex. So -- my favorite part, why do customers choose SoftwareOne? Because we solve a problem they're dealing with on a daily basis when it comes to software and what comes with it. They don't have the expertise because they focus on what they do best as a business. Just like us for the past 25 years. This is our industry. This is what we have been doing where we are best-in-class.

We're on the pole position, as I mentioned, as the global #1 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SAM as well as for IDC to help the customer to implement software as a management and FinOps to be able to reduce 30% of that AI spend. You also heard AI is making sourcing and licensing more complex. Imagine what AI does for unmanaged SaaS solutions. It is growing. It is increasing the cost by 30%, unless they get the help of SoftwareOne to manage this from a cost, but also from an AI perspective. Regulation, security, vendor lock-in, AI is increasing the demand for multi-cloud by 60%, which demands for a provider who covers the entire flywheel, all of the four phases.

And once again, driving simplification in that complexity. We are providing real value in AI through our data, as you heard, our knowledge, and our expertise. We want to monetize that, building IP. What customers don't need is another point partner and solution. What they need is a partner who sees this as a big picture, end-to-end and actually makes it work with the customer.

So if we go back to our comparison throughout the presentation on our travel and airport analogy, you need a flight plan, you need the right routes and partners. You need the operations to run safely and reliably, and you need someone who keeps everything coordinated, so nothing happens or slows down and everyone reaches its destination. You need a partner who stays with you across the entire journey. We optimize to innovate, but we also innovate to optimize for customers and ourselves. This provides our customers, but also us, SoftwareOne, with a future-proof self-sustaining cycle, and that is why customers choose SoftwareOne. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.

So you have heard it now through the presentation, how organizations are actually trying to navigate across the complexity of the cloud vendors and also now AI all over the place, right? The real story comes from those who are living this day by day. And it's with great pleasure to welcome Roy Torheim, who is the Procurement and Operations Director at Visma. On stage, please. Thank you, Roy. A little bit about the business, about Visma before you can introduce a little more because it's a very cool company. They are -- they have over 160 software businesses across Europe and LatAm. So Roy brings a really real perspective on what it means to take technology, manage it with the partners and actually driving innovation in that kind of scale. So thank you very much for being here to take the travel and come and join everyone. Also, thank you for all your business we have done through the advisory, the licensing management, and the managed service. So it has been a true partnership with you, guys.

So thank you, Oliver. So at Visma, our focus is on empowering people and business through software. To do that, we need to stay focused on what we do best while navigating in an increasingly complex technology landscape. That's why strong partnerships like the one we have with you matter. This partnership help us move faster, make better decisions and create the foundation for innovation. And obviously, with AI creating new opportunities across our industry, having that foundation in place has never been more important.

I guess it would be relevant to give the audience a short intro to who Visma is. Visma is actually the fifth largest software company and the largest cloud ERP player in Europe. We consist, as Oliver said, of more than 160 companies in 28 markets in Europe and Latin America, where we provide cloud ERP, payroll, and HRM to more than 2.5 million customers in SMB and local government market. That's Visma.

Thank you, Roy. So of course, with the presentation around the flywheel and the cycles, there's the first and prominent question is really the complexity that Visma is facing today with that fragmentation and with across the vendors, entities that you guys have, the cloud environment, but also how do you manage all of this internally?

Well, I'd just like to pick up one thing I sort of noticed from your speech. We don't like surprises, obviously. And surprises is coming more and more with the more complex landscape around the cost for AI. Obviously, our complexity comes from both our scale and operating model. We have, as I said, more than 160 companies operating with a high degree of autonomy. And that has been one of the reasons why we have been succeeded that well, but also means that we are managing technology decisions, governance and commercial agreements across a very decentralized organization. We are also operating in a true multi-cloud environment. We work obviously with Microsoft, Google, AWS and many, many other providers across the group.

Different businesses within Visma have different requirements and different workloads and different technology strategies. As cloud consumption continues to grow, so does also have complexity. We need to balance flexibility, governance, cost and long-term strategic decisions across a large portfolio of companies. And could we do all this internally? Perhaps. But we see that our focus is to build software that our customers will continue to use and we want to serve our customers. So we rely on partners with deep specialist knowledge to help us navigate in this increasingly complex landscape and make better decisions faster.

Thank you for the insights. And of course, as I presented on the Software & Cloud Sourcing specifically, right, you have a very broad scale with all these companies. So how do you navigate that complexity with decisions around the vendors, whether it's technology or software since you're also developing? And how do you structure those agreements? And how do we bring value to you?

Well, I would say that one of the biggest area of value has -- that you has been helping us to make informed decisions across our vendor landscape. We can take a great example back in 2024, you helped us out to renegotiate our Azure agreement. And that project stands out because you could bring commercial insights, benchmarking, negotiation support and expertise around all these platforms that helped us to get a better outcome than we expected. Beyond that, you are obviously also helping us with around Microsoft licensing, which still is quite complex, I would say. We have helping us with enterprise agreements with CSP and also broader licensing strategy.

However, what I would like to bring out more is that we value more is maybe the conversation around beyond licensing. We can discuss different vendor approaches, cloud strategies, commercial models and for us, having access to independent advice and market insights that helps us understand our options and make better decisions. As we continue to evolve toward a more decentralized consumption model, having that support help us balance local flexibility with group-wide governance and control.

So what has actually changed how we support Visma from the early advisory consulting approach to a more structured ongoing model that we're doing today and how does this actually impact you and Visma?

Well, I would say that the biggest change is that the relationship has become more strategic and continuous. So historically, engagements are focused on specific projects, transactions. Today, technology decisions are evolving constantly. Cloud economics change, as we have heard, where the strategies change and AI is creating entirely new opportunities and challenges. So what we value today is having a partner that understands our business and our operating model and can support us continuously rather than on renewal or negotiation points.

That ongoing relationship gives us access to expertise when we need it, helps us make more informed long-term decisions and allow us to move faster. We run a fast-moving business, and we're dependent on working with partners that can join us on that journey, bring specialist expertise and help us to stay focused on our core competencies. To succeed with such a relationship, it is essential to build trust between us and our partners, something I would say we have managed to do with SoftwareOne.

Thank you. So the last question I have actually is more about Visma itself. So this foundation that you have built and really moving beyond our first engagement on cost control that you have now towards the innovation and that AI adoption that you have across the entire business and the software development. How does that look like today?

Well, this is where things becomes really exciting. For many, many years, conversations around technology focused primarily on efficiency and cost optimization. Those things remain important, of course. But today, the opportunity is much bigger. AI is creating one of the most significant shifts we have seen in our industry. And we view this as an opportunity, not as a threat. We have strong software platforms. We have structured data. We have deep domain expertise and talented people across the organization. And that puts us in a strong position to create value through AI. We are already investing heavily in AI enablement across the business with hundreds of employees participating in programs focused on practical use cases, obviously, in R&D support, but also across functions like finance, legal and content creation. There's a lot of uncertainty in the markets, but we believe this is the most exciting moments in our industry history. So rather than replacing software, AI is creating new opportunities to deliver more value to customers. Having the right cloud foundations, governance, structures, and technology partnership in place allow us to focus on innovation rather than administration. Optimization creates capacity, and that capacity can then be reinvested into innovation, product development and AI adoption at scale.

Thank you, Roy, for coming in, but also showing the audience. And of course, also thank you so much for your valuable partnership. And yes, we will be working further together, of course, on the AI.

Thank you.

So thank you, Roy, Oliver, and Alex for that insightful presentation. I hope you also found it interesting you in the audience and that you now have a better understanding of how we work with our customers throughout that life cycle and help create value.

The next agenda point is very exciting. We will now do a deep dive into our channel business. This is a business that I know many of you are not that familiar with. But as Raffi and Melissa have already addressed and explained in their presentation, this is an area where we see significant growth potential. This is a highly scalable, highly profitable distribution machine.

To present, I would like to welcome Guðmundur Aðalsteinsson up on stage. He's our Chief Sales & Partner -- Channel Partner Officer.

Thank you, sir. Thank you very much, Al, and thank you all for being here today. In an earlier section, Oliver talked about how we can help our customers navigate our industry complexity and take them through our optimize to innovate customer journey. I'm now going to focus on taking you through the channel business or distribution, which is a categorization that we fall into, I would say, often unfair because we do distribution quite differently than others. Channel is one of the most scalable business. It's a very capital-efficient growth engine in our business today. And I'll explain that in slightly more detail now.

In for SoftwareOne, we reach out to customers through basically two routes. We sell directly to our customers, to upper mid-market and enterprise customers where we provide software and services. The second route, which you see at the bottom of the slide, is via distribution. This is where we sort of perform platform-based services with local expertise. We're focused on cloud technology from the top hyperscalers and a few other selected vendors through to partners who then own the end customer relationship. On the left-hand side, we have the vendors. These are the ones that build the technology. These are the Microsofts of the world, the AWS, the Google, and so forth.

On the right-hand side, however, you have the customers who consume that technology. Those are both large and small customers as well. In the middle, however, this is where the machinery sits that connects the two distributors and partners. And this is what we refer to as our channel business. This, for the most part, is the same technology, reaching out to end customers, but a fundamentally different economic model.

For SoftwareOne, the channel lets us extend our reach into the SMB segment, which is serviced by our partners. We talked about it before, over 200,000-plus customers. If you compare our direct account management team where you have an average, let's say, an account manager has 15 end customers, A partner account manager, which has 15 partners, is servicing over 200 per partner -- 200 customers per partner. So you can see the channel business scales way, way more than any of our other lines of business. So why does this matter for you as investors? Well, our channel business is a growth driver with revenues up to 18.7% year-on-year in constant currency. And the channel is highly profitable. It's an attractive model, platform-centric, scalable with global capabilities and local execution. It is really that scale engine for all the vendors who are trying to reach the SMB segment. And it's also very complementary to other business lines of SoftwareOne. It gives us full segment coverage and exposure to the ISVs and the product companies that really suit this model perfectly, growth, margin and reach, all from a business that is so much lighter to run than the direct.

I spoke in my previous slide about the type of partners that we want to work with. And ideally, these are the ISVs. These are the ones that we build, they build their own products and their own IP. And not only do we provide them with access to vendors, they get a direct line to our domain expertise, which really helps them to get to market quicker. Partners choose SoftwareOne because their growth is at the center of our model. We've talked about cloud consumption. We're not all things to everyone. And in channel business, we are really focused on the top three hyperscalers because the complexity of the licensing of the services, of the programs, incentives, I mean, the list goes on, and it keeps on getting more and more complex. What is unique to us is having the right skill level on the ground to support our channel partners and always be adapting to the latest technology changes that are constant in this ever-evolving industry. And one of those things we've done to simplify that complexity is focus on platform excellence.

And Melissa mentioned this earlier. Our platform takes the administration out of their business, so they spend more time with their customers. Our platform provides automated procurement, renewals and billing. And to leave you with a thought, we have about 1.5 man hour per month for manual operations to service all of our Microsoft CSP business with our platform. But that's not all. With the introduction of Cloudy, our intelligent AI assistant that is embedded within our customer and partner platform, we're bringing AI to the day-to-day partner operations in a very, very practical way. Rather than thinking about abstract use cases, Cloudy really helps the partners to interact with their data, surface insights, and make better decisions in real time. It continuously learns and improves and becomes a smarter assistant over time.

Now Oliver talked about the customer journey flywheel and the services that wrap around it, which is also very, very relevant for our partners. They can now take our services offerings in a co-sell motion and land them with their end customers. And we extend our partner services portfolio, and we enhance their ability to build upon our services to create their own IP. Also, we leverage our partner services to deliver better outcomes for our own direct customers. So if there's one thing, and we talked about the channel being a new thing for SoftwareOne.

There's one thing I really want you to kind of take away from what I've said today and what has been said earlier today is that the channel is one of the biggest opportunities for SoftwareOne. Distribution is shifting. Partners do not just want the typical transaction partners. They want true partnerships. So they want to do what's really best for -- focus on what's best for their customers, and we're helping them to take that complexity away.

Vendors are continuing to consolidate. With the ever-changing program requirements, it's really, really difficult for partners to keep up. And a good example of this in the recent changes in the requirements from Broadcom, which has consolidated its partner business to very, very few players, which has in turn been very, very good opportunity for SoftwareOne.

Local business relationship remain a key investment area for us. We need local relationships for speed, for effort, for the agility to respond to customer needs. But it's also the global nature of SoftwareOne, which is the opportunity for expansion into new markets and for our channel community. Raffi talked about the 25 markets that we're currently in. Approximately 98% of that market is Microsoft. We have a significant potential for growth in those markets, selling other hyperscaler solutions and our services portfolio. On top of that, as we are now one large combined company, we have 46 markets that are completely untapped, where we can drive exponential growth with our already proven channel business model.

You heard a lot about AI. And I wonder, this is the biggest opportunity for this organization ever, and we've got the right model, and we've never been more relevant. AI is embedded in everything that we do. This includes our channel business, and it really plays to the mission of being an AI-powered business. But don't just take my word for it. I also have the privilege here to have one of our partners here today. Let me welcome to the stage, Thor, who is the CEO of Apro. Welcome.

Thank you.

Are we standing or are we get seats -- we get seats. Great.

Good. So I'll tell you a little bit about Apro. We are a search fund-backed company with 90 employees, and we specialize in cloud, DevOps, data and AI. We actually left our previous distributor to join with SoftwareOne because we needed a more hands-on and agile partner to match our growth potential.

Thank you very much for that. So far, so good, I assume.

Still going strong.

Still going strong. Well, you're here, so there must be something. All right. So let's tell us a little bit about Apro and how you -- what made you decide to partner differently with SoftwareOne...

So we work very closely with customers and the hyperscaler environment keeps getting more complicated. We want to maximize the time we have with our customers. And we also see opportunities that we would like to maybe explore further, bring to other markets and so forth. That's why we picked SoftwareOne.

Came to the right place for sure. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've learned building Apro and where those learnings have like taken the business?

Sure. So Apro is a business outcome-focused company, just like SoftwareOne. And we have proven success in Iceland with both AI and cloud. And in Iceland, actually, every company is essentially on SMB because the market is so small. So we've learned a lot in short time. And what has worked best for us is to move past the technical hype of AI and focus more on people and processes and enabling business users to create the AI value.

And that's interesting because, I mean, now having that opportunity to try this out in Iceland, often micro market with only 400,000 people. We're both from Iceland, by the way. So what did that teach you about, let's say, the gap between AI excitement and the real business impact of AI?

Yes. In my opinion, AI is all velocity today, but companies are hitting a wall because they lack direction. There is a huge value gap. And this is why we have built our own best practices and platform that we call the Lighthouse.

Lighthouse is a very, very interesting project, might I say? How would you say -- because now we look at -- we've talked a lot about AI here as SoftwareOne, our DNA being sort of optimized to innovate and innovate to optimize. How would you say that your IP complements the business of SoftwareOne?

Yes. So the Cloud IQ is great to manage the cost of the hyperscalers. But the landscape is, as everyone has said here, getting more complicated. So our platform actually enables us to have a more granular control of how you're using AI and spending on it. Tokens are being spent in a lot of different ways. You have agents, you have software development, chats and so forth. So companies need to manage those costs to measure the value that you're actually getting from AI. We are one of those companies, for example, on the product development side of the Lighthouse, we wanted to capitalize the cost of using those tokens. So you need to get the kind of granular oversight to be able to do that.

Yes. And let's talk about AI, what is Apro then doing to be relevant in the market demand? And how do you see the future of our partnership growing?

So the AI needs of our customers, they are a moving target. To be relevant, we must stay ahead of the curve. And right now, we have a proven model in Iceland. The Lighthouse is working there. We have 20-plus customers with monthly subscription fees. It gives us access to upsell opportunities, and it drives cloud adoption. So now with you, with SoftwareOne, we are trying to see if this can be replicated to new markets, if other partners like us can use this with their clients.

Which is a very exciting project, and we're really happy to work on that with you. But I mean, we're all -- I mean, I'm not sure if you want to speculate, but do you have any wise words or final thoughts about what's going to happen in the world?

Yes. I think the key is to think big, but you need to start small and then you need to scale fast. And in our case, I think we can do that with SoftwareOne. So we obviously want to get something from this partnership, too.

Yes. You mean about time or Yes. We'll deliver that. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time, and wish you all the best.

Take care.

Thank you so much, everyone. For our next speaker, I welcome Nina, our Chief Human Resources Officer. Welcome to the stage.

Good afternoon, and a warm welcome from my side. My name is Nina Janorschke, and I'm the Chief HR Officer at SoftwareOne. And I'm pleased to be here with you today to share about our talent. At SoftwareOne, everything we do starts with our people. It's their expertise, their mindset and the culture that brings it all together. They are one of our truest competitive advantages and at the heart of our success. But to understand SoftwareOne's unique ability to scale and execute, we have to start with our people. And we clearly see that we are stronger than the market on the average factors you see on screen. But what does that entail?

Today, our team consists of more than 12,000 people. That is a global workforce that combines scale with strong expertise and continuity. Our median tenure is at 8.6 years versus the 2.5 years on market average. And that is a very strong indicator for our ability to really retain critical knowledge and the right talent in our organization. Our average age is in line with market, and that is above -- no, that is slightly below 39 years. And our female representation is at 34% versus the 27% we see on market average. That is again a very strong evidence that we are building a more balanced and competitive talent base.

We're also operating on a truly global level, as you already heard, with the 70-plus countries we represented in. Our largest workforce is in APAC with 29%, followed by 16% each in DACH and LatAm. We have 14% in WEMEA and across Nordics and CEE, we see 10% each, followed by 5% in Noram.

That regional diversity gives us both reach, but also the local relevance as we use all levers of a really continuous globally connected workforce. Most importantly, we have built the right skills and expertise, and they are highly differentiated. We have more than 700 ITAM and FinOps specialists amongst us, and they're representing the largest ITAM practice globally. We have more than 12,000 certified employees amongst us, and they have certifications in Microsoft, AWS and Google. And we also have over 350 data and AI practitioners.

And because market leadership require us to have a continuous reinvention, we continue to invest in learning and upskilling of our people. We're averaging 11.5 training hours per employee, and we see that our leaders visibly participate in training themselves. Altogether, this gives us a workforce that is not only global and experienced, but also ready for the next phase of our growth.

What further sets SoftwareOne apart is something that is a bit harder to quantify, but incredibly powerful, and that is our unique value-driven culture. At the core of it is our one company, one team mindset. After the integration of 2 former competitors, we're now operating as one team. And that is not just in structure, it is truly in mindset. Our people care for one another, they support one another and they take ownership. And they always go beyond their individual roles to collectively support each other and work on something with a true entrepreneurial mindset.

So when our people stand up for each other and work towards a shared purpose, we create something very distinctive. And that is the connected community we see amongst us. That connected community helps us to deliver for our customers and for each other as we always go the extra mile. We're also clearly guided by our values. And you have seen the slide before, it is super important that we foster that impact we're trying to create. That is fostered through integrity, momentum, passion, accountability, customer focus and trust. And what you see on slide, they are statements, but that's just not what we live by it.

These were strongly curated things by our leadership team collectively with all of our colleagues worldwide, and we did that right when we started the integration because we wanted to build that foundation that builds a strong, strong start for us to actually make decisions, to collaborate with each other and to always perform as one team. They also create that consistent foundation across, as we build our global organization and fuel the impact we strive to make on a day-to-day basis. And that continues to foster the next phase of our growth.

On top of that, we truly embrace diversity. We see it as one of our core strengths and a strategic enabler in our business. That is why we are committed to further build an inclusive workplace that is something where different perspectives are actually valued and people feel that they can be their true selves, that they are valued and bring the impact to the day-to-day business activities they're operating in.

We do this through dedicated measures internally, that is DIB in all hiring and promotional practices, our employee resource groups and global awareness campaigns. And we do not only do this to continue to attract top talent, we also do it because the customer needs are getting more and more complex and diverse. And that way, we can answer them in the right way. And I think why culture can be described with these 3 distinctive examples, it is best experienced. So we added the voices of our people who get to experience and live the uniqueness of SoftwareOne on a day-to-day basis, although they do it in different roles, functions and scopes.

And last but not least, I would like to reiterate the important role of people and culture as a true strategic driver of our performance, of our growth and the company culture we would like to see. We really believe that our scalable success is brought in by the right combination of a strong human-centric culture and the retention piece. And retention comes in because we have a deliberate investment and the right capabilities needed for the next phase of our growth. This combination for us is not accidental, it is a conscious choice. We are focused on literally building a future-ready workforce across 3 key dimensions, and we deliver that with a team of over 300 people and culture experts together with the leadership team and colleagues.

What are these 3 key dimensions? First, it is leadership and retention. We invest in the right leadership capabilities needed for the AI-driven world. That is a leader that fosters trust, transparency, but also gives a clear direction. We always ensure that we operate as one team while always maintaining a strong human connection. Because in a transforming environment, we see leadership is the anchor to literally create that future readiness.

And second is our AI capabilities. We invest heavily in the development and career from all our people. And we are equipping our leaders and all our people to actually work with the skills needed to thrive in the AI-driven world. We want them to work smarter. We want them to move faster, and we want them to make greater impact. But how do we do this? We do it through structured AI learning journeys. We also do it through responsible, ethical AI, and we also build generative and agentic AI skills across our organization. What we do as well is that we lever AI on all of our development and coaching activities to actually make them more scalable and also more personalized across the globe.

And third, it is the AI-driven workforce transformation. We recognize that AI is really reshaping every workforce, including our own. And our approach is to combine the best of both worlds. It's the flexibility, the creativity and the judgment we get from our people with the power of AI, always applied responsibly and at scale.

The strongest organization of the future will be the ones that get this balance right. And our ambition is to make sure that AI can reshape our existing roles because we see it as an evolution and also a lever to literally focus on the strategic impact of our work tasks. We're optimizing our workforce composition.

So ultimately, our strength is not just technology and it's not just our people, it's how we combine the best of these worlds and bring it all together in a very intentional and thoughtful manner. These people on the slide are, again, showing our culture in action. They're demonstrating genuine care, collaboration and high-performing teams and true empowerment across our organization. And for me, this is what truly defines us. It is a company I can deeply identify with, a culture that I genuinely believe in and an organization I'm incredibly proud to be part of.

Thank you for having me today.

[Presentation]

Okay. So now we have been given a lot of information from several of our management team, from our customers and our channel partners.

We will now have the first Q&A session of the day. And if you would like to ask a question, anyone in the room, just raise your hand and we will provide you with a microphone. We will then open up for questions from the online audience.

And with that, I give the word to Ines (sic) [ Nooshin ] from Deutsche Bank, if someone can provide her with a microphone.

Nooshin Nejati from Deutsche Bank. So you highlighted a strong revenue synergy pipeline and cross-sell opportunity across the life cycle. Can you share early examples where this is already translating into tangible revenue wins and how you think about scaling that motion over time?

And one more, please. You have highlighted Channel as a scalable and profitable growth driver while it still represents only 8% of the total revenue. Looking 3 years out, is there a realistic path for Channel to become a materially larger contributor to the group mix? Or should investors think of it as a high growth but still relatively small business? And as you scale into remaining markets, how should we think about the pace of rollout versus the margin profile? And what would be the key constraint to faster scaling?

Thank you very much for the questions. Around the revenue synergies, let me start with that, we always mentioned that also in our quarterly updates, it's in a way, difficult to quantify. But for sure, on one side, and I've mentioned it earlier, we see good growth results already looking back into the last 2 quarters, and we have certainly a good momentum. If we talk about examples, let me take both portfolios, which we took together, right? So as an example, in SoftwareOne, we have a SoftwareOne cloud support, which we offer to our customers. This is something, which the Crayon customer base very much is embracing. We are doing a lot of upselling of those kind of cloud support services into, let's say, the legacy Crayon customer base. This is a typical example.

Another example is our ISV and vendor certifications, which we have, let's say, many, many more on a truly global scale, which gives us, in some regions and areas, a more competitive pricing compared to, let's say, the past. Those are other examples where we start to see the realization of the potential, let's say, in terms of revenue synergies of the 2 companies coming together.

In terms of Channel, you are right, in a way, it's 8% of the total business, right? But that's also the opportunity. At the same time, I think, for us to gain further market share and to have accelerated growth in the combined company. And that's certainly something which is part of our 2030 plan. We see it as the fastest-growing business line today. We also see it moving forward as the fastest-growing business line. So I think -- we think if you look into our projections, we think the Channel business will grow faster as the direct business. And therefore, also the mix is slightly shifting. And that should also help, by the way, from an overall EBITDA margin profitability perspective and make a slightly positive impact.

Did we answer your questions? Good.

This is Ines from BNP Paribas. I just had one question. It was very interesting because you're basically developing internally some agents for internal purposes. But eventually, you will sell them eventually to external customers. On a 5-year time frame, aren't you scared of cannibalizing your own revenue and services? Is services going forward at the industry level is going to be the growth tailwind for resellers? That's what I understand right. So what's your view on a 2-year or 5-year time frame?

Well, it's a good question. So the answer is yes. Of course, we're building agents internally. I always say we have to start with ourselves before we take it to customers because then we're going to be in a much better position to actually deliver and sell it as a product. So the example that was shown earlier with end user license agreements, these types of concepts we've built internally, and then, we test it and we take to customers.

To answer your question around cannibalization, I mean, certainly, I think the technology shifts have adopted and changed. I mean, a year ago, we didn't even see agentic AI at the levels that it is now. And I think that, call it, the shifts will continue to evolve over the next 5 years. We see this as a way for us to actually create far more revenue, I think, synergies, also help us streamline the costs so that we're much more efficient and productive, which also implies to our EBITDA margin over time. I think it's always difficult to say what the world will look like in 5 years, but certainly, this is something that we will continue to evolve, and we think have that proven capability over the last 25 years to continue to do so.

And just is this something that your competitors are already doing typically? Are you a bit ahead of the curve?

I would say in these specific use cases, we haven't seen our competitors deliver them to date. So the example that we talked about with Agent AURA, which is a CSP renewal agent, we were the first to market to deliver that and did that together in joint partnership, of course, with Microsoft. So we need to be ahead of the curve without a doubt. And I think this is where the insight and capability of our people that Alex Waldhaus talked about in terms of bringing up these internal use cases, really understanding where do we think we're going to have the most impact is critical so that we have speed and time to market.

Any other questions from the audience in the room?

Everyone wants to go for coffee.

It's Andreas Wolf, Berenberg. Could you speak about the automated billing, especially in CSP, and how it helps you to lower working capital and improve the order to cash process?

Yes, it's a great question. And we think it's SoftwareOne, but I think it's a good example of the Channel business and where we saw automation with CSP. So in the Channel business, we automate CSP billing from end to end. So it is highly scalable. We do not have the human necessity necessarily. But it also really makes sure that, that time to cash is efficient. And we see that in terms of the historic working capital performance of Crayon as a stand-alone business.

Now fast forward, what we're doing is we're taking that insight, and we're building that all together as one SoftwareOne. So creating much more streamlined operations. So over time -- I mean, clearly, cash is so critical to our business, and we stay very committed on net working capital. So we should see that transcend to more efficiency and time to processing, especially around areas like CSP.

And one follow-up, if I may. If we look at your medium-term targets, the high mid -- high single-digit growth rate, how should we think about the Microsoft revenue share in 4 years from now?

Well, today, Microsoft is 60% of our total revenue mix overall. We still see Microsoft to be vital, and we'll talk about that later today in our session with Microsoft. We need to continue to grow that, but it's also about expanding into other multi-vendor and attaching on behalf of on total Microsoft estate.

I always say every customer needs Excel. So it's really difficult to say when you don't need Microsoft in-house. So it's so important for us to be able to continue that growth, but also see additional opportunities to support our customers across software vendors, but also other cloud providers. So I think we could safely say that 60% is a healthy, strong number and puts us in a unique position to continue to drive additional growth.

Any comments?

Yes. Maybe to add on, it's very important for us, of course, to stay agnostic and independent, right? And it's also a bit dependent on the customer demands out there and what our customers really want. And that defines then that mix to some extent. But at the end of the day, I would say we have a very broad vendor portfolio, which gives us a lot of possibilities also in the future.

[indiscernible] here. I have the question just on the vendor side. Could you talk a bit about how the relationship with Anthropic and the other sort of model vendors is developing? And how that is working? That would be very interesting.

Yes. So we've just started an initial partnership with Anthropic. You may have seen that covered on the vendor slide. And we see this as incredibly accretive to our overall business. As Raffi just rightly stated, it's all about customer choice. In the end, it's about being independent and being in a position to advise and support the customers accordingly.

With Anthropic, we certainly see that to be critical because especially when it comes to applied research or deep custom, let's say, project-based research that you want to use Cloud for, Anthropic, of course, is -- has a leg up. But when you look at the development of LLMs and AI overall, it's a vast playing field, and it's starting to really differentiate.

Microsoft with Agent 365 has access into Anthropic with their partnership. So that also builds on our Microsoft space to continuously have that as essential. So in the U.S. market, we are continuing to, let's say, pursue this because that's the starting basis of our relationship with Anthropic. And we want to, of course, have it globally.

[ Andre ] from ING. Maybe a follow-up on that one. Does that mean that you will not aim to work with other LLM providers or OpenAI, just to mention one, or Perplexity? So that's one.

And the second is AI was mentioned quite a lot. So I think that was made clear. But your added value on AI is going to the likes of my company and say, "Hey, I will let you know how you optimize in." Token economics is, thus, one of the first things you mentioned, Melissa. So if you just can really explain again what exactly -- how -- I mean, a concrete example as to how you help your customers with AI spend, for example?

Yes. Great question. So Anthropic has decided to do a partner -- extension of a partner model. So that's why we're continuing to pursue it. Of course, we advise across any LLM. So whether you want to use Perplexity, whether you want to use Gemini, Copilot, any of the case. And I think the reality is that most companies will end up having multiple models in-house. I mean, certainly, that's our experience today. Depending on, let's say, the specific need, we will go to different LLMs depending on that need. And so that's where I think that advisory comes into play.

When it comes to, let's say, ING, which is a valued customer, but also a bank for us, it's important that we continue to advise around that cost. So yes, so helping with negotiation around what to buy. So when Oliver talked about that full life cycle, sourcing across the multi-cloud estate, but also the vendors, and then, of course, reducing costs. And these are things that we provide capabilities today, and we'll continue to do so.

And I think in the world of token economics, this is something that with compute costs being so volatile and energy costs also being high, data centers are just -- there's just not enough data centers there. So the costs are continuing to be very high. We believe we have the position to really support because of that cost optimization background that is really who we are to assess that, the tokens and spend.

We're moving into a world where I believe it will be very much managed like travel and entertainment budget where each headcount will have a certain allocation of tokens. So these are things that we are building IP around today through agents so that we can help our customers and advise in the world of tokenomics.

Okay. It seems like there are no further questions from the audience in the room. So then, I would like the operator to open up for the online audience.

We now have a question from the line of Christopher Tong from UBS.

I guess my question is on the EBITDA margin targets of 28%. So it's quite a big step-up. So I was just wondering if you could provide some of the drivers of this, either by segment or what you want to do with headcount given all these efficiencies.

Yes. Thank you. Maybe I can start. And -- I mean, if you bear with us for the other, let's say, 1, 2 hours, which we have ahead of us, our CFO will give much more insights on how we achieve this and how we deliver this, and there will be a Q&A afterwards as well. But I mentioned already before, let's say, the shift which we see Channel business, our most, let's say, strongest growth business line for the next years, which is also our business line with the highest EBITDA margin. That should obviously help, that shift, that accelerated growth. The business mix shift should slightly help to improve EBITDA margin. We mentioned before about AI in everything we do. And also that will obviously help to gain efficiencies over the years. And for sure, also our overall services portfolio is something where we see room for improvement to achieve higher EBITDA margins throughout the course of 2030.

We have no further questions at this time.

Okay. Then that concludes the Q&A session and the first part of our program. We will now have a short break. When you come back, we will shift the focus a bit. We will invite our regional managers from DACH, NORAM and APAC up on stage to give you a regional spotlight and better insight into how they drive the business on the ground in the regions that they manage. Following that, you will have Melissa and Ms. Nicole Dezen from Microsoft on stage for a fireside chat. And then, of course, the last presenter of the day, the man that you're all waiting for, our CFO, Hanspeter Schraner.

I ask you to be back here at 4:30 for the second part of the program. Thank you.

[Break]

Hello. I'm Brian Moats. I lead Global Commercial Sales and Partners at Broadcom Software. I'd like to take a moment to share my perspective on SoftwareOne and how their evolution is so critical to the VMware-related demand we see. So here's the context. Enterprise leadership faces a massive challenge. As public cloud costs escalate and AI demand surge, organizations are moving towards sophisticated hybrid and private cloud environments. But managing these shifts creates intense architectural and economic complexity. Our joint customers need a partner who can help them navigate and transition safely and cost effectively. This is why SoftwareOne continues to evolve in our opinion. The market knows them as a powerhouse in software sales and management backed by service practices like application migration to public cloud.

And as hybrid infrastructure and private cloud have become the new corporate standard, SoftwareOne is tracking to that demand. So we work together to accelerate that evolution, ensuring that they expand their private cloud capabilities at a pace that the market requires. What makes their response so compelling is how we're doing it. SoftwareOne is making significant incremental investments in private cloud services while leveraging their established public cloud migration expertise. This existing muscle side is highly transferable.

In what they know about moving applications, they're scaling to help customers, our mutual customers architect the optimal mix of hybrid and private cloud. For Broadcom, this ability is vital. It means that SoftwareOne can quickly help customers optimize their stakes and unlock the capital needed to fund the relation. To me, this is an intelligent story for us. They are leveraging a proven foundation to capture massive sustainable market. As they scale these infrastructure services, they are transferring into an end to end multi-cloud partner through this highly responsive, and that's what Broadcom needs.

I wish I could be there in person with all of you. Hope you are having productive conversation. Thank you.

Good. Thank you very much. You are all back in the room. The room is still packed. So very happy that you are sticking around. Over the next, I think, 1 hour, we are going to have a little bit more interaction. So we will bring some people on stage. We have some of the regional presidents joining soon on the regional spotlight. And afterwards, we have Melissa and our special guests, Nicole from Microsoft joining us on stage.

Before we go into the spotlight, I want to provide some perspectives first around our, I would say, local delivery capabilities. One of SoftwareOne's unique strengths is the combination of global reach and local expertise. We have talked about this already. Our customers are increasingly operating across multiple countries facing complex technology environments and rising regulatory requirements. They need a partner that can support them consistently around the world. At the same time, technology transformation is ultimately delivered locally.

Success depends on understanding the local market conditions, regulation, language, local culture and customer requirements. That's why local expertise matters just as much as global scale. SoftwareOne brings both together like no one else in the industry. We combine a global platform, global vendor relationships and a worldwide delivery capabilities with teams that are deeply embedded in their local markets. In all our 70-plus countries, we have feet on the ground, means local sales and local delivery capabilities. On top, we have regional delivery centers, which ensure further scale and competitiveness. This slide here illustrates the power of global reach and local expertise. We don't see this just as a differentiator. It's a competitive advantage that is actually difficult to replicate.

With this, I would now like to invite some of our -- we call them internally local heroes, our regional presidents, on stage, Patrick from DACH, Regina from North America and Varun from APAC. And -- we discussed a lot about growth, revenue growth. You have seen our Ambition 2030. And yes, we want to be -- hear a bit more from our local heroes on how they want to make it happen in their markets.

Good. Maybe we start with a quick introduction, just a few words about yourself.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Patrick Kaegi, like Kagi Fret. Obviously, I'm from Switzerland. I'm very happy to be here. I started my career in the telecom industry. But to be honest, I spent almost my entire career in SoftwareOne. I'm here since 16 years plus. And since 1.5 years, I'm leading and serving the DACH region.

Good afternoon. I'm Regina Manfredi. I have the honor of serving the North American market. And I have been in the Microsoft ecosystem for over 20 years and started the U.S. channel for Crayon. So thanks for the Channel questions. And I'm happy to be here today. Thank you for including North America, Raffi.

Of course. Thank you.

My name is Varun Paliwal. I come from a very small region, APAC, just 15 countries, countless languages, and as you might have noticed on the slide, 29% of APAC's global workforce. I spent almost half of my 23 years of professional career at SoftwareOne, including an entrepreneurial stint. And exactly the reason why I'm so happy and passionate to be around is just the amazing people and the entrepreneurial spirit we have in this company. So thank you for inviting me here.

Thank you all. Great.

So maybe we start with the combination of bringing really Crayon and SoftwareOne together as one. And I think we are all eager to understand what that really means in your markets. How did the combination really help you accelerate? How did it help you maybe in your markets to win or cross and upsell into your customer base? You had some questions about revenue synergies. So I'm sure the audience is very interested to hear your perspectives from a local market perspective. Maybe Varun, we start with you.

I think it's a good point to start from, Raffi. As you are aware, SoftwareOne and Crayon both had a very strong presence across APAC. So it was a complex integration that we ran for the last 12 months. But we're now beginning to see the results of this very successful integration that we ran. We are seeing some of the fastest growth we have witnessed over a period of time. The combination has given us access to a wider market base, a broader portfolio and access to new customers and partners that we have never ever accessed in the past. And this is happening consistently across the 15 countries that we operate in, across our transaction and services business.

I would like to dive a little bit deeper into the services business because it's the fastest-growing business line for SoftwareOne in APAC. Because of the combination, one, we are able to sell more not only to our existing direct customers, but also to a larger customer base that is now accessible through our partner ecosystem.

Second, we are able to deliver services faster. This is key because it allows us to recognize revenue faster than ever. And fundamentally, if you see what is happening for SoftwareOne in APAC is that we are winning services faster than we are able to build delivery capacity. The combination of these 2 companies coming together has given us both the capacity and the capability from our partner ecosystem to now accelerate the revenue delivery for the services business that we are winning.

The third piece is about being future ready. And we seriously believe that if you want to have the right to exist, we constantly need to innovate and modernize on our service delivery engine. We have combined the security capability of SoftwareOne with the data and AI capabilities of Crayon to build a highly scalable, secure and agentic delivery model that will allow us to really be relevant and profitable in the market for the next 3 to 5 years.

So in essence, Raffi, we see that we are able to scale faster, operate leaner and structurally deliver higher profitability across the region.

Very good. I think the audience likes to hear that. Very good. Regina, maybe you want to share your experiences in North America.

Well, we're really excited in North America because we feel like this is where the growth can compound the fastest. So speaking of revenue synergies, when you think about the growth that Crayon experienced in U.S. in 2025, we had nice double-digit growth. And we did that in 2 market segments that really are going to fuel the engine of the business going forward. And that's the mid-market and the channel. And the reason why we think that's important is because on the SoftwareOne side, we have strength in the enterprise space, nonprofit and SMB. And so when we take those 2 platforms and bring them together, that means more. It means more reach. It means more opportunities, as it relates to multi-vendor, AI specifically and our IT portfolio management.

IT asset management is where we are a true Gartner and IDC leader in the North American space, and it actually physically shows up on the P&Ls of our customers, and it matters. And then when you marry that with our channel partners, we don't compete with our channel. We actually truly partner to grow and create win-win situations for our customers. And that channel becomes a force multiplier because we leverage each other's strength in the market. They buy their Microsoft CSP, their Google through us. Yes. But then they leverage the strength of our IT portfolio management as well as our services to help their customers win. And it's a win-win-win for everyone involved. And we really believe that having the more resources together and more segments are going to drive tremendous scale for us.

Fantastic. Let's turn the conversation a bit around our midterm revenue growth. We just announced the high single-digit revenue growth midterm. And maybe you can elaborate a bit how -- what are the key drivers to achieve that in your markets and how you basically want to contribute? Maybe, Patrick, we'll start with you.

Yes. Maybe let's distinguish between the reselling, so the transactional side and the services side roughly. On the transactional side, we are clearly acting out of a strengthened position in the DACH region because we are a market leader in 2 out of 3 countries. So in Germany and Switzerland, we are a market leader in multi-vendor and Microsoft distribution already. Whilst in Austria, we are very strong in the enterprise segment today. So this gives us access to a very broad customer base with existing good relationships. And the answer on that can clearly only be that we have to increase the share of wallet per customer in the reselling area. So we are expecting to grow laterally across the market in line with publishers. We do have dedicated presales teams, of course, with Microsoft; Broadcom VMware, we heard him before; Citrix; Adobe; and especially with the security vendors like CrowdStrike, Sophos, Trellix or Trend Micro, which changed the name to TrendAI recently.

Moving towards services. I think one of the biggest strengths of the DACH region is a very diverse portfolio. We have multiple bets to play on. We heard optimize to innovate circle. And let me maybe highlight some service lines, which are not mentioned today. In particular, we have a very strong support offering called multi-vendor premium support, which is fueled by the demand of customers asking for affordable support in Microsoft and also other multi-vendor solutions. We do have HMS contributing significantly, where we manage hybrid and on-premise workloads for bigger accounts. And of course, the strongest one in services motion is the EA to CSP to services.

We heard a lot about AI already. Of course, we want to capture business automation needs from customers through our dedicated AI teams. And yes, so I believe, as I said, this combination of strong position in licensing and combination with services is underpinning our ability to deliver short, mid- and long-term growth.

Thank you. Regina, I mean, you went through quite a turnaround in North America. I would say the investor community is very aware of that. And we are all, I think, including me, relieved about the Q1 result back to growth and the impact you make. Thank you for that. But maybe you can elaborate a little bit more on how you -- from a turnaround situation now back to growth, and how you want to kind of have sustainable growth in your region?

In North America, we -- it was a team effort. The first 6 months through the integration were a true team effort, and we have strong leadership in North America, and I'm proud of what the team has accomplished as one company. And that takes quite a bit of work, as you all know, through an integration. It was all about sales execution and a new management system and driving greater discipline around that sales execution to amplify the value proposition of the combined SoftwareOne and the combined company.

So we started the year, we started -- last August, we decided that we were going to really double down on 4 top priorities in North America for FY '26. And those included our ITAM capabilities because we had substantial bench strength, our multi-cloud capabilities because we know that our customers need us to meet them in a multi-cloud environment as well as a multi-AI environment because the demand, as you guys are probably aware, is astounding, especially in our market. And the fourth one is around channel. 40% of the net new logos in North America in Q1 were referred to us by our channel partners. So that is a compounding growth that is really a force multiplier, as I mentioned before.

So it allows us to double down in SMB and mid-market because that's where customers are really experiencing the most complexity. They don't have the resources. They're very constrained. They're trying to figure out which LLM do I use, how am I going to figure out AI, how do I secure it, how do I govern it. And they're really needing an adviser to come and sit alongside them, get them ready for AI, secure it, govern it and make sure that they get the ROI that they need.

I'll give you an example. There was a customer in Q1 that is the largest freight -- privately held freight company in North America, and they were struggling with cost, and they wanted to deploy AI. Specifically, they were looking at Copilot and other LLMs. And so we came and sat alongside them and helped them build a road map and a plan. We took their enterprise agreement and transitioned it to a cloud services provider solution together with support, and we also helped them create a road map, leveraging the Microsoft programs that could fund the services that were needed for them to innovate. So they put in $1.1 million back in the P&L so that they could innovate and accomplish their goals. And we helped them figure out how to leverage Copilot with Claude Cowork for their enterprise. And now, we're moving forward with other solutions and multi-vendor with them. And that's what we do. We meet them at the cost crisis, and we support them along the way.

Very exciting example. Thank you for sharing the insights. Can you tell us just a little bit more about what that all means now from a midterm growth perspective for North America?

Well, from a midterm perspective, I believe that we have a real opportunity when it comes to continuing down the multi-cloud, multi-agentic advisory services that we provide. But we have a good pipeline of acquisitions that are actionable, and we're going to try to leverage that to build out the AI bench strength that we have within our organization. And we can't forget the channel and how we can continue to leverage the strength of how we partner differently than the traditional distributors to create that win-win-win combination.

Thank you, Regina. Varun, over to APAC. I mean, you have obviously delivered consistent growth. If we look backwards, nice growth. I guess the question for you is, how do you keep it up? Or how do you really accelerate the pace even further?

Yes. So thank you for that question, Raffi. I think we are looking to continue the momentum in APAC. There are 2 simple ways of keeping the momentum going. One is we need to continue to add new customers and partners. And second, we need to go broader and deeper with our existing customers and partners.

When we look at the strength of channel that we are bringing, we still have certain markets in APAC where we can expand the channel presence. And that's the first task we are looking at doing right now because the channel presence allows us to really go into the untapped SMB market and start adding more and more customers to the multiplier effect that we get to the channel business.

We are also seeing certain markets and market segments where there's a lot of untapped potential for new customer acquisition. In these markets, we are making investments on a hunting team that is primarily goaled on net new customer acquisition. Now, when we look at how do we go deeper, broader with our existing customers, we know we operate in a position of strength with Microsoft. That's been the core pillar of our business. But we are also now building and implementing services and solutions on the other 2 hyperscalers.

In addition, we also have 8 to 10 strategic ISVs that we are working to build solutions as well as building presales capability around it. So all of this fundamentally gives us the ability to accelerate the selling motion that we want to drive in our existing customers' partners, and we spoke about continuing this momentum, Raffi. I believe we really need to build and look at long-term strategic contracts with our customers' partners, and that's where our managed services offering becomes very critical. And fundamentally, we are investing in modernizing that managed service offering for specific customer requirements in APAC to be able to continue with this momentum.

I think with all of this, we are very confident of continuing the momentum that you have seen with APAC over the last few quarters.

I mean, all of you touched a bit on customer segments, and let's dive a bit more into these topics. I think we would be interested to understand which of the customer segments you foresee providing you most of the growth opportunity and how you also kind of service attach in some of the customer segments.

Maybe, Patrick, we start with you.

Yes. This is clearly a tough question, Raffi, because looking at the data, currently, the 3 segments, corporate, enterprise and public sector, are equally strong in DACH, contributing around about 32% of net revenue. That leaves 4% for SMB and channel. So the answer should be SMB and channel, obviously. We had that topic before. We are planning to invest into channel as well. And coming back to the combination, I see that Cloud-iQ is really well perceived in the market. We made it available already to the SoftwareOne client base, and we are building on that, of course.

Moving to enterprise, corporate and public sector. A lot of growth was delivered in the past from public sector, and we are foreseeing continuous demand in that area. Why? Because public sector institutions are still early in their modernization journey. Topics like sovereignty, AI, and of course, modernization of application and infrastructure are an ongoing topic for them. And with our diverse portfolio, we believe we are perfectly structured to capture these opportunities.

Moving to corporate and enterprise finally. The sweet spot for many publishers is clearly corporate. That's where most publishers really want to partner with us. That's also where the EA to CSP motion to services lends the best. So clearly, we have a focus there. And as well in enterprise, I mean, IT complexity is not decreasing, it's increasing, and that fuels the demand for advisory or consultancy or managed services. And as you heard with our portfolio, we believe we are very well positioned there as well. So we plan to grow in all the 4 segments.

Varun, what's your perspective?

So for us in APAC, we're seeing growth in all market segments, including enterprise, corporate, SMB and public sector. But we are going to have a special focus on the underserved mid-market. You spoke about services, Raffi, right? In this segment, when we are meeting our customers, we are seeing a very clear demand for them asking SoftwareOne to not only consult, but also deliver the services that we are really talking about can make an impact. So what we are now beginning to do is we are beginning to unleash the full power of our portfolio in this customer segment.

We typically start with an advisory or a consulting service, then we really deliver value for the customers through a professional services project. And eventually, we see the long-term contract with them through a managed service offering. So fundamentally, the entire range of what SoftwareOne can offer is something we are able to sell in this customer base. And what we are also seeing is that we are typically operating in the CHF 100,000 to CHF 1 million services deal. And our contribution margin on the services that we're selling in this space is the highest amongst all. So that's the reason we want to improve our profitability also in services, and we are going to really double down on this particular segment.

The other segment, which is offering us a meaningful upside, is public sector and regulatory markets. And in this case, we are seeing increased demand through local AI adoption through sovereign cloud and through the demand from customers for local technology ecosystems. And that is where the local presence of SoftwareOne is really giving us the leverage to service them in the way they want.

Thank you very much. I mean, looking into the regions, obviously, we have regional differences, right? I mean, North America, DACH, we are operating really in 2 or 3 countries versus in APAC, it's like, I think, 16 markets or countries where we are operating in. And I was wondering maybe, Varun, Regina, can you elaborate a little bit? Does this require a distinct approach on how you engage with customers and vendors?

Yes. Maybe I'll start, Regina. I think APAC really offers a very, very diverse market, culturally very different. You have multiple languages, which requires local market presence, but also the digital maturity of every country is very, very different. We see very highly advanced and mature markets. We see the upcoming highly growth-related emerging economies. And on the other side, we also see some of the regulated markets.

What's really working for us is the ability to act local in these markets with a local presence. That is what the customers are looking for. And that's where we have a local sales, a local presales and a local delivery engine. But we're also bringing the power of SoftwareOne, right, in more a regional or a global sense. And that's where our operations, marketing and the regional delivery centers we have are really helping us service customers in the way they really want. And specifically for APAC now, we have 3 delivery centers, one which -- a couple of them which really focus on the English language, while we also have one which services all the different languages like Japanese and Korea and in Chinese, right? And that is really helping us serve these markets in the way we really wanted to support them.

Thank you. Regina?

So we're lucky that we have really one language, but in Quebec, they do speak French. So I have to admit that. But in North America specifically, it is the most advanced and fast-moving market for us today. And it's a race for AI. And I talked a little bit about our IT asset management capabilities. And one of the things that we've learned this year is it is resonating. If you walk into any boardroom in North America and simply ask the question, how much have you spent in AI in the last 12 months and then follow up the question with what's the ROI on that? You will not get a straight answer from anyone. And so we can truly leverage that with our IT portfolio management services. And that is a core strength for us. As a matter of fact, this year, I'm incredibly proud of our service delivery team who have delivered CHF 209 million, that's USD 269 million, USD 0.25 billion, back into the P&Ls of our customers so that they can reinvest that money in innovation.

That's huge. I don't know anyone else in the North American market that's tracking it the way that we do, delivering, executing and being accountable to that. The mid-market needs that help because they're grossly under-resourced, and they need to compete in the market. I can leverage the channel and the channel partnerships to help us drive that mid-market space and that SMB. We proved it in Q1, and we're going to continue. We still have work to do. We have a lot of work to do in North America. But while others sell AI hope and hype, we're going to sell AI economics and tokenomics in FinOps.

Impressive. Thank you very much, and you see the confidence for future growth in North America. Let me summarize, right, and we go to the last question and maybe keep it short and crisp in one sentence. I mean, how would you describe your region from a growth perspective?

Okay. So -- and I really believe in this, Raffi. APAC is a market limited by our imagination, where we have unlimited growth potential, driven by innovation in the market, modernization. We are seeing cost pressures for the customers. And all of this, we believe that SoftwareOne is uniquely positioned to win trust and deliver value to our customers and partners.

North America is a high-growth, innovation-driven market where SoftwareOne and our partners execute and deliver with excellence around IT portfolio management and the channel.

Yes. Last but not least, DACH. I would say it's a highly penetrated market in which SoftwareOne is leveraging its strong marketplace position and its diverse service portfolio to increase value per customer.

Thank you very much. Thanks to all of you. Thank you, Varun, Regina, for flying in all the way from Asia and North America to join us here. Yes. And I think -- thanks for sharing all the insights as well to everyone. I think this shows the growth potential, which we basically see. We mentioned it. We see across all the regions, basically broad-based growth looking into 2030. Some will be faster, some less, but overall broad-based growth. And I think it gives us confidence that we can deliver the ambition, which we defined. So thank you for that.

And I think with that, I hand over to Schraner or Melissa or both of you or...

[Presentation]

All right. I have the privilege and honor to bring on Nicole Dezen, who I will have her introduce herself, but she's the Corporate Vice President, leading the overall partner ecosystem within Microsoft. As you know, Microsoft is our largest provider vendor that we work with. We started our business with Microsoft, and we have a deep trust with them. But I know many of you are eager to hear this session. And so I would like to invite Nicole to have a discussion with me and be able to help answer some of the questions that you have all asked us over the last few years.

So first of all, thank you, Nicole. It's really a pleasure for you to be here. For context, Nicole is based in Seattle. She flew in just for us to be here with you. So it's a huge time commitment, and I just wanted to say thank you for that.

Well, thanks for having me. It's such an honor to be here.

Honor is ours. And maybe just briefly, before we jump into questions, give a bit of your role background for this audience here today.

Sure. So I'm -- actually, I think today -- yesterday, I celebrated my 19th year at Microsoft. And 18 of my 19 years have been in our partner business. And Microsoft's heritage is the partner ecosystem. We actually turned 51 years old in April. Partner is in our DNA. Satya, our CEO, has very publicly said, we will always be a partner-led company. And it's never more applicable than right now with all of the new innovation, AI capability. And so I'm so grateful to be able to spend so much time with the team at SoftwareOne and see all of the incredible things you all are doing on behalf of our shared customers.

Thank you. Well, it's -- the trust goes both ways.

So let's get into it. I mean I know that there's a big underlying question. I'm going to get the elephant out of the room.

Please, yes.

So let's jump into it. So Microsoft clearly has been moving more direct in the enterprise space. So I think a question top of mind that many of the people in the room have is why are partners so essential? So what's -- when you think about that, what's your partner strategy overall? And particularly in this fast-moving pace with increased complexity, which has been the theme today, an AI-driven environment, where do you see partners specifically?

Sure. Well, as I said, Microsoft has always been a partner-led company, but you hit on it. It's so complex. What AI has brought to the world is so incredibly exciting and extraordinarily technical and a little bit terrifying to customers. And so this is where partners are so crucial to the equation. Microsoft's strategy is that we have a platform approach. And so we invest extremely heavily in R&D and AI innovation so that partners like SoftwareOne can invest in IP services and your unique differentiation on top with the goal that 1 plus 1 equals 10 in front of a customer. And what partners do is you really bring our tech to life. You translate all of the technology and the tools into business outcomes.

The other thing, I think, came through really wonderfully in the regional discussion we just listened to, was the way that partners extend Microsoft's capability, you scale it in every industry, every geography and every customer segment. And so you are absolutely an extension of Microsoft, and you play a critical role that we will never play ourselves.

Thank you for that. I mean, thank you also for the investment. I think what often is underestimated is how much you've been leading in with us. So if we look at our AI transformation, back in 2019, we were AI Partner of the Year for Microsoft globally. But that was not done on our own. It was done through the investment that you helped us prepare for this AI era that we are in today. So when we talk about SMB, this has been a big growth driver for our future. We just announced our 2030 guiding, and channel, channel, channel is a big topic that we keep talking about. And you heard that in the regional session as well. You've identified this SMB segment as an important growth opportunity. How do you define SMB today? And why is this customer segment so crucial for Microsoft's future growth? And where do you see partners like us contributing and helping to reach this jointly together?

Yes. SMB is a topic I'm particularly passionate about. So I was so excited to hear the references so many times throughout the day-to-day. I'll start with numbers. IDC forecast that in Microsoft fiscal '27, which starts in 3 weeks, by the way, the TAM for SMB is $625 billion. It's a massive TAM. And candidly, we don't yet have our fair share. And so our job together is to find the way to serve the unique needs of those customers. And this is one of the things that's so special about our partnership is that you have the capability through your distribution business to uniquely serve those SMB customers, but you bring all of the capability that you've invested in centrally for so many years to bear. And so I think it's a fantastic combination. Distribution is core to Microsoft's strategy to serve small and medium businesses. And what you'll see us do in fiscal '27 is increased investment to enable distributors, particularly one that's so unique like SoftwareOne to be able to serve the needs of SMB.

One of the things I'm particularly excited about right now is I think that AI is the great democratizer for small and medium businesses. These are -- historically, technology was designed to serve large enterprises, which you do quite well. But SMBs have a massive business opportunity now with AI and agentic, they can't do it without a partner. And so they're counting on partners like you to be able to package up the capability, give them confidence in what they're doing is secure, reliable, scalable, and that's really the capability that you're bringing to the market. I'm quite excited about it.

Thank you. And we're excited as well. I mean, if you think about our revenue growth and our margin profile, we fully believe that we need to scale out this because I always say it's about economies of scale. So it's the reach, it's the presence that we've overall said.

When you talk about the importance of frontier firms, so that's the big, let's say, new thing. Satya just came out of Build talking all about frontier. What makes SoftwareOne a frontier firm? And where do you see us creating the most value for Microsoft and our customers?

Yes. Maybe I'll just start with how I think about what a frontier firm is. A frontier firm is an organization that makes AI real across the board inside the organization. It's not about a model or a tool or an agent here and there. It's truly rethinking the end-to-end business operation through the lens of AI. It's not about tech for tech's sake. It's about taking the business outcomes and then applying this amazing innovation that's -- it feels like there's something new every day coming, but it's about using the innovation to address your business outcomes more quickly, more effectively.

There are several things that I look at when I think about a partner that's truly a frontier firm. And SoftwareOne is the example I often turn to publicly. The first and most important thing that we look at is a partner that is what we call customer zero. That's an organization that is using the technology internally first. And you know this well, Melissa. Microsoft has had a practice of using our own technology internally first for many years. And what that's done for us is it's allowed us, one, to just road test the tech and make sure that it's ready for prime time and ready for the scale of the businesses that we serve together. It also gives sellers, our engineering teams and our delivery people real-world credibility.

And so one of the things I'm so pleased about when I look at what SoftwareOne has done is you've really embraced the belief behind why Customer Zero matters, integrated technology internally in order to give the entire SoftwareOne organization that expertise, that credibility and that insight. And then you take all of that and you bring it to customers. And this is where you can operationalize end-to-end workflows, use your own experiences. And for those that aren't aware, we train our own sellers and our customers to ask partners how they're using Microsoft technology internally. And the reason that we do that is because customers need to know that they can trust a partner with this very, very precious transformation goal that they have.

I love it. And you're right. I mean, Microsoft has had this long history of testing the products internally. I mean, you look at Teams, when I was at Microsoft, we were testing Teams before it was even actually rolled out and then COVID came. And wow, the world was then better prepared to have a digital infrastructure in place to communicate during a time like that. We adopted that in SoftwareOne, and it's actually been crucial to our sales capability so that we have the internal ability to sell to our customers and show that we are that customer.

Now the big one I have to go to because this is the investor community. So they look at incentives, how you pay, and there's always these questions of are incentives going to change again like they did with the EA incentive. And I keep reaffirming, no, no, no, CSP is here to stay. And I think you can rightfully say that CSP is, yes, here to stay.

CSP is here to stay. CSP is our hero motion for SMB and the mid-market. I'm giving you a preview to our fiscal '27. So I can confirm. I'm wearing my money jacket today. So I agree.

Because as you build out your partner model and incentives, we always say it's a shift, it's an evolution, it's helping to build that capability for the future so that we're in a position to deliver together and co-sell together. What do you think the kind of underlying objective? And how do we think of the role of partners in this kind of future? And I know you can't reveal anything yet because you haven't -- they're just rolling out this fiscal year for starting in July. But how do you evolve that more from a holistic perspective?

Sure. So one of the things I'm responsible for as the Chief Partner Officer is our partner incentive strategy, and it's a material investment that we make. It's one of many investments we make in the partner ecosystem. We make all of our investments through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner program or you'll hear us talk about MAICPP. This is the holistic capability that we -- where we enable partners with benefits, skilling the badges, your designations and specializations, which SoftwareOne has quite accomplished that, by the way, go-to-market, co-sell, and of course, incentives. And I know everyone, particularly this community gets quite excited about incentives.

Our objective every year as we look at how we put incentives to work for the business is to motivate and reward partners to generate growth. And that's what everyone will continue to see in our fiscal '27. The incentives are designed to ensure that we're working effectively together at the face of a customer to enable you as the partner to be focused on growth and growth looks like many things. Growth can be new customer acquisition, it can be upsell, it can be cross-sell, it can be attached, like we're here to ensure with our ever-growing portfolio that you've got all of the tools at your disposal to serve those customer outcomes.

I look at partner incentives as the moral equivalent to our seller incentive compensation. And in our planning processes that we do every year, I sit with our incentive compensation team internally, and we look together at what are the levers we're going to use to motivate Microsoft's own sales force and then what are the levers we're going to use to motivate partners. In our fiscal '26, which has 3 weeks left to go, we had a record level of investment. I'll be able to say the same thing again in fiscal '27.

Thank you. And thank you for the continued investment. It's so important that this community hears it because I know we went through a big shift in 2025 with the enterprise business. But I think it's fair to say we had a partnership approach going through. And the investments, as we always said, there was actually -- there wasn't a decrease overall. There was an opportunity to actually earn more, but that shift went from -- to CSP and to our services business overall. And I think we're certainly benefiting from that as we look to 2026 and beyond.

I also just want to thank you and the entire team at SoftwareOne. That is the hallmark of real partnership. We were making changes in our business that we felt were right for the long term for customers and for partners, but it did mean a shift for you. And looking at the way that SoftwareOne pivoted, you still have phenomenal licensing and transaction capability because that brings the cash register and that's important for everybody. But the investments that you made in order to really be able to shine through advisory capability, services and delivery capability, that's magical. And that is the kind of growth that we are rewarding and investing in, in partners like SoftwareOne.

Thank you.

Yes.

And you're right. I mean, the transactional business is still here, and it's still important. And we still have to deliver it to customers, to enterprise customers, to public sector. We still have to deliver there. It's extremely important, and that's a big portion of overall business as well as what we call indirect markets, so emerging markets. Let's kind of maybe shift to my last final question for you. Looking ahead, we're talking all about AI, clearly, Microsoft, you are talking about AI, as it accelerates, how do you see the role of partners such as SoftwareOne evolving?

The role of SoftwareOne and other partners only becomes more critical in the equation. I heard references to some of our new products. I know you and I are quite excited about Agent 365 as an example. Microsoft is releasing new product, it does feel like every day. I know we announced quite a few products at Build recently. You are the face of Microsoft to customers. And so you are the ones that take all the amazing tech that we're building and you make it real for customers. You are the ones that sit with a customer to understand their business goals, whether it's about enhancing their own employee experiences, reimagining customer engagement, reshaping business processes.

It's a partner like SoftwareOne that internalizes that and then decides what are all of the capabilities that you package up in a very complex world that's moving very fast and also understanding that all of that has to be done securely. Security, governance, this is nonnegotiable. Like you can't have AI without security anymore. And so when I look at SoftwareOne, I look at the investments that you've made in your centers of excellence, in cyber, in delivery, you are world-class. And so this is why customers continue to bet their businesses with you. This is why customers trust you.

Thank you. Thank you, Nicole. It's really -- I mean, an honor to have you here to fly all the way to take the time, I think, to demystify some of these questions that our investors don't get the chance to meet with you every day. So I really want to say thank you on behalf of everyone here and for everybody online. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.

So with that, now we're going to take a deeper dive in terms of our overall financial aspirations and midterm guidance. So my pleasure to bring Hanspeter, our CFO, on to take us through that.

So good afternoon, everyone. Let me also extend a warm welcome from my side. It's great to see such a strong interest in our story. I'm Hanspeter Schraner, Chief Financial Officer, and it's a privilege to walk you through our financial ambitions for 2030. Over the next 20 minutes, I want to give you a clear and compelling picture where we are heading financially and importantly, why we are confident in our ability to get there. We have spent the last year delivering on the most significant integration in our industry, bringing Crayon and SoftwareONE together. That work is now largely behind us and what has emerged is a stronger, more diversified and more scalable business.

Today, I will talk you through 3 things: First, the foundation we have built; second, our specific financial ambitions for 2030; and third, how we intend to allocate the capital along the way. So let's start with our foundation. Our combined business, SoftwareONE and Crayon has created a truly strong financial foundation built on 3 pillars. First, successful integration, successful execution of the Crayon integration, supported by strong underlying business momentum. We have already delivered CHF 86 million in synergies, and we are ahead of plan to reach our CHF 100 million target. Beyond cost synergies, we have established a robust financial backbone with unified data and reporting across the combined entity. This is not just about efficiency. It provides us a single source of truth to manage our business with greater discipline, transparency and speed.

Second, a relentless focus on value creation. Our strategy is around -- is centered around profitable growth. We are disciplined on cost, focused on operating leverage and driving strong cash conversion. At the same time, we are seeing a clear improvement in earnings quality with less noise, fewer adjustments and more predictable, transparent financials. Third, a clear commitment to delivering attractive shareholder returns. This is reflected in a balanced and disciplined capital allocation approach, investing in growth, returning capital through dividends and maintaining a strong balance sheet. This discipline preserves the financial flexibility to act on value-accretive opportunities as they arise. So the foundation is solid. The integration is delivering and the business is built on real momentum.

This slide is at the heart of what I want to leave you with today, our 4 headline ambitions for 2030. Number one, high single-digit revenue CAGR from '26 to 2030. We are positioned directly in the path of structural growth across IT cost management, software and cloud sourcing, cloud services and data and AI solutions. We do not need to create new markets. We need to execute in markets that are already expanding rapidly around us with AI acting as an additional accelerator. Number two, an EBITDA margin above 28%. This represents an improvement of around 5 percentage points compared to our 2026 baseline, driven by structural factors, operating leverage, automation and AI-enabled efficiency rather than one-off measures. And number three, the cash conversion above 60%. This is about constantly turning profit into cash, reliably and repeatedly at a level that supports our growth ambitions while maintaining balance sheet discipline.

These targets are firmly grounded in the structural strength of our business and the progress we are already delivering. Further, we confirm our commitment to our dividend policy with a target of 30% to 50% of net profit. Let me now unpack our revenue ambition. On the left, you see our 2025 starting point on a like-for-like basis, 1.4% growth, assuming Crayon has been consolidated from the beginning of 2024. In 2026, we expect mid- to high single-digit growth. And looking at 2030, we deliver high single-digit CAGR across the period. So where does this growth come from? Let me start with Software & Cloud Direct. We continue to scale within the Microsoft ecosystem, driven by the ongoing transition from AI to CSD. At the same time, we are expanding across other hyperscalers and independent software vendors while increasing our presence in underpenetrated markets.

Software and Cloud Channel is, as Gumi explained, a highly scalable global growth engine with significant uptake from a relatively low base. Growth is driven by the expansion of the Microsoft Tier 2 model into new geographies as well as increasing scale across other hyperscalers in underpenetrated regions. Additional upside comes from expanding ISV distribution rights, enabling us to capture incremental revenue and internalized margins as well as from service-led cross-sell where channel partnerships unlock access to SMB customers and drive incremental demand through bundled offerings. Overall, this creates a diversified, scalable and structurally supported growth runway for the Channel business. Software and Cloud Services remains a core growth pillar, increasingly driven by AI-led services in data, AI and IT cost management.

Growth is supported by strong underlying momentum in cloud services with all service lines benefiting from rising infrastructure demand and increasing focus on data and AI. Cloud services and ITAM are becoming key attach points for AI-driven workloads and more complex enterprise environments. At the same time, the portfolio is actively reshaped, reducing nonstrategic, lower-margin offerings while focusing investments on higher growth, higher-value areas. Data AI is the primary growth driver, complemented by IT cost management, where a-driven cost optimization and governance capabilities further strengthen the value proposition. Overall, this results in a more focused, higher growth service portfolio with AI acting as the key accelerator of both revenue growth and strategic relevance.

Now let's talk about profitability. Our 2025 adjusted EBITDA margin on a like-for-like basis was 20.9%. We expect to be above 23% in '26 and our 2030 target is above 28%, implying roughly 5 percentage points of expansion over 5 years. Let me explain the dynamics behind this. There are 2 structural forces shaping margin trajectory. First, our business mix involves. Direct channel is structurally higher margin than services, and our delivery margin is already at industry benchmarks across all 3 business lines. AI-enabled solutions and delivery support us in maintaining this benchmark contribution margins even in a more competitive environment going forward. As the share of services increase, it creates a natural mix-driven dilution at EBITDA level. However, this dilution is more than offset.

The key driver is AI-enabled efficiency. We are embedding AI and automation across both delivery and SG&A from service execution and support to sales operations and back-office functions. While delivery margins are highly optimized, AI further supports margin resilience and targeted improvements within the Service business, ongoing portfolio sharpening and the focus on higher value areas such as Data & AI and IT Cost Management structurally enhance profitability. At the same time, -- the primary impact is further down the P&L through structurally lower sales cost and administrative costs, resulting in a leaner operating model and tangible cost savings. Combined with operating leverage as the business scales, this drives sustained EBITDA margin expansion despite the increasing share of services in the mix while also improving earnings quality to reduce reliance on adjustments and nonrecurring items.

Cash conversion. I know this is a metric many of you follow very closely. Our target is above 50%, defined as free cash flow over EBITDA. Let me walk you through the drivers. On the operating cash flow side, we are seeing a step change driven by 2 factors. First, the EBITDA growth as just described; and second, a structural release of net working capital over the next 3 years. Integration of Crayon and the internal use of AI allow us to reduce time to invoice, improve credit and rebuild as well as harmonize customer with vendor payment terms, supported by a strong cash collection. Together, this unlocks cash that has historically been tied up in the balance sheet. On the CapEx side, our bigger than CHF 150 million incremental investment over the next 3 years in growth, technology and AI enablement is self-funded through that working capital release.

We are not asking you to accept a period of heavy capital expenditure with promise of future returns. The incremental investments we are making are funded from within the business. Taken together, this creates a structural step change in cash generation. The combination of EBITDA expansion from 29% above 28% and the net working capital reset drives a sustained improvement in free cash flow conversion in the near term and through 2030. This means we are not just growing profitably, but we are converting the profit into cash at scale. And this gives us flexibility to reinvest in the business, to return capital to our shareholders and to act on value-accretive opportunities. With this, we change to the capital allocation. Our capital allocation policy is built on 3 principles, and they are deliberately balanced. First, investing in sustainable growth. We prioritize focused investments in organic growth initiatives, strategic AI to drive both revenue and efficiency and selective value-accretive bolt-on M&A.

We are not pursuing transformational deals. Our focus is on targeted acquisitions that either strengthen capabilities or accelerate our position in high-growth segments. Second, a progressive dividend policy. We are committed to return 30% to 50% of net profit to shareholders. Progressive means growth as earnings increase, the dividend increases. This also reflects our confidence in the sustainability and quality of our cash flows. And third, a disciplined leverage. We maintain a healthy net debt-to-EBITDA ratio, a strong balance sheet provides resilience and importantly, the flexibility to act when attractive opportunities arise. We are investing in growth while delivering returns and maintaining financial discipline.

What you are looking at is a business with 4 clearly defined and mutually enforced financial characteristics. Sustainable revenue growth, broad-based, structure supported and accelerated by AI across all business lines. Structural margin expansion, driven by AI-enabled efficiency and operating leverage more than offsetting mix effects. Improved cash generation driven by EBITDA growth and anchored in a structural net working capital reset, converting profit into cash at scale and rising earnings quality as integration effects fade and adjustments decline, reported results increasingly reflect the true underlying business performance. These 4 elements reinforce each other. Better growth drives better margins, better margins drive stronger cash generation and stronger cash generation fuels further growth while enabling us to return capital to our shareholders.

This is a business with momentum, built on a stronger foundation with clear visibility on how we deliver our targets. And we have the strategy, we have the discipline and we have the team to execute. Thank you for your attention. I hope I have given you a clear sense of both our ambition and our confidence in delivering on these targets. I look forward to your questions and to updating you on our progress on the quarters ahead. Thank you.

Thank you Hanspeter. We will follow the same procedure as in the previous Q&A session. So we will start with taking the audience -- questions from the audience. So if you have a question, please raise your hand and we will provide you with a microsoft. Sorry, microphone.

Yes sir. Thank you forum for the presentation. Just 2 clarifications. You're not breaking out the margin targets for the 3 pillars? You only have an overall margin target?

That's correct. We have an overall margin target above 28%, but there are no targets for the 3 business lines.

And the same question. Sorry.

The report on the margin quarter-by-quarter or half year and the end of the year in our segment reporting.

And the goals include M&A?

Goal does not include M&A.

It don't include M&A?

It does not include -- it's organic.

Okay. So what's the role of M&A?

We certainly believe M&A will help us drive inorganic growth, but we don't plan and model that way. So this -- you could say our guiding expectations are delivered based on organic growth. So the growth drivers that we see in the business for the bridge that Hanspeter walked through. We -- I think M&A from our perspective is certainly something that could be accretive in the future. Right now, our focus is to continue closing out the integration of Crayon, which we're very pleased with the current progress. And then we'll continue to pursue efforts. Certainly, North America is a geography that naturally makes sense given the scale and the opportunity that Regina discussed already. And of course, also augmenting skills and capabilities, especially on the technical service side overall. But at the moment, our focus is to make sure we drive organic growth.

And a question -- a follow-up question, if I may. So I mean, you said you're not really trying to buy at this point or making many M&As at this point. But what about the prices in North America? Aren't they very high? I mean would they have to fall in order for you to be interested in buying companies?

Not necessarily. I think it depends on the strategic asset and capability. Yes, you're right that typically pricing is much higher in North America in terms of valuation overall. However, we could do bolt-on acquisitions, carve-outs and some of those types. But at the moment, I think let's make sure that we deliver on what we say. So that's crucial. We have 2026 guiding. Our focus is delivering on that, executing the business. We see so much growth potential in our existing portfolio and continue to hire organically is certainly a focus, but we will always consider M&A opportunities in the future.

I'm Reasol,Berenberg. I'm interested in the net working capital release. So how should we read it? And could you also comment on the factoring levels going forward? And also what a potential decrease in factoring levels might mean for your EBITDA margin as apparently there is going to be an IFRS rule changed from next year onwards?

Okay. These are 3 questions. Let me start with the factoring. And as I stated many times, we see factoring as flexible financing instrument, which is tailored for the specific purpose. We use it. Today and currently, it's cheaper than bank financing. So -- and this does not change going forward. Regarding the capital conversion target, it's assumed that factoring is -- has no impact. So with other words, in the model, it's assumed that factoring stay constant. If we would increase or decrease factoring, of course, we would adjust for that to calculate the cash conversion, keep it neutral. The last question was related to the introduction of IFRS 18, I guess. We are currently analyzing the impact of our industry.

As you rightfully said, it will have an impact in the disclosure. We are analyzing that also comparing what our peers are doing. And as soon as we have clarity, we will tell you what the impact of these targets are. These are targets under the current IFRS regime. and not under the 2027 regime.

One quick one on the geographics. I mean one might think that the maturity of different markets are kind of different. Which of those markets would you need to invest more to make sure that you are going to accelerate your growth or basically retain your market share in a sense? And which would you see more competition and more critical for your growth?

I mean as you mentioned or as we mentioned before, it's -- we have a very diverse region, right? And -- if you look into some of our more mature regions, I would say, like the DACH region, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, kind of the homegrown region from software on since day 1. You can also take the Nordics, right, which is like the home of Crayon, where we have a very, I would say, high saturation also a lot of customers, which we are already serve. I think there it's more about investing into cross and upsell potential and therefore, probably in presales and dedicated delivery capabilities in order to really increase that wallet share.

I think that's probably more for some of the more mature markets. And then we have territories like APAC, which is really a mix, right, some mature markets like ANZ, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, but then also some very emerging markets and also some markets where we have relatively little market share still in the mix. So it depends really there country specific on where you invest more and where you focus more on, let's say, increasing the wallet share. It really depends a bit country by country from this perspective.

And is there anything like remaining in North America to ensure that turnaround has actually happened? That's what we saw in Q1, and we're going to have like a sustainable growth going forward?

I mean, in general, we are confident in North America for growth for the full year 2026. I think given the leadership which we have in place, the team which we have in place, we have a clear direction. I think Regina introduced some of her ambitions to us before. And I believe also in the opportunity, I mean, North America is a massive market, right? It's the biggest market by far globally. We still have relatively little market share, which gives us a huge opportunity to grow, right? We have a very good business model around our Channel business, around our IT Cost Management solutions there. And I think with focus and doubling down on these areas, we see long term, a very good growth opportunity for us in North America.

I have one question regarding your -- the new financial numbers that you have given us for 2030. I was wondering a bit that you look so far out given the fact that the environment is so dynamic and also the 5 percentage points of margin expansion looks like a lot on the first view. Now you also call it ambitions. You don't call it targets or guidance. Can you qualify that a bit? Should I put these numbers in my model as a midpoint? Or is this really like an ambitious target that you strive to achieve with your crew and the sales team? Or is it more like the bar and you're actually aiming for more than that in 5 years down the road?

You should put the numbers in your model.

It's midterm guiding.

So that's the midpoint.

Assuming you achieve your targets in 2030. Based on today's share price, you would trade at like 5x cash flow at a 20% yield. So my question is, why wouldn't you allocate any cash on buybacks?

I mean, look, it's a fair and a good question actually. We have this capital allocation framework, we present it. Of course, I mean, this does not -- this is our priority. And this is where we see the priorities, but this is not a complete no to buyback. So as the gentleman said, it's a 5-year period. We have our priorities mentioned in the framework, but I mean it's not an absolute no to share buybacks. But for the time being, it's what we present.

And I got another question on monitoring the token usage of the different LLM providers. Is this a capability that you have today fully? And do you have it just for Anthropic because of the partnership? Or is it something you're still building out?

So we have the token capability across the LLMs today. So everything from Copilot to Gemini to Anthropic. This is something that we will continue to build that IP component and service our customers, and you'll continue to hear more from us on this.

Yes. I think my question was already asked to touch on, but maybe just to drive the point home for other shareholders that have the same view. As we sit here today, I mean, you've laid out these very attractive targets that you -- based on the regional leaders have a very high degree of confidence in delivering. And we're sitting here at a valuation that's really a substantial discount that there's not too many of the capital-light type of peers. Maybe there's Softcat and Byte and then you look at where you guys bought rhipe, where -- obviously, there's a lot of synergies but whorfMyst transacted at, where Softchoice has transacted at.

And I think there's maybe some confusion as to why we should have such high degree of confidence in these guidance numbers if we're not confident enough to buy back our own shares, why should we have confidence in those numbers if we're not putting that capital then just buying back our own stock.

I think it's a good feedback. So first and foremost, I mean, when we look at the growth potential, we also have to invest in growth. So we want to invest in profitable growth, and that's the focus. I think building on your answer in terms of country scale up, if you look at North America, I mean, you've come from the U.S., you know the potential. It's significant. And so if you look at just 5% of our employee base today is there, I mean, we need to continuously build up. So I think driving the skills and capability and talent profile is essential. Yes, share buybacks is certainly a consideration, and we will continue to evaluate that as part of our overall capital allocation framework.

Any further questions from the audience?

What about online?

There is another one.

I have still a question regarding the shareholder structure you have. Do you know there is still a main part of shareholder with one. Do you know in the future, are they going to sell more shares? Because recently, when one of them, I think Mr. Curti, he sold quite a big part of shares and then the share price went down. Do you know that if it stabilized at the moment or have you to expect further of this huge share sales? And another question -- second point, I would like to ask once again regarding America, where you're so optimistic. What about the competitive? I never heard about this because I know that in the States, there is a tough fierce competition there. You have taken this in consideration with your growth ambitions?

Maybe I can start with the competitive situation in North America. I mean you are right, there are big players out there, much larger than us in North America. However, I think we also have to consider in terms of the IT Cost Management, IT Asset Management business. We are the market leader in North America. So we have a very good positioning there. In terms of our Channel business, I think we see very strong growth rates in North America. And considering the size of the business which we have, if this continues, actually, we are quite positive that we can achieve solid growth rates midterm and long term, irrespective of somewhat the competition. And the second point is, I mean, we have competition everywhere, not only in North America, in all the local markets.

I can take. Okay. The second question, I guess, was the sale of the shares of Mr. Curi. So at the end of the day, this has nothing to do. I mean, first is not an insider. So he had no knowledge about Q1 numbers. And there was a private decision at the end. Based on this -- it was nothing to do with SoftwareONE at all. And we do not expect something similar. But we have absolutely no indication that this will happen in the near future again. And there was a third question, I guess. Okay.

Okay. Any further questions from the audience in the room here in Zurich? Then I would -- sorry.

Just a quick one. It's Andreas again. So could you maybe comment on the role of partners in general as more demand is moving towards AI and tokens. Do you see a bigger place in between the software vendors and clients as you have it in the Microsoft space in software nowadays?

Thank you for that question. I absolutely do. I see so much more potential even bigger than before. And the reason for that is that the AI journey and just that journey of us as a company, all of those steps have to be in place for a customer to realize the benefits of AI. so much, let's say, on-premise business still exists to really harness AI really need cloud. Having your data state and order needs to be in place. How do you prioritize which scenarios because there's only so much budget that a company can deploy. So really getting that maximum return takes prioritization and focus. That's where we come in. So we have the full service capability to deploy and to prepare a company.

We can advise on the LLM space, and then we can also manage that full cost. So when you look at that life cycle, we touch all of those points. So for us, we believe that this actually increases the opportunity, hence, the implied midterm guiding. And we see that partners such as ourselves need to lean in and support our customers because it's increasing in complexity with choice. which option do you choose? How do you go pass it? Nicole said it so well herself. I mean the Microsoft portfolio continues to just expand and expand. And so it's quite confusing for customers, and that's where we play a very distinct role to advise and to grow that portfolio.

Okay. It seems like we have no further questions from the audience in the room, but I would like the operator to open up for online questions.

We have a question from the line of Christopher Tom from UBS.

I guess just one question on headcount. How do you expect this to sort of develop given some of the AI efficiencies? Do you think it's going to increase or sort of stay flat? And what part does it help with the margin expansion?

Look, we -- I mean, first of all, it's not a DIA introduction. Let me start. First, we are a company having capabilities to do it by our own. That's a big benefit. So we will internally introduce AI as we evolve. It's not -- it will not happen overnight. And of course, it will have an impact on the FTE number. But it's not a kind of, let's say, restructuring case or big layoffs. It's a gradual involvement through 2030. And the big thing is we have internally the capability, the expertise and knowledge to do it. And we already do it actually. So I guess it will have an impact on FTEs, but it will not be like a layoff of, I don't know, a number of people. It will gradually involve, if that answers.

I think. Certainly, I think when we talk about growth and driving it, we're going to continue to invest in sales capability, invest in our people skills and development as well as presales and service delivery. We need to continue to broaden out our skills. So it's not that AI is going to replace headcount. I think that's extremely important. We shift the tasks and the focus of our employees to get greater efficiency out of their time. So it's -- if you look back, people used to have to operate an elevator. Those jobs don't exist because they've been shifted. And so that's how I think about it in the sense that AI helps us do our work better. I mean I use it on a day-to-day basis to help me be far more efficient in how I build my PowerPoint slides to content development.

And in the past, I would have to go and try to leverage others for that. So I think that's just what's been saying, using our brains. I think humanity in the end needs to win in this whole AI race. But we have to be able to, let's say, be more efficient in scale. And so that's certainly something, I think, from a headcount perspective, we'll continue to invest in people. That does not necessarily go away.

Okay. Then I think we are on time actually, and we will conclude the program for today. Thank you so much on behalf of the whole EB team and the SoftwareOne team. Thank you also to the guest speakers of today from Visma, Apro and Microsoft. We will now serve an outside of the room. And as always, if you have any follow-up questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to the IR team. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SoftwareONE Q1 2026 Trading Update Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Valentina, the Chorus Call operator. The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Kjell Hansen, Head of Investor Relations at SoftwareONE. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining SoftwareONE's Q1 '26 presentation. My name is Kjell Hansen, Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today are our Co-CEOs, Raphael Erb and Melissa Mulholland and our CFO, Hanspeter Schraner.

In terms of agenda, Melissa and Raphael will start with the Q1 business performance. Hanspeter will then take us through the detailed financial performance. And finally, Melissa will give her closing remarks. Before handing over, please let me draw your attention to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements and non-IFRS measures on Slides 2 and 3.

With that, I will hand it over to Melissa.

Thank you, Kjell Arne, and welcome to our Q1 '26 presentation. Our headline numbers tell a compelling story. On a like-for-like basis, revenue for the quarter was CHF 387.7 million on a constant currency basis, representing growth of 12.9%. This was a strong result, and importantly, it was broad-based with every region and every business line contributing to growth. Adjusted EBITDA grew 32.8% to CHF 79.4 million, with margin increasing by 3.4 percentage points to 20.5%. Even stronger is the growth in our reported EBITDA, which increased to CHF 71 million, up from CHF 61.9 million in the comparable period. These results reflect our consistent execution of a clear strategy, building one stronger, more capable and more efficient company.

Turning to our business lines. We delivered growth across all three areas, driven by strong customer demand. Software & Cloud Direct grew 5.8% to CHF 153.8 million. We are seeing clear acceleration in our EA to CSP conversion as customers are increasingly moving to cloud-based licensing. Importantly, EA agreements are also positively impacting growth, demonstrating the depth and strength of our customer relationships. In addition, following Broadcom's partner program, restructuring for VMware, we remain a pinnacle partner, the highest tier and the only partner covering the whole of EMEA with this designation.

Software & Cloud Channel grew by 37.3% to CHF 40.4 million. Growth was led by APAC, driven by India, while NORAM showed continued momentum. The Google Cloud partnership we announced in Q4 is gaining traction, further strengthening our hyperscaler mix alongside Microsoft and AWS. The market dynamic in our channel business is becoming increasingly competitive as Microsoft tightens CSP partner authorizations, significantly increasing revenue thresholds and consolidating the partner ecosystem. While this creates near-term pricing and competitive pressure, our scale and capabilities position us well to benefit from when smaller partners exit or are deauthorized.

In Software & Cloud Services, we grew 14.9% in the quarter. The primary driver was CSP-related services activities. As customers transition to CSP licensing models, it becomes easier to bundle services with the license and to expand managed services over time. Furthermore, cloud services, data and AI, and cybersecurity all showed strong momentum in the quarter, which tells us that the service portfolio is broadening and customers are increasingly turning to SoftwareONE for a wide set of their technology needs. That gives you a sense of our business line performance.

Raphael will now take you through the regional results in detail.

Thank you very much, Melissa, and a warm welcome to everyone. Turning to our regional performance. I'm very pleased to report that every region delivered growth in Q1 '26. This also reflects the acceleration or the accelerated EA to CSP conversion we are seeing across business lines. I'm especially delighted with the performance in North America, which delivered 10% growth. This reflects the deliberate actions taken over the past year to stabilize and refocus the business. There is still more to do, but the direction is encouraging. 8.4% growth in DACH was driven by the accelerated EA to CSP conversions, especially in Germany and Switzerland. Overall, public sector demand in DACH remains robust. Western Europe grew 11.1%, led by both direct and channel, while we also saw encouraging progress in services.

The Nordics delivered a standout performance with growth of 32.7%. This was driven primarily by the direct business where multi-vendor also contributed positively alongside a strong contribution from services. APAC grew 18.4% with all three business lines contributing. Services were the primary growth engine, reflecting strong demand for cloud, data, AI and cybersecurity. The direct business also performed well, supported by EA demand in Southeast Asia and Greater China. I'm pleased to confirm that the previously disclosed outstanding receivables from a public sector customer in the Philippines has now been fully collected, bringing this matter to a close. CEE delivered 18.2% growth, a strong result for a region where we continue to build scale and strengthen our platform. I'm also pleased to see LATAM returning to growth with 9.4%. CSP growth was strong, supported by new customer wins while services contributed through hybrid managed services.

Now let me share with you a concrete example of how we can deliver tailor-made AI solutions for our customers. The district office of Waldshut faced a challenge that many public sector organizations recognize, high volumes of citizen inquiries, large amounts of information that was difficult to navigate and services that's tied strictly to office opening hours. As demand continued to grow, while resources remain constrained, they needed a smarter, more scalable approach.

SoftwareONE implemented a Google AI-powered multilingual chatbot integrated directly into their website. The solution provides 24/7 access to administrative information independent of office hours. It requires no manual maintenance and automatically draws on up-to-date website content. The impact was immediate. Citizens can now access the information they need at any time. Recurring inquiries are handled automatically, significantly reducing phone and e-mail volumes. And the administration has freed up capacity to focus on more complex individual cases rather than routine inquiries. This is just one example, but it illustrates a broader pattern we are seeing across our customer base. AI is not a future opportunity for SoftwareONE. It is something we are delivering for customers today with real measurable impact.

With that, I will now hand over to Hanspeter to walk you through the financial update.

Thank you, Raphael, and welcome to everyone. Let me walk you through our financial performance for Q1 '26. For reference, this slide presents IFRS figures. Please note that Crayon was consolidated for the first time in June 2025, and as a result, the Q1 '25 figures reflect SoftwareONE on a stand-alone basis. As Melissa and Raphael mentioned, we delivered strong top line growth. On a reported basis, revenue was CHF 387.7 million, up 67.4% year-over-year, reflecting both Crayon acquisition and organic growth. Our reported EBITDA margin improved significantly, up 6.8 percentage points to 18.3%, driven by revenue growth and operating leverage. Q1 '26 was impacted by a high volume of 3-year CSP agreements and early renewals ahead of Microsoft's upcoming price increases. Nevertheless, our Q1 2026 underlying growth was very solid. Turning to the adjusted EBITDA bridge. We continue to narrow the gap between the reported and adjusted EBITDA in order to improve the quality of earnings. In Q1 '26, adjustments totaled CHF 8.4 million, primarily relating to Crayon integration expenses. You will notice that while the reported EBITDA margin improved substantially, the increase in adjusted EBITDA margin was more modest. This is purely a mathematical effect, as EBITDA adjustments in Q1 '26 are CHF 10.9 million lower than in previous year.

This slide shows our cost base development, including third-party delivery costs on a like-for-like basis quarter-over-quarter. Starting from our Q1 '25 adjusted OpEx base of CHF 301 million, there are a few moving parts to walk through. We delivered CHF 14 million in cost reductions from our synergy program. Offsetting this, personnel expenses inflation added CHF 11 million, while variable compensation increased by CHF 9 million, reflecting the stronger performance in the quarter versus previous year. Third-party delivery costs added CHF 3 million, driven by growth in our services businesses. We also had CHF 10 million one-offs in the quarter. This primarily related to management consulting strategy support, legal fees, audit fees related to Crayon acquisition, software costs related to the combination of SoftwareONE and Crayon as well as bad debt.

CHF 6 million relates to strategic investments, mainly in IT infrastructure and selective hiring to support our transformation and growth. Finally, FX provided a tailwind of CHF 17 million. Total adjusted OpEx amounts to CHF 308 million, remaining broadly flat despite inflationary pressures. Given that OpEx adjustments in Q1 '26 are CHF 10.9 million lower than in Q1 '25, unadjusted costs are CHF 5.3 million below the previous year.

Now turning to Slide 14, which shows our detailed business line P&L on a like-for-like basis. As of this quarter, we reintroduced the contribution margin per business line consistent with previous reporting. Starting with Direct. Revenue grew 5.5%, ending at CHF 153.8 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 44.8%. Revenue in Software & Cloud Channel increased 37.3% in Q1 '26 year-over-year at constant currency, with adjusted EBITDA growing CHF 8.3 million to CHF 24.3 million, reflecting a margin of 60.1%, an increase of 9.5 percentage points compared to previous year. Software & Cloud Services delivered a strong growth of 14.9% year-over-year at constant currency. Contribution margin was CHF 80.1 million, reflecting a margin of 41.4% compared to 38.5% in Q1 2025. The adjusted EBITDA margin increased from 1.5% to 5.1%, driven by increase in revenue and operating leverage.

With that financial overview, let me hand back to Melissa, who will provide further insights into the '26 outlook, followed by her closing remarks.

Thank you, Hanspeter. Based on our strong Q1 performance, we raised our 2026 revenue growth outlook from mid-single digits to mid- to high single digit, while margin guidance above 23% remains. Our Q1 growth and 2026 expectations reflect the structural shift from traditional licensing models towards cloud-based subscription and consumption-driven solutions, combined with broader multi-vendor expansion. Growth in services is expected to be driven by customers' increasing need to optimize complex cloud environments, managing software estates more efficiently and unlock value from data and AI. We remain on track to achieve the CHF 100 million in run rate cost synergies by early May. We have achieved more than CHF 80 million of run rate cost synergies to date.

Let me close with 3 key takeaways from Q1 '26. First, our strategy is delivering. Growth was broad-based, every region, every business line contributing. This reflects the strength of the combined company we are building. Second, margins are expanding. Growth and operating leverage are driving this expansion while we remain committed to continuous cost control. Third, the integration itself is on track to reach CHF 100 million by year-end. We are executing with discipline, capturing synergies ahead of our plan and building the foundation of sustained performance. Altogether, Q1 demonstrates progress on our strategy and gives us confidence in the long-term value we are creating. We look forward to sharing more details on our combined strategy, midterm financial targets and ambitions at our Capital Markets Day in June. Thank you.

We will now transition into questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Nooshin Nejati from Deutsche Bank.

Congrats on the strong results. Maybe two questions on the Services and Direct, if I may. So, Services growth accelerated to 15% and significantly outperformed expectations. How much of this is structural demand versus linked to CSP-related activity and project timing? How should we think about the momentum for the rest of the year? Services margins improved to 5% this quarter also. Do you see a path for services margin to structurally move higher as the businesses scale? And also on Direct margins declined this quarter despite revenue growth with SG&A cited as the driver. To what extent is this deliberate investment, and how should we think about margins from here?

Thank you, Nooshin, for the question. What we're seeing on the services portfolio is structured strong customer demand. A significant portion of that is driven, of course, by the strength of our Microsoft business on CSP, but also importantly, on the increased growth that we're seeing with data and AI. This reconfirms the fact that we've been doing this for a number of years and are really now seeing this come through with momentum across the business overall. We continue to drive revenue synergies on the combined company, which I think also implies the improved margin overall. We are committed to improving services profitability as a company and structurally would expect this to continuously improve throughout the year.

On the Direct side, yes, you're correct to point out the, let's say, the margin difference there. This is, let's say, an aspect around SG&A relative to the accounting when we merged Crayon and SoftwareONE together. And I can hand it over to Hanspeter for any further comments on that.

Yes, Melissa, thank you. So the SG&A is broadly flat. And as Melissa said, it's an effect of the consolidation of Crayon, and it's also influenced by less EBITDA adjustments, which have an impact on the Direct business.

Understood. So, how should we think about the margins in both divisions going forward for the rest of the year?

What we see is we see overall positive demand across our business portfolio, and we're really pleased to see growth across all business lines, but also, of course, across all regions. And so we would expect that to continue and progress also, hence, the adjustment to our guidance.

The next question comes from Ines Mao from Bank of America. This is from BNP Paribas.

So I have two questions. First, can you give us an update on initial targets -- does your full year guidance include any revenue synergies going forward? And the second question comes back to service strong.

Sorry, I think you need to repeat the question.

Sorry, you're cutting out, unfortunately. Can you repeat from the beginning?

I'm sorry, your connection is bad. Maybe try again or we could see if your connection improves.

Now it's better.

Can you hear me better?

Yes. Unfortunately, we lost you. Maybe we'll try to do a follow-up. There you are.

Yes. Sorry. So let me just repeat my two questions. My first question is about the revenue synergies. Can you give us an update on where they stand today versus your initial targets? And does your new full year guidance include any revenue synergies going forward?

And my second question comes back to the strong performance in Services. Was it mostly related to strong demand for a more complex environment to navigate, which means not driven by one vendor particularly? Or was it primarily wrapped around Microsoft renewals or more demand for Microsoft products? I hope it was clear.

Thank you. I appreciate your patience for us on that. So in terms of revenue synergies, we don't actually report the full year number or, let's say, any number around revenue synergies. What we've stated overall is that we expect them to outperform or exceed the cost synergies. And we continue to see improvement, I would say, overall, and that's reflected across our business lines because it's very difficult to quantify the effect of that. But certainly, what I can say is the organization is working really well together as indicated based on the results, which we're very pleased by. Of course, this would naturally be, let's say, pulled into the full year guidance. I think around the services side, we see strong demand across the board. This is not just with respect to Microsoft. But as mentioned, we're seeing continued delivery around Google as implied to the customer case example, but also AWS. So, this is extremely important for us as our customers are operating in multi-cloud environments, and we have the capabilities to deliver against that.

The next question comes from Christian Bader from Zürcher Kantonalbank.

I have a couple of questions. So, the first one related to your strong performance in Software & Cloud Services. So, this like-for-like growth of 14.9%, is it possible to break this down into, let's say, a volume effect and a price effect?

We don't necessarily look at it from that perspective between volume and price. I would say that overall, it's just improved efficiency as we brought our organization together, really delivering a stronger capability across our services lines and capturing demand.

And maybe to add on, we see growth on services in every region, right? So every region is growing on our services line, which, of course, further helps to contribute to the overall growth.

But I remember in the last call, you mentioned that there's strong demand that you see for, let's say, higher value-added services. So, I was kind of assuming that, if there's also some sort of price effect maybe included in this strong revenue performance?

I would say that the important part to mention is that the increased services is also related to how we bundle services with CSP. So naturally, if we're seeing a strong delivery on the CSP portfolio and we execute accordingly, that would also play into effect. So, I think that's another important element to state.

Okay. All right. Good. And then in terms of your, let's say, outlook for the rest of the year in terms of top line, which you have slightly upgraded. So, I was just wondering, I mean, this different momentum that we saw in the first quarter with the direct business being up in mid-single-digit territory, Services up 15% to high teens and Software & Cloud Channel 37% up, so by far the highest. I mean, shall we expect a similar momentum for the rest of the year?

I think certainly, we see the strong demand continuing throughout the rest of the year. It's also important just to remind in terms of the seasonality of our business, Q1 is our smallest quarter. So with that, we want to make sure that we deliver according to our expectations that we set to the market, but we do not necessarily see demand slowing down.

Okay. But do you expect the Software & Cloud Channel to be the fastest-growing segment followed by Software & Cloud Services in the full year?

Yes. I think looking into our forecast, I think the Software & Cloud Channel, our channel business, we are positive that we see good growth, probably based on the forecast, this is the fastest-growing business line throughout the year. Yes, that's -- we have indications for this, yes.

All right. And then I have two other questions. What will be the full year integration expenses for 2026?

Apologies, there was a sound background. So you asked what the full year integration expenses would be? Is that correct?

Yes, that was a question, yes.

Yes. So what we said is the total integration cost is in line with the synergies. But this is an aggressive assumption. So we said last quarter, it will be a little bit below. We have integration costs of CHF 25 million in 2025. In the first quarter, we had CHF 7.4 million, and I would use the CHF 7.4 million as a run rate for 2026.

For each quarter, you mean?

Yes.

Okay. I see. All right. And my last question is...

Which, of course, depends on the acceleration and on the steps we do, but I think as a guidance, I would take it as a run rate.

Okay. So CHF 7.1 million (sic) [CHF 7.4 million] quarterly run rate. Good. And so -- and then I assume that there will be no integration expenses in 2027?

Yes.

Okay. And my last question is, which corporate tax rate shall we model for this year, please?

That's a good question. Actually, I would model 30%.

The next question comes from Christopher Tong from UBS.

Just maybe two questions from me. So, you called out early customer renewals ahead of Microsoft price increases. So, I was just wondering if you can sort of quantify the impact in Q1? And my second question is at the full year results, you said that profitability would sort of accelerate towards the back half of the year. I was just wondering if that's still the case.

It's a good question. In terms of the Q1 performance, if we exclude, let's say, the price, let's say, impact and pull forward from those specific deals, the growth implied would be approximately 8.5%, still delivering a very solid performance for the quarter. In terms of your comment regarding the full year expectations, that was alluded to the fact that if you look at the seasonality of our business, Q4 being the largest quarter, Q2 being the second largest quarter tends to be much more towards the back half in terms of volume of that cycle. Certainly, we continue to see a solid, let's say, demand overall, also with Microsoft just launching an E7 as a SKU. So, we see continued, let's say, business momentum going throughout the year.

The next question comes from Marc Bürgi from Finanz und Wirtschaft.

The first question was already asked in part by my speaker before. This effect of those renewals of those price increases. You mentioned something I didn't understand it correctly acoustically. Maybe you could repeat your answer. I mean I just would like to understand how much -- if you said the momentum will continue. So is it not the case that maybe some orders were placed early in light of coming price increases. I mean how does that get -- that's the first question.

And the second question is, you mentioned those new thresholds that Microsoft imposes on its vendors. So, I'm interested in how this changes the market. I mean, I assume that you profit from that because you're one of the biggest partners of Microsoft. But just maybe could you maybe shed some more light on this changing dynamic of the market due to those thresholds that Microsoft imposes on vendors?

Thank you for asking the clarifying question. Regarding the overall price increase, just to start there. What I was referring to is that, that price increase really starts in July. So, with the point of it being that customers, especially in Q1, are taking advantage of that renewal cycle. And the overall effect of it, if we exclude that, would be our growth on a stand-alone would be 8.5% approximately. So, still a very good performance, excluding the, let's say, the pull-forward demand that we saw on these agreements. I hope that.

So 8.5% compares to what?

12.9%.

Hopefully, that clarifies. In terms of the thresholds, what I was referring to is that Microsoft is consolidating down the number of CSP providers in the market that are authorized due to volume. So to your point, this would imply, let's say, an opportunity for SoftwareOne to capture that as there's more of a consolidation in the market overall.

Okay. So you're profiting from that?

Yes. Of course, there could always be some competitive aspect in the market as others are also certainly taking advantage of this as well.

The next question comes from Andreas Wolf from Berenberg.

Congratulations on the strong start to the year. I'm also interested in the prebuying activity of clients. Should we expect a similar momentum Q2? Or might there even be an acceleration given the fact that the price increases will kick in from the middle of the year?

And then could you also comment on the growth rates within the enterprise agreement contract framework? My understanding is that enterprise agreements are still expanding. And the last question is related to the working capital. Apparently, there is a massive valuation lever hidden in the receivables. At Crayon, the business operated at negative working capital. Do you believe this is also achievable at SoftwareONE? And if so, over what time frame?

Thank you very much, Andreas, for the questions. So first of all, related to Q2 and the price increase on Microsoft. I think as we have highlighted, we saw a very good performance in Q1, right? Melissa mentioned before the impact or, let's say, the normalized growth of 8.5% without this impact. So we saw many, you could call it, early renewals already in Q1. And we maybe don't think that in Q2, it will be that many or that aggressive early renewals like in Q1. But overall, we see the momentum continuing. The demand is there, but Q1 was clearly a lot of early renewals already happening.

Then if we go into the second question related to the growth on enterprise agreement. I think as we always mentioned, enterprise agreements are going to continue, especially in our public sector segment. And we have a very good robust business in public sector. We see continuous good growth in public sector, and that's also helping, of course, the overall growth around enterprise agreements. On the working capital question, I hand over to you, Hanspeter.

Thank you, Raphael. The net working capital, I mean, it's a high focus area for us. We are actively working on specific areas. The topics are time to invoice, credit review and payment terms. We made significant progress in overdues. So overall, you can assume that we will improve our net working capital situation to 2026.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Kjell Hansen for any closing remarks.

Sorry, we have a last-minute question from Christian Bader, Zürcher Kantonalbank.

Yes, I have a follow-up question. These integration expenses for Crayon, can we assume that those are all included in the corporate costs?

I mean -- what do you mean including in the corporate cost?

Well, in terms of segment reporting segment results, I was just wondering the integration expenses that you have shown the CHF 7.1 million (sic) [CHF 7.4 million], are those allocated on the segment? Or are they 100% included in the corporate cost item?

We show the adjusted EBITDA in the segments, and so they're not included in the segments. They are not allocated to the segments.

So they are in corporate costs completely.

Yes.

There are no more questions from the phone now.

Thank you, everyone, for participating in the call. And as always, please feel free to reach out to the IR team for any other follow-up questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SoftwareOne Full Year 2025 Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. I'm Valentina, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded.

[Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Kjell Arne Hansen, Head of Investor Relations at SoftwareOne. Please go ahead.

[Audio Gap] presentation. My name is Kjell Arne Hansen, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at SoftwareOne. Joining me today are our Co-COOs, Raphael Erb and Melissa Mulholland; and our CFO, Hanspeter Schraner.

In terms of agenda, Melissa and Raphael will start with a summary of the year and the Q4 performance. Hanspeter will then take us through our detailed financial performance. And finally, Melissa will take us through the final section covering our AI opportunities within the business model as well as our financial outlook for 2026.

Before handing over, please let me draw your attention to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements and non-IFRS measures on Slide 2 and 3.

And with that, I will hand it over to Melissa.

Thank you, Kjell Arne. Welcome to our full year 2025 presentation. 2025 was transformational. With the combination of SoftwareOne and Crayon, we have created a global software and cloud leader with unmatched reach and capabilities. Today, combined gross sales amount to CHF 14 billion. We serve over 70,000 clients across more than 70 countries, supported by 13,000 highly skilled colleagues.

Our ecosystem is equally strong with more than 10,000 vendors and a network of 12,000 channel partners, providing reach to the SMB segment. This scale matters. It shows how we are one of a kind and a truly global partner for hyperscalers and ISVs.

In addition, both Gartner and IDC have recognized us as a leader in software asset management. We are well positioned to capture the structural growth opportunity and customer demand based on our global scale and market position.

Overall, we have delivered. We returned to growth with revenue up 1.4% year-over-year on a like-for-like basis, ahead of our initial expectation of broadly flat development. Profitability remained strong with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20.9%, in line with our commitment to stay above 20%.

At the same time, we maintained discipline on adjustments coming in below our guidance on below CHF 30 million, excluding the Crayon-related costs. Lastly, we made good progress on synergies, delivering CHF 43 million of run rate by the end of 2025. As of today, total run rate cost synergies amount to CHF 64 million.

This was a year where we delivered on our promises while building the foundation for further improvement. Growth improved steadily throughout 2025, and by Q3, we were back to positive territory. And in Q4, we reached 11% revenue growth. We will continue to build off the foundation laid in 2025. The actions we are taking are working, putting us in a stronger position to drive momentum in 2026.

Let me briefly comment on the full year performance. I'll focus on the combined like-for-like numbers as this best reflects the underlying development of the business. As stated earlier, we delivered 1.4% revenue growth for the full year, with a clear acceleration into Q4 where growth reached 11%. At the same time, profitability improved and we delivered an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20.9% for the year, an improvement of 0.5 percentage points compared to 2024.

The key message is clear. We are improving our growth momentum, combined with continued strong margins. Hanspeter will explain the detailed IFRS numbers shortly. But as you can see, our business is on a path of continued growth.

Looking at our 3 segments, we see a clear pattern of improving momentum across the business. In direct, the full year performance was impacted by the Microsoft incentive changes. However, we saw a clear rebound in Q4, supported by multi-vendor and continued CSP growth.

Going forward, we see significant growth opportunities driven by our broad partner ecosystem across global software vendors, including AWS, Google, VMware and Adobe. Furthermore, the push for EU sovereign cloud increases demand for multi-cloud compliant cloud solutions, playing directly to SoftwareOne's strength in navigating complex vendor ecosystems and regulatory requirements.

In channel, growth was strong at 18.7% for the full year, driven in particular by APAC, which represents 60% of the total channel revenue. At the end of February 2026, we became the first global authorized distributor for Google Cloud, enabling channel partners to access and resell Google.

This is a strategic milestone allowing us to significantly expand our channel business through authorized distribution of Google Cloud services across 10 markets, covering Australia, India, the Nordics, Germany, France and the U.S., with additional countries to follow throughout the year.

In services, we see solid momentum, supported by demand in areas like cloud and cybersecurity. Across all business lines, growth reflects our ability to capture new incentive opportunities introduced by Microsoft across CSP and services. While EA-related incentives were reduced, we have partially offset this by leveraging our combined service portfolio and strong CSP offering.

Profitability improved across all business lines, driven by stronger growth, impact from cost savings and synergy realization. We see a strong and encouraging development with solid growth in channel and services and a recovering direct business entering 2026.

I will now hand it over to Raphael to walk you through the regional performance.

Thank you very much, Melissa. Welcome to everyone from my side. I will now take you through the regional performance.

First, I want to highlight the change in our segment reporting going forward. Following the acquisition of Crayon, our operating segments have been reassessed. Given our significant presence in the Nordics and the CEE, the rest of Europe region has been restructured into 3 new operating regions: Nordics, Western Europe and CEE.

In DACH, revenue grew 2.8% in 2025, driven in particular by a strong Q4 growth of 15.4%. Headwinds from Microsoft incentive changes on enterprise agreements negatively impacted revenue during the year, but this was offset by a successful transition to CSP as well as strong multi-vendor and public sector growth.

Revenue in Western Europe increased 3.3%, driven by strong growth in multi-vendor sales and services, while also here partly offset by changes in Microsoft incentives. Similar to the performance in DACH, the year ended strong with 12.2% revenue growth in Q4.

APAC grew 11.4%, driven by strong results across the region, with India performing particularly well. The largest contributor to growth came from services business as was driving by strong demand with data and AI and cloud services.

I'm also pleased to share that during Q1 2026, payments commenced from a public sector customer in the Philippines on Crayon's previously outstanding receivables with USD 22 million collected as of today. The remaining amount is expected to be collected shortly, bringing this long-standing matter to a close.

Nordics revenue grew 0.7% in 2025. During the year, growth in the direct business was positive and accelerated to double digit in the fourth quarter as the impact from Microsoft incentives ease.

2025 was a disappointing year in North America with revenue declining 12.6% year-over-year. The 2025 performance reflects the previous GTM-related sales execution challenges as well as impact from Microsoft incentive changes. The previously initiated turnaround measures are gaining traction, with internal sales metrics improving sequentially, supporting a recovery and return to growth in 2026.

LATAM declined 4.4%, driven in particular by weakness in the direct business. We see strong growth opportunity across key markets like Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, and are confident in our capability to achieve profitable growth in the region. As part of the portfolio review and to support improved future performance, the company has decided to exit 4 nonstrategic countries in the region: Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Finally, CEE grew revenue with 14% in 2025 driven by strong double-digit growth across both the direct business and services business.

Now I want to present a good example of our Google Cloud capabilities and how we support customers in a cloud migration and modernization project. Barton Peveril, a U.K.-based college with more than 5,000 students partnered with us to migrate to Google Cloud. They were facing a significant increase in on-premise hosting costs, alongside the need to modernize their IT environment and support new AI-driven learning tools.

Together with SoftwareOne, they executed the full cloud migration over a relatively short period, followed by a managed service agreement to support ongoing operations. The outcome was solid, where they achieved meaningful cost savings, reduced operational workload and significantly improved the performance and security of their systems.

Importantly, this also led to a 5-year managed service agreement where we support and maintain their cloud infrastructure going forward. This is a great example on how we combine cloud migrations with long-term services, creating both immediate customer value and recurring revenue streams for us.

With that, I will now hand over to Hanspeter to walk you through the 2025 IFRS financial update.

Thank you, Raphael, and a warm welcome to everybody joining us today. In this section, we are presenting the IFRS figures in reported currency. As a reminder, the income statement includes 12 months of SoftwareOne and 6 months of Crayon.

Year-over-year revenue growth of 22.5% mainly reflects the acquisition of Crayon closed on 2nd of July 2025. Reported EBITDA margin improved -- improvement is driven by benefits of the previously initiated cost reduction program and continuous cost control.

The increase in depreciation, amortization and impairments from CHF 72.7 million to CHF 123.7 million is related to the acquisition and includes depreciation on fixed assets, amortization of intangible assets [Audio Gap] of right of use assets and CHF 17.8 million of impairments. The impairments comprise CHF 3.8 million on intangible assets, CHF 8 million on LATAM goodwill and CHF 6 million on right-of-use assets related to office closures due to integration.

Net financial expense increased to CHF 54.4 million, significantly higher than prior year. This was mainly due to lower finance income and higher finance expenses. The decrease of finance income is largely reflecting a CHF 12 million lower fair value gain on Crayon shares in 2025 compared to prior year.

Finance expenses increased driven by higher interest costs from acquisition financing and higher factoring costs in line with the increased use of factoring. In addition, other finance expense includes a one-off CHF 5 million make-whole payment related to the early redemption of Crayon bonds following the acquisition.

Income tax expense is CHF 28.1 million, implying an effective tax rate of 95% compared with the expected average group tax rate of 23%. The main drivers of this gap are nondeductible expenses for tax purposes as well as unrecognized tax losses. Net profit for the period is CHF 1.4 million.

In this slide, I will take you to the adjusted to reported EBITDA. Our reported EBITDA ended at CHF 207.6 million in 2025. 2025 adjustments to reported EBITDA of CHF 69.4 million in total were primarily related to Crayon transaction and integration costs totaling CHF 48.3 million. Excluding these costs, adjustments to reported EBITDA were CHF 21.1 million, well below the CHF 30 million target.

Overall, we saw a significant reduction in adjustments with 2025 adjustments constituting around 30% of reported EBITDA in comparison to around 90% in previous year. The adjusted EBITDA margin in Q4 2025 was 23.4%, down 1.5 percentage points year-on-year, mainly due to significantly lower EBITDA adjustments compared with Q4 2024.

Let me now walk you through the developments in adjusted OpEx on a like-for-like basis. This bridge shows the development on a combined like-for-like basis which we believe is the most relevant way to assess the cost development.

Overall, OpEx remained broadly stable year-on-year, declining slightly to CHF 1.2 billion, reflecting strong cost discipline despite inflationary pressure and continued investments in the business. In '25, realized CHF 74 million of cost savings from the legacy SoftwareOne cost-saving program, which was completed in Q2 2025 as well as 16 million of in-year synergies corresponding to CHF 43 million of run rate synergies.

Synergies from the Crayon acquisition are primarily driven by the elimination of publications, simplification of the organizational structure and efficiency gains across corporate functions. These effects helped offset underlying cost increases during the year.

Compensation increased by CHF 42 million mainly due to salary inflation across the existing global workforce and the catch-up of social security contribution in India following legislative changes.

In addition, we continue to invest selectively in sales and delivery capabilities to support future growth. Importantly, these investments are funded by realized synergies, allowing us to strengthen go-to-market and delivery capacity without diluting margins over time.

We also saw higher third-party delivery costs in line with increased activity levels as well as some nonrecurring and other costs, and foreign exchange had a positive impact of approximately CHF 4.6 million. Overall, this reflects a balanced cost development with tangible synergy delivery, disciplined cost management and continued investment to support sustainable growth.

Turning to the balance sheet. The most significant year-on-year changes reflect the impact of the Crayon acquisition, which is clearly visible across several line items.

Cash and cash equivalents increased to CHF 419.1 million, while financial liabilities rose to CHF 788.4 million, mainly reflecting the CHF 575 million term loan, CHF 100 million utilization of the revolving credit facility at year-end and the CHF 100 million bridge loan, which was repaid in January 2026. As a result, net debt amounted to CHF 369.3 million compared to a net cash position in the prior year.

Net working capital on 31st December 2025 was negative at CHF 564.4 million, primarily driven by the inclusion of Crayon and the continued use of factoring. The increase in intangible assets is mainly driven by the recognition of acquired technology and customer relationships from the Crayon acquisition as well as an increase in goodwill which primarily reflects the value of the assembled workforce and the expected synergies from combining the operations of Crayon.

Equity increased to CHF 981.4 million driven by the acquisition of Crayon. Overall, this balance sheet reflects the step up in scale following the acquisition.

Before I walk through the trade receivables 2025, I would like to briefly comment on a matter we decided to disclose proactively in today's press release. Preliminary legal proceedings have been initiated into potential forgery of documents by individuals relating to SoftwareOne's recording of certain overdue trade receivables in the first half of 2024. The proceedings are not directed against SoftwareOne, and they were triggered by allegations raised by a third party.

I want to make it very clear. Internal audits performed an extensive retrospective assessment of trade receivables and related provisions of the first half of 2024 and concluded that they were accurately recorded. The assessment also confirmed that provisions were appropriate and consistent with subsequent write-offs and provisions.

The slide presents the aging of trade receivables and the corresponding lifetime expected credit loss for 2025 and 2024. The acquisition of Crayon led to a material increase in trade receivables in '25. In accordance with IFRS, acquired trade receivables are recognized at fair value net of expected credit losses.

The implied bad debt amounts to CHF 33 million included in the respective fair value and is largely allocated to receivable past due by more than 181 days. For like-for-like comparability, and on a cross presentation of the acquired trade receivables, the expected credit loss in the bigger than 180 days bucket would be approximately 50%, broadly comparable to the previous year.

As of December 2025, Crayon's acquired trade receivables included USD 37 million related to a public customer in the Philippines. As Raphael already mentioned, USD 21.5 million of this amount was collected in March 2026.

At year-end 2025 and next to the standard closing procedures, internal audit again performed an additional assessment of the trade receivables and related provision recognized at year-end 2025 and again concluded that they were accurately recorded.

Further, the statutory audit of the 2025 full year accounts, which included a focused review of revenue recognition and the provisioning of overdue trade receivables provided further independent assurance regarding the appropriateness of the provisions recognized in the 2025 accounts and their compliance with applicable standards.

Turning to the net working capital. Net working capital after factoring decreased by CHF 411.6 million year-on-year, mainly reflecting increased use of short-term factoring of approximately CHF 282 million as well as the positive impact from acquiring the negative working capital from Crayon.

Given our business model, characterized by high gross sales volume and seasonal volatility, effective working capital management is key. As part of this, we use nonrecourse factoring as a flexible and economically attractive liquidity management tool applied in a disciplined manner. However, it's important to state that our primary focus remains on structurally improving underlying working capital over time.

Net working capital before factoring decreased by CHF 129.5 million year-on-year, driven largely by the acquisition and consolidation of Crayon. Crayon entered the group with a strong negative working capital position which contributed positively to the balance sheet and reduced net working capital at the combined company level.

On the right-hand side, we outlined key operational levers we are addressing across the end-to-end order-to-cash cycle, including faster and more accurate invoicing, reduction of overdue receivables, strong credit entry billing processes and better alignment of payment terms with vendors and customers. Together, these measures support our ambition to structurally strengthen working capital and, in turn, improve cash flow over time.

Now turning to our cash flow statement. Working capital changes gave a cash inflow of CHF 130.6 million. However, as mentioned on the previous slide, this is significantly impacted by the use of factoring. Noncash items of CHF 169.6 million mainly reflect depreciation, amortization and impairments, together with the add back of the net finance results.

CapEx came in at CHF 65.5 million, primarily driven by investments in internal IT, systems and platforms. The cash outflow related to the Crayon acquisition amounted to CHF 290.2 million, as presented in the cash flow statement, and shown net of cash acquired.

Gross cash consideration totaled to CHF 504.8 million comprising CHF 419.4 million for the acquisition of Crayon shares and CHF 85.4 million for the subsequent squeeze out. This was partially offset by cash acquired of CHF 270.3 million. The remaining CHF 2.7 million relates to earn-out considerations to be paid in cash for Medalsoft and Predica acquisitions back in 2024 and 2022, respectively.

Financing contributed a net inflow of CHF 273.4 million, driving by debt funding, partially offset by 2024 dividends of CHF 45.6 million and interest costs. We ended the period with a cash of CHF 419.1 million, giving us a solid liquidity position.

Turning to the net debt development. The increase over the year was primarily driven by the cash outflow related to the acquisition of Crayon. The Crayon acquisition reflects net cash outflow of CHF 405 million as well as the impact of the derecognition of the Crayon shares. Excluding the acquisition effect, the underlying cash generation was driven by a positive contribution of CHF 277 million from adjusted EBITDA and the further CHF 130.6 million inflow from changes in working capital.

Other cash outflows mainly relate to cash-effective portion of EBITDA adjustments, capital expenditures, interest and tax payments as well as dividends. As a result, net debt stood at CHF 369.3 million at year-end. Leverage measured on as net debt divided by adjusted EBITDA on an IFRS basis remains at a comfortable level of 1.3x. On a like-for-like basis, leverage would amount to 1.2x.

Finally, let me turn to the dividend. Our dividend policy targets a payout ratio of 30% to 50% of adjusted net profit for the year. As a reminder, at our H2 '25 earnings release, we refined our policy by excluding transaction and integration costs related to the Crayon acquisition when calculating adjusted net profit used for dividends. This was made to better reflect the underlying earning power and dividend capacity of the business in a year of integration.

For 2025, we proposed a dividend of CHF 0.15 per share, corresponding to a total distribution of CHF 33 million and the payout ratio of 37% of reported adjusted net profit. Excluding Crayon-related transaction and integration costs, the implied payout ratio is 71%.

This dividend proposal reflects our continued commitment to delivering attractive shareholder returns while maintaining a balanced capital allocation. It also underlines our confidence that the actions implemented to strengthen net working capital and improve operational execution will translate into improved cash generation in 2026.

With that, I will hand it back to Melissa, who will provide further insights in how our business model benefits from AI, followed by her closing remarks.

Thank you, Hanspeter. Before I go into our outlook and closing remarks, I would like to address how we are positioned in a market that is now rapidly and fundamentally being changed by AI. AI is increasing software and cloud consumption, but also complexity, driving a much greater need for governance, optimization and services.

At the same time, AI adoption is forcing customers to upgrade their software estates and invest in new tools while accelerating cloud migration and usage. This plays directly into our model. We thrive in helping our customers in maximizing return on investment in IT and simplifying complexity.

We support customers across the full life cycle from sourcing and procurement to migration and cloud services to optimization and cost management and increasingly into data and AI solutions. And as customers become more AI ready, we see a clear increase in demand for higher-value services.

From a hyperscaler perspective, the vendors see us as a clear driver of AI solutions. Given our customer proximity, AI capabilities that have been established since 2017 and our agility to market, we are uniquely positioned to help customers manage the complexity and spend through our AI solutions. AI is not just a technology shift. It is a structural growth driver for our business.

Let me finally turn to our outlook for 2026. We expect revenue growth to accelerate to mid-single digits on constant currency on a like-for-like basis. We see growth driven by CSP, multi-vendor expansion, increasing demand for higher value services and continued channel growth.

Expanding our AI capabilities alongside the sales force enables us to build and deliver AI-driven customer solutions, further accelerating consumption growth. At the same time, we expect further margin improvement with adjusted EBITDA margin above 23%, driven by operating leverage, synergies and continued cost discipline.

On synergies, we remain on track to reach CHF 100 million run rate synergies, building on the strong progress already delivered in 2025. As already mentioned, by the end of March, the total realized cost synergies amounted to CHF 64 million. We enter 2026 with improving momentum, clear drivers for growth and a strong path towards higher profitability.

Let me close with a few key takeaways. 2025 has been a transformational year, while the performance also demonstrates the strength of the combined company. We have executed with discipline, successfully integrated the business and delivered ahead of our synergy targets. At the same time, we have delivered on our financial commitments and strengthened our position and customer offering.

Finally, we are uniquely positioned to capture the continued growth in software and cloud, supported by our global scale, strong vendor relationships and clear commercial focus. This is a business with improving momentum, a stronger platform and a clear path forward, and I'm looking forward to sharing more about our strategy and priorities on the Capital Market Day in June.

Thank you. I'll hand it now back to the operator.

[Operator Instructions]. The first question comes from Mao Ines from BNP Paribas.

Congrats for the strong result today. I have 2 questions. So the first one is the company is guiding for mid-single-digit revenue growth next year. Does this include a recovery of North America region already?

My second question is, can you give us more color on why profitability improved so much year-over-year in Q4 in the Services segment? So we expect this margin level as the new normalized level, so to stabilize from here? Or is there more scope for margin expansion in the Services segment?

And my final question is...

Sorry, somehow your voice is not so clear. We can hardly understand.

Can you hear me better?

Yes, now it's clear.

Okay. I'll restart. So my first question is about next year revenue growth guidance. Does this include the recovery of the North America region in this guidance?

My second question is on the profitability level in the Services segment, which has improved quite significantly year-over-year in Q4. Should we expect this margin level as a new normal level, so to stabilize from here or more margin expansion in the Services segment?

And my last question is, can you discuss the growth prospects for the Services segment in 2026? And any new offerings that will drive growth? Typically, in Microsoft E7, I understand it will be a readiness assessment conducting by SoftwareOne team. Would you recognize this as the Services revenue going forward?

Thank you. Maybe I kick off with the first questions around North America. For sure, as we all know, 2025 has been a disappointing performance for us. However, we are making, as mentioned, also step-by-step progress, especially also around our GTM turnaround. Our internal sales metrics and KPIs clearly show that we are making progress.

And with that, to answer your question, we are positive that 2026 is going to be more resilient actually and a more predictable year for us in North America, and we are positive that in that region, we will return into revenue growth for the full year 2026.

Around the services margin, maybe also, I think if you look into the numbers and the development from 2024 into 2025, it has been a positive progress. So the margin overall has been increasing, and we are positive that this will continue.

It will continue as our service portfolio is shifting more and more towards cloud-native capability, also higher value advisory and managed services and support services, which we are having in our offering. I think this will help to further improve and accelerate our overall margins in the services business.

Thanks for your questions. Regarding E7, you're right to call it out. We see this as a strategic opportunity with our Microsoft portfolio as it combines, let's call it, the SKU capability along with AI through Copilot to simplify this for our customers. And we see this to be particularly attractive in the high end of corporate into the enterprise segment. So we're well positioned to capture additional growth opportunities from this.

In terms of additional service areas of growth that are implied, certainly, we're going to continue our focus around AI as well as agents and continue to improve the, let's say, the efficiency of the overall services line, which is implied in terms of the overall margin improvement in Q4.

The next question comes from Christian Bader from Zurcher Kantonalbank.

I have 3 questions, please, and I'd like to do them one after the other. First of all, you mentioned several times new business with Google Cloud. And I was wondering what is the revenue potential here? And is this business going to be margin accretive?

Thanks for the question. So with Google and with our channel business in general, this is a new opportunity for us. As we've seen with our AWS channel expansion, it will take time for this to be able to really take effect in terms of the P&L. So we expect this to deliver additional upside in the back half of H2, but more likely in 2027 from a materiality perspective.

From a margin standpoint, this is very accretive to our overall channel margins as the channel business is very highly dependent on our platform, Cloud IQ, which gives us more efficiency and scale. So we see this to be particularly attractive across the markets that we are ready to launch with more countries to come.

From a margin standpoint, this is very accretive to our overall channel margins as the channel business is very highly dependent on our platform, Cloud-iQ, which gives us more efficiency and scale. So we see this to be particularly attractive across the markets that we are ready to launch with more countries to come.

Okay. My second question has to do with LATAM because you said that you exited 4 countries, Argentina and 3 others. So I was wondering how much of revenue is lost due to the exit of these 4 countries.

The revenue impact is not significant because those markets are very, very small markets already. There actually the revenue impact from the revenue of 2025 has been very insignificant.

I see. All right. Okay. And then my last question is, is it possible to get some guidance for your investments, both in tangibles and intangibles for 2026? CapEx guidance, any CapEx guidance, please.

So as we are continuing to invest in our technology, especially in the platforms, the investments will maybe slightly increase, but for sure, have a similar level as in 2025.

The next question comes from Florian Treisch from Kepler Cheuvreux.

My question is around the Microsoft incentive changes, EA changes. I mean we discussed at length last year being a headwind for SoftwareOne. So the first question would be, have you actually, let's say, delivered better than expected on these kind of headwinds as you have mentioned or flagged that Q4 has clearly been driven by the CSP transition? And then looking into '26, how much of a tailwind can it become? Or would you still assume it's a slight negative impact on the overall business?

Thank you so much for asking. So great question. In terms of Q4 and what we saw for the full year for 2025, yes, we delivered better than expected given the, let's say, negative effect of the EA changes. This was driven by the focus to CSP realization, which I'm pleased to say we delivered.

In addition, we also saw the shift to services-based incentives as particularly accretive, and that's also demonstrated in the Q4 profitability improvement overall for services. As we go into 2026, we do not see any headwinds effect with related to the EA incentives.

If anything, there will be stabilization of incentives as indicated also by Microsoft. So with that, we will further, let's say, accelerate the growth that we've had around CSP and services as we see that to drive more potential.

The next question comes from Christopher Tong from UBS.

Maybe 2 from my side. I was just wondering on exceptionals in 2026. What should we expect over here? Obviously, you'll have to take some further cost synergies, but is there anything else we should be mindful of?

I mean, look, as we already stated, our goal is to narrow the gap between the reported and adjusted EBITDA. So we said it's below CHF 30 million. And of course, you always have certain items to adjust which are non-recurring, but we stick to the below CHF 30 million and with a clear ambition to further decrease. This does not include the Crayon acquisition cost or cost related to the integration, to be clear.

And maybe to add on, on the cost synergies, as we already mentioned, to date, we are at the CHF 64 million, and we are making further progress on that. We are very committed on our CHF 80 million to CHF 100 million target, which we mentioned. And through that, we should also -- this should also help to make a positive impact also going into H2 on our overall OpEx situation.

Got it. And I guess maybe on just the outlook and the cadence of revenue growth for the year. You mentioned that profitability would probably be more weighted towards second half. I was just wondering if you think revenue growth would also be sort of second half weighted as well.

Yes. I mean with the seasonality of our business, Q4 is the largest quarter. So you could certainly see that implied growth pick up on towards the back half of the year.

Next question comes from Marc Burgi from Finanz und Wirtschaft.

I only have one question concerning North America. You already talked about it in length, which is about the growth. Can we expect that in the second half? Or could you maybe be more precise about when that should occur? And just about the general market situation, how is the market -- how is your market position?

In general, as mentioned, I'm very confident that in North America 2026, we will return into growth overall as a company again, which is very good, given where we are coming from. I also expect in Q1 a better performance than in Q4. So from this perspective, I'm positive that the trajectory is going to improve, and we should see an improvement already in Q1 compared to Q4.

Overall, I think the market for us is -- remains to be an attractive market. And again, with the combination of Crayon, I think we have a good chance now with a better overall setup also with the channel business as an additional business line for us. So we continue to be very focused on North America.

The next question comes from Andreas Wolf from Berenberg.

Congratulations on the strong Q4. I have several questions. The first one is related to the assessment of the individual regions. Have you already fully assessed the region's performance? Or is there a possibility of impairments also in 2026?

The second is related to AI and the adoption of use cases? Do you see opportunities associated with the deployment of on-site engineers to drive use case adoption and ultimately, your business?

Question number three. How are AI providers such as OpenAI or Anthropic dealing with resellers? Does this -- does their growth offer business opportunities for you as well? And the last one is related to Microsoft price increases. What do you believe will be the tailwind from those in 2026?

Let me take the first question regarding the impairments. So what we did in 2025, we do the impairment test on CGU levels, which are the 7 regions. And obviously, there were no impairments based on the current business plans for all regions with the exception of LATAM.

LATAM we impaired CHF 8 million. And we believe this is the right number based on what we know today. So based on what we know today, there are no further impairments expected in 2026. Otherwise, you would have impaired already at the end of 2025.

Thanks for your question regarding AI. So I'll start with the first regarding the adoption of use cases. So this is something that we are very much focused on. We always believe that it's important to test internal use cases before we take them to market.

And we're also finding ways to drive AI through internal adoption to increase more efficiency and scale also to reduce cost to make us quicker to market to customers. So this is something that, yes, we are focused on, and yes, we are also looking at ways to deploy our internal AI capability to both support customers, but also ourselves.

In terms of your question regarding Anthropic, OpenAI, certainly, this is something that is quite exciting to see in the market. Anthropic is certainly an area where we see additional partner opportunity as they need partners like us to be able to deploy and also to help customers manage which AI models should they actually consider.

This is where our business model really thrives around complexity. So we help guide our customers around which model makes sense for their data environment, but also how to implement and build those solutions. So we see business opportunity to come out of that.

In terms of the Microsoft price increases, I always say Microsoft price increases help our business. So there's certainly a carryforward from that.

It also positions us well to be able to support our customers in navigating that price increase as our business has always been focused around cost management overall. Hard to say what the actual implied impact will be, but certainly, we see this to be positive for 2026.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Kjell Arne Hansen for any closing remarks.

Thank you, and thank you, everyone, for joining the call. And as always, please don't hesitate to reach out to the IR team if you have any further questions. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SoftwareOne Q3 2025 Trading Update Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Valentina, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] And the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Kjell Arne Hansen, Head of Investor Relations at SoftwareOne. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining SoftwareOne's Q3 2025 Trading Update Presentation. My name is Kjell Arne Hansen, Head of Investor Relations at SoftwareOne. Joining me today are Co-CEO, Raphael Erb; and Melissa Mulholland; and our CFO, Hanspeter Schraner. In terms of agenda, Melissa and Raphael will start with a summary of our Q3 performance. Hanspeter will then take us through our detailed financial performance. And finally, Melissa will share an update on integration and closing remarks before going into the Q&A.

Before handing over, please let me draw your attention to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements and non-IFRS measures on Slide 2 and 3. And with that, I will hand it over to Melissa.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q3 2025 presentation. In Q3, we continued to build momentum as one integrated organization. Our focus remains on execution across our operational business performance, delivery on synergies, supporting customers and partners and positioning SoftwareOne for sustainable, profitable growth.

Let's look at our Q3 performance. On a reported IFRS basis, revenue grew 46%, reflecting the consolidation of Crayon from July 1. I will emphasize the combined like-for-like view as it best reflects the underlying performance as well as what we have framed our 2025 outlook on. On a combined like-for-like basis, I am very happy to report that SoftwareOne is back to growth. Our revenue grew 0.6% year-over-year in constant currency. Adjusted EBITDA increased 18.1% to CHF 65.2 million with margins improving 2.9 percentage points to 19%. This reflects early benefits from integration and previously initiated cost reduction programs. Additionally, on a like-for-like basis, our reported EBITDA improved from CHF 30 million to CHF 42 million, reflecting a growth of 39.6%.

Slide 7 illustrates the combined growth performance since 2024. Following 3 quarters of negative growth as we have implemented the go-to-market model, navigated Microsoft incentive changes, close the transaction between SoftwareOne and Crayon and started the integration, we returned to positive growth in Q3. The trend is improving quarter-on-quarter since 2025 driven by stronger service growth and early signs of cross and upsell opportunities materializing, also reflecting stabilization across NORAM, go-to-market as well as easing of the negative impact from Microsoft incentive changes.

Turning to our businesses, direct channel and services. We continue to see steady progress and improved growth trend across the combined model. Each business plays a distinct role and together, they give us a balanced exposure across segments, regions and customer buying behaviors. Our direct business declined by 8.2% in constant currency in Q3 as changes in incentives for enterprise agreements continue to weigh on the business throughout 2025. Meanwhile, the enterprise agreements to CSP conversion is gaining strong momentum, supported by Microsoft's commercial changes, which are expected to further accelerate customer migration and strengthen the CSP value proposition. Revenue in Software & Cloud Channel increased 18.3%, driven by strong Microsoft CSP performance, continued AWS momentum and the successful investments in large, high-potential markets such as NORAM and APAC.

Software & Cloud Services delivered revenue growth of 5.9%. The performance on a regional basis is supported by solid improvement in the Nordic services business as well as strong growth in APAC and rest of EMEA. We see continued demand for cloud optimization as well as AI and cybersecurity services. Customers increasingly focus on hybrid and multi-cloud environment, and we see strong growth in AWS in particular. In bringing the organization together, we continue to leverage the combined capabilities and have increased the usage of internal resources in our project delivery, resulting in higher utilization.

I will now hand it over to Raphael, who will give you an overview of the regional performance, including a closer look at our strategic focus and importance of our NORAM business.

Thank you, Melissa. I will now walk you through the regional development based on a combined like-for-like performance. In Q3, NORAM grew 0.3% in constant currency driven by strong performance across the Crayon business. Turnaround measures to improve performance are materializing at a slow but steady pace in the legacy SoftwareOne business. We have taken the right actions and we see a clear improvement in the underlying growth trend. Under the new regional leadership, the strategic focus has been refined.

I will give you some additional color on this in the next slide. Performance in DACH region is improving, and growth ended at a negative 0.8%, mainly driven by a decline in the direct business. As a reminder, our largest exposure on enterprise agreement incentives is in the DACH region. So this was expected. Yet, this was partially offset by strong growth in our multi-vendor business.

Revenue in the rest of Europe grew 1.6% supported by improved performance in the Nordics as both direct and services business grew high single digits. APAC grew 8.6%, driven by robust performance in Australia and India supported by strong performance in our channel business across the region. The 5.2% revenue decline in LATAM is primarily driven by weakness in the direct business as changes to incentives remain a challenge in many markets. A favorable market has been Brazil, which continues the strong performance, delivering double-digit growth in Q3 2025 driven by strengthened Microsoft partnerships and digital investments to support faster CSP growth.

In NORAM, we are making slow but steady progress. The region is transitioning to an aligned GTM, leadership changes and commercial refocus. And we are now beginning to see the groundwork translate into more stable performance and selected pockets of growth. We now have a combined leadership in place with an organization of 590 fully operational employees. Our sales pipeline visibility has improved. Moreover, it's trending to support our full year 2025 outlook. Under our new regional leadership, we have sharpened the strategic focus towards segments and routes to markets where we see the strongest return potential.

We are scaling the proven Crayon partner model in the U.S. expanding relationships with managed service providers, [ hosters ], solution integrators and digital-led partners. This gives us reach in high-velocity SMB and mid-market demand with lower cost to serve and faster sales cycles. We are prioritizing accounts with meaningful cloud renewal cycles, supported by our IP portfolio management and FinOps capabilities. Focus is on deepening wallet share and expanding service penetration in existing customers.

Public sector modernization and cloud adoption trends in federal, state and education are structurally strong. We are investing in dedicated go-to-market motions and certifications to accelerate traction here. We continue building a more digital and partner attention for SME customers. This alliance with Microsoft Cloud and AI priorities and provide scalable growth potential over time. Market environment is volatile with U.S. tariffs and government shutdown affecting multiple industries. We are confident that U.S. presence is essential to serve global enterprise clients. NORAM remains the world's largest cloud and AI market. While competitive, it presents a significant long-term revenue and profitability opportunity.

Slide 11 shows an example of how we partner with our public sector customers. We are supporting the federal government of Germany in advancing the modernization of Germany's public administration and ensuring its IT landscape is fit for the future. The agreement has an initial term of 1 year with the option to renew it for up to 3 1-year extensions. The total potential volume amounts to EUR 1.5 billion. This is a significant win and reflects our competitive position in the public sector in the region.

I'll now hand over to Hanspeter to walk through the financial results in more detail.

Thank you, Rafi, and a warm welcome to everyone joining us today. In this session, we are presenting the IFRS figures in reported currency. The numbers reflect that the acquisition closed on 1st of July, with Crayon being included for 3 months and SoftwareOne for 9 months. On a reported IFRS basis in Q3, revenue grew 46% year-over-year, driven by the Crayon consolidation. Reported EBITDA margin ended at 12.2%. While the EBITDA development also reflects the impact from the Crayon acquisition, it is also driven by continued disciplined spend management, impact from the previously initiated and completed SoftwareOne cost reduction program as well as early cost synergy capture. On a 9-month basis, revenue increased 8.6%, with an EBITDA margin of 15.3%.

I would also like to mention that contribution margin and delivery costs are not presented this quarter as Crayon and SoftwareOne have historically applied different approaches to cost allocation and reporting. As of Q4, we will resume reporting contribution margin and segment level profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis.

In this slide, I will take you through the adjusted to reported EBITDA bridge. Our reported EBITDA ended at CHF 42 million in Q3. Adjustments mainly related to Crayon transaction and integration cost of CHF 13.7 million and CHF 7.8 million, respectively. Excluding these, adjusted EBITDA was CHF 65.2 million. We remain on track with our integration cost target and are committed to keeping non-Crayon adjustments for financial year 2025 below CHF 30 million, reflecting our focus to materially lowering the level of adjustments. As a reminder, restructuring expenses of CHF 19.2 million year-to-date relates to the previous cost reduction program initiated in 2024 and closed in Q1 '25.

Slide 15 provides an update of our cost synergy realization. We are progressing well towards our CHF 80 million to CHF 100 million run rate cost synergy target by end of 2026, with CHF 21 million run rate savings achieved by early November. In the last few months, we continue to streamline the organization by removing roles, leadership duplications and enhancing efficiency. We are tapping into the combined internal resources to defer noncritical hirings, capturing additional near-term savings. We have also mapped out overlapping office locations to be consolidated or closed. Finally, we have eliminated third-party contractor spend in IT and customer platform and are currently streamlining and optimizing our combined internal licensing costs.

Before I hand back to Melissa who will take us to the closing perspective and 2025 outlook, I want to briefly walk you to the adjustments we have made to the '24 like-for-like financials following the alignment of accounting policies between the 2 companies. Previously reported Crayon figures have been aligned to SoftwareOne's accounting policies mainly in relation to IFRS 15, principal versus agent applications to services contracts.

Overall, this led to a reduction in revenue of CHF 31.1 million compared to the revenue figure we have provided as a basis for our full year outlook during H1 '25. The revenue adjustments have a minimal impact on revenue growth given that the magnitude is very similar in the first half of '25 compared to the first half of 2024. This change is purely technical, reflecting accounting policy alignment under IFRS and does not affect underlying performance or outlook.

With that, I will now hand over back over to Melissa.

Thank you, Hanspeter. As we have come together as one organization, it is important to illustrate how we support our customers across the entire software and cloud life cycle from optimized to innovate. We start with optimize where we help customers manage and optimize their software and cloud spend through advisory, IT asset management and FinOps services. This is core to our roots as a combined business.

We then move to source, giving customers access to a broad range of multi-vendor reselling and procurement services. From there, our services business helps clients build, migrate, implement, manage and modernize their cloud environments.

Finally, in innovate, we help customers to unlock new business value through data and AI-driven solutions. Together, this creates a continuous flywheel from optimize to innovate, a customer-centric life cycle approach that defines how we engage with our customers, fostering long-term retention and help them grow sustainably over time. It is this combined offering that makes SoftwareOne stronger across our 3 strategic pillars: growth, scale and innovation.

First, growth. In direct, we are focusing on enterprising corporate customers with large renewal cycles, attaching our full service portfolio. In channel, we are leveraging Crayon's ecosystem and partnerships with solution integrators, hosters, managed service providers and digital partners. Within services, we offer deep expertise across data and AI, digital workplace, cloud migration and modernization, ITAM, FinOps and cybersecurity. And across all motions, cross-sell remains central. Every contract and renewal represents a services opportunity.

Second, scale. Shared platforms, Marketplace and Cloud IQ provide our capability to scale, including pricing tools, delivery hubs and digital sales capabilities, drive consistency, speed and efficiency across the organization.

And finally, innovation. Our services are increasingly AI-enabled from FinOps automation and ITPM analytics to secure AI adoption across Microsoft and the hyperscalers, inclusive of multi-cloud platforms. We are scaling co-sell and hyperscalers as key ISVs supported by improved data and life cycle insights. And internally, we are deploying agenetic AI workflows to raise productivity in both sales and delivery.

Now turning to our revenue synergy ambition. Alongside cost synergies covered by Hanspeter, we are laying the foundation for substantial revenue synergy realization. We have launched multiple sales plays to drive cross-selling, complementary services and multi-vendor licensed solutions. A joint digital sales strategy is being developed to win new clients through coordinated, aligned and targeted marketing campaigns. We are improving renewal rates and tender win ratios through better sales execution, streamlined tender handling and optimize account management. As a combined company, we continue to strengthen vendor alliances and have already achieved higher status amongst several vendors like Adobe and ServiceNow by bringing the 2 companies together. We leveraged Crayon's channel business to capture further revenue streams, cover additional markets like Canada through SoftwareOne's country portfolio and optimize the SMB sales strategy.

We confirm our 2025 outlook, which is based on combined like-for-like financials. Revenue growth is expected to be flat in constant currency and adjusted EBITDA margin to be over 20%. We expect positive momentum in Q4 driven by acceleration in CSP across both our direct and our channel businesses. In addition, we see strong services momentum as shown in Q3 and carried over to Q4 by bringing the organization more efficiently together, increasing utilization and taking advantage of the services opportunity we see in the market.

Continued benefits of go-to-market improvement, including the North America turnaround, further reduced impact from the Microsoft EA incentive changes, which, as we have indicated, will bottom out in Q4. Strategic initiatives launched to drive cross and upsell across our expanded customer base and a more favorable comparable period. Margin development is driven by reduced spend, ongoing cost control as well as early impact from cost synergies.

To summarize, we are very happy to be back on a growth trajectory. We are focused on improving profitability by continuing cost discipline and delivering on both cost and revenue synergies. We are strategically strengthening our vendor agreement status, which I'm pleased to confirm we continue to benefit from. Progressing well on the integration, we are positioning the company for sustainable, long-term value creation.

With this, I'll now hand it back to the operator for the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Chris Tong from UBS.

Maybe just 2 from my side. On the Microsoft incentives and the EA impacts, can you just talk a little bit about the impact and add a bit more color on the direct business? And how has the sort of removal of EA discounts impacted the CSP transition? And maybe I'll leave it there before I go on to my next question.

Thanks, Chris. Great question. The Microsoft and EA impact, as a reminder, a majority of that has already been covered from Q1 through Q3 with the final remaining amount in Q4. For 2026, we do not see any negative impact from the Microsoft incentive changes as the real emphasis has been focusing on CSP growth, which, as stated, we are seeing strong CSP growth overall. And this is important to state because as we reconfirmed our outlook and guiding for the year, we see that acceleration across the business in Q4. And this has really been a focused effort across the entire organization.

Microsoft continues to emphasize CSP is the hero partner-facing motion. And the reason for that is it provides more value-added capability, driving services growth across the overall portfolio. The pricing changes that Microsoft implemented November 1 actually helped to create parity across the enterprise agreements in CSP, giving more capability to service our customers through CSP adoption. And hence, why we remain confident based on our ability to execute across the overall business.

Got it. And maybe just a comment on current trading. So I mean it implies -- I guess the guidance implies a bit of an acceleration in Q4. Can you just talk about what you're seeing in October and maybe November?

Great question. Q4 has been an important quarter for us as it is our largest quarter throughout the year. We are seeing acceleration in terms of the early signs of the quarter, hence, our reconfirmed guidance. It's also important to state that we see the growth potential across all our business lines, direct channel and services. So this continues to be a focus across the organization as we capture revenue opportunities with co-selling and bringing our organization closer together.

The next question comes from Ines Mao from BNP.

Just a follow-up question on the Microsoft contract. Can you just give us more color in terms of products delivered and whether this will mostly fall within the services segment or into the channel category? And what will be the impact of the potential revenue if, for example, the contract length remains range bound within 1 year or if it actually extends towards 3 years?

Can I just ask you to repeat the second part of your question? I heard your question around the kind of overall Microsoft, let's say, where does it fall across the business lines, but it would also be just good to understand the last part of your question because you cut out.

Yes. So my second question was more in terms of revenue opportunity if the contract length is range bound to 1 year or if you actually extend it towards 3 years? What could be the range actually of the contract in terms of quantum? Could you say EUR 1.5 billion but is it impacted if the contract is shorter than 3 years?

Yes. Thank you for the question. Let me take this one. So it's -- basically, the revenue is impacted for our software and cloud direct business as this is a Microsoft framework agreement, licensing agreement, which we successfully renewed with the German Federal Ministry of the Interior. It's a large framework agreement where all these ministries over time can buy the licenses through. So we will see this gradually over the next 3 years, we will see the 1.5 -- up to EUR 1.5 billion gross sales impacting.

And are you just -- are you seeing a lot of opportunities in Germany, notably on further public spending on IT modernization? Or do you think it's just a one-off and you benefit from this renewal?

No, in general, our public sector business in Germany is a very, very big and important business for us. It's growing very well. And we see, yes, continuous focus and growth potential in the public sector area in specifically also Germany.

The next question comes from Kristian Spetalen from Arctic Securities.

I just have a few questions on the cost base for me. First, it looks like the underlying cost base declined into Q3. Can you provide us with an updated head count?

And second, how do you see this headcount developing into Q4? Should we only account for the kind of synergy trajectory? Or is there any notable increase in the head count from -- aside from this? It's just that your margin guidance at the very low end could imply a jump in cost in to Q4.

And lastly, a short 1 on the one-offs. Will the transaction costs from the Crayon acquisition come down towards low single digits or 0 in Q4?

So let me start with the -- thanks for the question. Let me start with the transaction cost. Yes, the transaction cost will come down to close to 0 in Q4. So it means the majority of the cost is in the P&L. Regarding the FTEs, I mean, FTEs are reducing as part of the synergy program. And you see the FX already in the P&L in the OpEx line, and this will continue in Q4 and in 2026.

The next question comes from Christian Bader from Zürcher Kantonalbank.

A couple of questions from me, and I'd like to do them one after the other. So first of all, talking about your cost base for the fourth quarter, are there any, let's say, seasonal effect like bonuses or provisions that we should model?

No. The bonus accruals and the bonus expense is in line with our expectation for the 2025 results. So there is -- I think there's nothing to model. So it's a real cost base based on the -- based on our forecast.

Okay. And you have been relatively upbeat in your commentary for our revenues in the, say, current quarters in the fourth quarter. Can you maybe provide a little bit of background information why you expect this, let's say, acceleration, especially from Microsoft CSP incentives?

Thanks, Christian, for asking. We see continued momentum as we transition enterprise agreements to CSP on our direct business. In addition, the channel business continues to grow. This is important because the channel business is primarily represented of a lot of CSP agreements through our 2-tier business. And with the expansion that we see across the Microsoft ecosystem, this presents further growth opportunities in Q4 but also 2026. And last but not least is our services business as it's deeply connected to how we go to market with our customers and we're seeing improvement across our services business for the quarter as well.

Okay. And the last one for me really is, I mean, are there any, let's say, market software or software reselling market-related topics or any, let's say, vendor-related developments that we should be aware of that could, let's say, negatively or positively influence your business in the immediate future?

I wouldn't say there's anything negative to be concerned or aware of but only positive. In bringing the 2 companies together, it's actually strengthened our vendor business as a whole. The feedback, the support has been greater than ever as we offer -- we provide more opportunities to scale across the overall vendor portfolio.

As I mentioned, Adobe is a great example, where now we have even a greater, let's say, status and capability than if we were on a stand-alone basis as a company. So this provides more growth opportunities. And as Raphael mentioned, the multi-vendor business, excluding Microsoft, has also been extremely important to our overall growth focus as a company.

Okay. If I may follow up on this one. I mean, are there any, let's say, remarkable changes of incentives of any of your vendors?

Not at this time, no.

The next question comes from Nooshin Nejati from Deutsche Bank.

A couple on North America. First, you mentioned sales pipeline visibility has improved. Can you please share color on the pipeline for the next 12 to 18 months, possibly? And then can you also remind us of your exposure in public sector in North America and vendor shutdowns has impacted you in any way in the past probably.

And the last one is on the integration. Can you please elaborate on how you are managing the integration of the 2 organizations in the U.S. while addressing the challenges of go-to-market, specifically, what progress have you seen in aligning teams, culture and responsibilities? And how would you describe the experience over the past few months in terms of ensuring a smooth transition?

Thank you very much. Let me start with the last point on integration and progress. I think we are very happy with the progress, especially with the integration with Crayon, which has happened over the last 3 months, and we have been advancing very, very fast in the U.S. We mentioned the organization is fully established, the combined organization. It's not just on a leadership level. It's really throughout the entire organization. We work as one company.

Coming back to the, I would say, GTM issues, which we have. I think the actions which we have taken end of 2024 are really now starting to have a positive impact also on a stand-alone basis. We mentioned it's slow progress, but it's very steady. And I would say we really see an improvement and clear trends of growth now. And you can also see that in the numbers, we tried to highlight it. I mean, we had in, what was it, in Q1 '25 in NORAM, we had a negative 23% growth, right, or a decline of 23%. In Q2, it was 18%. And now in Q3, we are at positive 0.3%. A significant progress from this perspective, and we are positive that this is going to continue going into Q4 and the next upcoming quarters. So from this perspective, we are very pleased with the progress.

We mentioned, of course, around the government shutdown in the U.S., our government business is one of the key priorities for us. We see, on one side, good potential, good growth. It's a massive market. We have limited market share, but we have a good team in place, and this is something where we see continuous growth. The current shutdown certainly doesn't help. And we saw our pipeline slightly impacted by this. But overall, it's not a material concern.

And maybe on your pipeline question, overall, we see a very good acceleration in the pipeline over the last couple of months, which is good. I still think we need to work on an improved win rate to really make sure we realize the potential fully, and that's something which is a priority for us.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Olav Rødevand from Pareto Securities.

Two questions from me. The first one, I appreciate you being 1 company now, but could you give us some color on the performance of Crayon and SoftwareOne in the U.S. this quarter, just to kind of understand the improvements you're seeing there?

I mean, specifically related to the U.S., I think we mentioned it on a SoftwareOne stand-alone basis, we still see a slight decline, right? And I would say the growth which we have as a combined company is very much impacted as well by the good continuous performance, which we see in the Crayon stand-alone business.

Right. And then the last one for me is do you have some sort of split on your exposure on EA versus CSP now? Just to kind of understand how much of your exposure has been shifted to CSP to sort of understand which share of the revenue will gain incentives going into 2026.

It's a good and fair question. We don't publish that view [ but just the sense ] we've taken. But certainly, we've seen this shift accelerating across the contracts that we see overall. And this is also due to the, I would say, positive developments that Microsoft has taken to further emphasize the CSP program overall.

It's also important to say that for certain large -- especially large enterprise customers, especially from the SoftwareOne heritage side of the business, those agreements, we continue to remain on an enterprise agreement. But with that said, we're continuing to scale in with services as well as multi-vendor. And that's also, I think, illustrative throughout the growth that we see going into 2026.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Kjell Arne Hansen for any closing remarks.

Thank you, and thank you all for joining our Q3 trading update. We wish you all a good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SoftwareOne's H1 2025 Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Anna Engvall, Head of Investor Relations at SoftwareOne. Please go ahead, Madam.

Good morning, and thank you to everyone for joining SoftwareOne's H1 2025 Results. I'm Anna Engvall, Head of Investor Relations at SoftwareOne.

Joining me today are Co-CEOs, Raphael Erb and Melissa Mulholland; and Hanspeter Schraner, CFO.

In terms of agenda, we will kick off with an update on the Crayon combination, followed by a summary of SoftwareOne's stand-alone H1 2025 results presented by Raphael. Hanspeter will then take us through our financial performance. Thereafter, Melissa will cover Crayon's stand-alone results, progress on integration and outlook. We will finish the session with Q&A, as usual.

Before handing over, please let me draw your attention to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements and non-IFRS measures on Slide 2 to 3. With that, I will hand over to Raphael.

A very good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Together with Melissa and Hanspeter, I'm very excited to be presenting our results for the first time together as a combined company. By joining forces with Crayon, we have brought together two global software and cloud providers, creating a leader at scale with complementary businesses across 70-plus countries. Integration is progressing according to plan. Based on thorough preparation, we are executing on a clear road map. We will, of course, keep you posted on key milestones over the coming quarters.

In terms of cost synergies, we are fully on track with CHF 11 million run rate savings already achieved. We remain confident in reaching CHF 30 million run rate by year-end and CHF 80 million to CHF 100 million by end of 2026. Importantly, we are also laying the ground for capturing significant revenue synergies based on our combined marketplace, enhanced services portfolio to drive cross and upsell and joint GTM model.

Looking to H2, we expect to return to growth already in quarter 3 after a challenging first half of the year, a lower negative impact from Microsoft incentive cuts, plus a more favorable comparable period will support this recovery. Overall, for full year 2025, we expect revenue growth to be flat in constant currency compared to 2024 on a combined like-for-like basis, with an adjusted EBITDA margin over 20% of revenue in a transitional period focused on integration.

Let's now look at SoftwareOne's stand-alone performance. Revenue declined by 4.3% in constant currency in Q2, an improvement compared to Q1 and in line with guidance communicated in May with our trading update. We navigated Microsoft's incentive changes during the period, with 2/3 of the expected total negative impact affecting us in the first half, particularly in June. We continue to implement mitigating measures, including CSP conversion. Recently announced measures by Microsoft also support this transition.

Adjusted EBITDA was down 2.7%, reflecting a margin improvement of 0.5 percentage points to 23.5% in H1. This was thanks to the impact of our cost reduction program and continued strict cost control.

Moving on to the regional performance. Overall, we are on track in the regions. With exception of North America, but here, we are seeing improved momentum on the back of our implemented action plan. And together with Crayon, we have a stronger business and leadership team in this region. APAC delivered revenue growth of 13% in constant currency in H1 with strong results across the region. We continued to see excellent growth in services in Q2 with AWS services more than doubling in size compared to prior year.

DACH revenue declined nearly 3% driven by the Microsoft transactional business. Our largest exposure on EA incentives is in DACH, so this was expected. Partially offsetting this impact was solid momentum in our public sector business where we had a number of new customer wins. Rest of EMEA was down 1.7%, with solid results in Benelux and Southern Europe, offset by other countries, including the Nordics, where a number of large deals slipped into the second half.

As mentioned, while Q2 was again challenging, NORAM is showing signs of recovery from the GTM-related sales execution issues. And we are confident in returning to growth already in Q3. Finally, revenue in LATAM decreased by around 5%, largely driven by Brazil, while Mexico delivered another strong quarter in Q2 and Colombia returned to growth.

Now turning to our business lines. Software and Cloud Marketplace revenue declined 11% in constant currency in H1, driven by the Microsoft transactional business. Microsoft gross billings declined 2% as a result of proactive business management given the enterprise agreement incentive cuts and in alignment with Microsoft taking a few large transactions direct. The incentive changes and resulting impacts were, of course, anticipated. And as mentioned, we have mitigating initiatives in place. We have accelerated efforts to transition customers to CSP, collaborating with Microsoft, who also recently announced price increases on EAs and more options around subscription terms for customers to support the transition.

We are also focusing on Microsoft funded pre- and post-sales activities with revenue more than doubling quarter-to-quarter, which will increasingly help to compensate for a sizable part of the EA incentive impact in H2. In the meantime, services gained some momentum with mainly North America and large deals in prior year weighing on growth. Excluding North America, services revenue growth was 7.5% in constant currency in H1, demonstrating the solid momentum that we are seeing in most of the regions.

To wrap up this section, I would like to highlight a great example of how we are helping customers boost productivity through AI. We supported AEON in Vietnam in introducing an AI chatbot that gives employees instant access to process knowledge, streamline collaboration and enhances customer service. The solution is now being packaged to scale across other major clients.

I will now hand over to Hanspeter to take us through the H1 results in further detail.

Thank you, Raphael. I would like to start by extending a warm welcome to everyone joining us today. It's a pleasure to meet you all virtually. Let me provide an overview of our financial performance at group level, starting with the condensed IFRS income statement.

Revenue declined by 8.1% on a reported and 4.9% on a constant currency basis in H1. This was driven by the go-to-market related issues in NORAM as well as Microsoft incentive changes. Reported EBITDA was CHF 85 million, up 3.5% with a margin improvement of 1.9 percentage points, driven by the cost reduction program and continued strict cost control despite of the revenue decline. Higher CapEx in recent years led to increased depreciation. Meanwhile, flat asset development, despite higher investments, is mainly driven by FX effects.

Net financing expense reflects a negative CHF 12 million year-over-year impact driven by the change in the fair market value of our Crayon shareholding. Finally, the tax rate was distorted by Crayon acquisition-related effects and nontax deductible expenses, including M&A earnout expenses.

Moving to the reported EBITDA bridge. On the left, you can see the decline in revenue by CHF 26.2 million in constant currency, primarily driven by NORAM, partially offset by growth in APAC, with all other regions were flat to single-digit negative. On the right, we highlight the significant OpEx savings of CHF 38 million, mainly personnel expenses driven by our cost reduction program. This effect is expected to continue to materialize in H2. In addition, EBITDA adjustments decreased by CHF 10 million, reflecting our commitment to materially lowering the level of adjustments.

The achieved cost reductions were partially offset by wage inflation and other adverse effects. EBITDA adjustments totaled to CHF 29.7 million in H1 2025, a net reduction of CHF 10 million, as mentioned. The main adjustments related to cost reduction program, the total is in line with our expectation of being below CHF 30 million on a stand-alone basis. Additionally, we incurred Crayon transaction integration-related costs. These costs have been clearly defined to ensure that only expenses directly attributable to integration are adjusted for. As a reminder, we expect integration costs within the same range as a run rate cost synergies of CHF 80 million to CHF 100 million.

Moving on to the business lines. In Marketplace, revenue declined by 13.9% in reported currency in H1. Microsoft revenue fell partially offset by modest growth in other independent software vendors. The contribution margin remained stable at 87.8%, driven by optimization of delivering costs. The adjusted EBITDA margin was 53.4%, up 3.3 percentage points from the prior year, reflecting sizable SG&A reductions.

In services, revenue declined 1%. Excluding NORAM, services grew by 4%. Delivery costs decreased slightly with the contribution margin up 0.7 percentage points. SG&A decreased by 2.8%, driving improvements in the adjusted EBITDA margin by over 1 percentage points to 8.6%.

A few words on the balance sheet developments. To finance the cash consideration of the Crayon transaction, the company entered into a bridge facility in H1 2025. CHF 424 million was drawn as of June 30, which is reflected in cash and cash equivalents as well as in other financial liabilities. We successfully refinanced the bridge in July with a CHF 600 million term loan, while also refinancing the existing CHF 600 million revolving credit facility. Supported by a broad group of leading Swiss and international banks, the financing provides security for a minimum of 4 years plus a potential 1-year extension. The bridge remains open for an amount of CHF 100 million until its latest expiry in Q2 2026.

As of June 30, net working capital was negative by CHF 216.6 million, an improvement of CHF 400.6 million year-over-year, driven by nonrecourse factoring. Reduction in equity is mainly due to the dividend distribution of CHF 45.6 million, negative currency translation adjustments of CHF 34.8 million from the Swiss franc appreciation, hedging effects, recognized directly in equity and partially offset by the net profit for the first half of 2025.

Turning now to our cash flow for the 6-month period ended June 30. Operating cash flow was positive, driven by the net profit and the net working capital. Cash used in investing activities includes CapEx of CHF 30.1 million, in line with the previous year. In addition, investing activities includes the settlement of the total return swap of CHF 35.7 million. Cash flow from financing activities reflects the bridge drawdown of CHF 424 million for the Crayon acquisition, dividend payments of CHF 45.6 million as well as interest paid of CHF 13.7 million. Cash and cash equivalents at June 30 was at CHF 655.1 million.

This slide shows the net bridge over the 12-month period. We closed H1 with a net cash position of CHF 36.2 million, primarily driven by the positive swing in net working capital. Major cash outflows included CapEx, M&A and earn-out payments, interest paid as well as significant returns to our shareholders in form of dividends and the share buyback program completed in 2024.

The chart on the left shows net working capital as defined, which was negative CHF 216.6 million at end of June of this year. As mentioned, we launched a new nonrecourse factoring program in the U.S. and in the DACH region for the sale of eligible and insured receivables. Total factoring amounted to CHF 488 million as of June -- at end of June, up from CHF 116.8 million one year ago. Excluding factoring, the underlying improvements in net working capital was CHF 29 million, being a stabilization of the underlying working capital compared to previous year.

Beyond this program, working capital remains a top priority for the group. We continue to execute on initiatives to expedite collections, improving invoicing, accuracy to limit rebuilds, leveraging dashboards to track collections, supported by KPIs linked to bonus achievements. We are, of course, also sharing best practices with Crayon, who has demonstrated strong improvements in working capital over recent quarters.

Turning to my last slide. I would like to wrap up with our planned segment reporting structure going forward. The structure aligns our financial reporting with our integrated go-to-market strategy. Our primary reportable region will remain as DACH, Rest of EMEA, NORAM, LATAM and APAC. Crayon's Nordics business along with SoftwareOne's is included in Rest of EMEA. The new business segments will be Software and Cloud Direct, Software and Cloud Channel and Services. The Direct business combines marketplace with Crayon's software and cloud direct business, channel consists mainly of Crayon's channel business, while services brings together our combined offering, including Crayon's software and cloud economics and consulting.

To provide a clear basis for comparison, we will be providing restated historical numbers under the new reporting segments prior to our Q3 2025 trading update in November.

I will now hand over to Melissa to go through Crayon's results.

Thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share Crayon's stand-alone results for the second quarter. In H1 2025, we continue to see good underlying demand as reflected in our gross sales growth of 20%. However, growth in gross profit ended at 0.2%. In H1, we focused intensely on the transition from enterprise agreements to CSP, given the benefits to a customer and the increased earnings opportunity for Crayon. Like SoftwareOne, 2/3 of our EA volume lands in H1.

I'm pleased with the CSP performance where we grew 58% and were able to recover the total enterprise agreement loss in the first half of the year. The transition takes focus and careful alignment with the customer. And consequently, this resulted in less enterprise software deals, such as IBM and Oracle, which generate high margin. In June, we had negative growth. This is due to the large volume of EA agreement as it's our largest EA renewal month in the year. In combination with less enterprise software, which is non-Microsoft, this compressed our gross margin and gross profit in our Software and Cloud Direct, which ended flat in H1.

In addition, growth was impacted by underperformance in the Nordics consulting business. The Nordics consulting market remains cautious, holding back on larger consulting investments, focusing on need-to-do investments. This applies to both private segment but also specifically in the public sector, which represents 50% of our total Nordics business. We see reluctance to invest in larger, longer-term consultancy projects.

Adjusted EBITDA ended at NOK 469 million for H1, reflecting a margin of 15% on gross profit. This was a decline compared to the prior year, driven by the lower-than-expected gross profit growth. At the same time, we delivered record-setting working capital performance, underlying the resilience and the strong execution capabilities of our teams. Our focus on working capital has resulted in sustainable improvement.

Looking ahead, we are well positioned to accelerate growth in H2, and I'm confident in returning to solid growth in the second half of the year. Q3 has been off to a good start with great momentum, and we can see a turnaround in our performance. We have spent 23 years building a growth-orientated business and our success in navigating the various market challenges illustrates the strength and resilience of our business model.

On January 1, Microsoft reduced incentives related to enterprise agreements. This represents a shift from large multiyear agreements to consumption-based agreements known as CSP. This benefits the combined company as the margin on CSP is higher than on EA. One of the key changes in Microsoft incentives has been a higher focus on value-added services. As Microsoft incentives shift away from one-off EA deals, they're increasingly rewarding partners who can attach high-value services like cloud, AI and security. In the past, the incentive was almost exclusively tied to the software or cloud license itself. Now as the chart illustrates, partners are rewarded for the license in addition to the services provided. In addition, Microsoft's upcoming pricing changes on EA, as of November 1, will accelerate the change to CSP and provide growth opportunities for the combined company.

Turning to integration. I'm pleased to report that we are progressing fully as planned. Our focus since closing has been on ensuring business continuity while laying the foundation for value creation. In the first 3 months, we have prioritized stability and continued customer focus. We introduced our new operating model and have appointed key leaders for the organization, regions and countries, all with leader representation from both companies. This will ensure clear alignment and clarity across the company. Our sales force is a crucial connection to our customers. So enabling them remains a top priority.

We have identified key customers for upselling opportunities where we can expand our licensing and service offerings into existing accounts by leveraging SoftwareOne and Crayon's complementary strengths. An example of this is SoftwareOne's ServiceNow global capability that was announced. This serves as a new sales motion that we can extend into Crayon's customers worldwide. Multiple sales initiatives in security and AI are also underway, and support services are being aligned to increase margin and productivity.

Another example that I want to highlight is Crayon's channel business. This is strategic as it delivers high EBITDA margin given the scalability in reaching mid-market and SMB customers. With SoftwareOne, we will extend the channel business into the country and transition small customers to our partners to drive increased sales efficiency and overall profitability.

In terms of early synergy realization, run rate cost savings of CHF 11 million were achieved by the end of August 2025 due to reduction of duplicate management roles. As we move into the 6-month base, the targeting operating model is being rolled out. The go-to-market and segmentation strategy are in place, and we are realizing synergies. Looking ahead to 18 months, our ambition is full value realization in line with our commitment to our investors, customers, partners and employees. By then, we will operate fully as one company with a single set of targets, harmonized operations, aligned vendor and channel strategy and sales plays deployed across integrated countries.

Throughout this process, we prioritized active change management and ongoing communication with all our stakeholders to track impact and reduce risks during the transformation. Importantly, we are confident that we will achieve cost synergies of CHF 80 million to CHF 100 million by the end of 2026 as committed.

Before the outlook, let's move on to the combined like-for-like financials. These financials have been prepared to allow for better comparability and transparency. They illustrate the combined performance as if the transaction had taken place on January 1, 2024.

On a combined basis, H1 revenue declined by 3.1% in constant currency with a margin of 20%. Importantly, the 2024 numbers provided baseline for our full year 2025 guidance for the combined company. Taking into account our year-to-date combined performance and the integration period, which lies ahead of us, we have adjusted our expectations for the full year. On a combined like-for-like basis, we expect revenue growth to be flat in constant currency over 2024. We are confident in returning to solid growth in H2, driven by a lower impact from EA incentives, only 1/3 of the total impact for the year, accelerated CSP growth and a turnaround in North America. We will also benefit from a more favorable comparable period.

Adjusted EBITDA margin, as a percentage of revenue, is expected to be above 20%, driven by the full impact from SoftwareOne's cost reduction program initiated late last year, a high emphasis on cost control as well as synergies. Beyond 2025, we expect to accelerate growth and enhance profitability, supported by run rate cost synergies of CHF 80 million to CHF 100 million as well as meaningful revenue synergies. Microsoft EA incentives will also have bottomed out and the CSP transition fully taken a hold. Guidance for 2026 and midterm targets for the combined company will be provided with our full year 2025 results early next year.

I will close by looking ahead and outlining how we see the journey for our combined company over the next few years. Our focus is clear. We build a strong foundation and accelerate growth today, creating sustainable long-term value for our stakeholders in the future. In 2025, our priority is to set the integration engine running. We prepared thoroughly, started integration and now have a combined leadership team with a clear execution plan. In the meantime, we have already captured early cost synergies to support stable profitability, even as the top line growth will be limited. In addition, we are driving multiple sales plays to capture revenue synergies across the business.

From 2026, we expect the growth engines to shift gears. We'll be unlocking revenue synergies while benefiting from a stronger momentum in our Microsoft partnership and other ISVs and hyperscaler opportunities. Importantly, 2025 will mark the bottoming out of EA incentives, giving us a cleaner base for growth. From 2027 and onwards, we have crossed the finish line of the integration with the full realization of both cost and revenue synergies. Revenue synergies are expected to exceed cost synergies. At this stage, the combined company will be in the best position it ever was in the global IT services and software market and will be driving a higher share of recurring high-margin services, making our growth got stronger and more predictable.

Before concluding the presentation, we would like to highlight a change in our Investor Relations team. Kjell Arne Hansen, former Head of IR at Crayon, will take over as Head of IR at SoftwareOne, while Anna Engvall moves on to a new opportunity. We would like to thank Anna for her significant contributions over the last 5 years, and wish Kjell Arne all the best in his new role.

With this, I will now hand it back to the operator for the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Christian Bader from ZKB.

Yes, good morning, and thank you for this dynamic presentation. I have plenty of questions, but I will limit those to three, and I'd like to do them one after the other. So first of all, apparently, SoftwareOne has achieved cost savings already in the first 6 months. And together with Crayon, you foresee additional cost savings. I'm assuming this is predominantly derived from staff savings. So therefore, I think the obvious concern is, do you experience additional fluctuations at this point at your -- from your staff?

I can take that, Christian, and thanks for the question. I think we are seeing a very limited increased attrition, yes, but it's very limited in certain geographies. Other than that, I would say we are, in general, retaining the talents, and we are very focused also on this, and we are not seeing this impacting really our plans and results in the future.

Okay. And my next question has to do with factoring. Two, if I may, on this one. First of all, why increase the factoring facility right now? And secondly, the change of the amount of factoring that I have calculated back on the envelope is CHF 364 million against the year end, can you confirm that please?

Thank you for this question. I can take it. So first of all, we are talking here about nonrecourse factoring. We have these new programs. And this factoring helps us to manage the seasonality and the peaks of our net working capital.

And the changes against the year-end, please?

I mean the changes against the year-end depends at the end -- I mean, first of all, we have a seasonality in net working capital and net working capital is peaking July, August. So we are now at the peak. The changes against year-end what I can say today, it will be lower. At the end, I cannot commit to a number today because at the end, it depends on our ability to improve the underlying working capital and the seasonality actually.

Okay. And my last question has to do with your refinancing. You've mentioned that you have refinanced the bridge facility with a term loan. Is it possible to get additional, let's say, terms and conditions for this term loan, in particular, the interest rate?

I mean, the interest rate is market -- market standards, giving our financial structure and ratings. So, yes, it's market standards. In terms of -- the term loan has to be amortized with an annual amortization of CHF 50 million. And the committed facility has a tenor of 4 years with an extension option of 1 year.

Okay. But where would the cost of debt to SoftwareOne stand-alone or on a combined basis turn out after this refinancing, please?

I mean at the end, it depends on how much we have drawn on the revolving credit facility during the year. But you really can assume market interest, you can assume that the term loan is fully drawn. And the revolving credit facility was drawn at midyear by CHF 180 million. And after acquisition, it was drawn by CHF 270 million to finance the acquisition. So apply market rates, and you will find this number.

The next question comes from Knut Woller from Baader Bank.

Also a couple of questions. Just starting firstly with the North American go-to-market challenges. Can you provide us here with an update where you are in terms of this go-to-market implementation?

Thank you, Knut, for the question. So on North America, the action plan, which we have basically announced also with our Q1 result update last time has been fully implemented and successfully implemented. Just to give you some flavor, we announced that we had one of our EB members and the current CEO, Oliver Berchtold, spending most of his Q2 over in North America, really working closely with the leadership team over there. We have reinstalled and hired some employees, specifically focused on our multi-vendor business, which has been under pressure. So we have three higher dedicated ISV experts. We have had some global experts supporting North America.

And this has shown already in June, actually some first results with an increased and improved renewal rate on the multi-vendor business. And now it's great, we also have new leadership from Crayon coming in. And we have basically announced the leadership team in NORAM for the combined company. They are already working well together. And we are positive, very positive actually going into Q3 already that we are seeing growth in North America, and we will see growth in Q3, Q4, H2 in North America. So we are positive that North America is back on growth territory going into Q3.

Thank you, Raphael. And another question. When you -- so when you look at your promise of a return to growth already in Q3, does this also hold for SoftwareOne's stand-alone and Crayon's stand-alone? Or is it just a commitment for the combined entity?

I mean we -- today, we issued the guidance for the combined company. So I want to continue to talk about the combined company. And here, we are positive that we are in growth -- back in growth territory Q3 onwards.

Okay. And just quickly to get a better understanding, I understand that you're now just thinking in terms of the combined entity, Raphael. But is it still fair -- or would there be any reason to believe that your former guidance for SoftwareOne standalone wouldn't hold given the confirmed drivers for H2?

Knut, over the recent months, SoftwareOne has successfully, I would say, very successfully implemented our cost reduction program and also taken action to resolve the GTM related issues, particularly in North America to ensure we deliver the stand-alone guidance we issued earlier this year. And I think these measures really ensure that we are on track to reaching our combined guidance for the full year 2025, which we have just announced previously.

Excellent, Raphael. Just lastly, quickly, how to think about the combined company in terms of margin expansion potential from 2026 onwards? Can you give here some qualitative comments already? Or is it still too early?

We will basically announce our guidance for 2026, with full year 2025 results announcement. So it's a bit too early. I think we made some statements that we are, of course, focused on realizing the cost synergies. We have a plan in place to also realize significant revenue synergies. And if that works out, I think there is a positive outlook. But yes, we will provide full year guidance with 2025 results.

All the best for the [indiscernible] for the combined entity.

The next question comes from Nooshin Nejati from Deutsche Bank.

I have also two. Regarding NORAM, can you please elaborate further on the development? Any KPI regarding the rehiring you announced last quarter? I was wondering how much of the return to growth in next quarter is contributed to improvements in NORAM, as it's much easier comps? I believe this stand-alone guidance was highly dependent on NORAM. So it would be very helpful to know what's the situation now there? And what are the risks of that customer loss in Microsoft direct approach? What percentage of your customer base is at risk here?

So the first question on NORAM again. Thank you. So as I mentioned before, we expect North America to return to solid growth in H2 driven actually by the improved business momentum. And we also -- I mean a few more factors, right, aside of resolving the GTM issues. I think also in North America, we see a lower impact from Microsoft incentives going into H2. So also there, it's a bit front loaded, which should help us going into H2. And we are also entering into a more favorable comparable period, right?

If you look into H2 last year in North America, North America in H2 2024 SoftwareOne stand-alone declined by about 15%, right, due to some one-timers and so on. So I would say we are entering into a more favorable period, which also helps to kind of be positive that we are back in growth going into H2, solid growth, actually.

Okay. Understood. So I was just wondering if that impact is coming mainly on easier comps? Or is actually returning to growth way ahead of those 15% decline last year?

I mean it's a mix of all the factors which I mentioned. I think the new leadership team, which is in place helps. We are having clear plans in place on how we execute the multi-vendor business. We see first signs of improvement, thanks to the people we put in place, thanks to the KPIs also we put in place. And then again, maybe also highlighting about the combination because we are really now a combined company, right? Crayon has been growing very well in North America over recent quarter. We see this trend, I think, to continue. And we are also very happy with the leadership and in general, the team from Crayon in North America, which we are together now. And I think this helps as well.

Just to add from the Crayon's perspective, we've been deeply focused on building up our channel business, which, as we mentioned, we will continue to report on as a combined company because we see this to be a significant opportunity in North America, but also, of course, globally. And this has been a big driver of our Crayon's turnaround in growth performance in North America, which will be helpful in terms of the combination of the two companies where we see an opportunity together.

And sorry, your second question, maybe can you repeat again? I have...

Absolutely. So I was wondering what are the risks of further customer loss to Microsoft direct approach?

I think, look, in general, on the Microsoft -- yes, I think, look, it's out there for some time already. And we have mentioned it as well that for the very large enterprise customers, some of them Microsoft wants to transact directly with them, which may be also partly explains our slight decline on gross billings. And also the EA incentive reductions, we have also looked proactively to managing certain unprofitable EAs and trying to transition them into new licensing models or kind of collaborating with Microsoft on taking them direct.

What's very important for -- I think, to mention is that we don't see any negative impact of those Microsoft taking some customers direct on our revenue, on our profitability of the business. So there is no negative impact because of this, it actually provides probably even more opportunities to -- on the services side, especially related to helping customers maximizing the value from their investments, our Microsoft advisory services and so on. So I would say this impact of Microsoft taking some customers on the transaction direct doesn't have a negative impact on our revenue.

The next question comes from Florian Treisch from Kepler Chevreux.

My question is on the implied H2 growth rate. I would argue, that before offering a combined guidance that the implied H2 growth was probably a bit better than what is implied by the combined guidance. So my first question would be around what has been the negative data to, I would say, in general, you have confirmed the overall, let's say, positive factors contributing to a return to growth? And then a quick -- let's say, second part to it, would you expect the non-NORAM business to return to growth as well in the second half?

I start with the second one. I think in general, of course, as mentioned, overall, we are positive that the company is back in growth territory in H2. I would say, based on what we see in the business, we see the chances that most of the regions, if not all the regions, can achieve positive growth again in H2, and it's certainly the goal which we have.

I think to your question around the guiding, it's also important to say that, yes, we are very much committed to growth for the back half of the year. On a full year basis, of course, there is negative growth. And when you add it together, it's also important to mention that we are in an integration phase. So we're very much focused on the cost synergies, but also the revenue synergies, but we are still coming together as an organization. So that has also been factored into the guiding all that. But we are very positive based on the momentum we see coming into Q3.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Christopher Tong from UBS.

Maybe just two questions. Back to NORAM, was there anything incremental that got worse in Q2 because growth was sort of similar to Q1 despite having easier comps? And secondly, on Microsoft's news on sort of eliminating discounts on some of the EA incentives, what are sort of the expectations internally on how that will affect your business?

Look, I think the outcome in Q2 in North America is as expected. It's as we communicated also with our Q1 results. So I think there is not any really negative surprises. As I mentioned, we have been working very hard on implementing the actions throughout Q2. We have seen early successes in June, and we are very positive for the future that we will see solid growth again in North America. Melissa, maybe you can take the Microsoft related question.

Yes. Thank you, Christopher. It's a great question. As I saw that UBS also provided a report on this. The EA price changes presents a great opportunity for partners like SoftwareOne and Crayon. And the reason for that is that it makes CSP even more attractive from a pricing perspective to customers. And CSP does have a higher margin profile than enterprise agreements. So Microsoft continues to invest in this area because it also enables and unlocks the value of services. It's hard to quantify what this opportunity will bring, but we certainly see it is a great mechanism to also drive customer demand and the transition to CSP. And this is quite helpful as we, let's say, close out Q4 and go into 2026.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Anna Engvall for any closing remarks.

Thank you for joining the call [indiscernible]. Bye.

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