innoscripta Stock

Hello, everyone, and welcome. Good morning to everyone joining from the U.S. and North America, and good afternoon to everyone here in Europe. I am Max. I'm Head of Investor Relations here at Innoscripta and I'm very pleased to have you all with us on this earnings call for the first half year of 2026 today.

We've scheduled around 30 minutes for this call. [Operator Instructions]. Also, please be aware that this meeting is being recorded. Okay. With that, we are ready to get started, and I will hand over the word to our CEO, Michael Hohenester.

Thank you very Max -- very much, Max. Can we jump into the first slide, please? Yes. So basically, you saw the highlights already from the -- from today's press release. So basically, we have continued business operation in the second quarter and the first half year. So we see constant customer growth, constant low burn rate and let's say, stable financial data.

Next slide, please. Some things we would like to address to give you some color about what we have reached already. So if you look at the German R&D workforce, as you know, probably R&D research and development is a pretty recurring endeavor. So that means once you do research and development, once you set up a research and development department, usually, you continue year over several years. And yes, so this is actually a pretty stable, let's say, a pretty stable environment. And we have managed to capture already around 10% of the whole German R&D workforce.

So that means if you count all our customers together. And if you count how many employees are in our platform. We have actually what we believe reached some considerable scale, which also makes it easier for us to establish a standard when it comes to documentation and making sure that, that what is in the claim is the correct value. And another number I want to highlight here is if you look at large enterprises, that means non-SME so non-small and medium-sized enterprises which got the BSF certificate, again, this is the certificate for that you are actually doing R&D. 31% of them were our clients.

And this is actually also a pretty interesting number. So that means that, again, our platform or the way how we document R&D for the tax credit claim is becoming more and more standard in Germany. Next slide, please. This is why we announced also the expansions or I'd say, at least the office setups in other locations and other geographies during the year. As you might be aware of, you already have some substantial traction in Austria. That's simply because we already had an office there since several years.

So we wanted to repeat the success story, and this is why we started here in other countries for, let's say, pretty much the same reason. So our main aim is a little bit to, of course, serve our customers outside of Germany. So as you know, a quite a substantial part of our customers is international. So that means they don't have only R&D in one geography that means Germany, they also have other geographies. And opening offices and, let's say, building a local establishment there enables us to serve also documentation requirements in other countries.

France, we have an office close to Toulouse like is one of the biggest and most established tax credit markets in Europe. There you typically have, let's say, a more difficult pricing situation since a lot of players that are competing on price. We don't compete over price. We compete our quality. And this is what is our playbook there is we want to establish our different way of how to do tax credit claims with larger corporations there and helping them to make better claims that like is also very relevant because also in France, there is increased scrutiny from the French government, especially in larger claims.

The United States, naturally is the biggest market in the world. So there is a lot of tax credit claims handed out each year, and we had a quite big increase -- like a big increase in documentation standards or let's say, in documentation, standard like the commentation requirements in the past year, which means that we believe that there is actually a need now for a lot of CPAs serving customers there to, let's say, have a better documentation, especially, again, if it comes to larger claims.

Yes, also here, we like opened an office in New York City and look forward to hire some more sales professionals there. And last but not least, the United Kingdom, where we see actually also again, a similar trend. Yes, the HMRC, the British let's say, a revenue collection service has massively increased the compliance checks and especially also for larger claims, there are more investigations. We also believe that there is after many reports also in the, let's say, newspapers about broad and arrows.

We believe there is a tailwind for us with our, let's say, superior documentation standard. So all in all, if you put everything together, let's say, we see it as a start of a longer journey. This is not where you the immediate impact in terms of revenue and EBIT, but we believe this will step-by-step, make the market, which we currently serve much bigger and which will also create synergies. So also if you win over our customers in those other geographies, they might have as well operations in Germany or one of these other countries.

So to a certain degree, we also believe that there will be network effects once we settled or started in enough geographies. And this is a little bit the idea which we pursue here. Next slide, please. Yes. As you saw in this morning's press release, let's say, let's say, the say, result might look a little bit, let's say, lower than expected, but you also have to take into account that we did big migration in the first quarter of this year, which, let's say, hindered us in converting order intake into submissions, which basically made this impact in Q2. So if we hadn't done this migration, the numbers would certainly be higher -- and I think from the standpoint, you have to see it. This was necessary in order to serve the international markets and also to improve the efficiency in the future. So from our standpoint, especially if you look at the parameters of order intake and, let's say, continuous business operation, we don't see any deviation from the current growth path, and we don't see any, let's say, impact at the end -- we had a system migration and it impacted the submissions in quarter 1, which impacted the revenue in quarter 2.

But with future, let's say, gains to be harvested on this migration and efficiency wins. Okay, please continue. Yes, leading over to Alex.

Hello from my side, please, let's go and tap into some financials to have a look at the historic development and then comment on recent developments. So again, we would like to highlight midterm journey that we have already successfully passed and also then highlighting how we feel that at this point of time, we also managed to steer this company into further long-term sustainable growth. To remind you, in 2023, we came from roughly EUR 40 million. Then shortly for the IPO, we increased the revenues to EUR 65 million. After our IPO, we managed this jump that we had communicated during our IPO process that we were to land at a revenue figure above EUR 100 million. And yes, last but not least, we gave out a guidance for this year, which was EUR 140 million.

And we feel that we are absolutely on track and considering our regular business assumptions in terms of R&D volume that we get in every month and the success rate by the German government couple of other variables stay constant, then we are confident to achieve this guidance. Yes. Year-over-year, we see growth in H1 from EUR 44 million to EUR 63 million in revenue, which represents an overall growth of 43% in revenue.

We also see Q2 over Q2 growth, again, as highlighted, we had a software migration and we're working in our software that slowed down slightly the admissions of R&D proposals. -- this R&D volume is not gone, yes. So for the past, it led to a slightly lower growth, but the volume is there, and we're confident that this will accelerate our future performance from platform perspective. Okay, let's go ahead.

Yes. The same we -- a similar journey, we can report about our EBIT growth. So if we look back at 2023, where we were coming from EUR 15 million, we managed to grow to EUR 38 million. And then in our IPO year, we successfully managed an EBIT of EUR 63.6 million, and yes, we also highlight that EBIT growth continues. So if we compare H1 2025, we were standing at EUR 24.5 million. We landed at EUR 36.4 billion this year, which represents an EBIT growth of 49%, so close to 50%. And again, highlighting that we continue our midterm growth trajectory.

Okay, let's go ahead. Now we at yes, a couple of individual cost items, and maybe also at the historic trajectory. Sales and marketing is one of the major areas that we invest in. So we regard growth as major variables. One is to win new clients over. We still feel that this market has a lot of potential for us to increase the customer base. And then the second function is to retain existing customers, which we document through a low churn rate of below 2%. These cost categories are basically highlighted over here. And again, we are coming from EUR 12 million. It was relatively flat to 2024. And then we see in our IPO year, we significantly invested more in our sales and marketing efforts. And this also gets clearly documented if we look at the figures from H1 2025, where we spent EUR 8.9 million.

And we increased our absolute spending to 12.4 million. This expenditure also includes some of our investments into new markets, yes? So we received the question from one of the analysts about customer acquisition costs, if they have gone up on paper, if you divide the amount of contracts by sales and marketing expenditure. It seems that they have slightly gone up, but those expenditures also include the investments into new markets and where we know that the sales cycles are it's somewhere between 3 to 9 months. So these expenditures also include further investments that we'll start paying off towards the end of the year and in 2027.

As of revenue, the amount we spend on SME is relatively constant as of now. So we roughly spent 20% in H1 last year, and now we're at 19.6%. Okay. Please go ahead. R&D, yes, that's a very important function that we invest in our IT platform and our own IT people. There, you can also observe, let's say, midterm trajectory of continuous investments coming from EUR 3.4 million in 2023, slightly increasing. And then within our OEM nearly doubling the R&D expenditure to EUR 6.6 million. And we compare now the H1 2025, where we stood at EUR 3.1 million and now look at what is happening in the first 6 months in 2026, we can also see, again, a slight increment in R&D expenditure.

And yes, we will continue to invest in our platform to continue building on our USP for our clients. Okay, go ahead. G&A, were to summarize, we always try to be very efficient in whatever we do. You see historically 2023, we had an absolute investment of EUR 8.4 million, then it went up to EUR 11.4 million. And within the over year to further professionalize and invest in legal and finance and accounting, the price or the cost went up, and this is also documented in H1 2026. So if we compare the G&A investment from last year, H1, it was EUR 8.2 million have increased the spending to EUR 11 million.

But again, interestingly, we stay in a similar ballpark. So our G&A is relatively efficient and stays at roughly 17% to 18% of our overall revenue Okay. In summary, we have the following EBIT bridge. So we have a gross profit of EUR 63 million in H1, and we have our sales and marketing expenditure of $12.4 million. We have our R&D expenditure of roughly EUR 4 million. We have our G&A at EUR 11 million. And then we arrive at an EBIT figure of 36.4 billion. Okay. Please go ahead. Yes. Last but not least, I think we can highlight that we also have improved on cash collection. There are basically 2 main reasons.

In the past, we have optimized our payment terms, if you remember from previous meetings and calls that we had. So our standard payment terms since about 2 years is that invoices are due within a period of 180 days after a BSF that approval? Typically, 66% of the invoice are due at the time of a positive approval and then the rest of the invoice is due within another 6 months' time. we can use a factoring provider, and this enables us to collect our cash relatively early. As a reminder, in the past 4, 5, 6 years ago, we had payment terms of up to 2 years. So very long payment terms. Why did you originally start like this because the cash back for the client comes with another delay of 9 to 12 months after peers of that approval.

So we had to find an alignment between the customers paying us and when the customer receives his cash back from the German government. Now we managed to optimize these payment terms and basically, that shows our strong cash collection, which actually has gone above 108%.

Okay. Then I think we can jump to Q and A.

Yes. Thank you very much, Michael and Alexander for the presentation. I think we can start with question or maybe 1 or 2 questions. from Gustav Froberg, please feel free to unmute and then you can tell us your question.

Thank you very much. Can you hear me okay? I have a couple, but I'll try to be quick -- and I have my first question on growth. Q2 is seasonally soft as we know, but your customer count on the other hand, it seems to be flying. So I just wanted to ask absent [indiscernible] migration, if there are any other timing effects with respect to tax credit filing applications or anything that meant that some of the revenues you should have booked in Q2, where, for example, booked already in Q1 because they were filing in Q4? Or if there is anything that will be booked in Q3? I'm just trying to get a sense of how much we should read into sales with respect to your full year guidance figure. That's the first question.

Yes. So basically, we work on the software migration in the first quarter. Remember for our monetization, we have a rough delay of months after an R&D submission. So when we hand in an R&D proposal in the first quarter, it typically leads to revenue in the second quarter. Now because we knew that the second quarter is from a seasonal perspective, relatively the weakest quarter we have used the first quarter to work on our software migration. And it's hard to quantify a precise number, how much basically revenue is lagging because of this -- but for effect, let's say, it slowed down the submissions of proposals significantly for the first 2 months, yes.

So basically, in January as a holiday month, so most people don't return for submissions from mid to end of January, and that had a strong impact. So I would say it's fair to assume that the number of submissions that could have led to revenue in Q2 could have been significantly higher, and if we just as an example, if we deducted 1.5 months from Q1, this also would mean that this lag is present in Q2 numbers. And this migration now is over or the major maturation is over. So we don't expect any significant delays in the, let's say, future quarters.

Yes, a couple more, please. Again, I just want to come back on customer count because that was a very nice figure to see 2,000 customers? I'm just trying to get a sense for -- and you addressed my customer acquisition question earlier, but what's your view on the velocity of customer additions in we expect a similar pace as we've seen this year so far? Or any changes?

So at this point of time, we don't have reasons to assume that our customer signing is significantly dropping. So let's say, what we have seen between H1 last year and this year or basically in the first 6 months is not something where we have great volatility from month to month, but it's relatively constant. So we assume it's fair to assume that our customer signing will have a relatively constant number over the next couple of months.

Great. And then a question on one-off expenses. I know it's small, but we need to ask about it anyway. Do you expect any of the one-off in Q2 to reoccur in Q3 and Q4?

No, we don't. So in summary, we invested in a slight restructuring of the company. We, as you remember, announced during our full year report during our hub so long that we have moved our headquarters to using. And alongside, we have changed a bit of the company structure and created a KG structure. So basically, we built a lot of speedboats with small managing directors to give our let's say, team leaders an opportunity to run their own P&L.

So we have done this a slight restructuring in terms of KG structure and their own managing directors build up a structure for the future where we can provide our best employees relatively high autonomy and the opportunity to run their own P&Ls. So this is the reason behind it, and this is a one-off expense and we don't expect a significant impact in the future.

Okay. I will take the next question from heavy mode investments, who is not here to ask the question personally. So the question is regarding capital allocation. Yes, basically, the first question is, will the dividend payout remain at the full payout like in '25 or with Innoscripta pay out a lower percentage of earnings to return on cash. To answer that, we strive for stability. So we would like to increase the dividend payment this year. So at least let's say, a little bit the full payout, that currently, we don't have any specific plans regarding that.

We -- because we -- the question is a little bit, what can the cash be used for M&A targets or buybacks. So M&A targets, we have looked at a few opportunities in the first half of this year, but we don't find anything which will serve our strict quality criteria. So that means that we don't have any immediate plans for cash deployment and M&A, which leaves share buybacks as an option. But again, there is no decision made. At least we will keep the dividend payment stable or we at least aim for a slight increase.

Okay. The next question from [indiscernible]. Max, can you please unmute?

[indiscernible] from Kepler Capital. I would like to ask first about the customers in the U.S. So two questions. First, are these German companies with a U.S. branch? Or are these U.S. companies?

And the second question is what size of company is this?

So we are -- the first customers we signed up our German companies with a subsidiary in the U.S. since we have already established relationship with those customers and the size ranges from larger midsize, which means around 500 employees to also some large corporations, so over having over 1,000 5,000 employees. I don't have the specific numbers here, but it's the first sign customers in basically France, U.S. and U.K. are pretty much customers of the existing customer base in Germany, which, by the way, also proves that this works if you address it the right way. Nevertheless, you need a local team on spot in order to serve the customers, of course, we have to have with the submission, and we need local people to facilitate the submissions there.

Okay. So -- but the submission is for is for the U.S., not for the German applications?

Yes, let's say, all tax credit schemes worldwide are slightly different. So that means that you have different processes in Germany. You have a 2-stage process. You first have to submit the government authority, which is called the beers of set and then this claim basically substantiate your R&D tax credit.

And then again, you have to collect the cash at our annual tax statement. And in the U.S., it's a little bit different. You only have one step here, you only have this annual tax statement. So Nevertheless, you have to support the customer there, and they expect the local personal local workforce to help you there. Our main aim is not only to have this local processing workforce, but also to have a local sales workforce who generally win over American companies. And this is, let's say, a harder step because this is, of course, requires let's say, a few references and -- but this will come time over time when we scale up and build the sales force over there. By the way, we happen to manage to do this in Austria quite successful.

So we have some traction now in Austria with the Fossenier, which is also a different tax credit scheme as in Germany. And yes, so we expect that we can repeat this playbook there. And maybe we can also answer your second question.

This is -- can you describe how AI is improving your OpEx? What is the main use case for AI in script today?

Yes. So basically, what are we using AI mainly for we are using AI for pricing documents. So if you can imagine customers submit a lot of documents to us. So we have payroll downs covering several thousand pages. And our main concern here is, of course, the speed of processing those documents, but also the reliability and quality. Quality comes from two different perspectives. That means, let's say, versus the accuracy, how we do this document.

So no solution here reaches 100%. You always have errors, which you have to feed into a [indiscernible].

The second one is where do we do this data processing. So our strong direction here is to have our proprietary data processing in the European Union. So in order to address data concerns from our customers, which are obviously concerned that data is being used for training data on some models. So this is actually the big main part where we will use AI and how we can accelerate our business. Improving OpEx. If you if you see our main, let's say, expenses here is R&D, which goes into developing new products. So we don't see any main impact.

You see some let's say, improvement in G&A. But let's say, we don't see a very big driver of that. It's more about like the ability to improve to serve the customer with a drastic increase in quality, which basically gives us reason to believe that AI basically helps us here in a big deal. Next question?

Partly my question was already answered. But maybe you can give some insight regarding your three new markets France, U.K. and the U.S., what would be the potential in the coming 1, 2, 3 years from your perspective? What is competition looking like -- and when do we expect to breakeven? I mean you build up some offices, with people. Maybe you can talk about that about these 3 points.

Yes. Thank you, [indiscernible]. So basically, in order to give you some color here. So we don't expect any significant contributions in 2026. We see -- like I say, our requirement for those markets is that we get very soon to, let's say, within the first 12 months to a revenue of EUR 1 million. This is the first target which we see on those markets. Obviously, this is not the breakeven point that will come at, let's say, a single digit, let's say, 1 million amount. That depends a little bit because of the salaries in the U.S. are quite high as we found out there.

But let's say, what we really have to manage there is we have to build up a sales organization, which is, let's say, not an easy task. You have to build -- we've hired experienced sales people there who know already the tax credit scheme, we work for competitors. So there are also onboarded some, let's say, people, they knew. But we have to see how we, like, let's say, how the revenue even the PAP development will be. So obviously, we have a strong pipeline in all of those, that's main markets, let's say, with some companies already in contract negotiations. But let's say, we are here in the long run, yes.

The main challenge, which we see is, for example, in France, you see an intense price competition. You see basically tenders. Where companies are invited in and which is where competition is happening mostly over price. We don't believe this is smart also for the customer because at the end he pays the price with the quality standard and especially when there's [indiscernible] from side of the -- from the government there, especially when it comes to big claims, we believe we have a deep value with our approach of the data collection because data collection, data processing and providing the documentation for a customer, which answers those questions, those detailed questions.

This is what we believe has a superior value -- and our main challenge is that we communicate this in the market. So this is not something which happens in half year, a year, but I think we will basically see if a market the market surpasses EUR 1 million revenue within 12 months. We have reason to believe that this will be very successful. And all of those markets are already much bigger than the German market. So if it only comes from the U.S., we see a potential of several magnitudes in revenue like compared to the German market. And this is why we are doing it essentially.

Okay, let me pick up a couple of questions because we are running out of time. I see a couple of questions. So I see a question for Mark, and I'll summarize quickly myself. Can you explain some revenue move from Q2 to Q3?

Yes. So what we basically just briefly talked about is the software migration and that at least 1.5 months, we're missing in the first quarter to get to revenue in Q2 with our 3 months delay in revenue recognition. So we expect to catch up with this in Q3 and Q4. So we don't communicate a fixed number at this point of time, how we expect that to distribute between Q3 and Q4, but we are confirming guidance that we generally keep believing in our guidance, which is EUR 140 million of revenue on in EUR 80 million EBIT.

Then I think we touched the question of Gustav, if we see any increasing customer acquisition costs going up. So the additional expenditure that we have is the investments in our international markets that naturally leads to new contracts coming in with a couple of months delay. So it looks as if the customer acquisition is going up. But we feel in our established markets based on numbers that we see. And if we roughly assume the amount we are spending on international markets here in our core market in Austria and Germany stays fairly constant.

Then regarding our market share. So this was a comparison where we had the fixed numbers of PSF set approvals in 2025. And there, basically, we had official statistics of the BSFS approvals, and we had our own internal numbers. And based on that, we came to a conclusion that we have a market share of approximately in non-SME liens that court granted the first BSF set approval in Germany. Yes, we, at this point, don't communicate a forecast how we expect the total amount of applications to develop in the coming months. But naturally, with the growing customer base, we expect that to grow Data migration is over. Yes, I can confirm that, that majority of data migration is over. We don't expect in the short term, further delays.

And now last but not least, I would like to pick out the question from Thomas H. How does management see the business developing over the medium to long term without committing to specific guidance in terms of revenue growth and EBIT margin what long-term range would management consider realistic? And does management feel comfortable with prevailing analyst estimates for the next 3 years. Just a couple of thoughts on this.

So we see in our core market in Germany, where we have started off, we see an increasing generosity of tax credits. So this year, for example, the threshold of expenditure that can be handed in was increased from EUR 10 million to EUR 12 million a year. And basically, this way, the funding rate also got increased. So we see positive regulatory tailwinds. Now if we think beyond growth in Germany, where we see a lot of potential to win again new clients who have never filed for tax credits before or have dramatically under claimed we see the potential in other adjacent markets.

Number one is the U.K., where roughly EUR 9 billion are spent in tax credits every year, just as a comparison, the German market at this point of time stands at EUR 1.2 billion a year. So the U.K. is multiple times bigger France is currently standing at EUR 7 billion in R&D tax credit expenditure, yes? And the U.S. is an even bigger market, yes. So we try to expand into other geographies where tax credits seem to be more attractive and even a bigger volume. And with our approach, we offer one platform to a global client, and we serve them in all geographies on one platform we assume to have a long-term competitive advantage.

Other alternatives are typically big 4 and old to additional consulting companies, yes? That's our competition. They have very little to no software solutions, and this is where we are USP and where we feel we can also gain market share in other geographies.

Maybe let me pick a couple of another questions since we are short on time to address all questions. Andrea Ruda said you expected age to EBIT growth slows down. So I can only refer on the published guidance, which we confirm there, which is EUR 140 million in revenue and EUR 80 million EBIT. So we feel you're confident we will, let's say, beat this. And basically, this is the current state of the information here.

Question from Thomas H. Like you said I already addressed this question, Thomas H. regarding the international role. I think you already addressed it as well here. So we believe those markets are magnitudes larger than the German market. So at least currently, since the German market is still -- infancy is still growing at quite high rates. And we believe we have reason to believe that we have a competitive edge in those markets where we our main challenge is to explain to the market that this is actually an advantage. So the customer also understands it.

Then Nicolas Olofsen has a question about -- so I just go through, which I already answered. Let's say, do we know something about the total market value of total tax grants brands in Germany, France, and if the markets are stable or if they cycle with the over economy. So the answer here is they're very stable. They don't cycle because R&D expenses are usually very let's say, very slow to change. And even in crisis, the R&D head count is the last one to be reduced. And the overall market value of -- I think we have the slide, as I just referred to the published slides here, so France currently is several times as big as Germany, the U.S. is way larger. So as I referred to last year in Germany, we had EUR 1.2 billion France was EUR 7 billion, United States, EUR 34 billion, the kingdom EUR 9 billion.

So roughly, you can say it's 9% of the R&D expenses of our country is the tax credit claim. This is what you see, the headwinds from cluster migration, what has this Yes. So basically, we can hand in faster with more stability. So this is actually -- and we can make international [indiscernible], and this is why we where we did this migration. Do you mean you serve some customers outside of clastics that migrated into clastics.

I don't particularly understand the question. So like there are customers outside of cluster rig. So it's more, let's say, a migration from a previous system. So we reduced the number of software systems we use internally and those submissions will be pushed over to Q3. Again, let's say, we see, let's say, that we were not able to hand in some submissions in the first quarter, and naturally, they will be handled in the coming quarters.

How does a normal customer typically function over, let's say, a 10-year cycle. Yes, let's say, when we have a given churn rate of below 2%, then. Basically, we expect, like, let's say, a customer to be there in 10 years. So the average customer, and let's say, in terms of submission, I think we still have to do some improvements in our aftersales process. Yes, there's still some, let's say, improvements we can do. We remain focused in Germany with new customers. So that means that we want to still capture the market, this opportunity and still invest a lot in capturing new customers.

And so when it comes to submissions of existing customers, there is still some potential, which we could leverage. So usually, a customer make submissions when we onboard them. Like in some cases, we, let's say, there's basically no real playbook what happens after that. In some cases, there is another submission in 6 months. In some cases, we build up a relationship with the customer. So the first submission is quite small, and the following submissions are quite large, every time larger to build up this trust relationship.

In some cases, the customers hands in for previous years. So at the end, let's say, we see the typical customers coming back, so it doesn't come back in predictable patterns. But there is still some area which we let's say, where we could improve the, let's say, derives and the structures area also to lead the customers to more regular refi submissions. And this is something still upcoming for the future, which we see some area of growth and improvement. There's another question from Guilhem of the EUR 140 million forecast. Let's say, how confident are we? As I already said, we confirmed it, so we are confident. And regarding the capital allocation of the company, is it fully focused on the expansion? Or do we have other initiatives.

Yes. Again, we look forward to keep at least the dividend stable or slightly increasing, not necessarily see a full payout and -- we also have the option to make some share buybacks, which we cautiously would weigh in the future. And maybe leading over to Alex for some other questions. I'm just checking if there are any significant questions, which we haven't touched as yet.

Okay. So a small question. Can you give us a feeling how much the office openings have had an impact on EBIT in 2026. So I feel the major investment is into people. Of course, office infrastructure is also an investment. But as we start with relatively small and flexible office structure, it is not a very super significant amount in comparison to salaries when you hire 5 to 10 people, for example. So this represents majority. Then I see your question, sales went down because migration, can you explain the correlation of migration and sales decrease -- so I think this is a very good question because we have to differentiate here.

So sales in terms of incoming contracts with customers and R&D volume has not gone down. So this is a very constant figure that we touched on with good stuff earlier. That's our customer acquisition over the last 6 months or last 12 months. What has gone down in that limited period of time is simply the submission of R&D proposals via our software platform.

Again, that is only a temporary slowdown. The R&D volume behind with existing customers has not decreased. So there is simply delay? And the migration benefit overall is a simplification of internal software systems that we use to serve clients and that will enable us to be more efficient and work with higher speeds and better precision in the future. Maybe another interesting question, how many percent of your customers need special adoptions? And if so, how many percent of those are paid for by the customer? And do you expect those numbers to be very different in U.K., France and U.S. So we work only with country-based workflows.

Customers don't get individual adoptions. So the cockpit within our platform for each customer, looks the same. There is no customized work included because the tax credit workflow within a geography is usually the same for every client. In some geographies, you have a differentiation between an SME scheme and a large company scheme that there might be two different workflows. But generally, this workflow has to be built for a country, but then this workflow for a customer is the same. And last but not least, if state elections in Germany in September result in a government coalition breakdown and snap election, early 2027, how do you see impact for submissions, cash back time line in the scripted in general?

So we are working based on a law, which is indefinite. So tax credits is like your regular tax declaration and rules and regulation around it. So it's a law that there is a legal right to have a cash back. This is an indefinite program. It's not limited to a period of 2 or 3 or 4 or 5. And if you were to check how parties generally think about R&D tax credits, then every party doesn't matter if left or right or middle or however you would define what the party is everybody is in favor of R&D tax credits.

So first of all, it's a very stable instrument. It has been in adjacent countries very stable over time, typically with more generosity. This is what we have Germany as well that the generosity was increased 4x since the inception of this program. It's embedded in the law, which makes it very reliable for companies to use this instrument, and generally, all political parties are in favor of R&D, yes? Because this is not about taxing somebody more or taking more from others. Everybody has the understanding that R&D is one of the very major welfare drivers of an economy.

Okay. I think -- and I hope that we have answered all questions and that we helped you with the understanding of our business. If there are further questions, please feel free to reach out to our colleague, Max Hunger, and he can answer further questions or also schedule one-on-one meetings with me and with Michael, if there are further questions. Thanks a lot for your attention, and I would like to highlight that you are part of our software world today. So this meeting happened in cluster meat, which is our own development, which we use internally to serve our clients. It's basically a video call and of course, also call software.

We are very proud that we were able to host our first earnings call within our own software framework. So maybe this gave you a little bit of a taste that we love to build great software and great processes. And at least today, you've seen a small fraction of what we have developed. So thanks a lot for taking part and bluster meat, and yes, feel to reach out with additional questions to us. Thank you very much.

Thank you, were from my side, and Yes. As Alex said, please feel free to reach out if you find that some of the questions were not answered here in this call because we have a short time frame. But we are here for you as you can address Max, and we will set up a one-on-one meeting or we will answer the questions in writing. And so please feel free out to reach any time. Thank you Bye-bye.

Thank you very much, everybody. With that, we are at the end of our call. Feel free to reach out, and have a good evening. Bye-bye.

Thank you very much. My name is Michael, and I'm the Co-Founder of innoscripta. So I'm here since the start of the company. And I will -- together with Alexander Meyer, also which is CFO and also Co-Founder with me, we will together present you the preliminary results for this year. First of all, a short recap. What are we doing?

So our mission is we want to help companies make their research and development more transparent. And this way, not only gaining efficiencies in their R&D operations but also getting tax cash backs from governments, which they're entitled to with their documented R&D expenses. For that, we developed a very extensive software solution called Clusterix, and this helps companies streamline and organize their R&D expenses and therefore, claim tax credits with a high degree of security in case of any audit comes.

Just a few words about our product and technology highlights, which we will extend further in our yearly report. But just to give you some insights, what did we do in 2025? Was -- like what did we invest our R&D spend ourselves? First of all, as most of you probably know, we are a sales organization, so that means we have a lot of salespeople. And one of our main, let's say, our main priorities is always to drive efficiency there, to increase the quality also of the sales pitch, to have a high-quality sales pitch but also to increase the efficiency.

For that, we developed a feature called pitch deck, and this extracts data from company websites and drafts highly personalized pitch materials. So the problem is a little bit that when you have a growing sales organization, all the salespeople do their own slides. So you have no real control about the quality of the e-mails they sent out. And basically, this is a tool which helps us internally to raise the quality, to draft e-mails to draft presentation materials with the help of AI using real data from the company, just to give them a little bit more for personalized and a more high-quality sales pitch.

And the second one, the second highlight I want to mention is cluster courses or Clusterix courses, where we basically provide learning materials for all the newly onboarded employees we have. So we regularly hire people, sometimes also with no prior industry expertise, and the challenge here is a little bit how do you bring them up to speed in a highly challenging environment. They speak to CFOs, so they are -- this is a very technical and very complex sales pitch and also to maintain quality and to give them some kind of proper background education.

Of course, we have our own processes, internal processes, but also this AI-driven software helps us to streamline the education there and to bring them up to speed, so they are successful in the field. Both of that features are also ready for the international markets. So whenever we pursue our international expansion, both of those features can be used as well, domestically as well as internationally.

Then we have the no-code application. Yes, I think most of you probably saw it in our press release that we are ready to configure country workflows within 2 weeks now. So this is a very fast and streamlined process now where you basically can collect the necessary documents and generate, let's say, internationally compliant, let's say, workflows. And this helps as well like for other market entries.

And last but not least, we continue to develop Clusterix. We give it a fresh and let's say, more operating system environment. And basically, this is what we want to release in '26, which will, let's say, bring it more to a level of an operating system where we have the, let's say, the single components, let's say, aligned like in an operating system and let's say, ready for use.

And with that, comes another, let's say, important development that we are currently working on a highly secure R&D data storage product. As you probably all know, like the geopolitical situation is quite tense at the moment, and there are high uncertainties, and we got some customer requests about, let's say, future strategies where to host data. So there are a few European options at the moment available, but we would like to position ourselves as well here as not only a processor of data but also provider who stores data in a very secure environment and which will help also because we already have the software for it and basically could switch the back end here.

Yes, some words about the customers we are getting increasingly. So just to give you some color on that, in '25, we had, let's say, more success in getting bigger names onboard. So as you probably can see from our materials on the Investors page, let's say, bigger names or, let's say, corporates are driving the bottom line for us and are also leading to continuous or, let's say, to -- they have a higher, let's say, gross margin and let's say, of course, way higher revenues. And -- but of course, it's very hard to win them in an enterprise sales pitch but with increasing successes, yes?

So just to show you some names here, which are currently our customers, but also a lot of other corporations, we are not allowed to show their logos. So '25 was really, for us, a very successful year given that, and we see continued traction in enterprise sales and winning larger clients with our solution.

So last but not least, we want to address an important point, and this is a little bit the current fear of investors of AI. Is AI replacing software itself? Can you wipe code, a solution like Clusterix, innoscripta to be replaced by Claude Code in 2 or 3 years? Yes.

And what we did is we asked a professor we worked in the past long before the onset of this large language models. And we asked him what do you think about it. And this is Professor Althoff from the Technical University of Munich and which is basically an expert in this field. We did some AI projects in the past, and he said basically, let's say, there's a -- it's a big important thing you have to remember because what an LLM does is it generates.

So basically, it doesn't know the truth. It generates you an answer given the prompt that you give. And so the formal correctness, let's say, of -- on a complex real-world situation, this is not something you can expect from an LLM. And this is an important point to stress because we believe innoscripta and the business model of innoscripta is here to last because, let's say, what is our key value driver.

Our key value driver is a terminal precision. If you do, let's say, a tax return and then you fill in a number for your R&D expenses, you want this to be absolutely correct. So when there's something generated, this is not something what you would like to see there. And especially when you can change the prompt and then you get a different result. This is very critical.

Then, of course, interconnected systems are hard to replicate. What Clusterix is doing is it really connects HR time tracking, project management, task management. This is a very complex endeavor. So there are a lot of data handovers. The data structure itself is very complex, and at the end, we just don't see that.

We use, let's say, all modern AI tools ourselves in our R&D., but of course, we see the current challenges and difficulties using those tools. And if you just generate code at the end, you get a lot of [ bucks ] and you need to know what you are designing here and the design of our system itself is quite complex. It's not an easy system.

And last but not least, if you are in a situation, you are the CFO and you used an AI solution to generate your documentation for your tax return, the question is like when there is somebody coming and is checking your books, an auditor, who's taking responsibility for that. AI cannot take the responsibility, and I think that's also a very important part of that. So this compliance-heavy feed in that we are, this is something where you need a proper process, a proper management.

And I think we showed that quite successfully in the past that we are a trustworthy partner here. And it remains to be seen if AI, let's say, cannot -- can, let's say, grow beyond its boundaries. But if you think about the nature of the current LLMs, they are tax generators. We believe that we have, let's say, a strategic position far beyond the next couple of years.

Yes, just to short recap in the past, how was the financial performance in the last 5 years. It shows you quite nicely that we essentially from 2020 to 2025, let's say, saw a pretty tremendous growth as well as in revenue as in EBIT, but at the end, we are here to say that we believe that this trend will continue. So that doesn't mean that we will keep the growth rates as tremendously high as they are at the moment with 60%. This is a pretty challenging task.

But we see at the moment no fundamental change in the business logic and the business drivers. We don't see any competitor coming up with a revolutionary solution. We don't see any AI solution challenging us. So we don't see anything, which brings us to the assumption that our dynamic growth path will not continue in the future.

Last but not least, just underscoring this is our deep belief in the company. So we didn't bring the company public just to offload all the shares and walk away. We are still here in the company. We work here, and we -- this is essentially our focus, our life focus, and we are here to stay. So we want to also support the shareholders which believe in us, and of course, we made some buybacks also recently.

We got some questions from investors why were the buybacks in the closed period. So yes, simple answer is that all buybacks or, let's say, all transactions are, let's say, advised by a lawyer, so we don't do any transactions without legal advisory. And at the end, for this, let's say, closed order purchases, the orders were placed already way before the closed period. And this is why we are not allowed -- we were not allowed to -- I was not allowed to change the order. This is the background.

So handing over now to Alexander Meyer and -- who's presenting the, let's say, the quantitative part of this presentation.

Thank you very much. Okay. Now I can see that. Again, highlighting our deep belief in the company with our buybacks. So overall, we still directly and indirectly own close to 80% of the company. And as much as for outside investors, it's our personal goal as well to drive the value of the company to achieve long-term success. So at this point, again, thank you for the trust of especially the initial investors, and we work very hard on a daily basis to improve results and hopefully also convince our shareholders in the stock market for future performance.

Okay. Good. Here, we see the long-term development of our top line growth. So again, I would like to remind our audience that we started off in 2022, if we look a couple of years back with roughly EUR 27 million in revenue, we constantly managed to grow substantially in the region of roughly 50% in the last 2, 3 financial years, going from EUR 26 million, EUR 27 million to close to EUR 40 million and then within -- prior to the IPO, disclosing that we grew to EUR 65 million. And today, we are very happy to present what we also posted in our ad hoc news that we managed to grow our revenue further to EUR 104 million, representing a growth rate of close to 60%.

If we have a recap of our EBIT development and look back in 2022, there, we started off at roughly EUR 9 million. We had tremendous EBIT growth, growing initially to EUR 15.5 million. And then prior to the IPO, we released the numbers of EUR 38 million in EBIT. And again, today, we are happy to report that we also see a positive development in absolute terms of EBIT and also profitability margin. So we can disclose at this point of time that we, before audit, expect a financial EBIT result of EUR 63.6 million, and that represents an EBIT margin beyond 60%.

So if you remember from the past, we always had the goal to stay around the 50% margin. We are willing in the future to sacrifice margin for growth. And with the recap of the growth drivers, working on organizational efficiency, this led to a slightly higher margin than originally expected by the analysts.

That leads us now to the different cost categories. So again, I'd like to highlight the development of sales and marketing costs, where we see a gradual increase. This is one of the main items where we try to invest our funds. It's exactly our sales force and sales processes. So we started off with EUR 7.7 million in 2022; and '23, '24, we already see that the absolute amount that we spend stayed quite constant, and we worked on organizational efficiencies, increasing our revenue. And our idea and desire is to continue investing in sales and marketing. We have big ambitions here; and in absolute terms, we increased our spending from roughly EUR 13 million to above EUR 19 million. But as our revenue growth is also substantial, it, more or less, stays in line as a percentage of revenue with the figure from 2024 with roughly 19%.

R&D, our own software development is another driver of our future sustainable growth. Here, we can see the historic development starting off at EUR 2.1 million, increasing spending to EUR 3.4 million, onboarding more developers on our platform, and we continued this journey in 2025, where we nearly doubled our R&D expenditure.

It's always important to invest in quality growth in this segment. What we learned with excellence of development processes is it's not necessarily about the number of developers but about the quality. So we have a very high quality focus on hiring. And together with our HR team, we managed to allocate a much bigger budget and to develop an even more sustainable workforce and R&D, where we believe this prepares the path for further growth in the future, leading to EUR 6.6 million in spending last year, and this is representing basically a cost of 6.4% of revenue.

G&A is something where we always try to be very cost efficient. We started off with EUR 7.5 million in 2022. At that time, it represented basically a percentage of roughly 28%. We have managed to grow our company and still managed to be very efficient, very effective despite the IPO. So we grew to EUR 8.4 million in expenditure in 2023, EUR 11.4 million in 2024. Now we see a slight increase in spend from EUR 11.4 million to EUR 15.2 million last year, so it's a substantial growth. However, again, if we look at it as a percentage of revenue, we basically show that we can scale and grow and have operating leverage. So as a percentage of revenue, we slightly improved the metric from 17.4% to 14.6%.

Yes. In summary, we have our EBIT bridge that we see how we get across the 3 cost categories to our final EBIT result, so we have a gross profit of EUR 104 million. If we look at sales and marketing expenditure, R&D expenditure and our G&A costs, we arrive at an EBIT of -- a preliminary EBIT of EUR 63.6 million, and this represents an EBIT margin of 61.1%. So we are extremely proud to share this result. This is beyond the expectations of the analysts with whom we try to communicate and talk regularly.

And we would like to highlight that especially the first year after the IPO was very important for us to show and prove the market that we believe in our company, that we believe in the numbers. We are here to stay. So the IPO was just the beginning for our further future growth case, and this is the result of the year 2025. And of course, we remain ambitious and would like to continue the growth trajectory or a similar growth trajectory in the future.

Last but not least, here, basically, the core message is that we managed to turn our revenue into cash flow, so we see in 2024, we had an adjusted EBIT of EUR 38 million and an operating cash flow of roughly EUR 21 million. And this year, it's EUR 63.6 million, and we have an operating cash flow of EUR 41 million. So we managed to convert it in cash. And if you remember, in the past, we had very long payment terms that we offered our clients during our collaboration. Roughly 1.5 years ago, we addressed this issue by shortening the payment terms, collecting our cash earlier, and now slowly over time, it becomes visible that we improve our cash collection.

Yes. And this so far was the summary of our, say, rough update, what happened in 2025, including first financial numbers before we release the full annual report. Thanks a lot for joining this call. And now we are open and happy for a Q&A session to address your questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Gustav Froberg from Berenberg.

I have one to start. I just wanted to ask a little bit on the funding environment and how you see that evolving in Germany at the moment. Obviously, we are looking at an increase in the cap of applicable R&D spend for tax credits in 2026. But could you maybe help us understand a little bit how that will impact the business kind of timing-wise? I'll start there, and then I have another question after.

Yes, I'm happy to take this, Gustav. Thank you for this question. So generally, we see very strong government tailwinds over the period since inception of German tax credit. They have been -- there has been increased generosity for the fourth time now. So in 2020, it started with a much lower cap of EUR 2 million cost that you could hand in. For the audience, the funding rate right now varies between 25% to 35%, just that presented here. So the same year, this cost limit was increased to EUR 4 million, increasing generosity. Then early 2024, this limit was raised to EUR 10 million of expenditure per year that you can file with the financial authorities.

And since the beginning of this year, there have been 2 major developments. Number one, the cost cap gets lifted by another EUR 2 million to EUR 12 million. Effectively, that means that every applicant, provided they have this R&D expenditure, this eligible R&D expenditure, can receive 20% higher funding because this cost cap has risen by 20%.

Another effect, and that's at least of the same relevancy, is from this year, every company regardless of their R&D budget automatically gets a 20% surcharge allocated by the German government. That means that the effective funding rate for every client, no matter how much the R&D expenditure is, automatically increases by 20%.

Example, if I'm a company that has EUR 1 million in R&D expenditure, from the government's view as of this year, it is EUR 1.2 million on which I get my funding. If I have EUR 2 million, it is, from the government's perspective, EUR 2.4 million. So these are positive tailwinds beyond what happened in the past, and it means, if we do our job very well, that potentially offers a scenario where we can generate 20% higher revenues with existing clients and new clients in the future.

And I would like to jump in here and also provide some additional coloring here. So the 20% surcharge, in our view, like as we see it, could be only the beginning because like typically in other funding programs from the government, you have surcharge rates, which are way higher, like 100%. So as we see it, the German economy is still not in a very good shape. Germany is still the biggest economy in Europe, but we are spending only a fraction of France and Great Britain for tax credits. So the government is trying to actively change that and to make the German tax credit system more generous. And this is something we see as a trend to continue in the future.

Great. And then just a question on new versus existing clients and how that developed in the second half of the year this year. Did you see a greater uptake of existing clients filing for tax credits? Or was it predominantly driven by new clients?

So maybe I take this question here. So we see -- like as we discussed in the past, we still have the focus -- our main focus is still the new client generation. Since we have a constantly low churn rate and every new client for us means that they don't go to the competition, so we still have -- are heavily focused on new client generation, but we see a constant growth in revenue coming from existing clients. This is since we also, of course, are improving the aftersales processes.

We are improving the visits to the customers, the kind of data we are getting there. The kind of standardization of this whole aftersales process has also greatly improved in 2025. And we see, let's say, in the sales representatives, which are doing aftersales, we see, let's say, typically very high revenues per head, which is typically 3 to 4x higher than in the new client generation bucket. Of course, there is an existing client relationship. And yes, so we cannot provide, as of this moment, a definite number, but we can give let's say, a qualitative answer. And we see, let's say, an increase in traction on existing customers, but we see still a very big potential here.

So the aftersales department is still very small. So out of 100 -- over 100 salespeople, only 5 are doing aftersales. Of course, we like are very conservative here. We want only the best salespeople to do this and to just maintain the client relationship since it's very hurtful since -- when a client leaves us. We want to make sure that we have the highest quality here, and so we are very careful with that. But at the end, we still see a great potential for the future to harvest on this, let's say, existing relationships we have here.

The next question comes from Fabio Holscher from Warburg Research.

A couple of questions because you just spoke about the 2 major regulatory tailwinds that you have starting from this year. Can you remind us what percentage of your current client base is already maxing out the current EUR 10 million cap?

I'm happy to take this. So within this presentation, we don't present any specific numbers regarding this. But what we see in practice at -- on the ground is that there still is a certain fraction of customers, which we can continue to develop. The main reason I would like to highlight is the journey of a large client, which big corporations typically go with us. So first of all, we onboard them after selling a contract to them, after selling a license to them. We onboard them into our platform.

Very often, before giving the full capacity of relevant R&D expenditure, despite signing a long-term contract, the attitude is we'll start with a sample project. So instead of figuring out how I give you the full EUR 12 million expenditure or EUR 10 million for the past, we'll start with a sample project worth EUR 2 million or EUR 3 million. The companies don't lose anything at this point of time because legally, they can claim up to 4 years backwards.

Now what happens when we hand in a project via our platform? This first approval where I get an innovation approval, first step in Germany takes 3 months. Now the challenge in the model is that the cash collection for the client happens at a second step, which takes usually another 6 to 9 months. So overall, when a customer starts working with us from onboarding data to final cash collection, there is a period of 12 months.

And very often, this is the moment that corporations want to see. They are happy with the first R&D approval. They're motivated to continue the collaboration. That's why we have low churn rates. But at the same time, the cash collection is quite late. And this is often the event that companies are waiting for until we can get more R&D expenditure onto our platform. So this was a long explanation. And did this address your question?

It does, yes. And it flows very nicely into my next question because can you quantify for how many years the average new client makes a claim when you onboard them in the first year? Is that what you covered in the previous answer where you said new client business is roughly 3 to 4x as high as existing? Or did I understood wrong on that front?

So we cannot provide a quantified number here, but there is an inverse, let's say, effect. So companies start working with us. Very often, they don't give their full R&D expenditure potential. A few of those clients do, but basically, we still see a lot of hidden potentials to increase, let's say, the R&D expenditures that we find for the past references.

An example to underline this is our strong Q4 filings, which lead to very high Q1 revenue. Historically, we always had a strong Q4 revenue. And since last year, it has changed because we have very strong -- the strongest hand-ins of volume in Q4, which transfers into revenue with a 3-month delay. This is the R&D approval. This is our revenue recognition. So whatever happens in our platform in Q4, you hand in the R&D expenditure, transfers into revenue in Q1. And so let's say, a metric to underline that a lot of companies have not fully utilized their R&D potential, the cash back potential shows that in Q1, the revenue for 2025 was extremely high and that the reason is a lot of money from 2020, which hadn't been claimed and would have been lost after 4 years, after Q4 2024 was filed for. And this led to very high revenue in Q1 2025. And we see similar patterns with the behavior of Q4 2025 and revenue development in Q1 2026, which we will -- that's something that we would expect to see again, and this is something we will publish with the Q1 update. So this is just a fact to underline that a lot of revenue potential still is within the customers because they are very conservative of filing costs until they have finally seen the cash back.

Okay. Great. And you highlighted in the beginning of your presentation the technology you're employing now within your pitches and so on. Can you comment on how your customer acquisition costs have been developing?

So just in terms of a qualitative answer, what we try to highlight is to show you that we are always concerned and focused on organizational efficiency despite available capital. And this is an example how we -- despite in the terms of percentage, just slightly decreasing our expenditure for sales and marketing that we still managed to more than proportionally grow our revenues and profitability. And that is maybe how I can address this question at this point of time.

Okay. Perfect. And then finally, maybe can you talk more about the current status of your international expansion plan? You said you're willing to sacrifice margin for growth in the future.

Yes. Maybe I'll take this one up here. So we are running currently experiments. That means where we are probing several markets at a time at the moment. Of course, this is a challenging task since these are established markets where there is an established competition. But we believe government tailwinds are also present in other countries like the U.K., which is seeing really a crackdown in, let's say, fraudulent providers of R&D credits and which are seeing increased documentation requirements, which are seeing increased responsibility where you have to name project responsibles now but also, of course, the U.S., which is naturally the most -- the biggest market for us, which you -- with the biggest volumes in the world, which is also seeing major scandals of established players. And we believe these are avenues for entry.

And yes, so what -- we are currently in the stage of forming teams there and bringing them to life. This is challenging because, essentially, we have to start the organization from 0. We, let's say, investigated if we could do M&A, but we -- for the sake of preserving the company culture and for the sake of preserving, let's say, that what made us successful in the past, we do not want to distract us here, and we rather choose this path. This is to the upside, which is, let's say, a little bit longer and more stony.

But on the other side, it's not as risky. So we don't have any big capital outlays. So we have no big capital spending. So this is essentially small amounts compared to our current traction and profitability. So we don't see any impact on margin right now. So we don't see, let's say, at the moment, a big investment. And of course, also to our philosophy, it belongs that the teams, which we build up here, they have to prove themselves. They have to make revenue. They have to be profitable quite soon. Otherwise, we will not continue. And when they do very well, they will have very high rewards. So at the moment, we don't see a major impact on margins, but of course, if there's an opportunity to invest, we will always do it.

So we would never choose let's say, the option not to invest. But on the other side, given that we are following this path, we are more, let's say, conservatively approaching the investment side here on the international expansion. But we are doing an expansion at the moment in 4 different countries.

The next question comes from Henry Reid from Euronova Asset Management.

We will take the next question from Peter McNally from Stifel.

I was just wondering, if I look at your consensus revenue growth for the year ahead, it looks like it's just under 40%. And I'm wondering, how much of that growth can you already say that is in the bag? In other words, how much is it going to be annualization of customers that you have won last year? How much more do you really need to win to hit those estimates? And do you think you can achieve that with a similar amount of spending on sales and marketing as a portion of your sales, please?

Yes, I'm happy to take this. So let's say, we are highly confident that we can show that we achieve this growth trajectory, what the analysts are forecasting. This is also our personal ambition. And there is a certain amount of customers that has not been monetized. So we signed a lot of customers last year. We saw a strong growth trajectory of new clients because this market in Germany, our core market where we have kicked off is still very much underserved, and we still see a great opportunity to increase our clients -- client base with long-term contracts.

So a lot of those contracts that have come in, clients are still in an onboarding phase, which typically takes a couple of months from signing until the first initial data is onboarded in our platform. And the client can be monetized. At the same time, we see effects through our aftersales department that the existing client base is coming back.

We don't have any quantitative number that we communicate at this point of time. But if we see our client growth, if we see the behavior of old clients, how we can develop them and find more relevant expenditure, onboard that into our platform and then at the same time, believe on our current traction with existing, let's say, sales conversations we are having, then we are confident that we can be on a path to achieve those numbers. We also will consider to provide a proper guidance towards April, towards the time of our Annual Shareholder Meeting, and then we will comment more in depth on our guidance for this year.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Jean-Marc Mueller from JMS.

According to official numbers from the Ministry of Finance, the payout for R&D credits in 2025 has increased by 60%, so in line with the top line growth that you have been showing. That would imply that you haven't really gained market share.

Now I mean, your market share is already fairly high. But going forward, would you -- should we assume that you can gain market share or that at least in Germany, you then will just grow in line with the R&D tax credit market?

Yes. Thanks for the question. That's very interesting. I think the numbers also state that 30% of the applications are coming from companies below 10 employees, which is not our target market. And then at the same time, we do have a lot of corporations who don't max out their filing yet according to our hypothesis. So this is a major driver. And then, of course, we see this instrument is becoming more known. It's becoming more popular and that opens doors.

And especially when the C-suite is aware of compliance requirements of audit, this is a continued avenue of growth for us. That's why we are fairly confident to be able to grow in the near to midterm based on the development of the market. And yes, then let's see how we will be executing if we could potentially achieve numbers beyond market growth, but this is then something we would more in depth describe in our proper guidance that we will issue.

Yes. Because I don't think that the expectation is that the market will grow by 40% in 2026. So if you imply that you're happy with the consensus estimate of nearly 40% top line growth, you probably would have to outgrow the market.

Yes. And to outgrow the market can be to grow alongside new clients that still have potential that are underserved or not being served and at the same time, to continue monetizing the existing client base and tapping into the potential, yes. But a very good analysis, and thank you for this question, yes.

Sure. Maybe an add-on on that. I mean, if you really manage to grow at such a high pace, let's say, 30%, 35%, 40%, whatever, I mean, I think it will be nearly impossible for you to grow your cost base faster than what comes in on the top line. And in the past, when you were looking at EBIT, when we spoke about EBIT margins, et cetera, and I question whether the margin should go down, you always said that you want to grow profitably. And for you, that was always that basically EBIT grows slightly faster than top line. Is this also how you would see it in 2026?

Yes. Maybe as I -- maybe I take this one. As I outlined already with the international expansion, just to give you some color on this, so actually, how fast the market grows is not, let's say, especially relevant for us because if you look -- as Alex briefly mentioned before, the question is like who is filing. And for us, of course, like the companies which are very small, they are not the user of our software. We want to focus on the larger enterprise clients, which have a bigger problem.

So they not have only one problem they mentioned, which is in Germany, but they have multinational organizations. They have R&D in many countries and basically to develop this client relationship, to open up other opportunities in other countries where we get those clients, and this is what we want to do.

And yes, as you -- as I said also earlier, like growing those teams, we are very cautious. So we don't do M&A. We don't invest, I don't know -- we don't hire 100 salespeople at a time and then keep them on the P&L. So we want to be really culture preserving.

And so we always invest what it takes, but we never do anything, let's say, which is for us economically unwise. And at the end, let's say, the margin, you can expect for some time in the future to -- that we basically stay at a high margin, especially if this current dynamics of revenue growth, which is the most important figure for us, if they continue to be there. So definitely.

The next question comes from Henry Reid from Euronova Asset Management.

Can you hear me this time?

Yes.

Very well.

Finally. Sorry, I had technical problems last time around. I wanted to just drill down a little bit more regarding the question that was asked by the Warburg analyst, Warburg Research, and that is regarding -- and I say this as a friend of your business. I've been invested since day 1. It's the question of how -- what percentage of your business is done with clients who you are selling 4- to 5-year contracts to, i.e., going back 4 to 5 years because 1 of the stock market criticisms that I hear over and over again is that your growth rate will fall off sharply when these -- when this client base has been fully exploited. And I think there are so many other growth factors in your overall story that there is no weakness in you addressing this issue absolutely full on. So I'm just wondering if you could just shed a bit more color on this one.

Yes. Thanks for the question. So maybe we can think of how we can address this better in a quantifiable manner in the future, beyond this call, what we present today. But again, remember this inverse effect and just this logical bridge from a first signed contract until revenue recognition with the client and until the client is reaffirmed that he also finally has a benefit with cash collection, and this period just takes at least 12 months.

So it's very logical to assume that it takes a number of years to fully develop the clients to their full potential. That's why we don't see at this point of time that the revenue is overall a collection of several years, but there is a lot of potential still left in existing clients, which we can develop over time.

Then beyond our tax credit growth, of course, we see opportunities how we can grow our TAM. And if we manage to enter a couple of markets, example, the U.K., which pays out EUR 9 billion every year, it's multiple times bigger as of now as the German payout because of this underpenetrated market here in Germany. If we manage to go to France, which has a payout of EUR 7 billion a year or Canada or the U.S., where we also see a lot of synergies with global multinational companies that basically have R&D in those various locations, and we can offer this platform to optimize tax credits globally, this just widens our TAM.

And beyond this, and this is also on our, let's say, midterm goal, is to monetize and sell our software fragments, which is really an ERP to run a whole R&D unit, if you think of time tracking, project management. So even these are potentials in the future to be monetized beyond our core growth case. So I just wanted to make clear that our vision of the company is to sell solutions to sell software that help companies to become more efficient in R&D in the long term.

Tax credits is a milestone on the longer path. It serves a little bit like the Trojan horse because the CFO and CTOs are suddenly willing to onboard relevant R&D data into the platform. And in the midterm, we might be able to showcase our clients that we could help them with those data and provide a much more value add in the future. So I just would like to highlight, we think of this as a long-term global vision that we are working towards very hard. It's not Germany only despite the major revenue coming from Germany at this point of time. Tax credit is a global market, but even the long-term goal with additional monetization opportunities is there. And this is what I would like every investor to keep in mind. This is not a tax credit Germany only idea and story.

And maybe to add a little bit here some -- yes, we certainly have to address maybe this -- we have to discuss addressing this issue. But let's say, we have a database of R&D employees, and all of those R&D employees have salaries. So they work, of course, at different clients or different organizations. And so if we just count together, let's say, the sum of the yearly salaries and apply a hypothetical, let's say -- or let's say, because we have, of course, all the contracts in our system, so we cannot only apply hypothetically but a real number.

And if you would calculate, if you would monetize this whole database every year and basically get the maximum available tax credit for all the clients, then we see that our current revenue for '25 is still way below the potential we could harvest every year. And again, let's say, our focus are larger clients. The more larger clients, the better the bottom line, like -- and also the higher the potential for international expansion.

Great. But I think that this argument needs to be made very loudly and over a period of time. But I have a much more mundane question, second question and last question. That is, you're generating a lot of cash. How do you intend to use it? Are we going to see some nice dividends? Stock buybacks doesn't seem very realistic on the basis of the free float. But how do you intend to deploy some of the cash you're generating?

Happy to take this, yes. So as you -- generally, we will make a decision shortly. This is always a discussion that we have. We disclosed in the past that we are ready to pay out a certain portion of that as dividends, and generally speaking, for our further growth, we don't need additional cash. These are maybe the cornerstones I can mention at this point of time.

And our philosophy is rather distribute the cash back to the shareholders. And regarding buybacks, we are kind of critical because we see, let's say, the liquidity of the stock already on the, let's say, limit that we should do. If we be too aggressive with buybacks, we have [indiscernible] anymore. So that contradicts a little bit the IPO. So at the end, yes, so let's say, we would weight it in our discussions and announce that in the near future, what we intend to do with the funds. But for us, the situation is pretty clear.

A bit of yield support is always welcome.

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

Yes. Thank you very much for listening and for the questions. Yes, it remains to be said that we are always happy to answer further questions. Like you can reach out to us over the channel given on the website.

And yes, so my closing remark here is we remain committed. We remain dedicated. We have a lot of plans for '26. That means as well geographic expansion as well as, let's say, new products, which we are actively introducing to our clients right now at the moment. And yes, I'm happy to say that we want to continue writing this growth story. So this is something very important for us. It's our -- essentially, it's our -- our creation. We want to stay onboard here for a very long time in the future, and we want to see this company grow.

And for us, it's a challenge, of course, being listed in the capital markets. But as you said, like the first occasion, we didn't disappoint, and I hope so that we get some credibility in the future also for our, let's say, performance, which we are, let's say, working very hard to continue. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye-bye.