Earnings call transcript: Checkin.com Group Q3 2025 sees 2.31% stock rise

Checkin.com Group reported its third-quarter 2025 earnings, revealing a 6% year-on-year decline in net revenues to SEK 17.4 million. Despite the revenue drop, the company's stock rose by 2.31% to 5.44 SEK, reflecting investor optimism driven by robust EBITDA margins and strategic partnerships. The company continues to focus on biometrics and facial recognition solutions, with the market expected to grow 15% annually.

Key Takeaways

• Checkin.com Group's stock increased by 2.31% following the earnings release.
• Net revenues decreased by 6% year-on-year to SEK 17.4 million.
• EBITDA margin reached 35%, the second-highest in the company's history.
• Strategic agreements with Visma Group and Skycity indicate expansion efforts.
• Cost-saving initiatives are expected to fully materialize in Q4.

Company Performance

Checkin.com Group experienced a decline in net revenues, dropping to SEK 17.4 million in Q3 2025, marking a 6% year-on-year decrease. Despite this, the company achieved a strong EBITDA margin of 35%, the second-highest in its history, indicating effective cost management and operational efficiency. The company's focus on biometrics and facial recognition aligns with industry trends, as the market is projected to grow 15% annually.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: SEK 17.4 million, down 6% year-on-year
• Gross profit: SEK 12.7 million, with a 73% margin
• EBITDA: SEK 6 million, reflecting a 35% margin
• Cash position: SEK 14.3 million
• Equity ratio: 92%

Market Reaction

Checkin.com Group's stock rose by 2.31% to 5.44 SEK, following the earnings announcement. The stock price movement suggests a positive market response, driven by strategic partnerships and strong EBITDA performance. The stock remains within its 52-week range, indicating stability in investor sentiment.

Outlook & Guidance

The company has suspended its previous "Rule of 40" target but remains optimistic about future growth. The partnership with Visma Group is expected to generate initial revenue in the coming weeks. Cost-saving measures are anticipated to fully impact financials in Q1 2026, with a long-term EBITDA margin target set between 30-50%.

Executive Commentary

CEO Christian Carlson emphasized the need for revenue growth alongside cost-cutting measures, stating, "We can't just cut costs, we also need to grow our revenue." CFO Martin Boymel highlighted the potential for gross margin improvement as revenue grows, noting, "Some of these costs are fixed or semi-fixed. So as revenue grows, the gross margin will go up."

Risks and Challenges

• Continued revenue decline could pose growth challenges.
• Suspension of the "Rule of 40" target may signal caution.
• Limited expansion of the travel product could affect diversification.
• Global regulations and AI fraud threats may impact market dynamics.
• Industry consolidation could increase competition from larger players.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the company's customer count reporting methodology and ongoing cost optimization strategies. Executives clarified the limited expansion of the travel product and provided insights on future revenue generation approaches, addressing concerns about gross margin fluctuations.

Full transcript - Checkin.com Group AB (CHECK) Q3 2025:

Moderator: Hello, and welcome to today's broadcast with check-in.comgroup. Joining us today are CEO, Christian Carlson and CFO, Martin Boymel. We'll begin with a presentation followed by a Q and A session. If you wish to ask any questions, please submit them via the form logged to the right. And with that said, please go ahead with your presentation.

Christian Carlson, CEO, Check-in.com Group: Thank you and good morning and welcome to today's webcast. My name is Christian Carlson and I'm the CEO. And together with our CFO, Martin Boymel, I will take you through our report for the 2025. I hope you had a chance to review the report this morning. We're very open for questions later on.

The plan is that I will talk about the company's overall development and Martin will go through the financial parts. During the quarter, we saw very big improvements, especially around our EBITA margin. But at the same time, we continue to hunt for growth. For the quarter, our revenues was million, which is representing a 4% decline from the previous quarter. The decrease is mainly driven by a little bit lower volumes towards the travel and the iGaming segment out of the quarter.

Already talked about a little bit from the start, but the revenue in the quarter was like minus 4% compared to the previous quarter and minus 6% compared to the same period last year. At the same time, we continue to streamline the organization to find profitability and also give us opportunities for growth going forward. We see, especially with the cost focus we had over the past six months, that it now really starts to show the numbers. And the EBITDA margin for the quarter was the second highest for the company's history. And we continue to work to aim for profitability and growth.

And we expect the majority of cost savings are expected to have a full effect during the fourth quarter. After the end of the quarter, we signed an agreement with a large fintech company, Vismagroup. This agreement means that we will be an integrated part of the platform, and there has been a strong interest from their customer to accessing the technology we can provide. Why this is important? But this also allows us to reach a lot more verticals and also gives us a fantastic distribution channel opportunities to really scale our software.

We also expect the first customers to use our software in the coming weeks already. Also, after the end of the quarter, we signed an agreement with New Zealand's largest casino group called Skycity, which is the plan to also go live in the end of the year. It's worth to mention this type of agreements comes with a monthly license fee from the signing date, followed by a variable model based on the volumes of traffic running through the software after the live date. We at the same time see quite strong demand in so called omni channel solutions, meaning like companies transitioning from physical environment to a digital one. We have also previously partnered with the French group Casino Barriere, which is in the same segment that we also expect to go live end of the year.

Going forward, we believe the iGaming vertical will continue to develop a positive way for us, and we see a quite strong momentum right now. The market for biometrics and facial recognition solutions is expected to grow by around 15% annually on a global scale. Our assessment is that both directly and indirectly around like four to 5,000,000 companies that is in need of this type of technology. The development is primarily driven by global regulations, stricter requirements to verify who the end user really is, and a growing threat from AI fraud or so called deepfakes. At the same time in the industry, we also see an ongoing consolidation trend, where we mainly see multinational companies acquiring specialized players within this field.

About our financial targets, our financial targets have been this classic sales metric, the rule of 40, which measures profitable growth. The goal has been to maximize the sum of the growth per share combined with the EBITDA margin with the ambition to reach 80% over time. We have previously communicated that we will not meet the targets for 2025. And yesterday also it was decided through the board that we will suspend this goal until further notice. And with that, I will leave over to our CFO, Martin, to review the financials.

Martin Boymel, CFO, Check-in.com Group: Thanks, Christian. Yeah, the quarterly report itself is filled with a lot of numbers. So here, I'll go through the headlines. So net revenues decreased to SEK17.4 million in the quarter, which corresponds to growth of minus 6%. We had some negative impact from exchange rates.

So if we adjust for that, the growth was minus 3% instead. And if we compare it to the previous quarter, I. E. The 2025, the growth was minus 4%. And gross profit for the quarter amounted to DKK 12,700,000.0, and that was a margin of 73%.

And EBITDA was DKK 6,000,000 in the quarter, and that was a margin of 35%. And as Christian already mentioned, that's actually the second highest quarter in the company's history. Cash flow from operating activities amounted to a little bit less than SEK 300,000. And we ended the quarter with a cash position of a little bit more than SEK 14,000,000 and the equity ratio was 92%. If we look into the net revenue more specifically, you can see in the chart that the revenue went down by 6% compared to the same quarter last year, and the revenue was SEK17.4 in the quarter.

And the main reason for that was, you know, a little bit weaker demand from our existing customers. We have previously in the last few quarterly reports mentioned our previous customer RingCentral and that the impact from the loss of that customer has not impacted the figures in quarter three. But if you look at the year to date numbers, the majority of the decrease in the year to date numbers are due to the fact that RingCentral is no longer customers. But going forward, we will not see any impact from this anymore. Going to gross profit, the gross profit in the quarter amounted to 12,700,000.0 kroner and that corresponds to a margin of 73%.

And that's in line with what we have seen in the last kind of twelve months. And if we go back to 2023, we were about 80%. So we continue to see a little bit weaker margins. That has also led us to have more focus also on the costs of the direct costs. So we have looked at, you know, optimizing servers and other direct costs that impact the gross margin.

But the biggest impact is that, as we discussed before as well, that many of these costs are kind of fixed or semi fixed. So as the growth is coming back, we believe that the margins will also go up because of that impact. If we look at sales and marketing costs, again, this has also been a focus area to, you know, make this more efficient and look at the costs also in this area. So we invested SEK 2,900,000.0 in sales and marketing activities in the quarter, corresponding to 17% of net revenues. And if we look at the first nine months, we spent around 20% of net revenues in this area.

Going to EBITDA, we have already mentioned a few times that we have been focused on cost savings and optimizations and efficiencies. And that will, of course, have a big impact on the EBITDA as we have seen in this quarter. And EBITDA landed on SEK 6,000,000 in the quarter corresponding to 35% margin. And if we look at the margin year to date, EBITDA is currently at 21% for the first nine months. And finally, we ended the quarter with a cash position of SEK14.3 million and the equity ratio was 92%.

And with that, I'll hand it back to Christian for some final remarks and the Q and A session.

Christian Carlson, CEO, Check-in.com Group: Thank you, Martin. To summarize, Q3 twenty twenty five growth rate was minus 4% quarter on quarter and minus 6% year on year. The EBITDA margin improved to 35. We still have a strong cost focus and we expect it to reach full effect during Q4. Some important new signings after the quarter ended with Bisma and SkyCity, and we're expecting a few new customer launches now in quarter four.

And with that, I will leave over for the Q and A.

Moderator: Thank you for that presentation. And yes, let's open up the Q and A section here. The total number of customers seems to be decreasing in between quarters. Can you explain the main reason behind this trend and why some customers choose to end their cooperation with you?

Christian Carlson, CEO, Check-in.com Group: Yes. It can maybe look like that, but the last one and a half year now we've been focusing a lot on different type of distribution, like platform deals and hope to find better distribution of software. That means that if we're working with some type of platform, shows that it's one customer. If we just take an example, recent deal with Visma, many of their customers will use our software, but it will just be counted as one customer. So in general, I think right now it's more customers that are using a technology, but how it's reported, probably will look a little bit less.

Moderator: Thank you for clarifying that. In May 2024, you launched a new travel product with a European airline in the Irish market designed to handle all types of, bookings. Has this product been expand to other markets since then?

Christian Carlson, CEO, Check-in.com Group: No, it's not been expanded. And right now, we not really see it will be expanded for time being.

Moderator: Understood. Thank you. Given that the travel industry continues to underperform financially for you, why do you contain such a strong focus into this segment?

Christian Carlson, CEO, Check-in.com Group: Yeah, I think the travel industry has been quite good for us historically, but obviously we had higher hope for the growth in the segment. We still believe we have a lot of opportunities there, but at the same time we also need to invest in those areas. We really see that we have the momentum right now. So I still believe in the travel industry going forward, but right now we will also spend a little bit more time and effort into other industries where we see more current momentum.

Moderator: With the recent changes to the board, how will the new board structure help the company return to growth in between quarters, especially now that the financial targets has been removed?

Christian Carlson, CEO, Check-in.com Group: Yeah, I can't answer behalf of the board, but I can answer as part of the CEO for the people who's working with this every day. But like, obviously, we've been doing a lot of changes in the organization, but it also should give us more opportunities to invest in growth. So this is something we're working with daily and we can't just cut costs, we also need to grow our revenue. So it's a mix of things obviously we're doing, but one of those is to continue to invest where we really see that we have momentum, which we see in some industries right now.

Moderator: And you mentioned agreements with Visma in the report. When can we start expecting revenue from this partnership and which business areas will your software be applied to?

Christian Carlson, CEO, Check-in.com Group: Yeah, we expect them to be live in hopefully already a few weeks time and that will then come into a revenue base for us. Obviously, we're not expecting any large revenue this year, but hopefully they can really scale for the next year. As we understand, it will be part of the platform, their enterprise partners can use the technology out of the box without any further integration or agreement in place.

Moderator: Thank you for that answer. With cost saving measures already implemented and improved profitability, can investors expect further profitability gains once all cost reductions are fully realized?

Martin Boymel, CFO, Check-in.com Group: I can do this one. Yeah, so with cost reductions, have different types of cost reductions. Some of them are immediate when you just cut a supplier or a purchase order or something, whereas some take a little bit longer to materialize. And the most common of those are employee costs. And we have not yet seen the full effect from the cost saving initiatives we have already taken.

So we will see those fully the full effect of that during Q4.

Moderator: Thank you, Martin for that answer. How do you plan to increase revenues again, despite a strong focus on cost management and how will this impact investments into sales and marketing?

Christian Carlson, CEO, Check-in.com Group: Yes. No, but over, I would say, the last six months, we've been looking into every area of the business, especially around the cost side. And right now, we are on a quite good level. As we already talked about, we're expecting the full effect in Q4, but it will be seen probably like the full effect will be seen in the numbers for Q1. But that also is to give us opportunities to invest in growth going forward but at the same time be a little bit more to say, persist where we invest and especially invest in areas that we see that the momentum is at this time, instead of like investing things that we maybe hope for in the future.

Moderator: Thank you for that answer. The gross margin has declined over the past two years, but has recently started to recover. What factors are driving this improvement?

Martin Boymel, CFO, Check-in.com Group: Yeah, I think that's for me to answer. Yeah, I would say the gross margin this quarter is pretty much in line with what we have seen in the last year, maybe, you know, one or 2% up compared to the previous quarters. So and as we said, we have looked at optimizing these costs as well as part of the kind of wider cost saving programs and especially looking at the server cost side. And we are constantly all kind of optimizing that. But I think the biggest impact, as I already mentioned in the presentation as well, is that some of these costs are fixed or semi fixed.

So as you know, if revenue is growing, then the gross margin will go up, everything else equal. And likewise, if the revenue is falling, then the margin will go down, everything else equal. So I think that is kind of the biggest impact on the and the biggest explanation of the kind of falling gross margins in the last year or eighteen months.

Moderator: Thank you. And we'll take one final question here before wrapping up the Q and A section. Can you provide additional insights on the EBITDA margin during the quarter and where you expect it to stabilize over the long term?

Martin Boymel, CFO, Check-in.com Group: Yeah, I think we covered this also. We have looked at a lot of costs in the last kind of twelve months and that will of course trickle down improved EBITDA and EBITDA margin. And for this quarter, we landed at 35%. For the longer term, I think it's hard to give any guidance right now. But if you look at kind of more mature, larger software companies and SaaS companies, it's not, you know, it's fairly common that they are somewhere between 3050%.

So I would expect us to be somewhere in that area as we, you know, grow and become more mature.

Moderator: Okay, and that concludes the Q and A session. Thank you very much Christian and Martin for presenting with us here today and also answering all of our questions. And we wish you all a great rest of day. Thank you.

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