Earnings call transcript: Qt Group’s Q3 2025 reveals sales decline, stock dips

Qt Group Oyj reported its third-quarter 2025 earnings, revealing a slight decline in net sales and a modest net profit. The company’s stock price fell by 5.53% following the announcement, reflecting investor concerns over market softness and reduced deal sizes. Despite these challenges, Qt Group remains optimistic about long-term prospects, bolstered by strategic acquisitions and product innovations.

Key Takeaways

• Q3 net sales decreased by 3.4% in comparable currencies.
• Stock price dropped by 5.53% post-earnings announcement.
• Completed acquisition of IAR Systems, expanding product offerings.
• Full-year revenue growth guidance set between 3% to 10%.
• Market weaknesses noted in consumer electronics and automotive sectors.

Company Performance

Qt Group experienced a challenging third quarter, with net sales of $40.7 million, a 3.4% decline in comparable currencies. Despite market pressures, the company’s year-to-date growth remained positive at 1%. The embedded market downturn, particularly in consumer electronics and automotive segments, contributed to the decline. However, the defense and medical sectors showed stability, and the company noted resilience in the Chinese automotive market.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $40.7 million, a 3.4% decrease from the previous year.
• EBITDA Margin: 10.5% for Q3.
• Net Profit: $1.4 million for Q3; year-to-date net profit of $13 million.
• Effective Tax Rate: 21%.
• Cash Balance: Increased significantly due to business seasonality.

Outlook & Guidance

Qt Group provided a cautious outlook for the remainder of the year, with revenue growth guidance between 3% and 10% in comparable currencies. The company expects the EBITDA margin to range from 20% to 30%. Looking ahead, Qt anticipates market improvements in 2026, driven by the integration of IAR Systems and a shift towards a subscription model.

Executive Commentary

CEO Juha Varelius stated, "We don’t see any changes on our long-term growth prospects," highlighting the company’s confidence in its strategic direction. He also noted, "We are becoming a Nordic powerhouse going global," emphasizing Qt Group’s ambition to expand its global footprint.

Risks and Challenges

• Smaller deal sizes and a shift from 3-year to 1-year licenses.
• Continued market softness in embedded segments.
• Potential impact of economic downturns on consumer electronics and automotive sectors.
• Forecasting challenges due to smaller deal sizes.
• Cautious approach to cost management amid market uncertainties.

Qt Group’s earnings call highlighted both the challenges and opportunities facing the company. While market softness and reduced deal sizes pose risks, strategic acquisitions and product innovations offer potential for future growth. Investors will be watching closely as Qt navigates these dynamics in the coming quarters.

Full transcript - Qt Group Oyj (QTCOM) Q3 2025:

Heli Jämsä, IR Lead, Qt Group: Good afternoon and welcome to the Qt Group’s third quarter 2025 results presentation. My name is Heli Jämsä, IR Lead, and with me today are CEO Juha Varelius and CFO Jouni Lintunen to present the results. After the presentations, we will have Q and A first in the room, and if we have time left, we will move on to questions from the lines. Without further ado, please, Juha, the floor is yours.

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Juha Varelius, CEO of the company, and as Heli was already saying, I’m going to go through the business performance on Q3 first. Our quarterly sales was $40.7 million. The decrease on 3.4 comparable currencies, it was flat basically. Year to date we’ve been growing on 1% on comparable currencies and our EBITDA margin on Q3 was 10.5%. What has actually led into this and why are we below on our expectation is the fact that the market has been softer, longer than we’ve been anticipating. If we looked at what we’ve been missing, it is basically larger deals. The number of the deals we’ve been making this year and on Q3 has been pretty steady and growing. We’ve been doing more deals than we’ve been doing before and we’ve not been losing any customers.

The churn rate per se is at the same level that it has traditionally been, but the average deal size has been lower. What we are experiencing on few segments, particularly where our customers are suffering, we are doing smaller deals. Our customers are reviewing the number of licenses they require and they try to go forward with a, let’s say, kind of with a minimum investment. There is still life in the market. We see the activity in the market, we don’t see any competing technologies. We’re dealing with the same customers, we’re getting new customers, but the deal sizes are lower. We’ve also experienced some shift from three year deal to one year deals. We were expecting that this on the second half this market condition would get better.

It hasn’t and we gave a profit warning because we anticipate that basically this same development will continue on the fourth quarter as well. We were looking for that the market demand would be stronger. Now we don’t anticipate that anymore. Of course, we could have been waiting and see what’s going to happen on a big deal on a Q4. I’m going to talk about that in the future outlook more, but as we concluded that we had a bit of same thing on the second quarter and now on the third quarter that we saw the bigger deals moving forward and the overall deal size being smaller, we think that this outlook that we’ve now given is more on a realistic size. The distribution license revenue on third quarter was on a previous year level.

Overall this year the distribution license revenue has been developing favorably and that’s been on our expectations. On our license sales we’ve been suffering both on ACUA and Qt side. Version wise, we had 922 people on September 30th and year-on-year increase is 64. We are of course cautious on the cost side, but in the long term we are still continuing our investment as planned because we don’t see in a long-term vision any changes in that sense. We did complete the IAR Systems acquisition a couple weeks ago, and like we’ve said before, where we see IAR Systems is that we do have a more comprehensive product portfolio. We see our strategy as that when we look at the development process of our customers, we want to be in the whole process. With IAR Systems, we are now with their compiler technology.

It’s in the very beginning of this development process, so to say, so that when customers are starting a new project, the first thing they will do is choose the hardware and then they start looking for compiler technology, and after that comes actually how to develop software and so on. It will give us a benefit, of course, to be aware of customer projects at an earlier phase. It also gives us a benefit that we can be yet even more of a one-stop shop for our customers. They don’t have to go and shop various things from various places. Specifically on our QA, our testing offering, it’s complementary or we can do cross-sell. When people buy the IAR Systems product, the open also needs to be tested, so we have a cross-sell opportunity over there.

IAR Systems is well positioned in safety-critical systems, which is also an area where Qt works. We do have safety-critical. You can see in the automotive, for example, quite a lot and in medical, so they are typically the same segments where we work. We do have coincidentally also offices pretty much in the same locations throughout the world. We are operating in the same segment and this strengthens our position in the embedded world quite a lot. We are becoming a Nordic powerhouse going global. IAR Systems is selling perpetual licenses. They have started the subscription change on licensing model, which we did a couple of years back. We are now reviewing that, we’re doing a bit different scenarios on what scale and on what speed we’re going to be doing the transition going into next year.

As of now, I don’t have info to give on what that’s going to look like, but of course, the more aggressive you’re going to be, the effect on the revenue is going to be greater in the short term and then later it’ll grow faster. What is the kind of our speed of change? We haven’t yet decided and we are doing that study as we speak, as well as we’re doing next year’s budgeting and so on and so forth. We do look that the IAR Systems acquisition is going to be a very complementary product for our portfolio and we’ve started the integration work now. When we made a public offer, it was done on a light due diligence.

Now we are going through the processes, we’ve started to integrate some work, and like I said, we started the planning for next year’s budget, we started the planning for the subscription change, and once we have those ready, then we’re going to share more on that information to you at a later stage. With these words, I hand it over to Jouni.

Jouni Lintunen, CFO, Qt Group: All right, thank you Juha and welcome from my behalf as well to the earnings call of Qt Q3. I will dig into a little bit more details on P&L income statement and balance sheet as well. You have already discussed quite in detail already about the top line net sales. We reported negative 3.4% net sales growth and we see that happening driven by the customers’ kind of cautiousness. For most parts we are seeing the headwind from the FX, specific from USD, and the magnitude of that was negative 1.4% in the Q3. In other words, comparable currencies, the net sales were flat year on year. For first nine months we are reporting negative 1% reported net sales growth. With the constant currencies we are around 1% positive, so flat. All in all, we did some flattening on the materials and services part.

There’s still an increase of roughly $100,000. That’s the resources, external resources that we are using for our customer consulting projects, so kind of insignificant in any means.

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: Though.

Jouni Lintunen, CFO, Qt Group: Our headcount, as you had described, was up by 64 year on year and we have been adding resources into R&D, product management, and also customer facing organization during this period. These are specific to the growth areas we see to be contributing going forward. This headcount increase reflects very much in line, in line into personnel expenses growth, 10% in Q3 or 9% for the first three quarters. Some increase in depreciation. We have extended the premises in some of the locations of ours, in our locations and also in Finland during this year. This shows a slight increase in that line. The other operating expenses, the spend side, it’s up roughly by $2 million. That’s for most parts driven by the IAR Systems related acquisition costs. That impact is $1.7 million now in Q3 or roughly 4 points in the EBITDA margin, if you will.

Run rate EBITDA margin excluding the one-off would be somewhere 15% level, still close to 10% or 9% down from last year’s. The amortization specifically from FrogLogic and Axivian acquisitions back in 2021 and 2022 remains unchanged, $2 million a quarter, $6 million for year to date. This leads us to the EBIT of $2.3 million or 5.6%, down by 13% points from last year’s. The year to date EBIT percent is 13.2%. The financial items did not play that big a role. Now in Q3 there was not that much fluctuation in the exchange rates. We are suffering from the headwind from the first half year from USD fluctuation, specifically by $1.8 million. Our income tax was for third quarter, $650,000, for first three quarters $3.4 million, which equals to roughly 21% effective tax rate, which is our run rate and a good scenario going forward as well.

This leads us to net profit of $1.4 million for the period, for the quarter, or $13 million for the year to date. Numbers on the balance sheet side, we see a significant increase in cash balance. I mean that’s the reason of the seasonality of the business. That shows us as well in the accounts receivable, trade receivables pocket, which went down by roughly $16 million from end of last year. This is driven by the seasonality of the business we execute. Fourth quarter is always the busiest one with highest number of invoicing. The cash will be collected in the first half year time and then again for fourth quarter will be the busiest one.

We also see a reduction in the contract assets by $3.9 million, which is a reflection that we have not been booking any major significant deals recently with multi-year deals with extended payment terms. This is kind of contributing to cash flow, which is $32.4 million for year to date. What comes to the equity and liabilities, there’s very little movement on that in accounts payable or any other items. I mean, this balance sheet obviously will be subject to change now quite significantly because of the acquisition of IAR Systems, and that will be taken into account into Q4 finances. In February, with these words, I will hand it back to Juha Varelius to go through the outlook and guidance for this year.

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Yes, thank you. We don’t see any changes on our long term growth prospects in a sense that we do see all our customers planning for new products. They’re going to be launching new products, they’re designing new products. We do see graphical user interfaces coming more and more into play. We see on testing that more and more software is being developed that needs to be tested to be robust. In that sense, we don’t see on a long term, we don’t see a whole other chance on that. However, we do see that on a short term, what we see in our customers, there have been layoffs in our customer base in different regions and segments. Basically, in all our regions, we see that our customers are in many cases in a saving mode, if you like.

We do see that there is, in embedded markets specifically, we see in consumer electronics, we see in automotive that there is a bit of a downturn in our customers on that. Do we see that that’s going to continue in the long term? No, we don’t. Do we see, like I’ve said before, that is there a need to develop further new products, have new product launches? Definitely. The number of devices will be growing, the software will be growing, AI will be generating a lot of software and whatever software AI develops, all of it needs to be tested because we never know what the AI does. The market uncertainty, this is a great question, that how long do we think that this is going to last?

As a matter of fact, I was thinking and we were kind of hopeful and we were, not hopeful, we were pretty certain that the second half would be better. That’s not been the case. We see that this market uncertainty in the embedded segment will definitely continue. How long, at this point I don’t want to make that estimation, but let me put it this way, I don’t see it getting any worse. We don’t, I think that the cost savings that we’re seeing companies are doing it and I don’t expect it to get any more challenging than it is as of today.

We estimate that we gave a profit warning and we gave the new estimation for this year 3% to 10% year on year comparable exchange rates and margin between 20% to 30% and as you know the large part of that delivery will come in the fourth quarter. We took a very well if we were on a positive side now we are our estimations we’ve been on a conservative side on the how do we see on 2025 as we go forward into if we look into the next year like I said the basis what we have on the on our how do we prospect market going forward we do expect this market to get better and we kind of are on a low end of this turn as we speak now.

It’s the usual I already mentioned that basically on our segments the automotive consumer electronics are suffering the most defense and medical maybe the least. It’s a good thing that we are on multiple different industries. If I look on the regions maybe U.S. bin for us kind of varies that which region is the best. Probably U.S. was suffering a bit more than Europe apart from the on APAC we’re doing better and of course when you think of it it’s kind of no surprise that the Chinese automotive is doing pretty well but it doesn’t kind of offset how we’re suffering in the other parts of the world. That’s basically the outlook we have. If you have questions please.

Felix Henriksson, Analyst: Felix Henriksson, there are three questions if I may. It sounds like your customers are reducing the number of licenses that they have in use. What is the reason for that? What do they tell you? Is it merely because of cost savings, or is there anything to do with structural matters, with developers becoming more efficient and companies needing a lower number of licenses and that sort of thing?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: They have less developers, they’re downsizing. If we look on the IT market, I think you know, two years back there was a shortage of developers. I mean everybody were anxious to get developers. It was very hard to find them and that was kind of a bottleneck for IT company growth. If you look now at the job market, there are developers unemployed basically at this point of time. Now it’s kind of the opposite. If you look at the big companies in the U.S. for example, how big layoffs there’s been during the course of the, let’s say, year and a half now. That’s one of the reasons. The other is the overall cost awareness. Let me put it this way.

It was very typical for our customers that whatever they had when they renewed, they renewed the same amount with the same deal, like a three year deal and so on. Many developers now are calculating exactly how many do we need, and they try to survive with the least amount of licenses. When they start new projects, when they are starting a project, they start with as small amount of developers as possible and try to go forward like that, whereas before they started in a bigger scale. That’s where it comes from. Like I said, the churn has not increased. We still have the same customers. They continue their development. They are just more cautious on the spending and also the number of the deals we do. The number of new customers, that is actually even increasing what we’ve been doing before.

Felix Henriksson, Analyst: What about quality assurance, did that grow in Q3? It sounds like you seem to think that there’s a bit of a structural tailwind from AI in that area. Is the demand on that front any better than for traditional Qt developers?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: I would say that our QA business, the license sales is suffering a bit same things than on Qt. The crowd on QA has been slow as well. Testing is kind of a development is something that you either do development or you don’t. Testing, you can always not to test and hope for the best, so you don’t have to test everything completely and so on and so forth. For customers, it’s easier to adjust on a testing bit than on development bit. I would say that our license sales been sluggish both on QA and Qt.

Felix Henriksson, Analyst: Were quality assurance sales down year on year?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: No, it’s not down, but it’s, yeah, you know, same roughly, you know, follows pretty much closely to what Qt is doing.

Felix Henriksson, Analyst: Regarding the one-off cost relating to the IAR Systems acquisition, they were for the full year at least a bit higher than what I had anticipated. Will there be any one-off costs in 2026 from that, 2026 on IAR, these one-time costs?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: I don’t think so. You never know if there are surprises that we need to close down something or do something extraordinary that we are not anticipating. I mean these one-off costs are, well, this money so far has been flowing mainly to bankers. Fair enough, what can I say? It’s a big amount. Do I anticipate any one-off costs in 2026? At this point I’m not aware of any. Of course, if there would be something that we would totally write off, then there would be, but we don’t see that as of now, no.

Felix Henriksson, Analyst: Okay, fair enough.

Matti Riikonen, Analyst, Inderes: Hey, Matti Riikonen from Inderes, I could ask, on the lack of large license deals and kind of the drivers behind that, do you have any sort of idea where that comes from? Why are larger deals not coming in?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: They’re being postponed. They’re being pushed forward. The big projects are waiting to start. A bigger deal usually comes. In our business, the first deal is always a smaller one. There is the people start developing, then there is the expansion and that comes a bigger deal. There have been postponements on those projects. They’ve been kind of put on hold. You say a wrong word. They continue with a smaller amount of developers. They don’t scale up. The projects are not going away, but they go on a lower flame, so to speak.

Analyst, Carnegie: Right.

Matti Riikonen, Analyst, Inderes: Does that mean that they are basically extending the timelines for getting those products out, or are they reducing scope as well?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Yeah, they’re doing with less. Yeah, okay.

Matti Riikonen, Analyst, Inderes: I could also go back to the discussion around having less licenses sold to the same customers and them optimizing the amount. Drilling down to the AI effect, because you could assume that developers are getting more efficient every year, you could see a recurring effect that companies downsize every year because they can do more with less. Do you see that as a realistic risk for the market and your license sales volumes, or do you think that the customers might just at some point expand the scope of their products because AI can help them do more?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: If I look at AI as of now, where I see it, that you can use it, is that on web technologies or mobile technologies? If you want to do a simple mobile app, for example, you can have the AI helping on that if you want to do kind of simple things that are very easy to verify what they are. You can do that with an AI. If you’re doing any safety, critical, functional safety type of things, you can’t, you know, or let’s say that the infotainment system on a car, it’s a very complicated system. AI can’t do that. Will it be able to do that someday? Of course you can take both views. Some people say that, you know, in a few years we don’t have to work anymore because AI is doing everything. Other people are saying that, maybe not.

I think that on embedded, before the AI starts doing so much work that there is really less need for developers, that’s kind of down the road and let’s see how that goes. On top of that, AI is not very reliable as you know. As of today you can’t, you know, you can do simple things with AI. On testing, for example, you can have test scripts written by AI and if that’s not complete, then the test is not complete, but it’s not end of the world. Those type of things you can do and you can use it, it can be a helper. Do I see that developers being so much more efficient that there’d be need for less on embedded side? Not really.

Do I see that what’s really affecting our customers is the lack of demand and their profitability is under pressure and they need to do less? That’s more of the reason as of now.

Matti Riikonen, Analyst, Inderes: Okay, thank you.

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Hi, Mikkolaksonen, private investor.

Felix Henriksson, Analyst: My question is about the competitive landscape.

Matti Riikonen, Analyst, Inderes: What’s going on in there, and are you seeing any sort of advances in the competitive technologies that might be impacting the license volumes?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: No.

Matti Riikonen, Analyst, Inderes: Okay.

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Yeah, that’s. I can elaborate on that. We do have the usual suspects. We do actually see the. I don’t know if you’ve heard me speak before. We have Android on the IV IO and the automotive, but there is not a whole lot of change. There is Flutter. Flutter was coming and that was kind of at the recent emerging technology, came from mobile and web, and they were kind of making inroads into embedded. We don’t see them that much anymore, and as far as I know, they are more in a maintenance mode nowadays and they’ve cut back on their development. We do see Unity. Unity is very good on the 3D and on advanced 3D. If you want to have the very nice looking 3D, then Unity, it’s a good choice.

However, it consumes more hardware, so you need to have more powerful hardware, more expensive hardware, and it’s fairly expensive on the per item cost. On Unity, it’s much higher than on our pricing, for example. What we now see is that in our good times, we saw Unity being used also on kind of a middle tier automotive, middle tier cars. Nowadays, we see that customers are looking at cheaper offerings for low and middle tier, and Unity can be used only on high tier vehicles. Basically, this cost pressure is, in that sense, working to our benefit rather than more against Unity. We don’t see a change over there, and at this point of time, we don’t see any new technologies that would be coming into our territory. Like I said before, we don’t have any customer.

Our customer churn is the same that it’s been for years, and that’s kind of our natural, I would say, natural churn that the projects ending and whatnot. We haven’t seen that, and we haven’t seen any reduction on the number of the deals we’re making. We’re selling as well as before, even a bit better on a number of deals, but the actual sizes are smaller.

Waltteri Rossi, Analyst, Danske Bank: Hi, Waltteri Rossi from Danske Bank. Thanks for the presentation. First, on Q4, as the problem this year has been especially related to the large deals, do you expect Q4 sales to be under more pressure actually compared to Q2 and Q3? Because I would assume that there’s even more of those large deals.

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Yes, when we gave our estimation for our full year guidance, we kind of took that into account that there will be less. Yes, we were more conservative on that one, especially for that particular reason.

Waltteri Rossi, Analyst, Danske Bank: All right, then about the license maturity mix, once again, would you say that the three-year license lower than expected renewal rate has had over or under 5% impact on this year’s sales?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: How much is 5%? I would say that it’s somewhere between $3 million to $5 million on a third quarter is the effect.

Waltteri Rossi, Analyst, Danske Bank: Yeah, on the third quarter.

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Third quarter, I was trying to calculate, but you know, what percentage.

Waltteri Rossi, Analyst, Danske Bank: Yeah, somewhere between there, and how much would you say year to date?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: That figure I don’t have out of my head, but I knew that you’re going to ask, so I looked the Q3 specifically.

Waltteri Rossi, Analyst, Danske Bank: All right, last one about the underlying market conditions. Do you expect the market to improve still this year, or are we going to have to wait until next year for that to happen?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: I was more hopeful when we were here at the beginning of the third quarter. I was expecting a better third quarter, that’s for sure. I was expecting that, and that didn’t happen. Right. We are now more conservative on that, and we don’t expect much of a change in the fourth quarter, and you know, hence our guidance. Are we going to see better next year? At some point this starts turning for sure. Yes, we are expecting, we kind of are seeing that it doesn’t get any worse than this. When do we see a turn to better, on what particular quarter that will happen, I can’t say that. As you can see from our fourth quarter guidance, it’s fairly conservative. We don’t expect any big turn this year.

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: Hi, Jaakko Tyrvainen from SEB, could continue on the AI and the related productivity gains on software development. Are you seeing such kind of a trend or pattern that proprietary development would become again a bit more appealing for the clients, or do they still need to trust in some sort of tools when developing the embedded solutions?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Yeah, they’re definitely going to be using tools, that’s for sure. I think that like I said on embedded development, you can use AI for writing test scripts. On embedded development, you can use AI in the design phase to give you great ideas, different kinds of solutions and creative ideas. The actual coding on embedded, I don’t see that AI will be there anytime soon to replace the developers. No, we don’t see that risk. On simple tasks, you can. I’ve used AI like that. It’s a great buddy, you know, it’s your best work buddy. It can help you out on automating many simple tasks and whatnot. The actual coding, I don’t see that on embedded for the foreseeable future. In many, many years that would change. I mean, you can use AI doing simple mobile apps, for example, now.

Of course, there is also the other side of the room saying that it’s going to advance so quickly that we’re going to all be surprised. Usually on these new things, as you know, when the change starts happening, it takes many, many years and people kind of even forget it and nothing happens, and then the change comes later on. On this embedded coding, not in the foreseeable future—it’s always kind of a scary word—but not in the coming years, let’s put it that way.

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: Okay. Still using the word of AI, have you included any kind of AI features in your own products? Has that improved the customer’s productivity so much that they need less licenses perhaps? Are you basically cannibalizing the renewals by including such?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: No, no. I mean these embedded systems that people build using Qt, they are very complicated systems, very big platforms and whatnot. That is not the case. What we see is that, first to your question, yes, we utilize AI in many aspects in our products. Is that downscaling the number, is that affecting less licensed sales? Definitely not. We do see that our customers are feeling the pain that they are not selling their products as much as they would like to and they have cost pressures, and that’s what we’re seeing. Those cost pressures are not only that they’re selling less. Many of our customers are having high tariffs, for example, selling stuff into the U.S. I mean, like the, I don’t know what’s going to be the South Korean car manufacturers tariff, but it used to be 25% before Trump now visited and they’ve made a deal.

I don’t know if it’s now 15%, but many, many of our customers are having a 15% cost increase on stuff they are selling to the U.S. There is a bit of an oversupply in some industries and whatnot. This is causing the overall friction in the embedded business.

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: Okay, then finally on the license maturity mix, you mentioned that customers are perhaps now choosing a bit more on the one-year licenses. Doesn’t this imply that you should have a pretty nice growth in your one-year license base for 2026? Could you elaborate a bit what type of growth you are seeing in renewing one-year licenses when going to 2026?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Of course, yeah. I mean, on a short term it affects us specifically as you know that our monetization model is that if you buy a three year license, we book it as revenue at that point of time as one goes. If people are buying more one year licenses, we book it at that point, which is obviously less than a three year license. The good thing is that the one year is going to renew next year, so obviously it’s going to help us. Absolutely.

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: How much larger is the base now versus a year ago?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: I can’t answer that, but I mean logic is right that it will help us next year, of course.

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: Super. Thank you.

Analyst, Carnegie: Good afternoon, it’s Matti Riikonen at Carnegie. A couple of questions. First, regarding your cost base at the moment, it’s now clearly more elevated because you have done growth investments but you haven’t got the growth. You are going with the pretty heavy cost load into 2026. How are you going to tackle that? Should we expect lower margins in 2026 because of that, or do you think that just operating leverage would work in your favor in 2026 to basically set it to the right path?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Yes. You should not expect lower margins because of that. The operating leverage will fix that. In the case that, let’s say that this would be a permanent situation, that the revenue will never ever grow, obviously then we would not have grown investments and, you know, we would get the, we would still get the profitability. Right now the one thing that will affect our profit margin next year is obviously IAR, and that effect I’m not fully aware yet. It depends on how aggressive subscription change we take. If we take very aggressive subscription change to IAR, then the revenue might be flat or even decreasing, which would mean that the IAR profitability would be diluting our group profitability. I will give guidance to that once we’ve made those decisions and I know what the effect will be. The IAR profitability traditionally has been lower than Qt.

Obviously there is potentially an effect. Having said that, IAR profitability will obviously improve because they’re not any more listed company and whatnot. We’re going to get some savings out of there. We have some ideas over there about how we can improve some of the performance on revenue even if the subscription is over there. That remains to be seen. Overall, that is the moving part over there. I would not be worried about the Qt profitability. By the way, of course we’re going to have one-offs the same type in the fourth quarter as we had in the third quarter.

Analyst, Carnegie: Okay. Now regarding Q4, you have a fairly big hockey stick modeled for Q4 to meet the full year numbers because in the first three quarters you haven’t grown at all, basically. When the customers know that and they kind of want you to give them discounts at the end of Q4 to close the deals this year, not next year, that usually creates a psychological kind of challenge. Is there a greater risk that if you stick to your discount policy and don’t give any discounts, then there would be a bigger share of those deals being postponed to 2026?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: They are. That is a risk. Of course.

Analyst, Carnegie: Right. A question of your forecast model. Throughout this year we have basically been disappointing in each quarter, and your sales forecast model looks to be kind of broken or it hasn’t worked like it did in the previous years. Have you scrutinized what’s wrong, and how can you improve the accuracy so that going forward your forecasts would be a bit closer to reality?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Yeah. We have two ways of looking into a forecast. One is that it actually starts from the bottom up. Each salesperson has their pipelines and they make the forecasts. They make what is their best case and what is the most likely case, and it’s been built upwards from the pipeline, and the sales makes their forecast through that. We have through finance, which is more like a scientific model, that they’ve been looking to pipeline over the history, and they have a forecasting model that this pipeline is likely to get into these sales. You have kind of an AI approach, and both have been basically broken this year.

On what we did, if you look on the third quarter, for example, when I was here telling you what are my expectations on the third quarter, we had a pipeline and we had a forecast model done by the sales that this is the most likely out of this pipeline. We do have the same thing from finance. We know that if this is the pipeline, most likely with these multiples, this is how it’s going to turn into sales. That was not the case. When we look into more detail on the big bulk of things, that’s how it’s been moving around roughly there, but less, and then these bigger deals being missing over there. If we look at the end of the day on these numbers, the deviation doesn’t have to be that many millions. Right.

If you’re missing some of the bigger deals over there, then all of a sudden you are on the out of the scale of what you were forecasting. That’s basically what’s been misleading, I say, a bit. We haven’t been closing the pipeline as we did in history. When you look at what’s been the reason behind that on the pipeline, we’ve been closing the deals on the pipeline, but the deals have been smaller. The average deal size has been smaller. Have we been able to forecast that we have this amount of deals? Are we going to close this amount of deals? Yes, we have, and we’ve done even a bit better than we’ve been expecting. The deal sizes on those pipelines have been smaller.

The deals have been closed, but on a smaller amount than being expected, and that’s what we need to adjust going forward in our forecasting. Our customers have been closing the deals, but smaller than we’ve been anticipating. Your follow-up question is that have we been giving discounts so that the deal has been shrunk? No, we haven’t. It’s been less licenses basically. That’s where we’ve gone wrong. Now, on Q4, or when we saw what happened on Q3, we took a more conservative look for our Q4 because, you know, in our old world, if we look at what’s our pipeline for Q4, it’s big enough for bigger sales than we have. We took a more conservative view of how that pipeline is going to be closing.

Analyst, Carnegie: All right, that was actually partly an answer to my next question, which was that did I really hear you correctly saying that you think that your guidance for Q4 and of course this year is conservative?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: We think that if it goes like the Q3, then this is the best guidance we can give. If we look on the pipeline and if we looked at the, we take the older history kind of multiples, then it would be conservative. Now we’ve seen three quarters that the pipeline doesn’t close as it used to be. I think that this guidance that we are now giving is very best we can give. I think that that’s going to happen given the fact that we are using now the multiples that be the reality on the second and third quarter. For the old world, it’s conservative. For this world, I think it’s spot on.

Analyst, Carnegie: All right, that’s all from me.

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: Thank you.

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Thank you.

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: Okay, Jaakko Tyrvainen from SEB, still continuing in the aftermath of, let’s say, Q3 and perhaps the year-to-date performance, which has been the most kind of a disappointing revenue stream for you. Has it been the renewals or the new license sales or the quality assurance tools or the distribution license?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: New sales definitely. New sales has been the, that’s been lower than we anticipated. We’ve had our challenges on renewals, but I’m very happy with our renewals team. They are doing a magnificent job. Of course, they do have this challenge that people, when they renew, they’re going to go through each license season. There are reductions in some cases, but our customers are renewing. The projects are continuing. They are not resigning, they are not churning. They do have a pressure on the renewals, but less so. New sales being the biggest challenge for this year for sure. If I look on Qt and QA, I would roughly say that the same challenge.

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: I know it’s difficult to have the apples to apples comparison in your case, but could you elaborate a bit what is the magnitude of average price hikes during the year?

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Average price hikes?

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: I believe you have hiked prices.

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Yeah, we have. We have. I would say that not significant. We’ve increased our distribution license. It’s kind of a complex. There are different buckets in our distribution licenses and we’ve changed their pricing on the different pockets. I would not say that, not a huge impact on that. No.

Jaakko Tyrvainen, Analyst, SEB: Thank you.

Heli Jämsä, IR Lead, Qt Group: There are no more questions in the room. I think we can check if there is anybody on the line. No, we can conclude the Q3 results and maybe some final remarks.

Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group: Yes. Thank you everybody for great questions. I think we kind of covered pretty much everything. Like I said, we do have, I want to emphasize the fact that we’re doing the number, the number of the deals we’re doing is looking good, promising. It’s actually bigger than we’ve been experiencing so far. What we do see is that our existing customers and new customers are very cautious on buying the number of licenses, and we’ve seen deal sizes decreasing. We haven’t seen any decrease on our churn, and we continue with the same customers we’ve had. We don’t see any new technologies or competition coming into the market on that effect. How long do we think that this embedded market downturn will continue? It will definitely continue through Q4 and going into next year. Do we think that we’re kind of on the bottom of the downturn? Yeah, definitely.

Do we see that we’re going to be going forward upward from here? Yes, but the timing is a bit of a question. Are we concerned about next year profitability because we’ve been investing on long term growth for next year? No, we are not, and we do expect the return on the normal profitability that you’ve been expecting to see from us. Like I said, we’re very thrilled about the IAR Systems acquisition. We are now going through with them different customers, integration facts, and whatnot. We are preparing a budget for next year, and depending on how aggressive we are going to go into the subscription change, that depends on what’s going to be the IAR Systems profitability next year and how that will affect on group profitability. That is the moving part, and we’re going to give you more info later once we’ve concluded that work.

I don’t expect that to take a very long time because we need to get going in the early, early next year. All in all, disappointing Q2, but we are very, we think that the future looks better, and we are in a good move to execute towards better performance on the top line. Thank you.

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