innoscripta Aktie

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.