ULURU.CO.,LTD. Q3 FY2026 earnings call

• Company Overview and Vision

  • Ururu was founded after an MBO in 2006, listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2017, and named after Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia, with a vision of "Solving labor shortages to enrich people and companies".
  • All of the company's businesses align with solving Japan's structural labor shortage issue by unlocking underutilized labor from groups like stay-at-home housewives.

• Core Business NJSS Overview and Competitive Advantages

  • NJSS (Nyuusatsu Johyo Sokuho Service) is a SaaS platform that aggregates public tender information from 9,000+ government and public institutions across Japan, providing searchable, organized access to corporate customers for a monthly subscription fee.
  • The domestic public tender market totals 27 trillion yen annually with 2 million new cases per year, only 10% of all Japanese companies currently participate in public tendering, leaving large untapped market potential.
  • Competitive advantages include: 17 years of accumulated historical data (26 million total tender cases, 18 million historical winning bid entries) that cannot be replicated by new entrants; in-house crowdsourcing platform Shufuti with 490,000 registered home-based workers to manually collect hard-to-crawl information that web crawlers cannot capture; very high 91% gross margin since information collection costs are mostly fixed, meaning incremental revenue flows almost directly to profit; low 1.4% monthly churn rate maintained through heavy investment in customer success.
  • NJSS currently has 8,000 paid customers, has delivered a 20% 5-year CAGR, and is targeting continued 20%+ annual growth driven by both net new customer adds and ARPU increases. Over half of new NJSS customers are currently first-time public tender participants.

• Growth Expansion into Govtech

  • Leveraging the NJSS data asset, Ururu is expanding into adjacent Govtech services, including: Choutatsu Info (a tender information service for public sector customers), bid qualification management outsourcing, GoSTEP (a database of budget and meeting minutes to help companies forecast upcoming tender opportunities), and GovTech Bridge (an end-to-end platform to support municipal DX).
  • The company recently released the 2026 update of Jichitai Dock (Municipal Checkup), which ranks all 1,741 Japanese municipalities by their DX progress, split into 8 population-based categories for fair comparison, to help municipalities identify gaps and access DX solutions from private vendors. The first GovTech Bridge event drew 600 attendees from both municipal governments and private DX vendors.

1. NJSS: Revenue of 2.752 billion yen, EBITDA of 1.416 billion yen. Contributes approximately 50.6% of total cumulative 9-month revenue, with all metrics up year-over-year. It is the company's core SaaS business with a 91% gross margin.
2. fondesk: Revenue of 838 million yen, EBITDA of 94 million yen. Contributes approximately 15.4% of total cumulative 9-month revenue. It is a growth-stage SaaS business focused on office telephone answering outsourcing.
3. en Photo: Revenue of 698 million yen, EBITDA loss of 73 million yen. Contributes approximately 12.8% of total cumulative 9-month revenue. It is an early-stage DX tool for kindergartens and nursery schools, still in investment phase.
4. BPO: Revenue of 1.087 billion yen, EBITDA of 115 million yen. Contributes approximately 20.0% of total cumulative 9-month revenue. It is the company's legacy business providing outsourced data entry and customer support services, with growing recurring revenue.

• Full year FY26/3 revenue guidance is maintained at 7.71 billion yen, with overall progress at 70.6% of the full-year target as of the third quarter, which is ahead of last year's progress rate.
• The company upward revised the lower bound of its full-year EBITDA guidance from 1.05 billion yen to 1.1 billion yen, keeping the upper bound unchanged at 1.2 billion yen, following stronger-than-expected performance through the first three quarters.
• Full year operating profit and ordinary profit guidance ranges were also upward revised to reflect the stronger Q3 performance.
• The company upward revised its full year dividend per share guidance from 2.75 yen to 3.00 yen, aligned with its target 15% payout ratio policy.

• The company is prioritizing aggressive growth investment to accelerate scaling, which carries higher near-term risk in pursuit of faster long-term growth.
• fondesk and en Photo are still in early growth/investment phases, meaning they are currently incurring lower profits or net losses as the company invests in customer acquisition and product development.
• Municipal DX faces inherent structural barriers that make progress slower than private sector DX, creating uncertainty around the timeline for revenue growth from the Govtech Bridge initiative.

Q: What is your view on the remaining growth runway for your core businesses NJSS and fondesk? Where are you in the growth journey currently?

A: The 400,000 current public tender participants are our serviceable available market, and we currently have less than 2% penetration of that market, so there is still massive room for growth. We are also actively expanding into adjacent new businesses like municipal Govtech to extend our growth beyond just core NJSS. We are proactively investing aggressively now to accelerate our growth trajectory, with the goal of reaching scale much faster than a more conservative approach would allow, because the original slow growth timeline would have taken longer than my own career horizon, so we chose to take on risk to speed up our expansion. We see large opportunities to grow both the core business and new adjacent segments from the NJSS base, and we are investing heavily to capture that growth right now.

Q: Is there potential for further dividend increases in the future?

A: Our current stated medium-term policy is to target a 15% payout ratio, and that policy could change in the future, but it is hard to give a clear forward commitment right now. We are still a venture-stage company as a public firm, so balancing growth investment and shareholder returns is a challenging tradeoff. We have no need for heavy capital expenditure on physical assets like factories, so we do return a portion of profits to shareholders, but we have also built a dedicated M&A team three years ago to pursue growth through acquisitions, which requires holding capital for investment. We will continue to evaluate the payout ratio and future dividend levels based on balancing these priorities of growth investment and shareholder returns.