4374.T

2025 Full-Year Company-Wide Financial Results

• Total company revenue reached 3.256 billion yen, growing 17.9% year-over-year, beating the re-revised full-year guidance published after Q3 2025 across both revenue and all profit metrics. Operating income hit a new record high of 774 million yen, growing 61.4% year-over-year, driven by revenue growth and operational efficiency initiatives. Q4 2025 operating income exceeded 170 million yen, growing more than 73% year-over-year despite temporary Q4 expenses from provisions and accelerated hiring, which stayed within normal seasonal ranges.
• The balance sheet reflects a 320 million yen reduction in shareholders' equity from a share repurchase implemented 1 year prior, but net income of 540 million yen brought full-year shareholders' equity back to positive. The deposit balance from ROBOT PAYMENT's payment business model inflates reported balance sheet size, resulting in a reported equity ratio of 15%; excluding deposits, the actual adjusted equity ratio is 60.9%, with zero debt, indicating strong financial health.
• Free cash flow increased substantially in 2025 despite variation from corporate tax timing, confirming steadily improving cash generation alongside accounting profits.
• Expense management: Advertising expense increased within business expansion ranges, with a focus on generating qualified leads and iterative optimization of underperforming campaigns to maintain high ROI while limiting overall growth. Salary expense growth lagged revenue growth, indicating improving productivity. Development expense stayed flat year-over-year as the team focused on incremental improvements to existing products while beginning preparation for new product development, with AI leveraged to improve engineering productivity. From Q2 to Q4 2025, salary expense grew as the company built out its sales team and insourced AI-focused development personnel. Hiring picked up strongly from Q3 to Q4 2025 after slower hiring in H1 2025, building out the team to support long-term growth targets.

2025 Business Initiative Outcomes

• Existing product improvements: サブスクペイ Professional improved UI/UX and integrated AI to improve usability; ファクタリング for SaaS used AI to speed up credit underwriting processing; 1click後払い continued to strengthen marketing. The underperforming service 1click早マール was discontinued after failing to achieve targeted results, to avoid continuing losses.
• Three new projects were initiated in 2025, all targeting a 2026 launch. M&A preparations were completed, with no completed deals in 2025 but the team structure now strengthened for 2026 activity.

Business Model & Long-Term Growth Strategy

• AI-resilient revenue structure: Only approximately 2.5% of revenue comes from ID-based per-user pricing, so any AI-driven reduction in user count would have a minimal impact. 97.5% of revenue comes from transaction-based pricing, which scales with transaction volume and invoice growth. Core payment and money movement operations require explicit human approval, legal compliance, and contractual relationships with financial institutions that cannot be replaced by AI, so the business model is not at risk of AI substitution.
• AI-powered product improvement: ROBOT PAYMENT has 25 years of accumulated payment and behavioral transaction data, which continues to grow as transaction volume increases. This proprietary data is used to train AI to improve product functionality, giving the company a competitive advantage over newer entrants and improving product value as AI capabilities advance.
• High barrier to entry for new competitors: The regulated, relationship-based nature of the payment business creates very high barriers to new entry, reinforcing the company's competitive position.
• Multi-phase exponential growth strategy: The company follows a three-phase growth model:
  1. Phase 1: Expand the number of business lines to grow total customer count
  2. Phase 2: Drive cross-selling across the expanded product portfolio, creating N×N cross-selling opportunities that drive multiplicative revenue growth
  3. Phase 3: Add finance services leveraged on accumulated transaction volume, which generates percentage-based fee revenue on total transaction volume to drive accelerating growth
• Investment return profile: The payback period for customer acquisition investment is 2.9 years, which has stayed consistent for several years, with a maximum expected extended payback of 3.5 years, maintaining efficient capital allocation for existing business investment.
• New market opportunities (all targeting 2026 launch):
  1. 債権回収ロボ: Target market is 330,000 to 340,000 Japanese corporations with 30+ employees, which is a larger market than the existing 請求管理ロボ market. The market is growing at a 32.6% CAGR, driven by increasing demand for outsourced, systematized collection amid population decline.
  2. 海外送金DX: Total Japanese export market is 220 trillion yen, with the total cross-border remittance market reaching 112 trillion yen. Japanese import permit volumes have more than doubled over 5 years to 190 million permits, creating strong growth demand for cross-border payment services.
  3. RBF (Revenue-based Finance): The total B2B payment market is 1,481 trillion yen, with current RBF penetration less than 0.1% at 77.93 billion yen. The market is growing at a 28.5% CAGR, creating significant long-term growth opportunity.

• 2026 full-year guidance targets continued revenue and profit growth, while starting structured investment to deliver on Phase 1 business line expansion following the company's pre-defined investment rules.
• Dividend policy follows the long-term capital allocation framework, targeting a 20% payout of 2025 operating cash flow across dividends and shareholder benefits. The proposed dividend per share is set at 31 yen, with a slight increase in dividend payout ratio to grow shareholder returns.
• 2026 existing business initiatives:
  • Expand geographic and vertical coverage for サブスクペイ and 請求管理ロボ, with 請求管理ロボ prioritizing integration with the new 債権回収ロボ, and サブスクペイ prioritizing cross-selling integration with RBF, advancing the Phase 2 cross-sell growth strategy.
• 2026 new business launch targets:
  • 債権回収ロボ: Target launch in April 2026, focused on building a standalone profitable business model, with pre-sales already underway and initial contracts signed; cross-selling to existing 請求管理ロボ customers will occur after the standalone model is validated.
  • 海外送金DX (tentative name 海外送金ロボ): Target launch in September 2026, development is already underway; the service includes both customer workflow digitization and core remittance functionality, with the company planning to complete 電子決済等代行業 registration to improve customer convenience.
  • RBF: Target launch within 2026. The company will pursue controlled risk-taking, implementing test marketing to existing サブスクペイ customers, strengthening credit guarantee capacity, and launching only after risk controls are sufficiently developed to minimize downside risk.
• M&A and CVC: The company had no completed M&A deals in 2024 and 2025 due to a lack of experienced M&A personnel, but an experienced hire joined in February 2026, which has significantly improved decision speed. The company prioritizes deals aligned with its existing product/ market footprint to capture synergies, focusing on two categories of deals: those that increase average customer unit price, and those that increase total customer count, and aims to complete at least one transaction in 2026.
• Human capital strategy: Continues to focus on two core priorities: recruiting high-quality talent, and supporting and developing new hires to reduce turnover, building out the organization to support 10-year long-term growth targets.
• Financial strategy: The company has sufficient existing liquidity, with no plans for new borrowing or equity issuance at this time. Capital will be allocated to existing business strengthening, new business development, M&A, minority investments, and CVC activity following the long-term capital allocation framework. IR strategy continues to prioritize transparency, with a focus on improving trading liquidity for the company's stock.

• サブスクペイ: Full-year 2025 sales grew 17.4% year-over-year, reaching just under 2.0 billion yen. Q4 2025 sales grew 14.5% year-over-year, driven by strong new orders and increased payment transaction volume from existing customers that lifted average customer unit price. Core KPIs including account count, customer unit price, and payment transaction volume all grew steadily; after a temporary decline due to the 3D Secure mandatory requirement, payment processing volumes bottomed out and recovered, growing 1.16% year-over-year in Q4 2025 and approximately 10% quarter-over-quarter between Q3 and Q4 2025, returning to a growth trajectory. This segment accounts for approximately 61.5% of total company revenue.
• 請求管理ロボ: Full-year 2025 sales grew 19.6% year-over-year, outpacing the growth of サブスクペイ. Q4 2025 sales grew 18.6% year-over-year, driven by both higher average customer unit price and increased new customer count. On a full-year basis, account count returned to double-digit growth at 10.1% year-over-year. Billing amount and invoice issuance volumes grew strongly, boosted by wins with multiple large enterprise customers in 2025; while growth in these metrics currently has limited direct impact on near-term revenue, management expects them to become a foundation for future revenue growth. This segment accounts for approximately 38.5% of total company revenue.

• RBF carries inherent credit risk; management plans to mitigate this through controlled step-by-step launch, starting with test marketing to existing customers and strengthening credit guarantee capacity before full launch, to minimize potential losses.
• The new 債権回収ロボ and 海外送金DX businesses are unproven for the company, and there is risk that they will fail to achieve targeted market adoption or profitability even after launch.
• M&A activity carries integration risk and risk that potential deals will not deliver expected synergies or returns.
• There is continued uncertainty around the impact of AI adoption on the broader SaaS and fintech industry, even though management expects ROBOT PAYMENT's business model to be resilient to this disruption.

No question and answer section was included in the provided transcript.