Aidma Holdings,Inc. Q2 FY2025 earnings call

• Core Corporate Strategic Priorities • AI-enabled cost optimization: Apply AI to automate tasks currently performed by in-house staff and crowd worker partners to reduce overall operating costs. • Work infrastructure development: Build digital platforms to directly connect businesses with workers across Japan with diverse career backgrounds. • Expand multi-unit business support: Grow beyond the historical core of sales support to offer Web marketing, back office, and other functional support services for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), packaged as individual units, with multi-unit cross-selling to existing customers.

• AI Tool Development and Internal Deployment • AI Oketsu Tsuuka-kun: AI-powered reception call routing tool that automates initial outreach to connect to decision-makers. It uses recorded voices from high-performing operators rather than generic generative AI voices, with 60 pre-built conversation scenarios. Internal operation launched in mid-March, covering 25% of daily outreach volume as of April, with the goal of handling 50% of total daily outbound calls. Full commercial launch to external customers is planned for Q4. Customer feedback during pre-launch outreach has been very positive. • AI Monitoring: Fully automated meeting monitoring that replaces manual human review, with built-in functionality to organize meeting agendas into actionable tasks, generate SEO-optimized written content for websites, and visualize customer engagement status. Development is ongoing to add analysis of customer sentiment and doubt detection from voice tone, which already performs at parity with manual human review; the team is currently working to add automated improvement recommendation functionality. • AI Role-playing: Initially designed to automate sales role-playing training, but full-length role-play created too much operational delay for staff. The team reworked the tool into segmented "short role-play" modules split into 10 topic-based content chunks. This framework has been adapted to build an AI-powered interview tool, which is already used for screening crowd worker candidates, with plans to expand to in-house staff interviews while improving accuracy. All AI initiatives both reduce internal operational costs and create new commercial products for external customers.

• New Business and Platform Launches • Shouhin Bank (Product Bank): A curated database of high-performing products with high appointment rates, close rates, and gross margins. The company has already curated 94 high-performing products from partner firms, and offers matching services to customers who want to sell their own products after achieving stable profitability with the curated portfolio. This initiative addresses the most common customer concerns (failure to secure appointments or close orders) and strengthens cash flow for the business and its customers. • SpotWorks: A spot gig work platform for online tasks, which is fully built and has 73,000 registered crowd workers. The platform uses an escrow deposit model where employers deposit funds, and workers can instantly withdraw payment after task completion. All onboarding, contracting, and task management is completed fully on the platform with no separate negotiations required. If the platform gains share in the online spot work market, management plans to expand to offline work and eventually international online work. • Sales Crowd Work Infrastructure: A full renewal of the company's existing Sales Crowd sales support platform, which will evolve from a platform operated via AIDMA Holdings as an intermediary to an open infrastructure that connects businesses and sales crowd workers directly with no required AIDMA intermediation. Launch is planned within the current fiscal year. • Unit-based expanded business solutions: Cross-selling additional service units to existing customers has grown from 20% of customers to 30% of current customers. Management is working toward offering combined multi-unit packages at initial sales, rather than only as a follow-up cross-sell, to increase average revenue per customer.

• Cost Structure Improvements Outsourcing costs decreased 4.1 percentage points quarter-over-quarter from the prior quarter, driven by AI-enabled efficiency improvements. Personnel costs fell 1.3 percentage points year-over-year, though the company expects personnel costs to rise in the second half of the fiscal year due to new hires.

1. Sales Support Segment: Revenue grew 26.7% year-over-year as part of overall company growth. Second quarter orders hit approximately 2,000 units, representing a 42% year-over-year increase, with order progress 5% above plan. This segment is the company's historical core business. 2. Human Resources Support Segment: Second quarter orders reached approximately 1,000 units, a 25% year-over-year increase. Both core segments grew more than 20% year-over-year in orders, hitting all-time quarterly record highs. Overall consolidated performance for the quarter: Total revenue was 6.25 billion yen, up 24% year-over-year, with 48% progress against full-year plan. Operating profit was 1.5 billion yen, up 20% year-over-year, with 51% progress against full-year plan. Overall total orders grew 36% year-over-year quarter-over-quarter. Average revenue per service unit is 3 million yen.

• Full-year 2025 August fiscal year results are tracking in line with original plan, with 48% revenue progress and 51% operating profit progress achieved in the first half.
• Q3 order volumes are expected to be roughly similar to Q2 levels (the all-time record), with moderate possible variation due to differences in the number of scheduled business days.
• Personnel costs are expected to increase moderately from Q3 through Q4, following the addition of 40 new graduate hires and 15 mid-career hires who joined in April.
• The company maintains its long-term target of reaching 3 trillion yen in annual revenue by 2030, supported by growing the customer base to ~20,000 companies (five times the current base) and an average of 5 service units per customer at 3 million yen per unit.
• Dividends will continue to be paid in the current fiscal year, and the company completed its previously announced 200,000 share repurchase program in late February.

• The growing headcount from new graduate and mid-career hires will increase personnel costs in the second half of the current fiscal year, which could pressure operating margins if revenue growth does not offset the added cost.
• Q3 order volumes may be slightly lower than the Q2 record high due to the lower number of business days compared to Q2.
• Multi-unit cross-selling and new platform initiatives have uncertain timelines for contributing to earnings, and do not have guaranteed positive impact on full-year results in the near term.
• While Japanese labor force decline is a long-term structural tailwind for the company's outsourcing solutions, growth could slow materially if demographic trends shift unexpectedly.

The provided transcript does not include a formal Question and Answer section with audience/analyst exchanges.