NEXT Biometrics Group ASA (NEXT) recently held its Q1 2026 earnings call, revealing a strategic shift towards intellectual property licensing amid financial challenges. The company’s stock price rose by 6.06% despite reporting a significant decline in revenue and an increased negative EBITDA. The market reacted positively to announcements about new patents, partnerships, and technology certifications. Year-to-date, the stock has surged 52.75%, though with a beta of 1.65, investors should expect continued high volatility. The company currently holds a market capitalization of $2.13 billion.
NEXT Biometrics faced a challenging Q1 2026, with revenues dropping 40% compared to the same period last year, primarily due to slow sales in India. The company’s strategic pivot towards IP licensing is seen as a move to stabilize future earnings. Despite the revenue drop, the market responded positively to the company’s announcements regarding new technology developments and partnerships.
NEXT Biometrics revised its revenue guidance downward, acknowledging that reaching NOK 70 million for 2026 is unlikely. The company is focusing on inventory conversion and cost reduction to improve its financial position. An InvestingPro Tip notes the company is "quickly burning through cash," making cost discipline critical. The strategic shift to IP licensing is expected to take time to materialize, with potential revenue generation from new partnerships and technology developments.
CEO Ulf Ritsvall emphasized the company’s strategic pivot, stating, "We are now transforming. We’re creating this Anywhere on Display, which has the potential to transform the biometric and display market." He also acknowledged the challenging market conditions, noting, "We came in very much lower than expected in revenues in quarter one."
During the earnings call, analysts questioned the validity of the company’s revenue guidance and the potential value of the Anywhere on Display technology. CEO Ulf Ritsvall indicated that while the NOK 70 million target is unlikely, the company remains focused on strategic initiatives to drive future growth.
Ulf Ritsvall, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), NEXT Biometrics: Good morning, good evening, good day, wherever you are. Welcome to the quarterly one presentation from NEXT Biometrics. You can swap to the next slide. I’m here. You can take the next slide. Ulf Ritsvall, CEO of the company. I’m here together with Eirik Underthun, CFO, to present the earnings call. You can take the next slide, please. The agenda for today, we will go through the Q1 highlights, we will go through the Q1 financials, and we will take you through business and market updates, and we will round off with a Q&A session. You can ask questions in the Teams window, or you can send an email. We have already received a few questions that we will answer during the call. Let’s take the next slide. The Q1 highlights. We came in very much lower than expected in revenues in quarter one.
It was 40% down compared to Q1 2025. We are suffering from a very slow market. As you have seen, the market size and market window from governmental is very slow. We, at the same time, have a global geopolitical turbulence in the world, which is not helping the governmental tenders to actually come through. We are operating in this tender-based business mainly. Our nowadays 89 design wins, the majority of them are now integrated hardware and software into a hardware design. It’s ready and it’s tested, and it’s approved by the customer. Majority is now actually waiting for deployment on the market. It’s a slow system because the order needs to go from the governmental tender into the OEM to the ODM and to NEXT Biometrics for us. This is taking far longer time than we had anticipated and we have seen previously.
I’ll get back to that a bit more with the measures we are taking. During Q1, we also received a very much needed FBI certification of our newly developed FAP 30 sensor, our NEXT Granite sensor. This is very important to be compliant to the different markets. It’s a quality statement that we are very proud of being achieved. Also during Q1, we had some major breakthrough and communication in our Anywhere on Display IP development. We have a key technical milestones achieved during the quarter. We have two patents now. We announced one additional during Q1. If you remember, in January, we announced that we have selected Giantplus as a partner for this strategic collaboration and for the demonstration unit to be shown. We will move over to the next slide, Eirik will present this. I hand over to Eirik. Next slide, please.
Eirik Underthun, Chief Financial Officer (CFO), NEXT Biometrics: Thank you, Ulf. Just wanted to everyone is aware that we have an ongoing NOK 50 million rights issue. You can see our stock exchange providing the details on that right now. Sent out letters in the post, so you should have received this letter by now. In those letters, we communicated that the rights have now been allocated to the shareholders. These rights are currently trading and that going to be the 3rd of June, 4:00 P.M. end of trading that day, then of those subscription rights will end. There is no more trading after that. The rights issue has already commenced. It’s commenced three days ago, on 26th of May. On June 26th at 4:30 P.M. end of business that day and available at arctic.com/offerings.
Want to read the prospectus and to understand the rights offering. Please be informed that these results you can see on this slide if you would like to participate in the rights offering. Please. I will now run you through the Q1 financials. The revenues were NOK one compared to NOK 3 million in the restated Q1 2025. Revenues were impacted by slow sales in India. The adjusted growth was 3% in Q1 2025, 55% in 2025. The margin is due to product mix. On expenses, we ended up with charges of NOK 16.5 million-NOK 17.5 million in the restated Q1 2025. The adjusted EBITDA was negative NOK 50 compared to negative NOK 15.8 million in Q1 2025. Ended that quarter with the cash NOK 7 million compared to NOK 8.3 million at 2025. The operational cash flow was negative due to low.
We had some financing, which was related to the shareholder. We received the first tranche of the bridge loan. The summary of this quarter is that there were slow sales in India which impacted the revenues. We shareholder loan and the first tranche of the bridge loan. The company had none of NOK million in net inventory write-downs. NOK 4.7 million in non-cash costs. The non-cash related to the first of all, redundancy cost for that were laid off, as well as shareholder remuneration cost, and also ongoing investigation and litigation cost related to the ongoing dispute in China. With this, I will turn over the call to you.
Ulf Ritsvall, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), NEXT Biometrics: Okay. Thank you. You can take the next slide. Actually, even one more slide. Going into the business and the market update. I would like to start with what we are doing in this company. We are now in the transition period of actually transforming the company from sensor sales, which we see is very slow, and we need to take measures. I will take that in the next slide. On doing this, we are now actually creating a IP, a intellectual property company. You can compare this to how, for example, it’s a large company called Arm doing similar type of IP licensing. We are now transforming. We’re creating this Anywhere on Display, which has the potential to transform the biometric and display market to where we are now positioning NEXT to be in the forefront of the next generation of smartphone security.
We are few steps ahead on this journey. This journey is a few steps more, but we have now two newly granted U.S. patents, which is very, very important for us. It secures the core technology of the core IP of this transition. It creates a defensible competitive barriers and a strong foundation for NEXT Biometrics to actually capitalize on this. One year ago, we sent out a press release about a smartphone market industry leader that confirms the technology and commercialization and the commercial potential of this intellectual property and the use case itself. In Q1, we had a strategic manufacturing partnership announced, which is Giantplus, and it’s a leading display manufacturers, which is de-risking the development as they are developing this hand in hand with us. We are taking a prototype to demonstrate on the Mobile World Congress.
We are having this milestone as demonstrating for key market leaders in display manufacturers. Also smartphone makers in this area. This is the type of premium positioning we now are taking. The technology is, of course, purpose-built for the premium smartphone at the end. Of course it has the capability of actually exploding into the complete smartphone segments, including, for example, where we are based today in the Aadhaar market. Where you, instead of walking to a bank, for example, and have external biometric reader to get a bank account, you can now actually use the cellphone and the display of actually confirming your Aadhaar identity at home. It will ease up many of different applications. This specific use case, of course, long-term. In the near future, this IP technology will be able to convert into licensing upfront licensing fees for the different licensees.
We are developing, it’s on track and it’s on schedule as we have it today. This is the current roadmap of this innovation. If there would be one reason for the investment and the prospectus that we have out right now, this is the reason. Because this is the NEXT way of NEXT. You can take the next slide. Short term, of course, we are in a difficult situation, as you can read in our financial data. We are right now actively converting the existing inventory across all majority markets, India, Bangladesh, Americas, but also China, Japan and so on. We ar