Exasol AG has reported preliminary financial results for the 2025 financial year showing significant improvement in key profitability metrics while executing its strategic transformation toward focus industries. Revenue increased by 5.6% to EUR 41.8 million, in line with guidance for mid-single-digit percentage growth. This includes one-time hardware and services revenue of EUR 4.1 million. EBITDA amounted to EUR 4.1 million, reaching the upper end of the guidance range of EUR 3.5 million to EUR 4.0 million and more than doubling year-on-year from EUR 2.0 million.
The strong operating performance had a clearly positive impact on group net income, which increased to EUR 3.1 million from EUR 0.2 million in the prior year. As a result, the equity ratio rose to 34.2% from 23.8% at December 31, 2024. Driven by the positive earnings development, cash and cash equivalents increased to EUR 18.7 million from EUR 15.0 million at the end of 2024. In line with its strategic transformation, annual recurring revenue in focus industries increased by 10.1% to EUR 26.7 million, with the share of focus industries in total ARR rising to 68% from 57% at December 31, 2024.
Overall ARR growth in focus industries did not fully offset the decline in ARR from non-focus industries, a development that had been anticipated. Contract terminations and downsizing, originally expected in the 2026 financial year, occurred earlier than planned due to pull-forward effects. As a result, total ARR declined by 8.0% in the 2025 financial year to EUR 39.1 million. For the 2026 financial year, Exasol expects a substantial reduction in ARR churn. A key initiative in the 2025 financial year was the realignment of European sales structures along focus industries, which has significantly increased the effectiveness of the sales organization.
During the 2025 financial year, Exasol further expanded the technological capabilities of its analytics engine. Progress was made in the development of the cloud-based Lakehouse Turbo solution, which enables the analytics engine to connect to the Databricks database platform. The solution offers customers three key benefits: reduced data analytics costs, faster delivery of analytics results, and continued use of existing Databricks environments. The solution is currently in the testing phase with a reference customer. In addition, Exasol successfully brought to market its solution for the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning applications into the analytics engine.
Customers can perform AI-based data analytics and training models via the Exasol analytics engine and store the resulting structured data in Exasol's data warehouse. With this, Exasol has reached a key strategic milestone and already counts a double-digit number of customers using these new functionalities. For the 2026 financial year, Exasol expects mid-single-digit percentage ARR growth compared to the 2025 financial year. Key drivers include a significant reduction in ARR churn and an acceleration of new customer acquisition. In particular, the strategic partnerships concluded in the 2025 financial year with MariaDB, Stackit, and Exoscale are expected to contribute to this development.
Revenue is expected to decline in the mid-single-digit percentage range. This is primarily due to lagging effects from the ARR decline in 2025 and lower expected one-time hardware and services revenue, which was exceptionally high in the 2025 financial year. Against this backdrop and taking into account planned investments in innovation and technology, Exasol expects EBITDA in the range of EUR 3 million to EUR 4 million. Exasol invites interested investors and media representatives to a virtual webcast on February 3, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. (CET). To participate in the webcast, please register at https://www.appairtime.com/de/event/94fe37a3-8f7c-4877-8728-060d21f8b292.
