MDU Resources Group Inc

NYSE:MDU

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the D2L Inc. Q4 Earnings Call. My name is Lucy, and I will be coordinating your call today.

[Operator Instructions]

I will now hand over to your host, Craig Armitage, Investor Relations, to begin. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Listeners are reminded that portions of today's discussion will include statements that contain forward-looking information. Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from a conclusion, forecast, or projection in the forward-looking information.

Further, certain material factors or assumptions were applied in drawing a conclusion, forecast, or projection as reflected in the forward-looking information.

For identification and discussion of such risks, uncertainties, factors, and assumptions, as well as further information concerning forward-looking statements, please refer to the company's annual management's discussion and analysis and the most recently filed annual information form, in each case as filed under the company's profile on SEDAR+ at www.sedarplus.com.

In addition, during this call, reference will be made to various non-IFRS financial measures, including constant currency revenue, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted gross margin, and free cash flow.

These non-IFRS financial measures do not have a standardized meaning prescribed by IFRS and may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other public companies.

Please refer to the company's MD&A for the years ended January 31, 2025, and 2024 for more information about these and certain other non-IFRS financial measures, including, where applicable, a reconciliation of historical non-IFRS financial measures to the most directly comparable IFRS financial measures from our financial statements.

I'd now like to turn the call over to Mr. John Baker, Chief Executive Officer of D2L. Please go ahead, John.

Thank you, Craig, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for our Q4 earnings call. We released financial results after the markets closed yesterday, which you can find in the Investor Relations section of our website at d2l.com.

Please note that the results we're discussing today are in U.S. dollars. I'm joined this morning by Josh Huff, our CFO, and I'm pleased to report that it was a strong fourth quarter that underscored our effective execution in the fiscal year 2025.

We balanced topline growth with meaningfully improved profitability with revenue and adjusted EBITDA, exceeding our full-year guidance. When you look at the numbers, it's important to understand the impact of FX in the period, particularly in Q4.

We've included several constant currency metrics to provide a more accurate picture of our ongoing performance. The Q4 highlights include a total revenue growth of 12% to $53.3 million.

Subscription and support revenue rose 11% to $46.8 million. Annual recurring revenue was up 9% over last year's Q4 to $205.3 million on a constant currency basis, and adjusted EBITDA increased $9.4 million with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 17.7% compared to 7.3% in last year's Q4.

In the fiscal year 2023, we set out a medium-term model that concluded in the fiscal year 2025. We executed well against this and have navigated the major transition in the financial profile of the business.

From fiscal '23 to '25, we added $37 million to our annual revenue, and adjusted gross margins were up approximately 500 basis points to 69%. Adjusted EBITDA improved by $31 million, and our adjusted EBITDA margin reached 13.7%, up from a negative 1.7% in fiscal year '23.

Free cash flow increased by $27 million. To express another way, we dramatically advanced our Rule of 40 performance, reaching 26% in fiscal year 2025 versus 7% in fiscal '23. At the same time, we've added 4 million users, bringing us to more than 20 million users on the Brightspace Learning platform at year-end. I want to thank the entire D2L team for their contributions.

This performance is a direct reflection of the tremendous focus and disciplined work across the company.

I also take this opportunity to thank Stephen Laster for his leadership and impact. As you may know, Stephen was a D2L client, partner, and friend for many years before joining our team.

Over the past 3 years, he's helped us build a strong and deep leadership group, and his work across other key areas of the business has allowed us to move forward on an even stronger foundation. We wish him well going forward.

Our results in the fiscal year 2025 were achieved despite challenges posed by the macroeconomic environment, which has affected market activity levels, particularly in U.S. higher education.

Through our 25-year history, we've experienced macro challenges many times, and our performance through these periods highlights the relative resiliency of our business. Organizations are managing through a period of austerity. We're a strong partner as our modern AI-first platform can improve learner engagement and retention while increasing efficiency, a compelling value proposition.

We have the team highly focused on building great software, delivering first-class services to our customers, and continuing to drive efficient growth. This work will put us in an even better position when the macro uncertainty clears.

Building on our strong foundation, D2L's next chapter will be defined by ushering in our AI-first learning platform strategy, as we've already started with the introduction of D2L Lumi.

We see platform innovation as a key driver of growth over the medium term as our clients look to us to improve the learning experience and outcomes. This chapter for D2L will continue to be a balance of growth and profitability while we drive to be #1 in focused education markets globally and establish ourselves as the next-gen learning platform for upskilling in the corporate market.

As you will see in the new medium-term outlook, we have high confidence in the growth drivers and our ability to generate higher revenue growth and margin expansion over this period.

Our confidence is rooted in several factors. One, my meetings with leaders globally continue to reinforce the underlying demand for a better learning platform as organizations look for ways to address high-priority issues like upskilling and reskilling, combating enrollment pressures or addressing growing demand for continuing education and professional upscaling.

And they appreciate that most platforms cannot meet their needs. Remember that in higher education, legacy platforms still hold a 30% market share in North America and over 70% market share internationally.

Second, our competitive position is getting stronger. Even in a challenging macro market, our team has delivered the fastest growth among our higher education learning platform peers, and in North America, we increased our market share last year and solidified our position as the #2 LMS vendor by enrollment. And our win rate continues to be strong at north of 50% in this important market.

Through the great efforts of our team, K-12 has also become the #1 higher education learning platform in many countries around the world. In our most recent quarter, our new higher education customers include Roger Williams University in the U.S., Solta Group in the Netherlands, and Desh Bhagat University in India. And our win rates are strong and improving across our corporate markets as well.

In Q4, we continued to expand the customer base in employee learning and training organizations, adding Energy and Shepherd & Company, among others. Third, our new products are hitting the mark with customers, and we're seeing strong pipeline generation from our recently expanded portfolio, including our AI offerings.

Our organic and inorganic product portfolio has allowed us to increase our attach rates and average deal size. SEDAR +, as an example, has doubled its ARPU following the acquisition of HIP in July of 2024, and the product now has an attach rate of 20% across our customer base.

Our attach rate on core merchants is up 55% since we acquired the business in May of 2023. As we lean into our existing relationships, we're providing incremental value to customers as they grow with us.

Recent examples of this in Q4 include in the APAC region, top rank public university serving 40,000 learners, which has been a long-standing customer of ours, renewing the relationship and expanding their suite of tools include SEDAR+, Engagement+, Creator+ and partner products that we resell.

And another customer in the U.S. added Creator Plus with AI generations via HIP on a renewal due to a steady increase in program offerings and enrollments with institutions expecting to triple the number of learners over the next five years.

These are just two of many examples that underscore our success in introducing new products that solve important customer challenges and help grow D2L's addressable market and revenue opportunity.

Looking across our customer base, our net revenue retention rate at year-end shows early evidence of this cross-sell and upsell success. Constant currency NRR increased by 60 basis points year-over-year to 102.7%.

Excluding the impact of a small subscription retirement, constant currency NRR would have been 104.1%, an increase of 200 basis points over the prior year. There is a significant opportunity to move NRR higher in the coming years, and we believe investments in AI will be one of the key catalysts.

Customers are responding very positively to our approach and solutions around AI. We continue to differentiate with an AI-first human-centered solution pragmatically delivered to our clients to have a high impact on the use cases that matter. And to do this right, we need to layer AI on top of the right foundation, a robust learning platform, and you need to be deeply rooted in learning, which are clear strengths of D2L.

As the market evolves, we believe that we can further differentiate in these areas. As we go to market, we're assembling case studies and efficacy data from Lumi users who are seeing a significant impact on improving educational outcomes from retention to engagement to time on task, and we're receiving industry recognition as well.

D2L Lumi won three awards in the primary, secondary, and higher education categories in the Teaching and Learning Awards of Excellence Best of 2024. Under the direction of our new CTO, Andrew and our Chief Product Officer, Christian Pantel, we will continue to strengthen our core platform, expand our portfolio and enhance our speed of development as we work to solve more challenges for clients, strengthen our growth levers and widen the gap between D2L and the competition.

We have a robust road map, and we look forward to unveiling important product developments at our users' conference in a few months. Lastly, even though we're in tough macro conditions, our confidence in the medium-term outlook is supported by a great team, a strong financial position with low debt, increasing cash flows, and the flexibility to invest in organic and inorganic growth levers for us as the company.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Josh.

Thanks, John, and good morning. Our full financials were posted last night, so I will focus on the highlights for the fourth quarter and full year.

As John mentioned, these results show great performance in balancing solid top line growth with significantly improved profitability and cash flow. Total revenue for Q4 was $53.3 million, a 12% increase over the same period last year, and constant currency revenue increased 14% to $54.3 million.

Full-year revenue grew 13% to $205.3 million, ahead of our guidance range, which was increased during the year. Subscription and support revenue increased 11% in Q4 to $46.8 million.

The full-year subscription results were also up 11% to $180.6 million. Constant currency annual recurring revenue increased by 9% from $188.1 million to $205.3 million. Foreign exchange was a headwind on ARR given the sharp strengthening of the U.S. dollar in the final weeks of our fiscal year, removing roughly $4 million from ARR sequentially from Q3 to Q4.

Professional services and other revenue increased 20% in Q4 to $6.5 million. On the margin front, we continue to show meaningful gross profit margin improvement. The adjusted gross margin for Q4 came in at 69.6%, up from 67.7% last year, and we saw a 170 basis point margin improvement for the full year to 69%.

Subscription and support gross profit margin rose to 73.2% in Q4 or 74.3% when adjusted for intangible asset amortization compared to 73% in the prior year. This improvement continues to reflect ongoing engineered optimizations in our cloud technology delivery, while at the same time we see increased utilization of the platform from our customers.

And the normalized gross profit margin for professional services and others was 32.5% for the fiscal year 2025, up 610 basis points relative to the prior year. We delivered these strong results while managing OpEx well during the year.

Operating expenses for the fourth quarter were $32.9 million, up 1% year-over-year. As a percentage of revenue, total OpEx was 62% this quarter versus 68% of revenue in last year's Q4, a 600 basis point improvement in operating scale.

R&D was 21% of revenue compared to 26% of revenue in last year's Q4, in large part due to efficiency improvements and lower headcount after the SkillsWave spinout. Excluding the impact of stock-based compensation and the HIT acquisition, sales and marketing expenses were relatively consistent year-over-year. And while G&A expenses increased, this was due in large part to nonrecurring legal and professional fees and transaction-related expenses from the acquisition of HIT and divestiture of Skillswave.

Excluding the impact of these costs, G&A decreased 3% year-over-year. This combination of revenue growth, improved gross profit margin, and operating leverage drove a substantial year-over-year improvement in profitability.

We reported Q4 adjusted EBITDA of $9.4 million or 17.7% margin, an increase from 7.3% in the same period of the prior year, and full year adjusted EBITDA was $28.1 million, above our recently updated guidance range and an increase of $20 million from the prior year.

And income for the period improved to $25.7 million compared with a loss of $3.5 million for the fiscal year 2024. Free cash flow improved to negative $0.6 million in Q4 compared to negative $6.1 million in the same period in the prior year, a roughly $5 million increase in the quarter.

For the full year, free cash flow was $27 million, an increase of $17 million from fiscal year 2024. This added to the company's strong financial position. At year-end, we had no debt and $99.2 million in cash, providing us the financial flexibility to invest in growth opportunities as we move forward.

In terms of capital allocation, we bought back just over 400,000 shares under the NCIB buyback program in the fiscal year 2025. This largely offset any dilution from equity grants. As a result, shares outstanding increased only 1% year-over-year. We will continue to make use of the NCIB within our capital allocation plans.

Turning to our outlook. With the release of our Q4 results, we presented fiscal 2026 guidance and a new medium-term target model. For the fiscal year 2026, we plan to continue making measured investments in growth while scaling the operations toward increasing levels of profitability.

Specifically, we are targeting subscription and support revenue in the range of $194 million to $196 million, implying a growth of 7% to 9% over the fiscal year 2025 and 9% to 10% growth when expressed on a constant currency basis.

Total revenue in the range of $219 million to $221 million, implying growth of 7% to 8% over fiscal 2025 and 8% to 9% growth when expressed on a constant currency basis and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $32 million to $34 million, implying an adjusted EBITDA margin of 15%.

These targets reflect the current macroeconomic environment and its impact on foreign exchange rates and our selling environment. They are also partly informed by sales activity that occurred during the fiscal year 2025 and the resulting flow-through impact on revenue recognition in the fiscal year 2026.

Lastly, these targets are based on our current operations and do not include the impact of any incremental acquisition in the period, which, if any occurred, would be expected to be additive to our guided revenue and profits in the period.

As John highlighted, we view these macro conditions as transitory and continue to see strong growth drivers over the medium term, which we expect will lead to higher revenue growth along with further adjusted EBITDA margin expansion.

Periods like this bring to light the durability and stability of our business, supported by long-term contracts, high customer retention, strong free cash flow, a diversified customer base, and a strong balance sheet.

To help investors understand our medium-term outlook, we have presented a new target operating model. Recall that we introduced an updated medium-term model in fiscal year 2023, bridging to fiscal year 2025, that was aimed at balancing growth and profitability.

As you will see in the MD&A, we landed within the target range on 3 of the 4 measures and would have also achieved a free cash flow margin if not for nonrecurring expenses related to several transactions during this period.

Looking ahead, we presented the year-over-year revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA margin that we expect to achieve over the go-forward medium term by fiscal year 2028. We expect to achieve 10% to 15% growth in annual revenue as we continue to grow our customer base and market share, increase net revenue retention, and pursue acquisitions.

And we expect an adjusted EBITDA margin in the range of 18% to 20%, a 300 to 500 basis point improvement relative to fiscal year 2025 based on further operating leverage.

To build on John's earlier comments, thanks to the D2L team for their great work over the past several years, we have made tremendous progress balancing growth and profitability.

We're excited about this next chapter. D2L has long been a market leader in innovation, and we have a compelling vision that will have a big impact on the learning experience while we also build a stronger and more profitable business.

And with that, I'll turn it back to the operator.

[Operator Instructions]

We have our first question from Doug Taylor of Canaccord Genuity.

The challenges that you referenced here with the U.S. higher education market, understanding some of this is related to the Department of Education changes that are being contemplated.

I just want you to dig into that a bit deeper so that investors have a better picture of what's happening. You see this as mostly about decision-making and distraction in your customer base versus how the budget for LMS solutions might actually impact as some of the funding mechanisms move around. Any additional color there, I think, would be helpful.

I think that, as per your comments, you've got a good read on the situation. I do think whenever there's a big change in a macro market like the U.S. higher education system right now is going through, you're going to see a slowdown in the decision-making process, or you might see more folks weighing in to sign off on a decision as they go through a period of uncertainty.

That said, I don't see the big demand drivers changing in U.S. higher education. I think what we're seeing is the demand being pushed into future quarters.

All the work that we're doing is paying off in terms of driving a better win rate. We're seeing good differentiation in our product. When I'm talking with presidents and provosts and other folks within our prospective client base, there's an incredible amount of interest in what we're doing with our AI-first strategy, all good indicators in terms of the top of the funnel.

We believe it is a short-term issue with just decision-making in the U.S. higher education market. I would not look at it as a change in the market dynamics long-term for the learning platform whatsoever.

We've been in a period for a couple of years now where I think you've consistently referenced the level of RFP activity being below what you consider normal. I mean, are you starting to see that level of activity slow down further? Is that in the short- medium-term pipeline? Is that evident here as well?

We're seeing good growth in many regions around the world in terms of RFP volume, either being flat or slightly up. U.S. higher education has a different reason for RFP volume for campus-wide implementations for the last two quarters.

The overall trend for our total RFPs tends to be slightly up year-over-year but for different reasons. For example, there might be campuses looking for continuing education or workforce upskilling RFP sort of tip the toe in the water versus doing a campus-wide.

We have seen that change in the last few quarters as they focus their energy on a growth driver as they navigate some of this uncertainty in the market. We believe that those RFPs will eventually turn into campus-wide RFPs; again, it's just building a good top of the funnel with building those initial early relationships. And our team is doing a great job driving win rate again with that part of the market that is coming up for grabs each and every quarter.

Maybe one last question for me. You've referenced some pockets of strength in other areas, I mean, Creator+, but also in international markets.

I guess when you get situations like what you're seeing right now in one of your markets, can you talk about your philosophy, John, on how you would adjust or reprioritize your resources, hiring, or otherwise spend in response to the evolving dynamics here?

Yes. What's interesting about this is that it feels like the fog at the beginning of the morning. It will eventually lift. The top of the funnel, the action that we're doing in the U.S. right now, is not really pivoting resources out of that market for clarity.

The work that we're doing with Provost, President teams around setting up a good process for them to run is still happening. There's still good progression with those deals. It's just taking more time, or the readiness to kick off an RFP might be pushed out a quarter or two. So we're not pulling resources out of that region. I want to be very clear on that.

That said, you may tweak some of the spending on the marketing side or where you run an event, or we might do a few more international events during this particular time frame.

And we're definitely leaning into international as the U.S. market goes through this dynamic. And then, Doug, to your point on Creator+ and Lumi, we're seeing great momentum in terms of the step function improvement quarter-over-quarter in terms of the attach rate with those products.

We certainly see a tremendous amount of opportunity for us to turn that into a real driver for change in the market.

At some point, it's my belief that an AI-first learning platform will become a catalyst for change, hopefully getting the RFP volume spiking up again like it was pre-COVID. And I think this technology with AI is going to be probably more impactful than cloud or mobile in terms of technology waves that we've seen in the past.

We just have not yet seen that play out in the market in terms of requirements in RFP, but we are seeing it at the top of the funnel when we're engaging with Provosts and Presidents. And they see this as a great product to drive efficiency while improving the student learning experience. That's a great combination in this type of uncertain market as well.

Our next question is from Gavin Fairweather of Cormark.

Maybe just to start in the higher-end business. You talked about how your competitive positioning is strengthening. Maybe you can update us on what you're seeing in the market in terms of win rates, selling prices, and how your competitors are acting as their bases renew.

Yes. So the market is definitely dynamic, Gavin, as you pointed out. Our win rates are ticking up year-over-year. So still north of 50%.

We see our competitive positioning getting stronger as we lean into our AI strategy. And every month, we're putting out new capabilities for our clients, everything from generating content to interactive to now assessment types. We'll be providing feedback on assessments to students based on an AI response.

We're linking learning outcomes to content and assessment automatically using these tools. And there's a long, long list of other innovations coming in the product in the months ahead. That's becoming a real driver for both adoption with our clients and also opening up doors with new prospective clients.

In our case, what we're doing is we're very much focusing on the things that will become a big driver for change in the market in the long term.

Maybe we can check in on the corporate side. I mean, a lot of work went into the product over the course of fiscal '25. Curious where you think you are on that journey in terms of just continually improving the product to make it more and more competitive in that big market, both for memberships and then upscaling within corporates as well?

Yes. I think, Gavin, if you look at the investments that we're making, we've got a public road map in terms of what we're sharing with the broader market. We are making significant investments in our corporate product.

We're doing a great job with training organizations globally. There's a great product market fit there, and there's really no reason why we can't continue to see good scale in that part of our business as we continue to lean into the go-to-market motion.

For broader employee learning and other segments, we're investing today around our key use cases so that we can have no excuse for not being the next-gen platform for adoption in the corporate market.

We anticipate most of that work will be done this year. There will be obviously ongoing work that continues to put us in a spot where we start to really pull apart and differentiate in the space. A great example of that is also HYP.

For a long time, companies have relied on SCORM as an interactive standard for building content, but it hasn't changed in 20 years, Gavin. And what we're doing with HYP is ushering in a new standard for building interactive learning. And I think that's going to be a real transformation of the corporate learning experience, building more engagement, making sure folks can retain the knowledge for longer while yet spending less time on the task because it's a better learning experience itself.

That product now has adoption with about 200 million people globally. We're going to work very hard to commercialize it in a bigger way in corporate, and that's part of our key road map as we look ahead.

And then lastly, for me, maybe for Josh, just on EBITDA margins. I mean, they certainly surprised in kind of more like the high teens in the back half of your fiscal year, and yet you've provided your guidance for about 15% for fiscal '26.

Maybe just walk us through the puts and takes in terms of seasonality, FX, incremental spending that you guys are planning on making on growth to help reconcile that EBITDA margin going forward.

Yes. Thanks, Gavin. Good question. Certainly pleased with the progress in F '25, with a roughly $20 million increase in EBITDA year-over-year. And as we look out to F '26, you're right, there is typically seasonality in the expense profile.

You'll see that in the past, notably in Q2, we have our Fusion user conference. And then in the first half of the year, overall, there's typically the reset of payroll taxes, benefits, and merit increases from a compensation perspective.

So you will see typically in Q1 and Q2, a bit of a step down relative to Q3 and Q4 and then back half of the year, that margin profile sort of steps up a little bit. So you can expect to see that as well.

And then from an investment perspective, I mean, a lot of the stuff John has hit on, we see a really important opportunity ahead of us, both from an AI and next-gen learning platform and education as well as some significant investments in corporate employee learning.

And so we're balancing growth and profitability as we have the past 3 years and making sure we're making the right disciplined investments, but certainly, we maintain confidence in those growth drivers as we work through the macro fog in fiscal '26.

Our next question is from Paul Treiber of RBC Capital Markets.

Just a follow-up question in regards to the EBITDA margins. But just looking out to 2028, when you look at the slope of margin expansion from '26 to '28, why wouldn't there be more operating leverage coming off revenue growth? Do you see those investments that you're making in '26 being sustained through '27 and '28?

Yes. Thanks, Paul. Good question. Yes, with the medium-term outlook, we're providing a steady lift in our margin profile year-over-year-over-year. And I would say, similar to the response to Gavin and an indirect response to your question, there is an opportunity to invest in growth, and we have confidence in the ability to accelerate growth through those investments.

And those investments aren't 12-month investments, so there's a need to continue to balance our growth and profitability over the entirety of the medium term, but I'm certainly confident that the business can continue to scale and increase our profitability year-over-year.

And in regard to costs, you mentioned AI as a product opportunity. Do you anticipate or have you seen to date AI improve productivity in product development? Or are you looking at it from a customer support perspective? Do you see opportunities to improve productivity internally in the company?

That's a great question, Paul. We're in the early days in terms of driving productivity across the different parts of the organization by leveraging AI internally. That said, the groups that have embraced AI have seen incredible improvements, everything from our learning services team that's embraced AI to help with the generation of course content and experiences for our clients.

They've been working with a number of clients to pilot this work out in the field, if you will, and it's having a great impact. We're seeing similar results with our customer support and services.

And as we continue to deploy AI across R&D and other parts of the organization, that innovation will drive significant efficiencies, which we can then turn into innovations for our clients that drive impact on the learning experience. I am very much excited about the opportunity to leverage these technologies internally here at D2L in this next chapter.

And then, just lastly for me, one of your competitors had a fairly high-profile security breach, and there's been a lot of news around it. They're more in the K-12 space.

But has that opened the door to discussions with customers across higher ed and other end markets just in terms of migrating from legacy platforms to something more modern? And how does that counter or how does that relate to what's going on in terms of the broader environment in terms of the uncertainty from a macro perspective out there?

It's client by client. Paul, we are seeing some universities and colleges have also gone through similar experiences as what you saw with the PowerSchool reach. I think that's what you're referring to.

In those cases, they are looking to modernize their learning platform infrastructure. It won't be overnight. We've spent a lot of time. I've visited the White House, and we've made commitments in this particular area. And we are by far the leader in our markets when it comes to investing in privacy, data security, and the controls that really are required to implement this properly.

It definitely is a big investment on our end to make sure that we're doing this right. That's why we've got a number of marquee clients that have embraced our technology because they need these controls in place.

And I think that as the broader market realizes that security does matter, this will become a growth driver for Brightspace. We are significantly differentiated both in K-12 and higher ed and even in corporate when it comes to how we handle security, data privacy, and the infrastructure for our clients.

Our next question is from Thanos Moschopoulos of BMO Capital Markets.

John, maybe just to clarify a point. The U.S. higher ed market is predominantly a replacement market. So I think that would imply that the budget is already there being spent on an existing LMS.

So, obviously, a lot of budget uncertainty. But from your perspective, is all this noise causing customers to delay decisions, even though presumably they shouldn't be spending any incremental budget on your solution versus what they're already spending on their existing on us?

Yes. No, I think it's a matter of prioritization for these clients. They're just dealing with a bunch of uncertainty. So they've got to work through that, set their budgets and strategies for the institutions as they go through that change. But what's clear in terms of my conversations with presidents and post is that our technology has never mattered more.

You're seeing it showing up in our services line. Clients are engaging us to accelerate the road map because this technology is believed to have a big impact on the student experience, driving better engagement, and helping them grow into new markets. This has become a mission-critical tool. And I think as AI becomes a powerful driver in this market, you will see them prioritize this in a much bigger way.

The early results that we're seeing from the efficacy studies, Thanos, have been incredible in terms of improving student outcomes while saving time for faculty. It's a killer combination for any school that's going through austerity because you get to improve the student experience while saving resources and doing it. It's a great combination.

And in terms of international, just expand as far as the geographies in which you're most optimistic about over the next year? And to what extent are you seeing a macro impact in some of those markets as well?

Yes. We've made some leadership adds in international. We're seeing, again, good growth internationally last year. We anticipate continued good growth this year.

Remember, most of the market internationally is traditional legacy players that have not evolved very much and are going through their own challenges in terms of restructuring organizations, things like that. And so we're competing incredibly well here.

We've seen a number of countries put up their best quarter year-over-year. Good results. I'm very happy with what the international team is doing, and we'll continue to lean into that as a good growth driver for us in the future.

And keep in mind, Thanos, many of these markets, they're at the 1% line. They're nowhere close to full capacity when it comes to putting in place great learning platforms to support their learners across their region. So this is an exciting opportunity for us to continue to lean into.

Our next question is from Brian Peterson of Raymond James.

Congrats on the strong win rates. So, John, I know you mentioned AI-first learning is a catalyst for change and that it's even bigger than the cloud. I'm curious, just given your expertise in time in the industry, how do you see that unfolding? When would you think that installed base that is largely on cloud today could look at AI as a shift to transition to a new LMS? Any perspective there?

I think the leaders will look at it, I hope so this year. We have not seen evidence of that, though, for clarity, other than my conversations with the Presidents from Probos. It has not translated into RFP volume yet, Brian. And we've seen one RFP globally, just to give you an early indicator.

But why do I think it? If you look at it from just simply a design perspective, the first wave of our technology made things that were done in the classroom now possible to do online.

Then, our next wave of innovation was to drive us to be the easiest-to-use learning platform in this cloud modern architecture, if you will. That has driven our win rates way up. And then this next wave, as we roll out AI to support all these different key use cases within the platform and all the key workflows, it has a dramatic impact on the learner experience and making it far easier for faculty to be able to create content, create assessments, provide the linkages, build a better learning experience.

I know it's going to sound strange, but it feels a little bit like magic in the learning platform as the system itself recommends things for you and you're hitting approve or making minor tweaks.

It has a significant impact on improving the faculty experience and the learner experience, and that's going to become a driver for change for institutions. If one institution rolls this out, which we're seeing now as we start to see our client base pick up in terms of adoption of these types of technologies, their neighbors are not going to want to be left behind, very similar to what you saw with mobile as a driver and very similar to what we saw with the cloud as a driver.

We've seen these things in the past. We were late to the game in some of these in the past. We're not going to be late to the game in this one. We're going to lead this revolution.

And Josh, maybe just one follow-up. As we're thinking about the medium-term targets, how big of a contribution could M&A be there? Or is that largely an organic number?

Yes. Thanks, Brian. Think about M&A as a construct consistent with our approach to date. We see value in adding to the portfolio of products to really add to that platform strategy that we have and add more value to customers.

And so we'll continue to look at doing that over the medium term. I think HYP and Connected Shopping are 2 good examples of that. And to the point earlier on the call, we're seeing some really good progress with them so far.

Our next question is from Suthan Sukumar of Stifel.

For the first question, I want to touch on your international growth. This has been pretty durable over the past several quarters. You mentioned you're leaning in, given the headwinds in the U.S. Can you speak a little bit about how your strategy might be evolving in your focus markets here? And how do you see win rates and deal sizes trending from here?

We're definitely seeing good opportunities in international markets. Again, many of these markets are in their very early stages. So our approach in terms of tweaking our model that we've had in the past has been to really drive a push on the leadership.

So we've made some investments into leadership in LatAm, the Middle East, the Indian region, and other regions around the world.

We are driving to be #1 in key markets globally. We're working very hard to make sure that we've got a good motion when it comes to opening up a market, building the capability in that market to get the first few key wins, and establishing ourselves as a leader. And then pushing again aggressively to drive quick adoption across the rest of the market, and then trying to create an opportunity for us to be a very clear #1 player.

You're seeing that in markets like the Netherlands, where we're now very clearly #1 in the market, and Singapore, where we're #1 in the market. Colombia, we've added, for example, another institution just recently to put us in a very clear market leadership position with the top universities in that market, and we'll continue to push down.

And there's many other great markets around the world that are opening up as we speak. So you'll see us continue to lean into international. We expect that to continue to be a 15-plus percent growth driver for us. I'm very excited about the opportunity globally.

On ARR, this continues to improve, but it sounds like you still see the opportunity for that to expand looking ahead. Can you speak to the opportunity for upsell, cross-sell of Lumi and Creator+, and some of the other modules within the U.S. higher ed base, just given all the macro noise?

Well, maybe I can put this response with Josh. We definitely believe that we can continue to lean in on NRR. And I know a few of you have asked about pricing. We are seeing pricing tick up a little bit in our markets. That's going to be a driver for NRR as well. But more importantly, we're leaning in with a great product that clients are loving.

So, Creator+ is a perfect example. We're seeing attach rates step up quarter-over-quarter. I mean, we will lean into that even more this year to drive better attach rates again.

Lumi, we're seeing incredible results. I mean, it's very early days within our client base, but we're seeing a big step function from Q3 to Q4. Remember, this has only been in the market for 2 quarters. The next 2 quarters are going to be really interesting as we lead into Fusion. And I think that will be a big driver for NRR expansion in the future.

And then we also have clients, as we mentioned on the call, that are early adopters of new technologies like Achievement Plus, really seeing the value of that being able to support the accreditation process in an institution. That was a product that we thought would take time to drive adoption within our base, but we're seeing a lot of clients showing interest in that one already. All of these things will continue to drive our NRR in the right direction. And Josh, do you want to add more to that?

Yes. I think the only thing I'd add is that you've seen this start to play out. Certainly, we identified about 2 years ago that there was a real opportunity for us to expand our portfolio and add more value to our customers.

And so to John's point, the NRR progress in fiscal '25, moving from $102 million to $104 million, is good. And still, I'd say, reflective of the early days. So we expect over the medium term to be able to continue to increase that NRR profile for the business.

Our final question comes from John Shao of National Bank.

I have a question similar to Brian's on your fiscal 2028 growth target. So, could you maybe give us a breakdown of how much of that growth acceleration is tied to a recovery in macro versus your OpEx investments and potential M&A?

Well, right now, that growth that we've provided for guidance for the year incorporates the FOG that we see today and the macro conditions, broadly speaking, around the world, as well as some of the FX considerations that we've been facing.

So feel confident that we can deliver against the numbers that we've provided for guidance. My hope is that we can turn some of the things that we talked about on the call into real drivers for accelerating growth in the medium term. And all the early indicators, as I said on the call, with conversations with leaders within the higher education system seem to indicate so. We just haven't seen it translate yet. So it's hard for us to guide for that at this stage.

But yes, John, just to add, I think from a medium-term growth outlook, the thing with FOG is that over time, it does subside. And so, as we look out over the medium term, we see an opportunity for our strength from a higher education perspective to continue to shine through.

We're making investments to further solidify that. And we've talked about that product portfolio continuing to expand and our upsell capabilities continuing to improve. Likewise, we've talked about the international end markets and the corporate end markets. And so it's really the combination of all of that that is incorporated into that medium-term 10% to 15%.

And given your FX exposure, would you ever consider hedging your currency risk on the top line when it comes to OpEx structure? Just want to make sure you still have a natural hedge to protect your EBITDA from the volatilities.

Yes, it's a good question, John. We evaluate, on an ongoing basis, the right approach. To date, we have not implemented significant hedging, but we continue to monitor and evaluate.

We have no further questions. So I will hand it back to John Baker, CEO, for closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us on the call today. We're really looking forward to updating you following our Q1 results. I hope everyone has a good week. And thank you again for joining us.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.