Nayax Ltd. (NYAX) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Nayax's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Aaron Greenberg. Please go ahead, Aaron.

Thank you, operator, and everyone, for joining us today on this conference call. With me on the call today are Yair Nechmad, Nayax's Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; and Sagit Manor, Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for the question-and-answer session. Our press release and supplementary investor presentation are available on our Investor Relations website at ir.nayax.com. As a reminder, during this call, we'll be making forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements on our call today are based on assumptions and therefore, subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause results to differ materially from those projected. We have no obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in our supplementary investor presentation released earlier today and our regulatory filings. In addition, today's call will include a discussion of non-IFRS measures. Management believes non-IFRS results are useful in order to enhance our understanding of our ongoing performance. However, these measures should be considered as a supplement to and not as a substitute for IFRS financial measures. A reconciliation between Nayax's non-IFRS to IFRS measures can be found in our earnings press release issued earlier today. All key performance indicators are intended to evaluate our business and properly measure factors in a macroeconomic environment to guide and support our decision-making. These key performance indicators may be calculated in a manner different from the industry standards. And finally, please note that all figures in today's call will be reported in U.S. dollars unless stated otherwise. Yair will start the call with key financial and operational highlights. Following that, Sagit will go through the details of financial results and discuss the outlook. And with that, I would like to turn over the call to Nayax's CEO, Yair Nechmad. Yair?

Thank you, Aaron, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today to discuss our results for the first quarter and the progress we are making across the business. We had an excellent start to 2026 with strong operational and financial results across the business. Revenue grew 32% to $107 million with organic revenue growth of 26%. Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 13%. The quarter results reflect the continued confidence and execution of our strategy, and we are reaffirming our financial guidance for the year. This quarter, our installed base surpassed 1.5 million devices, an important milestone that drives our recurring revenue model. Our customer base reached 120,000, which is truly exciting and reflecting continuing opportunities in the market. The more customers we onboard, the more devices they buy, the more transactions flow through our platform and the more our recurring revenue compound, it is clear that our growth algorithm is working. To this end, let me highlight a couple of KPIs. First, total transaction value grew 33%, with average transaction value continued to expand as we shift further into higher-value verticals such as EV charging, amusement and car wash. Second, our ARPU is growing, reflecting both the trend in cash-to-cash conversion with our existing customer base and our deeper presence in the high-value segments. Hardware sales were strong this quarter with growth of 46%, driven by strong demand for our products across all markets. In the unattended space, the rollout of our PIN-on-glass VPOS Media devices drove significant hardware demand in Europe and is unlocking higher ATV verticals where local regulation require PIN verification for transactions. In the EV charging vertical, we made our first joint appearance as the combined Nayax and Lynkwell brand at the EVCS conference, which is the largest conference in the EV space and received strong customer reception. Our pipeline of midsized network moving on to Lynkwell's white label platform continue to grow. With respect to geographic expansion, in Brazil, we continue to invest and are making significant strides in the region. Following the successful integration of VMtecnologia and UPPay, we have fully rebranded its operation to the Nayax brand, which is now operating as Nayax Brazil. In addition, we have started onboarding new customers as payment facilitator in the country, and we will soon be bringing the VPOS Media to the Brazilian market, which will allow us to address the market with a unified PIN-on-glass product. We are also making great progress with our platform expansion initiatives. As stated last quarter, our Yellow account, our embedded banking offering for the U.S. market in partnership with Adyen is in pilot phase and advancing well. We believe embedded banking can become an important additional monetization layer across our platform, leveraging our existing customer relationships and transactions data. This is a long-term strategic initiative that can strengthen customer engagement and increase revenue per customer over time. We expect to have more to share in Q2 about our embedded banking initiatives. Not surprisingly, AI is becoming an increasingly more meaningful driver across our business as we are embedding AI across our platform as well as throughout the entire organization. For example, R&D is advancing faster with AI system development. On the product side, we are launching in Q2 a new AI intelligence layer in MoMa, our mobile management app. This will give operators a conversational assistance for business insight, AI-driven shelf strategy suggestion and rapid merchandising plan setup using visual recognition. These initiatives and many more reinforce both our OpEx discipline and our long-term margin expansion strategy. On M&A, our pipeline is active and growing, and we are engaging on several opportunities in what is becoming a buyer market. We are disciplined about finding the right opportunity for Nayax, those that fit our strategy, our culture and our long-term growth profile. Our strong balance sheet positions us to act decisively when we find them. In summary, our growing installed base of connected device, the strength of our recurring revenue model and the disciplined execution of our team continue to position us well for sustained profitable growth. With 1.5 million devices on the platform and with the flywheel accelerating, we are well positioned to capture the opportunities ahead. I want to thank our employees for their continued dedication and our customers, partners and shareholders for your trust. With that, I'll turn it over to our CFO, Sagit Manor, who will review our financial results in greater detail and walk through the outlook. Sagit?

Thank you, Yair, and good morning, good evening, everyone. We appreciate having our shareholders, analysts and the entire Nayax team with us today as we review our financial performance. We are very pleased with our results for the first quarter as we continue to scale our platform, expand our installed base and drive transaction activity, all of which reinforces the more predictable and profitable recurring revenue contribution to our business. As Yair stated, revenue grew 32% to approximately $107 million, including 26% organic revenue growth over the prior year's quarter. Recurring revenue grew 27% and represented approximately 74% of total revenue. We ended the quarter with an installed base of more than 1.5 million managed and connected devices while serving 120,000 customers globally. As a result, total dollar transaction value grew an impressive 33% to approximately $1.8 billion. Consistent with more recent quarters, we continue to see a favorable mix shift towards higher-value verticals. Average transaction value, or ATV, increased to $2.36 from $2.06, while take rate remained strong at 2.66%. Combined, these indicators show that growth is coming from deeper engagement and higher value usage across the platform, which is a leading contributor to our success. We also saw a continued increase in the revenue generated from each connected device. Average revenue per unit or ARPU increased to $247, up 14% year-over-year, which again demonstrates improved unit economics and deeper engagement of customers with our platform. This increase continues to be driven by two main factors: first, the ongoing conversion of existing machines from cash to cashless transactions; and second, our strategic expansion into higher-value verticals such as EV charging, amusement and car wash. Turning now to hardware revenue. We saw a significant increase of 46% over the prior year's quarter to approximately $28 million, driven by strong demand for our products across all markets. Importantly, we continued taking market share, adding over 5,500 new customers and 41,000 managed and connected devices, proving that our growth algorithm is working. Moving now to profitability and margin for the quarter. Gross margin was impressive and in line with the prior year's quarter at 49%, driven by higher processing and SaaS margins, slightly offset by lower hardware margin in the quarter, primarily because of product mix. More specifically, our recurring margin increased to 54% from 52% in the prior year's quarter, driven by additional improvement in processing margin that reached nearly 40% from 36% in the prior year quarter, reflecting the ongoing benefits of renegotiated contracts with several bank acquirers and the company's improved smart routing capabilities. SaaS margin improved as well to 76.5% from 75.9%. Both processing and SaaS margins reflect the company's growing scale and increasing transaction volumes. Hardware margin was 33.1% compared to 39.5% in Q1 2025 due to marketing promotions for our newly released PIN-on-glass VPOS Media devices Europe. Adjusted OpEx of $39 million was 36% of revenue, an improvement over the prior year period and included a full quarter of delinquent expenses. Adjusted OpEx had an unfavorable impact of $1.2 million in the quarter compared sequentially to Q4 2025 due to foreign currency volatility. Adjusted EBITDA increased 43% to $14 million, representing 13% of revenue compared to 12% in Q1 2025 and again, demonstrating the operating leverage of the business. Operating profit was $4 million compared to $1.8 million in prior year period, excluding a onetime gain of approximately $6.1 million related to Nayax share repurchase of Tigapo in Q1 2025. Financial expenses net for the quarter increased by $2.9 million as a result of interest expenses related to the two bonds offering completed in 2025 at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, which raised a total of nearly ILS 1 billion. Net income for the quarter was $1.3 million compared to net income of $1.1 million in the prior year period, excluding the onetime gain associated with Tigapo. Turning now to our balance sheet. On March 31, 2026, cash and cash equivalents and short-term deposits totaled $306 million, while short- and long-term debt were $325 million, maintaining a solid balance sheet. Looking at cash flow. We generated $3.6 million from operating activities. Free cash flow for the quarter was negative at $6 million, mainly due to increased infrastructure investment and the timing of cash settlements from processing activities. Turning now to our outlook and referring to our forward-looking information disclosure in our press release. As Yair mentioned, we are reaffirming our financial outlook for 2026. Our revenue guidance for the year remains $510 million to $520 million, inclusive of organic revenue growth of 22% to 25%. We expect an adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 17%, which represents a range of $85 million to $90 million. Turning to free cash flow. We continue to expect free cash flow conversion from adjusted EBITDA of approximately 40% for the year. In closing, we are well positioned for future growth in 2026 and beyond as we continue to grow our installed base globally and capture market share. We'll also continue to focus on scaling our recurring revenue streams, in particular, our payment processing capabilities, which benefit from the conversion trend of cash-to-cashless transactions. I want to thank all of our Nayax colleagues for their hard work. And with that, I will now turn the call over to the operator for our Q&A session. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from the line of Rayna Kumar with Oppenheimer.

Can you discuss your EV strategy and like the EV contribution in the quarter, just given the rise in fuel prices? [Technical Difficulty]

Okay. Sorry for the technical difficulties. I can take the question. Rayna, thank you for the question. This is Aaron. So with regards to the EV strategy, obviously, we bought Lynkwell at the end of last year after 8 years of investing in the EV industry. And that was us doubling down on our strategy of really trying to penetrate this industry end-to-end, both on the software and the payment side. And as we see over the last few months, the gas prices rising, we see this as a potential secular tailwind for the EV penetration, particularly in the U.S. because as it's not going to necessarily impact the number of EV drivers today, it should impact as long as this continues, the number of drivers in the future, people buying -- switching from ICE vehicles over to EV, which should increase the utilization of EV chargers in the U.S. As we look at this, our EV strategy right now is to be connected to as many public DC fast chargers as possible, which is where these new EV drivers are going to be charging their car. And with the purchase of Lynkwell, we have a better opportunity to go after a lot of these midsized networks with a full end-to-end solution, expanding our payment business. And we believe the strategy is already working. We signed the partnership with ChargeSmart before the Lynkwell acquisition. We signed the partnership with E-Plug after the Lynkwell acquisition, and we expect to sign more networks over the coming quarters.

Extremely helpful, Aaron. And then just one more follow-up. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of hardware costs and how we should think of hardware gross margin potential for the remainder of the year?

A -- so hardware is supposed to stay as we've guided, which, again, I remind that we've just reaffirmed the guidance of $510 million to $520 million of revenue and adjusted EBITDA of $85 million to $90 million. Q1 specifically had lower hardware margins as a result of promotions that we have done in Europe with the bringing into the market the VPOS Media, our new PIN-on-glass products that are very relevant to our Europe as well as Latin America and Australia regions. However, I'm expecting that to stay around that level the remaining of the year, a little bit higher with a beautiful margins -- gross margin overall of around 49% as we've shown in Q1.

Our next question is from the line of Josh Nichols with B. Riley Securities.

I mean great to see the processing margins, they're nearly 40%, a record for the company. Can you just give us a little bit more detail, walk us through like what's driving that expansion? And how should we think about what the ceiling is for processing margins because they've continued to go higher over the last few years by a pretty significant amount.

Josh, so yes, we are very proud of the processing margins that continue to improve to nearly 40% compared to 36% last quarter or even around 38.5% in Q4. There's two main reasons for processing margins to improve as we've continued to explain that last year is a couple of things that we have done. One is the renegotiation with every major acquirer that we work with in order to improve our -- the fees and therefore, our margins as well as the smart routing capabilities that we've implemented. So we know how to -- where to send any transaction that comes that comes in to the acquirers that makes sense from us. But still, the customer gets its Coke or the service on the mass share in a nanosecond. Specifically, this quarter, it's a matter of geographical mix. You can also see that the take rate went down. However, from 2.75% last quarter to -- or previous quarter to 2.66%, it's a geographical mix. What do I mean by that? The higher the transactions are in Europe, the take rate is a little bit lower than the U.S., but the margins are higher. So -- we are continuing to push everything we can in order to improve margins in all aspects, both in processing as well as in the improved margins that we saw this quarter in the SaaS area and Q1 margins, I just spoke about that as well.

And then just one follow-up for me. Nice to see the ARPU growth accelerated from 11% year-over-year last quarter to 14%. We've talked about mix before. How much of that is being driven by like EV and amusement? And is there still room to continue to scale that up pretty significantly as those verticals become bigger over time?

Yes. So about that -- because this is the first quarter that we're actually showing ARPU on a quarterly basis. Again, it's a 12-month trade, but we saw that after showing it for '24 and '25 and have enough kind of historical quarters to show -- to continue to show that now on a quarterly basis. There's two main reasons for the ARPU to go down or up. One is about our existing machines and how much you can see there, the shift from cash to cashless. So this is one impact. And the second thing is obviously the entrance into higher transactional verticals like EV, exactly as you said, like car wash and amusement. So as long as we continue, and that's the plan to invest in higher transactional verticals ARPU should continue to improve.

Josh, I just want to add, this is Aaron, that on the ARPU, as you've seen over the last several quarters, the processing growth that Sagit mentioned, has been the main driver of the ARPU growth, and we expect this to continue to grow as it has. I want to flag though that this has been, as I said, predominantly from the processing side. The SaaS side, we've kept relatively the same across the business. As we look forward over the coming years, this is where I think that the embedded banking and some of these other services that we're bringing to the table really have the opportunity as a catalyst to grow the ARPU even further, which we'll talk about here over the coming quarters. But adding additional services like lending, issuing and e-commerce to our existing customers should continue to accelerate the ARPU growth.

The next question is from the line of Chris Kennedy with William Blair.

Just wanted to follow up on the pilot of Yellow. I know it's very early and we'll get additional information, but any initial learnings or kind of use cases that you're -- that are resonating with your customers?

Yes. Chris, this is Aaron again. Yes. So we've started the pilots on the Yellow account. We launched the marketing of it at the NAMA conference back last month. And so far, things are going well. We're learning a lot along the way with it. But I would say that the general perception that we see is that customers want to have this product. And I think there's a few reasons and many reasons, but I think the most important thing is ease of getting the payout at the end of the day. So one of the things that we're marketing is getting a faster payout into their accounts. They get to see it right away. as opposed to having to wait that extra potentially a couple of days in order to go and get it transferred from our accounts into an external account. So this is huge for businesses that live day-to-day on cash flow, which a lot of these nano merchants do. The other part, though, that is really important for us is this is the foundation for being able to add the other services over time. So the first step is to get people on to the Yellow account. The second step here is once they have the application and they're using on a daily basis, the fund flows are happening, so they get the pay-ins and payouts from this account and all the processing coming through us, then we can start layering in the other services and provide curated offers to them, which really personalizes what the customer needs are, which -- we don't believe it can be served by external parties as easily because an external bank that is going and working with these customers, they don't get the daily payment flows that are happening with these customers. We're seeing by the minute how their flows are happening, which allows us to either accelerate or decelerate the offers to these individual customers, which is a win-win for both of us.

Great. Very clear. And then just a quick update on Brazil. It sounds like you had a lot of momentum there. Can you just remind us of what the opportunity is in that market?

Yes. This is Aaron again. Brazil has been amazing for us so far over the last couple of years since we bought VMtecnologia and then last year buying UPPay. This is a couple of hundred million person country, larger than most of the rest of Latin America combined. And we see a huge opportunity there, especially for the unattended industry. And we're expanding into many different verticals there right now. As we speak, we've aligned the branding now with Nayax, and we've moved and are continuing to move the infrastructure over to unified Nayax infrastructure. We'll be bringing the VPOS Media there over the coming months. as well, the PIN-on-glass device. And we see a huge opportunity from a penetration side of some of these industries that historically didn't really have a cashless unattended and unattended is relatively newer there in the last 10 years, 15 years. So there weren't really incumbents prior to VMtecnologia entering and now obviously, us inheriting VMtecnologia. I think that there's still a lot of opportunity to penetrate there. And we're seeing a lot of -- it's mostly a rental business there with regards to the devices, which is amazing for us because -- this is a gross margin that is more comparable to our SaaS gross margin today. And generally, you're seeing 5 years, 7-plus years of life on the devices. So a lot to come there in Brazil, and we intend to continue to invest there and in the rest of Latin America. We talked about the Integral Vending acquisition and really making our penetration on both sides of Latin America and then moving to the rest of the countries.

And also to add, Cris, is that this is a great example of an acquisition that we have done in the past that now translate into strong organic growth. that we also showed in Q1, 32% growth on the revenue, 26% organic revenue growth. So that's, again, another example of translation into our day-to-day and create the growth machine.

The next question is from the line of Hannes Leitner with Jefferies.

I got also a couple of questions. The first one would be if you could talk about the FX impact for Q1. I think there was quite some movement in the U.S. dollar and the Israeli shekel. And then maybe just like you -- based on your definition, organic growth trends ahead of your annual guidance. So maybe you can just talk a little bit about how you see the rest of the year shaping up? And then just in the backdrop of the hardware contribution, which was quite healthy, Q4 has a quite tough comp in hardware sales. So maybe you can just give there a little bit of context?

So with regard to FX, actually, I'll give ourselves a compliment that we're doing a great job of monitoring all of the currencies that we work with, not just the Israeli shekel, but the euro and the pound. And as you know, we're selling our product in more than 120 countries. So FX is part of our day-to-day. We're doing a great job on hedging, whether it's a natural hedging or actually working with the banks to do that. Specifically this quarter, we had a [ $1.2 million] negative effect on the OpEx. But as we said, we are reaffirming our guidance, which takes into account a lot of things, including some of the unknown of the FX. So I don't foresee -- there is an effect, but I don't foresee a significant effect when it comes to currency volatility, again, with the current information that we have right now. On the organic growth, you're absolutely right, a beautiful organic growth in the quarter. And we did guide last year on 22% to 25% overall. That will come from a lot of other things that are happening in the next quarter. So we are not changing the guidance, but we are different from last year that we have a very hockey stick towards the second half of 2025, especially in Q4. This quarter this year, I'm expecting a better split between the quarters that will impact both the growth as we talked about as well as the organic. From the hardware contribution to your question, yes, very proud of 46% hardware revenue growth. As I said, this is exactly what I just said about kind of split -- better split between the quarters rather than a hockey stick in the next -- in the Q4 numbers. Having said that, H1 is always around 45% of our revenue. H2 is around 55%. So our quarterly -- we have a very common cycle because of the predictability of the business, the high revenue -- recurring revenue that we have that this quarter was 74%. So with that, we kind of know what's the rhythm of the quarters and the ability to predict gets easier as we go along.

Our next question is from the line of Sanjay Sakhrani with KBW.

This is Yvonne Jeng on for Sanjay. With regard to the question earlier on hardware gross margins, are you seeing any impact to hardware costs from the conflicts in the Middle East? And how are you managing inventory levels as a result?

We actually don't see a margin impact as a result of the conflict. We have a very strong operational team that's working on from a component cost standpoint to improvement in the supply chain infrastructure and processes. So I don't see any impact necessarily on that. Inventory levels are really good and as we've intended to have, basically flat from last quarter to this quarter despite the 46% increase on the revenue for the hardware. As we continue the year, we're expecting that to see around those level of gross margin, a little bit -- maybe a little bit higher on the hardware.

Okay. That's really helpful. And just a follow-up on M&A. Can you provide any color on how the pipeline is shaping up and whether we should expect any activity in the near term?

Yes. This is Aaron. The pipeline has been great, and we're seeing -- this is really in the last -- especially the last 6 months to 12 months, I've been mentioned the last few quarters, but there's really a pickup of this becoming a buyer's market. With AI disruption happening, it's freaked out the markets. in a lot of different ways. And private companies, especially have been having trouble getting liquidity for multiple years now, basically since 2022. And a lot of these companies need growth capital to continue even if they're very profitable businesses. And they're in a conundrum of what do they want to do going forward. And we're having many bilateral conversations now with companies and companies that have started sell-side processes. With that in mind of they need to sell the company or want to sell the company and we can get much more favorable terms than what a competitive process might have been 3 years or 4 years ago. As I've said previously, we're generally targeting founder-led or founder-owned businesses. And there are many opportunities that are on the table. We're actively in processes with several companies. And I still expect that we will complete the roughly few acquisitions that we have been projecting on our long-term cycle on a year-to-year basis. So more to come there over the coming months, but there definitely will be contribution from inorganic growth this year. And as we go towards the 2028 target of getting $1 billion of revenue, I remind that we still expect to see a couple of hundred million of inorganic contribution to that. And this year will be a part of that.

The next question is from the line of Chris Zhang with UBS.

So I wanted to ask about the potential for a rental or installment-based model. And then you asked about Brazil. So I guess it was a pretty good intro to that topic. Just wanted to get your thoughts or updates on the potential introduction of rental or lease-based model elsewhere outside of the Brazil market? And what do you think the opportunities and some of the unlocks are there? That's my first question. And then I have a quick follow-up.

So maybe I'll start with a little bit on the margin side and then Aaron can take kind of the strategic view of rental in general. So yes, margins are amazingly better when it comes to the rental business, one, because you kind of bundle the hardware, the processing and the services to $20 a month, $25 a month. And if you analyze it over time, usually, those customers stays as a regular customers pay for the 5 years, for the 10 years, for the 15 years and continue to pay that, which brings the margins overall to around 80% from everything, right? And while now we have hardware margin 40% and recurring revenue of 54% overall, it's an amazing margin. Having said that, one, it takes time to transition, right, from hardware sales to kind of a rental model standpoint, and it's sometimes relevant to some geographies versus others. It's also more relevant, in my opinion, to the small businesses, mid- to small and not necessarily to the large customers that like to buy their hardware and manage it in a way themselves. So there's a few specific rent to the rental market. But we are very excited about it. I also say it's not just the transition, it's also the infrastructure investment, right? It's basically a fixed asset that you need to make. So you -- the cost is on us today, the revenue will come over time. But we all understand that now obviously, with the balance sheet, with the strong balance sheet we have, we can afford that to make the transitions, as I said, over time.

Yes. So I'll add on the -- just on the strategy side. As we look at the rental business, I see it as two different sets of end customers actually. So the best way to think about it is the customers that we're purchasing are probably still going to purchase the hardware upfront. I think that it opens up a new segment, a new serviceable market for people that want unattended devices and people that might want to swap out from existing devices but don't necessarily have the CapEx to go and make the flip out so easily. So it accelerates their transition over to our products. So if anything, we're seeing that this increases the TAM over time. And for some markets like in Brazil, we see it being the dominant market opportunity to do rental over selling. So yes, more to come there, but we're definitely seeing a pickup in rental. And we expect that over the coming years that rental will continue to be a larger portion of the overall sales.

All right. And my follow-up is just to look at the free cash flow conversion and trying to think where that should be or where you see that to be in 2027 and beyond from the 40% level this year?

So first, maybe to talk about that our operating cash flow improved year-over-year. And it's kind of the normal first quarter cycle that we have that the free cash flow was negative $6 million. We made a lot of infrastructure investments and it's always the processing settlement timing that impact the Q1 free cash flow. As I said, we're still expecting that with the unit economics improved and with our ability to increase significantly the adjusted EBITDA this year, right, from the -- to around 17%, that's our guidance that it will translate into cash and into cash flow and obviously, to free cash flow. We haven't provided guidance for 2027 and beyond about cash flow and free cash flow, but I would love to think about it if it's something that we would like to provide for the market in the future.

At this time, I'd like to turn the floor back over to Yair for closing comments.

Thank you for joining us today and for your interest in Nayax. Q1 was a strong start to 2026. We grew our customer base at an accelerating pace and continue to compound profitability across the business. I want to thank our employees for their hard work and dedication and our customers, partners and shareholders for your continuing trust. Thank you very much.

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation. Have a wonderful day.