Welcome to Alma House, where I'm interviewing Kai Telanne, the CEO of Alma Media, regarding the company's recent Q3 results. Kai, let's start as usual with an overview of the third quarter.

Yes, we had a really good quarter once again. The third period is traditionally the strongest at Alma. And it is good to be so. We are at an all-time high. Revenue growth and absolute revenue, and similarly earnings, which is of course a good message in a rather challenging market. And what is pleasing is that all business segments performed really well. Revenue is growing and earnings are developing as planned. Now our good, broad, and balanced portfolio is doing its job just as it should.

Indeed, one sign that things are going well is this morning's profit warning. You raised your revenue guidance—meaning that previously you guided it to develop stably, and now you raised it to grow. Could you unpack the factors behind that? What changed? And also touch upon the operating environment. Has it? Have things moved towards the better here?

Well, you cannot really say that. Everyone probably knows by now. When you have read and listened to what is happening around us in the global market, no significant positive change has occurred. This perhaps communicates more the results of our own work and our good momentum. Our early part of the year has been good there. We have always been cautious in estimating turns during the year, and now the situation is perhaps that we do not expect a significant change in either direction in the market, but the good momentum of our own operations should continue, and thus we are confident that revenue will also grow just as it has grown here in the early part of the year.

Another question at the core of the business. If we look at your media business, the business there is already quite well digitized, but it is still somewhat behind if you think about the other two segments. Well, print media is of course in the background here, but there too, conversion from print to digital is happening all the time. What can you tell us about how you are managing this transition currently? Is it consumer-driven, or are you guiding this in some way? And on the other hand, have you been able to retain those customers? When people move away from print, do they transition to digital subscribers, or how has that developed?

Yes, practically all of our operations are tied to this digital development and digital, so we let print go its own way there. It is going down. Now our print revenue was down 6%, and that varies a bit. One can say between 5 and 10%. Sometimes we go down, and that stems from the change in consumer behavior. So our idea is that we do not forcefully try to keep anything anywhere, but we operate according to how consumers want to use these services. And that has led to practically all of our operations being focused on serving and developing the digital market. That is practically where we are. And that is working well now. Meaning print is decreasing by six percent, digital is growing by 10 percent, so that keeps our revenue nicely in the right direction.

So the pace of change is very good from your perspective. Now let's look a bit at the M&A front. You also announced this morning in the news there that you are acquiring KTI Kiinteistötieto. Could you elaborate on what this acquired business does and why it was a good addition? To Alma's portfolio.

Yes, right? We strive to serve our customers on digital platforms from start to finish in such a way that it is as comprehensive as possible, and we would then be able to serve customer needs from start to finish all the way from the search phase to the transaction phase, if at all possible. And this. This requires us to have very high-quality data available there, and especially now as artificial intelligence is being strongly implemented into these services and into our own operations, it requires high-quality, up-to-date data to support it. And now this KTI Tietopalvelu. That is, real estate information. So it is. It is a service built for the data needs of Commercial Real Estate, which is then used by investors and operators in that value chain. It is a business of around three million euros. 23 people, and a very complementary existing business and complementary service for us. So this is one part of building our service portfolio and fulfills the task intended for it quite wonderfully.

To bridge from that to your M&A strategy in general. The word complementary appeared several times there. Are these the kinds of acquisitions you will continue to look for, or what is it that you want to buy? Your cash position is quite good, after all, and you could actually accelerate development with it.

Yes, if we find larger acquisitions that fit our strategy, of course we will make them, and probably will, as that strengthens all the time and we are able to take larger leaps as well. But we will definitely make these complementary acquisitions. So we draw a sort of service menu in our strategy around all the business areas that interest us, and then we locate possible gaps we have there. And then that gap is filled either through our own product development or by acquiring ready-made capability. Just like in this case now with KTI Kiinteistötieto. So this has been our early game strategy, and we have very successfully followed it for a very long time, and we will certainly continue to do so.

Indeed, you have a very long history of acquisitions. Let's move on to investor questions. An investor had noted LinkedIn's growth or growing role in expert recruitment, and had also noticed that employees have become increasingly active on LinkedIn. Have you seen this affect the recruitment business in any market? Have there been changes in volumes? On the other hand, do you see any pricing pressures?

LinkedIn has been in all of our key markets for a long time, and we haven't really seen a significant change there, as these large global players do have quite impressive technology resources. They are of course tough competitors, but our own approach is again customer-oriented like this. So we have a good and solid internal organization, and we are very close to the customer. We create those services purely starting from their needs, and we have done very well with that. So no, we haven't seen any significant change or special threat now. These large operators are of course harnessing this new technology for use, but so do we. We have quite sufficient resources to adopt the newest technology. It is more about the organizations' ability to adopt them and harness them into workflows and rethink those processes in a new way. In a way, I don't believe these global operators are any better at this matter than we are.

Speaking of technology, artificial intelligence is of course a very big theme right now, and investors are somewhat divided regarding how it impacts marketplace businesses. On one hand, people think that AI platforms will in a way take consumer attention, and they will be the sources in the future where transactions are made, and AI agents will actually start making transactions on behalf of the consumer, so how do you yourselves see this situation? Does the proliferation of AI affect your marketplace business? Is it a clear competitive threat, and on the other hand, what opportunities do you have there?

It is probably both. Startups will probably emerge from there that will try to strike at least some point of these value chains with new technology and perhaps new thinking. But our answer is that we have very comprehensive platforms containing various service components and capabilities inside, and a very solid data foundation. If you think about where we build our competitiveness, we of course have strong brands. We have long-term customer relationships, we use the newest technology, and then very high-quality data. It really has to be high quality. And of course when you combine all these in the way we have combined them, with which we have built quite viable ERP systems for companies in the value chain and then brought consumers as well as possible into the fold of services at the other end, we believe that will remain a pretty tough nut to crack in the future as well.

I personally do not find, at least in the short term, this current technology capability a particular threat, but an opportunity yes. But there will certainly be competition, different kinds of competition, and some of those initiatives can certainly work. But but. We are quite confident in our ability to respond to this.

So many experts talk about how having the data of the value chain will be increasingly significant in the future. And like I said, you have it significantly, that is perhaps the area that is not always so easy for an outsider investor to understand—what data you have—so can you open up through some concrete example from one of your businesses what data you have and how it is utilized?

There is very diverse data, of course from various sources. We certainly. If you think of Alma as a group, we. This is a synergistic group, and we get vast amounts of consumer data purely through our media, which we then sensibly try to utilize in other services as well. But that is consumer data. It is. It is service usage data. It is sensible data retrieved from external sources, applicable to the high-quality use of those services for targeting purposes, building segments, and in such a way that it is quite a combo of different types of data. But the purpose of course is that with the help of this high-quality data, consumers get more relevant, higher-quality service for their own needs. If we talk about advertising, advertising in these services must be more targeted than before. Then when data capability grows, non-relevant advertising is not directly targeted, or then in recruitment or car trading or housing trading we talk about matchmaking, meaning matching supply and demand. The better the matchmaking happens for one's own need, the higher quality the service is. And that requires, for it to succeed, it requires very high-quality data so that needs and supply and demand meet sensibly. And that is what we try and work on. We then constantly work on it from various high-quality, sensible data sources.

And now in this AI world, if we think about what is happening here and how this competition might change, I think a big stumbling block for many will be the lack of high-quality data. That you can build all sorts of seemingly fun and cool things. But operating really commercially with high quality, long-term, and reliably there is a much more difficult trick.

So you have confidence in your data capabilities?

Us? Yes, absolutely.

Thank you, Kai, for this interview and good luck with the rest of the year!

Thank you very much! Have a really nice working week!