Amber International Holding Ltd (AMBR) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning. Welcome to Amber International First Quarter 2026 Financial Results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Maya, Amber's premium official HFI ambassador. Mia, you may begin.

Good morning, and welcome to Amber International Holding Limited's first quarter 2026 earnings call. I am Mia, Amber Premium's official Agent FI ambassador and your moderator today. Before we begin, please note that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of U.S. federal securities laws. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a more detailed description of these and other risks and uncertainties, please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Joining us on today's call are Michael Wu, Chairman of the Board and CEO, who will share a first-quarter overview, strategic vision, and AI initiatives. Vicky Wong, President, who will focus on our core business updates, client platform performance, and future focuses. Yibao, Chief Product Officer, who will update us on our regulatory update and platform evolution. Josephine Guy, Chief Financial Officer, who will review our financial results and provide guidance. And Steve Jung, Head of Capital Markets. Following their remarks, we will open the line for Q&A. With that, let me now turn the call over to Michael Wu, our Chairman of the Board and CEO.

Thank you, Mia, and thank you all for joining us today. The first quarter of 2026 was another tempered period for the crypto industry, continuing the downtrend we saw in the fourth quarter of 2025. Our total revenue for the quarter was $10 million US dollars compared to the $14.5 million in Q1 2025 and the $16.3 million last quarter. Despite a challenging environment, we see this as an opportunity to strengthen our foundation with clients and continuing advancing our strategic priorities. Our focus remains on how we serve our clients more efficiently and how we scale that capability through our agentic fintech capabilities. Through every cycle, what proves durable are Ember's most important assets, our ability to innovate and our ability to build scalable, future-proof infrastructure. To that point, this quarter marks another step forward in the strategy we have been building towards. As part of our broader agentic transformation, we introduced the A-Suite as an agent-native operating system that abstracts the complexity of digital asset financial services, enabling them to be automated and operated by AI agents. This is similar to how AWS two decades ago abstracted the complexity of servers and enabled a whole generation of web apps to simply build on top. That is where finance is heading as the agentic economy arrives, and our vision is to be the foundational layer beneath it. We are moving from competing as the interface and the distribution layers to providing the rails for the agentic economy itself. This is not an aspiration. It is already on the way. Ember Premium has already proven itself as a strong distribution layer with established institutional relationships, our regulatory licensing footprint, and the demonstrated segment profitability as disclosed in our financial statements. Building on that proven foundation, we are now creating the operating core beneath it. The greater efficiency and expanded addressable market unlocked by A-Suite are what will carry us toward the agentic future that I have always envisioned, spoken about, and built toward. This also marks the next step in how we define AMBR, not just as Amber Premium the crypto platform anymore, but as Amber, a truly emerging agentic fintech. As I mentioned in previous earnings course, Amber first began as Amber AI. The conviction that crypto and AI would converge to define the future of finance was not a strategy we adopted later, but rather it was the thesis we founded the company upon. What you are seeing today, this quarter, across both our business and our innovation is that this thesis is arriving in practice, and we intend to keep building it deliberately one proven layer at a time. Building on Amber Premium's proven success, we launched the first of our three flagship agentic fintech operating systems within the A-suite at the end of March. AMM, which stands for agentic market making, is an agent-native liquidity operating system for token projects and the designated market making infrastructure. AMM is designed to unify execution workflows, infrastructure, and transparency into a platform that can be orchestrated by agents with customized real-time performance and risk reporting and monitoring. We expect AMM to begin contributing meaningful revenue in Q2 and to scale from there. It is the first of the three A-Suite products we plan to bring to market this year. E will elaborate further on AMM and our A-Suite positioning later. Beyond A-Suite, we are also embedding AI agent capabilities directly into our existing operations across all of our businesses. Within our iClick digital marketing business, we are transitioning toward an agent-first and an agent-native operating model by integrating Mia, our first in-house AI agent, who is also our host today for the earnings call, into iClick's core workflows, decision-making processes, and service delivery. This goes way beyond just using AI as a tool. We are making autonomous agentic workflows a central driver of how we operate, and that is already improving efficiency and scalability across the business system. This is the practical execution of our broader AI agent-driven strategy. As we continue building towards this vision, I'm also pleased to announce our Crypto4AI vision. Crypto4AI, or C4AI as we call it, is our view that crypto will become the financial and economic infrastructure for the agentic economy. To that end, our inaugural C4AI Investor Day, planned for October, will be an important milestone where we will share our progress and showcase a whole fleet of AMBER agents with the market. One final point on capital allocation, because it reflects how we view our own valuation. We continue to repurchase shares opportunistically through Q1 and remain focused on returning capital to our shareholders. Under our $50 million share repurchase program announced in November 2025, we repurchased approximately $2 million ADS during the period. As of March March 31st, 2026, approximately US$45.5 million remained available under the program. We continue to have significant flexibility for opportunistic repurchases while investing for growth. Ultimately, Q1 reflected a deliberate strategic decision on our part. Our strategy is advancing and we are using this period to redefine the scope of AMBR and the position of the company for the next phase of the agentic economy. With that, I will now turn the call over to Yi, our Chief Product Officer, for a deeper look at our product roadmap and the launch of Ember's first agent-native operating system, AMM.

Thank you, Michael. Our platform innovation is a natural continuation of how we have always built and delivered financial products. From the start, Ember Premium operated primarily as a distribution layer, a UI-driven platform focused on user acquisition and onboarding. We are now evolving into a full-stack Asian-native organization, with a particular emphasis on building the service layer underneath that distribution layer. This is a natural next step beyond traditional UI-centric thinking, where our products were defined by features, buttons, and branches, issue managers, in fact, creating systems, economy, operating systems can deliver personalized and optimized service at a scale no standalone platform, manual process, or single-purpose application can match. This quarter, we took a significant step towards with the launch of AMM, the first flagship component of our A-suite, native market-making infrastructure platform. Its core value lies in creating a unified platform layer that abstracts complex execution workflows, operational infrastructure, and transparency requirements. For token projects, liquidity is critical to price discovery, trading experience, exchange relationships, investor confidence, and ecosystem credibility. Yet, designated market making has historically been manual, bilateral, and trust-based. AMM is designed to turn this process into automated and can define key requirements such as targets, values, omission, quote review, market makers are participating in the token liquidity value chain in a more scalable infrastructure driven and designed with a clear division of labor alongside traditional market makers. It is not a replacement but an infrastructure layer that enables greater efficiency, transparency, and scalability. In being able to offer different execution models combined with real-time visibility via our performance dashboard which is soon to be launched, we are already seeing strong early adoption and positive feedback from token projects in our soft launch phase. From this perspective, AMM not only strengthens our own execution capabilities, but also creates a scalable revenue architecture. Revenue can come from recurring service and platform fees, value expansion as clients add more centralized or decentralized markets, market maker participation, and potentially premium data and analytics over time. We anticipate AMN will begin generating meaningful revenue in Q2 and over time to serve as one of the A-suite operating systems we plan to launch this year. More importantly, AMN reflects the broader strategic direction of Amber, moving from distribution to service, from interface to infrastructure, and from manual financial workflows to Asian native opera programs will continue to strengthen our regulatory licensing footprint. We have been granted the viral license in Dubai and are making steady programs on our virtual asset service provider application in Hong Kong. These efforts reflect our strategic allocation of resources to better serve growing institutional demand supported by an increasingly visually visible, Hong Kong's state regulatory foundation is essential to building a sustainable, high-quality business in the future of our journey, a distribution-layered financial service platform into a fuller picture of Asian-native operating systems for projective crypto fintech. Next, I will hand it over to Vicky for a detailed review of our Q1 business performance.

Thank you Yi. Before deep diving into our AI and BR platform business, I would like to first build on Michael and Yi's earlier comments around how we have successfully scaled Ember Premium over the years and how we believe we are now entering the next phase of scalable growth. As Michael mentioned, Ember Premium has evolved into a highly scalable institutional distribution platform, supported by long-standing client relationships, a regulated operating footprint, and demonstrated segment profitability as reflected in our financial statements. Importantly, what we are building extends well beyond a single initiative. This quarter, we announced AAMM, which, as Michael mentioned earlier, we expect will contribute meaningfully in the coming quarters. More importantly, AMM represents only the first of the three A-Suite operational cores we plan to introduce this year as we continue building the infrastructure layer for scalable institutional automation. The same automation and infrastructure capabilities that power our market-making businesses can now be extended across a broader range of institutional financial products and services, creating a more scalable and higher-quality earnings profile over time. Turning back to our core business and Q&A performance, the first quarter of 2026 reflected a familiar market environment across digital assets, including software trading activity, lower-risk appetite, and more selective institutional capital deployment. This broader market condition will naturally reflect in our quarterly financial performance particularly within our execution solution and payment solution businesses. However what continues to evolve meaningfully is the expansion of the digital asset opportunity set. We are no longer only seeing institutional interest around core crypto assets. Increasingly we are seeing demand broaden towards tokenized financial products, on-chain yield strategies, tokenized railroad assets, and a wider range of digitally native financial products. Alongside the trends, we are also seeing growing client appetite for more sophisticated and tailored structured products. Clients today are increasingly looking for customized yield opportunities, defined downside protection and structure aligned with their specific return objectives, rather than standardized off-the-shelf solutions. Our ability to offer customized structure products across different underlying assets, tenor, and payout profiles is a direct response to this evolving demand profile. Importantly, we believe this training supports both deeper client engagement and and a higher quality revenue mix over time. As the asset universe expands, we believe distribution becomes increasingly valuable. Institutions are looking not only for access to products, but also for trusted platforms that can help clients access and manage these opportunities within regulated framework. This is where we believe Ember Premium is strategically well-positioned. At the same time, we are seeing increasing demand for financial institutions and platforms seeking embedded digital asset capabilities rather than building these capabilities internally. We believe this creates meaningful long-term B2B2C opportunities for us. Against this backdrop, our primary recurring revenue engine, wealth management solutions contributed 4.3 million U.S. dollars in Q1, accounting for 74.8% of Ember Premium Segment Revenue. This continues to reflect our intentional shift towards higher margin and more predictable revenue streams. To further strengthen our regulatory positioning, we also took proactive steps this quarter to optimize our plan account structure and align more closely with evolving regulatory requirements. As part of this process, we streamlined a portion of low engagement client accounts while continuing to deepen relationships with our core institutional and focused client base. Importantly, this optimization had minimal impact on overall asset-on-platform, while asset-on-platform per active client remains stable at $1.2 million. We believe this strengthens the long-term quality of the platform as the industry becomes more institutional. Ultimately, while market cycles may continue to impact short-term activity, we believe the long-term value of this platform lets in our client relationships, regulating infrastructure, and ability to scale customized financial services through automation. In summary, Ember Premium is increasingly evolving from a client platform into an Asian-native institutional layer for execution, coordination, and distribution of digital and tokenized assets. With that, I will hand it over to Josephine, our Chief Financial Officer, for our financial results.

Thank you, Vicky, and good morning, everyone. I will now reveal our financial results for the first quarter of 2026 and March 21st and provide our guidance for the second quarter. Throughout my remarks, I will primarily reference the consolidated AMBER International Entity, providing additional contacts for the AMBER premium segment where relevant. Revenue for the first quarter was $10 million. This compares to $14.5 million in Q1 of 2025 and $16.3 million in the sequential fourth quarter of 2025. Our Q1 performance was primarily influenced by a materially softer digital access market environment, which leads to a moderation in transactions volumes across the entire industry. Furthermore, our year-over-year comparisons was impacted by a non-occurring US$2.9 million service fee that we recognized in the prior year period. Looking closer at Amber Premium, performance across our core solutions was quite balanced. The wealth management solutions delivered 4.3 million US dollars. The execution solutions brought in 0.9 million US dollars. Payment solutions delivered 0.6 million dollars. And iClick marketing and enterprise solutions contribute approximately 4.3 million US dollars. The growth process for the quarter came in at 6.8 million US dollars, representing a 67.7% margin. This is a step down from the $12.1 million with gross profit and the 74.2% margins we record last quarter, reflecting shifts in our product max as our due products represent a higher share of revenue this quarter. Despite these near-term shifts, we remain firmly focused on driving long-term high-margin growth across all product lines moving down to the operating line we record an operating loss of 3.2 million US dollars for Q1 however our total operating expenses improved to approximately 10 million US dollars down from 11 million US dollars in Q4 2025 this reductions and highlights our strategic efforts to streamline operational resources alongside early efficiency gains from our internal AI initiatives. I want to highlight an encouraging case here. Within our iClick marketing and enterprise solutions business, we deployed our AI agent, MIR, into the operation. This integrations help reduce operating costs within that segment meaningfully this quarter alone as we are transitioning the digital marketing business toward an AI-driven operating model. The key takeaway for us is straightforward. AI is not just a forward-looking thesis for us. It is already actively absorbing operating expenses and improving the unique economics of our existing business. We expected this internal AI efficiency to continue compounding throughout 2026 as we extend the year's capability to additional corporate functions. The net loss from continuing operations was $3.7 million, compared to a net income of $0.8 million last quarter. Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 was a loss of US$3.2 million, compared to a positive adjusted EBITDA of US$50,000 in Q4 2025. Turning to the balance sheet, our financial position remains strong and continues to improve. We closed the quarter with US$36.5 million in cash and zero bank debt, giving us a highly resilient foundation. Looking ahead to the second quarter of 2026, we are issuing preliminary revenue guidelines for the Emerald Premium segments of between $9 million to $10 million, representing a quarter-over-quarter increase of approximately 58.1% to 75.7% from our Q1 2026 and with premium segments revenue of 5.7 million US dollars. Our guidance currently covers the AMBRE premium segments only and does not include revenue from our ITREG marketing and enterprise solutions to be consistent with peer risk guidance practice. As we look to the rest of the year, alongside the external growth strategic, we have peer receipt outline, Internally, we are also enhancing our financial reporting system to provide transparent insights into our performance and maintaining strong liquidity and balance sheet flexibility in order to support our global expansion and strategic partnerships. We believe that this disciplined approach will create sustainable and long-term value for our shareholders. With that, I will turn the call back to Mir. Thank you.

Thank you, Josephine. That concludes our remarks for today. We will now open the line for Q and A. Operator, please begin.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. and for participants using speaker equipment it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question comes from Brian Dobson with ClearStreet. Please proceed.

Yeah, thanks very much. You know, if we could just start it with a big picture question, I suppose two years from now, what do you think the business looks like and how do you think investors should be contemplating your growth outlook at this point?

Thank you, Brian. This is actually a great question, because fundamentally I think starting from this quarter, we want the market, we want the investors to understand that Ember is truly emerging from the platform, Ember Premium, which is by itself a very solid profitable digital wealth management platform, to Ember, which I define as a crypto-enabled agentic fintech. Two years from now on what the business should look like, I do think the agent-native operating systems we are launching today, the AMM and the remaining A-suite, and the agents that are operating them as of today, they will become a financial infrastructure for a lot more companies. They will hopefully, by that point, become the financial stack for the agent economy. how that will make our revenue model look like. I do think we have proven with our own platforms with Emma Premium that an already automated, already agent-native operating system can enable businesses in a scalable way. Two years from now on, I think that scale point, that scalability point should have been proven by that point. There should be a lot of platforms other than Ember Premium, a lot of platforms either owned, invested by Ember or completely unrelated to Ember on an ownership basis that are operating on this shared stack that we are building today. I'm highly confident in the direction we are going. I'm highly confident in delivering or accomplishing that in a two-year framework and I do think I think the market will gradually understand, Amber, as an emerging crypto-enabled agentic fintech, as I mentioned. And again, circling back to our crypto for AI vision, I do think being crypto-enabled as an agentic fintech gives us a unique edge if we look a bit further into the future. I do believe a lot of financial services today will move onto the crypto rail, especially As the agentic economy arrives, we not only have that vision, we are one of the first to actually deliver that vision.

Yeah, thanks. And I suppose just following up on that, do you think that leaning into that aspect of the business makes the overall business model more scalable as you're driving more agent-native systems, kind of similar to more like a software company?

There are similarities, I think, to software companies in the sense that most of the companies, as I always mention today, are engineers at the core. Ember at the core is a technology-driven company, but I do think the business model will look different from the software companies or especially the SaaS companies as we understand today. I don't think we are offering just a software, a tool, or an agentic tool even. What we are building and we are increasingly offering to our own platforms and externally is really more of an agentic capability. Take iClick as an example, as we mentioned today. iClick is a digital marketing, and maybe at this point still is a digital marketing business. What MIA does and what our AgentX does to iClick is offer the ability to offer the same services or even much better services to their clients with a much more agent-native way in terms of operation. Most of the operations now are being automated. The way the workflow they are streamlined is agent first rather than human first. The ability itself, again back to the scalability point, is highly scalable. A different company or even a company with only similar business or different client base or similar client base can easily render that ability compared to the software example you mentioned. Today, if another company uses a software from a software company, they still need to use the tool themselves. They still need to have stuff trained to operate with their own workflow using that tool. The agentic services, the agentic abilities we are offering is different. It's actually end-to-end. It's actually result-driven. We do think companies will start to get used to paying for the actual results rather than paying for the tools that can hopefully get them the results. I think that's fundamentally different. I think the market will start to realize that. A lot of that understanding, I think, is becoming more talked about among the private investors, among the VC investors. But really, in the public market, I do think Amber is one of the first companies that through our results, through our accomplishments this year, hopefully will also educate the public market investors about this new business.

Yeah, excellent. Thanks very much. Thank you.

Our next question is from Emily Wei with Cemetery Affluent. Please proceed.

Hello, management. I have two questions. Hello, management. Can you hear me?

Yes. Hi, Emily.

Hello. I actually have two questions. So first of all, can you help us understand why we are pivoting towards an AI story? And secondly, on AMM, what has actually been delivered so far, and when do we expect the A-suite to start making money?

Great questions. This is Michael again. First, I have to correct you. We are not pivoting to AI. First, Ember started as Ember AI. It's actually always been our DNA. And secondly, I've had this conviction, and I really think the company is putting that into reality as we speak that, crypto and AI are converging, and these two technologies well together define what the agentic economy looks like, especially in what I call agentic finance. And also this is already happening, as I mentioned about the MIA inside iClick example, this is already transforming operating expenses through automation, it is already changing workflows from humans using tools to agents leading towards direct results with humans in the loop. It's already making a financial impact. I think that's sort of related to your second question, which I will also get to. Also, if you look at Ember Premium itself, we really see Ember Premium as the proof case. Proof case because it is successful. It has a very strong reputation among I think the most highly demanding, highly sophisticated and high valuable client base. It is a profitable business. But we are just reviewing within Ember what enables the success of Ember Premium beyond of course our great sales team, our great management team and all the trust our clients are putting into us. It's actually this operating layer, which now we are reviewing as AMM, as A-suite. It's actually this operating layer and this agent-native operating capability that makes Ember Premium, makes our platform successful, makes us able to deliver a very diverse variety of products and services within crypto. And the ability to deliver that not only to the highest standards, but deliver that with efficiency, with scalability. So I really don't think we're talking about pivot. AI and the crypto has been in Ember's DNA since day one. But I do understand why you asked this question of where does this confusion come from. I think over the last year or so, we are a new public company. And throughout most of 2025, people were still trying to understand Ember Premium itself, itself, which again is our first showcase, our first success. And this year, of course, we are all on this call along with all the investors, with all the friends, trying to educate the market about the broader AMBER, which hopefully starting from this earnings call become more clear. And to the second of your question, about when does AMM start to contribute revenues, It's actually already started, as we mentioned, AMM was launched at the end of March. It's an agent-native liquidity provision of agents that operate in contributing revenue as we speak today. I do think we will start to see these increasingly significant revenue contributions from AMM and other A-suites as we launch them from the second quarter onwards.

Thank you. Thank you.

Basically, as Michael has mentioned, AMN adds extra scalable revenue streams to our future developments. Basically, I just want to make a similar analysis about some token projects or AMN market makers onboarded to a generic market making of the platform. Actually, they will be very sticky. and something like a middle-to-long-term agreement they were signed with us. So basically the revenue itself will be recurring and scalable as they're adding more values or maybe they're adding more parameters or they require more data of service from our side. So basically we do think that they're extremely scalable and start to contributing meaningful revenue.

There are no further phone questions. I would like to hand it back over to management for webcast questions.

Yeah, we have a few questions on the screen. I will read one of them out first. The question is, how do you expect AI strategy to influence margins, cash flow, balance sheet efficiency over time? Again, I think we touched upon some of that. The AI strategy is already influencing pretty much all of them on cash flow, on expenses. As we mentioned with iClick example, Mia's already reducing OPEX of the iClick business segment as we speak. In terms of margin, you know, AMM is another good example. It turns a fairly – it used to be a fairly bespoken kind of business model of liquidity provision in crypto and digital assets into highly streamlined agent operating systems. So that definitely increases not only the margin on the business, but also, again, how scalable the business can be. In terms of balance sheet efficiency, I think that will also show the impact over time especially as we launch the other two products within A suite in the coming months. Another question, the question is what LLM is being deployed to enable the AI solution for Amber? Are there any proprietary components to your agentic infrastructure?" This is very interesting to have a more technical question on this earnings call. In short, the way we build what we call the intelligence layer of our agentic stack is we are very open to use whatever LLM model or whatever intelligence actually enables our business and our clients' businesses to be better. We of course have integrated the in-house deployed, our fine-tuned versions of open source models where it fits both. There are of course areas within our agentic workflow that are smaller, maybe less intelligent, but cheaper and more customizable open source models are suitable. We've done that. So, in a way, we have our own fine-tuned smaller models, I guess, in the workflow. How are these, and are there proprietary components to the agent-taking structure? This is also a very interesting question. I think we touched upon the models, the intelligence layer, right? I do think there are companies, there are giant, gigantic AI labs that provide all these intelligence layers, and I don't think it's Amber's position today. at least to compete on that front. I do think in terms of building more vertical agentic services or vertical agentic service stacks, that's where our edge lies, whether specifically in fintech or in financial services, especially digital assets financial services, which I think are actually more complex but also more digital native form of financial services. There's a lot of harness you need to build. There's a lot of data sets that I'll be trained with. So the short answer is yes. I do think there are a lot of private or open source models.

Thank you all for joining us today. This quarter marks a defining moment as we continue to advance our agent-native operation system build-out while maintaining a resilient foundation in a challenging market. We remain fully committed to delivering institutional great excellence and long-term value for our shareholders. We sincerely appreciate your continued trust and support, and we look forward to sharing further updates with you in the upcoming quarter. This concludes today's call. Thank you, and have a great day.

Thank you. You may now disconnect.