Amber International Holding Ltd (AMBR) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, and welcome to Amber International Second 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. At that time, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to introduce your host, AMBR's AI Ambassador, Mia. You may begin.

Good morning and welcome to Amber International Holding Limited's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I am Mia, Amber's official AI agent moderator for today's call. Before we begin, please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. 1995. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. For a more detailed discussion of these risks, please refer to the company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent annual report on Form 20-F. Joining us on today's call are Michael Wu, Chairman of the Board and CEO. Vicky Wong, President. Yibao, Chief Operating Officer. Josephine Ngai, Chief Financial Officer, and Steve Jiang, Co-Chief Financial Officer. 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.

79.5 was one most turning positive from our agentic and the digital asset is 0.1 million. We bought back approximately 2.6 million ADF for about 5.8 million, roughly 44.2 million. Why they matter? Because they are the first evidence that our new strategy... Two days ago in Hong Kong, we introduced AMBR. We built AMBR as a Digital Wealth Management, so we believe this is where the greater opportunity We started in 2017 as Amber AI, learning exactly where capable models stop being used for sequential decisions. In June, I stepped down as CEO of Amber Group to run AMBR food for the next day on Monday, and I will repeat that today to this audience. And the strategy already has two, it does what Ember Premium's relationship managers have done, asset classes, a daily signal feed filtered to what a user actually what matters, and Ember is existing when a user decides to ask for relationship management inside iClick and the CMRS space of more than a hundred and so available directly from AMM and shareholders better. There's nothing to announce and we won't speculate on outcomes you learned of the MIA or EAM. We'll show you what else about the financial framework for the transition. Build AI agents.

For my side, it's simple. The agent strategy is already operating, not just announced. EAM went from operating system to 3.5 million US dollars of recognized revenue in a single quarter. MIA runs a substantial share of more than 100 enterprise workflows our team have run for years. We build agents on infrastructure we have, which is why we can move quickly without taking on the risk of building forms. What we have to do this morning is make the pivot concrete from the operating point of view. Michael describes the pattern we follow, which is that we operate the business expertise into an agent, and then we take that agent to market. Almost all the real work happens in that middle step and it's well I think let me pick up where I left our A3s and the ANS agent native operators. A few of you asked afterwards why we were leading with the agents themselves. An agent needs access to the right data. You can follow what is allowed to touch and and controls around execution, monitoring, risk, and compliance, in need of precise purpose. I mean a defined user, and the real situation where the intelligence, the operating environment lets that intelligence act, and the purpose determines what the action competing as the foundation model layer, and the model neutral, and use whatever intelligence works best for a given job whether it comes from a proprietary model or thinking about what that means for how you read the model race because when the models get more capable and cheaper it works in our favor rather than against us our agents get better without us it's a layer sitting above the model which is where you find deep understanding of a particular vertical the connections into the the right tools and the data, the design of the workflow, and the only unglamorous work of making general intelligence reliable enough that someone will be trusted with the real In the clearest example of how that plays out, market-making has always grown on a fragmented set of workflows with clients' requirements sitting in one system, facing another, monitoring such as to carry their own tools and their own manual steps to put their AI interface in front of all that, because their interface on top just gives you a faster route to the same bottleneck, which standardized the underlying workflow first, then connected the systems, structured the data, put monitoring and controls around it, and make the process machine-operable one step at the time described to you last quarter as the AM operating system. In the second quarter, AMM contributed roughly $3.5 million of revenue in the right seat. Underneath our agent strategy, the meaningful distinction in this field are still asking investors to fund an operation layer that doesn't exist yet. This is our definition of agentic revenue. The work runs on agent infrastructure rather than through the manual process it replaced. helpful about is what comes next. That revenue today still mostly reflect monetization of the operating platform and the capabilities and the agents getting paid directly for delivering the outcome. Our expectation does that the agents bring to that capability customer pays for. Starting with the manual workflow and eventually a specialized vertical agent that simply delivers the result. AMM is in the middle of the stage today. We will show you what we measured before we set the move. We also learned from Ron before we started on years of operating experience on portfolio analysis, risk monitoring, product evaluation, and the accumulated judgment of relationship managers, traders, structurers, and product teams. In both cases, we already understood well, operating knowledge into structured workflows and the system, let agents take home more of the work as it earns the right due to sink out of our legacy business inside the new AMVR. The customer relationships, the domain expertise, the regulatory infrastructure, the execution connectivity, the operating data and the risk and the compliance experience all stay valuable. Hard for the newer entrants to assemble from scratch to stay the same is the way we have traditionally delivered those couple of options. Relationship managers, operations staff, and the manuals that grows in the fairly street line with headcounts, and that's a different economic shape from the company we intend to build over the next decade. You can already see the difference showing up in this quarter. Each legacy business and the structure will end up as infrastructure or agent depend on and some delivery model will become that central we run a and beyond internal we want to be the first serious use of everything we build there was a practical reason for that which is that running our own agents in our own workflow is such as well they fail before a customer does issues as well they come out short where our human judgment is still needed, what context or tooling they are missing, and how the workflow itself should be redesigned, what breaks, and then we take it outside. Daboo is our operating model and it travels from one vertical to the next. So when you look at that $3.5 million US dollar from AMM, I would ask you to read it as early proof points rather than a destination. It's a foundation the specialized agent is a product customer should eventually be paying Well, the early in this transition, but we are starting from there We're starting with business that operates users who use them Workflows that function and the revenue that's already being recognized is turning those advantages into specialized agents prove they can deliver With that I work.

Thank you Earlier this week, on September 1st, we officially unveiled AMBR and introduced the next chapter of our company, focused on building specialized AI agents for high-value, high-stakes use and have been very encouraged by the initial response. Since the launch of AMBR, we have seen strong interest from existing clients, prospective users, partners, and the broader market. While we are still at a very early stage, that response has reinforced our conviction that users are looking for something beyond another general purpose AI interface. They are more intelligent to understand their context, know what matters to them, and can continuously help them to take action. And this is where we believe AMBR has a differentiated foundation. The AMBR brand is new, but the capabilities behind it have been built over many years. We bring deep domain expertise, trusted financial infrastructure, experience serving sophisticated users, and a detailed understanding of real-world high-stakes workflows become increasingly valuable in an agent AI world. Foundation models are becoming extremely powerful, but in our view, the most valuable specialist specialist agents will require a deeper know-how of the underlying industry, and this is where our domain expertise comes particularly valuable. Embry, our flagship personal finance agent, is one of the first examples of how AMBR is combining frontier AI capabilities with deep financial expertise to build specialist agents. Over the years, we have built deep capabilities across digital wealth management, base management, and financial infrastructure. Embry brings these capabilities together in a much more scalable and intelligent form. Rather than simply providing users with more information, Embry is designed to understand their financial context, identify what matters most to them, and help turn their intention. For example, Embree can build a holistic view of a user's portfolio across different accounts and asset classes, identify concentration and correlation risks, surface the signals that are most relevant to their actual holdings, and continuously monitor specific conditions or tasks on their behalf. The first version of Embree on September 1st, early response from our existing clients, partners, and broader community has been very encouraging. This is still an early version, and we expect the product to evolve significantly as we validate user behavior and progressively unlock more agent capabilities. Our long-term ambition is that AMBRI to make a level of personalized financial intelligence that historically was only available through high-touch private banking relationships, accessible to a much broader group of users. MIA solves the same shape of problems in a completely different market. Marketing teams run research in one tool, inside in another, content in the third, and distribution in the fourth, and nobody owns the seams between them. MIA is built to understand the objective and carry that workflow through end-to-end instead of handling it off four times. We saw it two ways now, embedded in the services, our marketing businesses deliver directly as a product and having both gives us an unusually clear read on what a customer will pay for the agent on its own versus the services wrapped around it. Our pick in the first batch of personal finance and marketing operations shares almost no customers, no regulations, and no workflows. So, if the same approach works and not luck, we'll choose the third agent and the fourth. We go where we're already and frequented, and where a newcomer would need years to assemble. We are still at the beginning of this journey, and there is significant work ahead. But the launch of AMBR marks an important milestone zone for the company and early response we have seen and have again strengthen our conviction in the direction we are taking. We look forward to sharing more as we expand the capabilities of AMBRI and MIA and introduce additional specialized agents across the AMBR platform.

Thank you Vicky and good morning everyone. Before I get into the numbers, let me start with the headline for the quarter. Revenue grew 39% sequentially and we moved from an operating loss of 3.2 million in Q1 to operating income of 1 million in Q2. And importantly, we did that while keeping operating expenses essentially flat at around 10 million. I think that's an important point for investors. The strategy Michael just described is not being driven by a significant increase in What we are seeing is that it's a change in the revenue mix, with higher margin agentic revenue growing alongside continued improvement in our core business. Typically, when a company goes through this kind of repositioning, you would expect to see a higher cost base first and potentially a need for additional capital so far we are seeing the opposite we are going revenue improving margins and moving into profitability with some materially increasing expenses that's the kind of financial discipline that we want to maintain as we execute this transition. Let me walk through the quarter in a little more detail. Starting with revenue, total revenue in Q2 was 13.9 million, up 38.8% from 10 million in Q1. Beginning this quarter, we have reorganized how we present revenue into two categories, which we think better reflects how the business is evolving. It's digital access platform revenue, which was $6.6 million and includes wealth management, execution, and payment solutions. The second is adjunct revenue, which was $7.4 million and reflects the initial contribution from AMM together with our marketing and enterprise solutions business. Within the digital assets platform, wealth management solution generated $5.3 million compared with $4.3 million last quarter. That improvement was mainly driven by stronger demand for both our diversified products and several newly launched offerings. Revenue was one of the key developments this quarter. AMM contributed $3.5 million in its first quarter of revenue recognition, while marketing and enterprise solutions contributed $3.8 million. And if you look at digital assets platform together with AMM, revenue was $10.1 million. That's slightly above the high end of the $9 million to $10 million outlooks we previously communicated. Moving to gross profit, we saw a significant improvement. Gross profit increased to $11.1 million from $6.8 million in Q1, and gross margin expanded to 79.5% from 67.7%. The main driver here was the mix of the business. We are seeing a larger contribution from higher margin activities, particularly AMM and our core wealth management business. So, from our perspective, it's not just the revenue growth that's encouraging. Revenue is also improving. Expenses, we remain at approximately $10 million, essentially flexed with the prior quarter. That's particularly important given the growth we delivered during the quarter. We are starting to see the operating leverage we believe can come from different AI integrations across the results. Operating income was $1 million for the quarter, compared with an operating loss of $3.2 million in Q1. At the bottom line, net income from continuing operations was $1.5 million compared with a net loss of $3.7 million last quarter. Adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations improved to positive $1.9 million from negative $3.2 million in Q1 and adjusted net income was $1.5 million. Turning briefly to the balance sheet, as of June 30, we have $34.2 million in cash, cash equivalents, time deposits, and restricted cash to address our loans because I know this will be an important question for investors. As Michael discussed, the company is going through a meaningful strategic transition toward becoming an energetic AI company. Given that transition, we don't believe our previously issued financial guidance is still the right framework for evaluating the company's future performance. We have therefore decided to withdraw that guidance while we build more operating history around this field, new business, and get better visibility into their financial contribution. Once we have enough data and forecasting visibility, we intend to provide update guidance. Besides that, withdrawing the guidance doesn't change our confidence in the long-term opportunity. It's really about making sure that when we give investors a forward-looking framework, it's based on the business we are building now rather than the business we had before this transition. So stepping back, I think Q2 gives you more early but meaningful evidence of what this new model can look like. Revenue growth, expenses stayed essentially flat, growth margin expanded significantly, and we move from an operating loss to operating profit. That's the pattern we want to continue seeing as we move toward a more Asian native. HireMind is still early in this transition, and there is a lot of work ahead. But we are encouraged by the progress we are seeing, and we will continue to stay focused on disciplined execution and long-term value creation. With that, I will turn the call back to Mia. Thank you.

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

Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to join the question queue, 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'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. We'll pause a moment to allow for questions.

AMBR's definition of what is even, and industry sort of defines AI agents in the lab, and take a step back to harness, increasingly an open source, free to deploy locally by AMBR or other companies. You also have a lot of open source harness, in fact, some of the most popular personal General Agent Harness, like the Permit Agent, Open Claw, PIE Agent, they're all open source, which means anyone, including AMBR. Because we have, again, very deep understanding to be serviced around their money, we understand how these come. Build Harness will pay, I believe. The system that's been running for years cannot build these programs.

Once again, if you'd like to ask a question via the phone, please press the star once on your telephone keypad. Were there any other web questions?

They do not need that 15 million, Amber and Mia.

Because that's not their phone.

They have barely a phone question at this time.

You can think of it as...

Thank you. That concludes today's conference. That concludes the question and answer session. I'll turn the floor back to Mia for final comments.

Thank you all for joining us today. This quarter marked a clear step in Amber's pivot from a digital wealth management business to a technology company that builds specialized AI agents. Ombre and Nia are the first two agents now in market, and the second quarter results are the first evidence that this direction is beginning to show through in the numbers. We sincerely appreciate your continued trust and support. We look forward to sharing more in the quarters ahead, including at our investor day, which we now expect to hold before year-end. This concludes today's call. Thank you, and have a great day.

Thank you, this concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.