Article in Kauppalehti.
“According to Laaksonen, the number of customers appears to be developing even better than expected.”
A reference to the US. So, Verizon could generate significantly more recurring revenue than previously estimated
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Atte had a chat with 
Timo, who is familiar from the Newbie interviews (Alokas haastattelee) thread. 
Topics:
00:00 Intro
00:10 Key points of Q2
01:29 Tier 1 investments
03:15 Verizon contract
05:00 Progress of the Tier 1 strategy
06:53 Development of the Total business
08:28 Dynamics of embedded and traditional cybersecurity services
09:30 Profitability development & cost structure
10:30 Development of headcount
11:19 New F-Secure Trust product
14:44 Guidance
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I listened to the interview and analyzed the Q2 figures a bit in my head.
Timo is, once again, an inspiringly confident speaker. My (optimistic) hypothesis is that this Tier 1 strategy will yield significant growth of 10-15% for the next 1.5 years (and hopefully beyond that). Verizon is at least $15M per year + another major client, with their live launch delayed to Q4/26 or Q1/27. The stock is relatively cheap right now, and the market likely doesn’t fully believe that the growth will trickle down to the bottom line. However, Timo stated in the interview that for the past 9-12 months, they’ve had to invest upfront into these big wins, and now that should start to show from Q3 onwards. Furthermore, they should be able to keep opex flat and convert consultants into in-house employees, making the expertise used relatively cheaper. The debt burden is also melting away at a good pace. I added more today, and it now makes up a significant 5% share of my portfolio.
Can someone smarter tell me why this wouldn’t be a “screaming buy”? And are there any fundamental flaws in my reasoning? My hand is still sweating over the buy button while we’re at the 1.8X price level.
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I’m no smarter, but I’ll answer anyway, if only so someone might be able to alleviate my own concerns.
The only thing that puzzles me a bit about this case is how phlegmatic Tier 1 clients seem to be regarding their business with F-Secure. The signing of the Verizon contract was delayed for who knows how long, and the CEO did say in the Q4 2025 interview (when negotiations were still ongoing) that a single iteration of contract negotiations takes over two months due to the partner’s slowness. Maybe that says something about Verizon’s decision-making processes or something similar, but it struck a chord when it was mentioned in the Q2 2026 interview that another Tier 1 launch has been significantly delayed due to the partner’s resource prioritization. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this and it isn’t a significant problem for the investment case as such, but it feels like we aren’t necessarily operating at the same level of motivation as the partners.
Add to this that, by its own admission, F-Secure has won all Tier 1 competitive tenders over the last two years. Does that speak to the excellence and correct positioning of F-Secure’s product, or something else…?
On the other hand, we aren’t buying a PE30 quality company with strong moats—at least not yet.
In the latest interview, it did sound good that if partners demand extremely high operational reliability for services, that could become a small competitive advantage in the long run if, and when, F-Secure has the capabilities and track record to deliver on it.
PS. Was there any more detail in the webcast about the collection issues related to cash flow? That sentence in the earnings report sounded rather strange, even though Atte quickly glossed over it in the results live stream.
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The global telecommunications services market seems to be in a state of transition. Traditionally, telecom operators were effectively monopolies, and I can still see traces of that culture in these companies.
The internet and mobile phones have brought such massive upheavals to these markets over the last 20 years that these companies have partly lost their previous business to technology companies, while on the other hand, customers have been able to shop around for prices more effectively. At the same time, companies have had to make significant investments just to stay in the game. In other words, it hasn’t been an easy equation for them.
Now, I think we can see that at least some of these companies are better understanding how they need to operate in the market to succeed, and bundled services for consumers are one potential way to create a better future for the companies (on one hand, to increase average revenue per user (ARPU), and on the other, to improve customer retention).
Today, I was interested in looking at, for example, Verizon’s 2025 report and, on the other hand, reading the transcript of their Q1/26 earnings call. That analysis of a single company contains many references to the challenges this market has previously driven itself into. The Q&A section had some quite interesting examples illustrating the massive mindset shifts these companies have had to undergo in their operations. The most essential point is that a secure and reliable connection to data networks is clearly becoming the core of the services sold to consumers, which is exactly the core of F-Secure’s strategy. I intend to continue this research for other Tier 1 operators and plan to return to this theme later.
In short, I understand the concern, and I do not want to downplay the risks, but my own ongoing research into the topic has confirmed rather than weakened my faith in F-Secure and its chosen strategy.
And as for the partners’ motivation, etc., based on my own personal experience, these are always tricky things. There can simply be too many different competing projects (within the customer organization—and these can be completely unrelated to, say, cybersecurity in this case), and internal arrangements, especially in a clearly larger organization, can take a surprisingly long time. For example, in Verizon’s case, they talked a lot about developing customer segmentation, which also ties up their IT resources (they have other development needs as well), and that segmentation, in turn, is very much related to what kind of packages are offered.
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