Cision: Announcement of Strategy Update and New Financial Targets

Regulatory News:

As a central part of its strategic update in Stockholm today, Cision (STO:CSN) will describe how it plans to build on its leading market positions to capture more of the PR market and extend the company’s products and services into Content Marketing. The heart of the strategy is the continued transformation of Cision to a cloud-based PR software subscription business. Following Cision’s new strategy, new financial targets will be presented, namely a growth of the subscription revenues to be >80% of total revenues, and an EBITDA margin ranging between 16 and 18 %, 2014-16, and to be >18% by the end of Q4 2016.

Peter Granat, CEO of Cision comments; "We remain committed to our core PR market and expect to leverage our existing customer base. At the same time we will focus on a subscription based revenue model and extend our services into content marketing.”

On the strategic update, CEO Peter Granat will present an overview of Cision’s business and strategy including a view on how the PR and media market is transforming and how Cision’s updated strategy will adapt to this changed environment. CFO Tosh Bruce-Morgan will summarize the financial trend up to and including the second quarter 2013 and develop on the indicative incremental effect of investments required to keep up with competitor’s investments in sales and marketing. The newly appointed COO of Cision US, Dawn Conway, will give a view on various opportunities in the US market and how the US business should execute on these. Magnus Thell, Managing Director of Cision Nordics, will provide a Nordic overview and present a content marketing case and define the possibilities for Cision within this area.

Strategy highlights

Cision’s strategy for the period 2014–2016 is to leverage its core assets and provide value for clients, employees and shareholders by:

• Maintaining focus and building off of its core PR market
• Growing revenues within the current customer base by leveraging the value of Cision’s fully integrated solution and cross-selling additional services to the majority of customers who currently only subscribe to one or two services
• Growing its mid-market and enterprise customers
• Changing the revenue mix, by increasing the share of revenues from subscriptions, through continued investment in product development
• Extending Cision’s services into social media and content marketing given the changing needs of the PR market
• Making increased investments in sales and marketing to support execution of the new strategy

New financial targets for 2014-2016

• Grow subscription revenue to be > 80% of total revenues by Q4 2016
• EBITDA margin ranging between 16 and 18 %, 2014-16, and to be >18% by Q4 2016

Dividend policy will remain unchanged: Cision’s dividend policy over the longer term is to distribute up to 50% of group earnings after tax in the form of dividend.

The information provided herein is such that Cision AB (publ) is obligated to disclose pursuant to the Swedish Securities Markets Act (SFS 2007:528) and/or the Swedish Financial Instruments Trading Act (SFS 1991:980). The information was submitted for publication at 08:30 AM CEST on August 28, 2013.

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