Sofina Newsletter #17 – 20/01/2026

The highlight of the second half of 2025 was undoubtedly the successful strategic scale-up of our investment platform, marked by the award of a long-term issuer grade rating from S&P Global ("A-"; outlook stable), an equity raise and a bond issuance. Both transactions were oversubscribed. We are deeply grateful to our core investors, our reference family shareholders and our retail base, for their confidence in our long-term strategy, focused on creating sustainable economic and societal value through the cycles. In an uncertain environment, it's a competitive edge to have the ability to protect the operating value of our investments while being ready to seize opportunities as they arise.

It was also a good moment to build upon a supportive capital markets backdrop, as the rights issue coincided with a modest share price discount, shortly followed by access to stable and responsive debt markets. All this at a moment when founders and management teams are increasingly looking for the support of deeply aligned, long-term partners to grow their businesses.

It was the right time to scale. Companies are staying private for longer, capital is increasingly concentrating with leading GPs, and longer exit cycles are creating opportunities for patient, long-term investors such as Sofina. Our investment team is working hard putting this extra firepower to work in the "right" deals: those that generate attractive returns, where we can add value, with partners that share our values. It's busy time at Sofina.

On the portfolio side, H2 2025 broadly mirrored the first six months. Our portfolio companies continued to grow in spite of the challenging macroeconomic climate and geopolitical tensions, volatile terms of trade, but buoyed by tech and AI-related investment flows, even as the technology's impact still needs to appear. In essence, solid underlying performance in most of our portfolio companies are offsetting the more challenging elements of today's economic environment.

We are leveraging AI as an enrichment of our operations and optimalisation of our investment practice. To illustrate: in 2025, 143,118 prompts were issued by Sofina employees across the platforms we use. We see AI as a fundamental shift for most of our existing portfolio companies across sectors and we encourage them to leverage this. Of course, AI is also an investment opportunity in new business models where end-user benefits and competitive advantages are clear. At this stage the LLM space (open AI and consort) has become an infrastructure play with a high degree of circularity among the players. The difference in scale required to be active in here effectively shuts it out for Sofina, except for a few earlier bets, like our stake in Mistral.ai. Sofina Private Funds however has been active from early days and have taken positions on some of the foundation models (for instance, Lightspeed in Anthropic).

Our preliminary, unaudited Net Asset Value (NAV) came in at EUR 10.6 billion at 31 December 2025, or at EUR 299 per share, compared to EUR 10.3 billion at the end of 2024, or EUR 312 per share. At half-year 2025, on 30 June, NAV stood at EUR 9.8 billion, or EUR 296 per share.

To understand Sofina's underlying performance, we need to isolate the impact of the capital raise, both in absolute terms and on a per-share basis. Like for like numbers thus tell the following story: NAV at EUR 10.1 billion and EUR 305 per share.

On aggregate, the operating performance of our unlisted companies in the Sofina Direct portfolio is positive, while the uncertain economic conditions among which the chaotic global trade conditions weigh on the activity. However, this positive driver hasn't fully compensated the currency headwinds, mainly of the USD, but also of other currencies, which we had highlighted already in our H1 report. These year-end figures still need to be completed with the value evolution of Sofina Private Funds during Q4; the complete picture of our portfolio will be shared with the publication of our FY results.

In our day-to-day business of investing and divesting, we had another active six months, with underlying activity and investment opportunity continuously strong. The current pipeline is the strongest we have seen in several years.

New portfolio assets include workplace finance platform Stream, autonomous driving tech company Zhuoyu, developer tools SaaS company PostHog, and intelligent transport management platform Qargo. We continue to support our commitment to the energy transition through an additional investment in GEO, and reinforced our commitments to cybersecurity specialist Cyera and to spatial biology leader Vizgen.

We also leveraged opportunities to crystallise value. We fully exited our stake in First Eagle and OrganOx. Two of our Indian portfolio companies, Asian eyewear manufacturer and retailer Lenskart and Indian payment solutions provider Pine Labs, successfully IPO-ed in the last quarter.

We're long-term value creators, and, whereas we are confident in the individual market position, execution and the trends that fuel the growth of our top 10 holdings, we also provide support wherever it is necessary. In the broader portfolio, we see growth momentum with companies positioned on accelerating trends like Cleo AI and Cyera - being generative AI and data integrity respectively.

Similarly, in our Private Funds business, which represents 46% of our portfolio, we were able to access some new opportunities. For the full value assessment of that side of our portfolio, we'll need to wait for our full annual results in March. We see more activity in the funds thanks to liquidity events and transaction activity. There is a trend towards concentration with the best General Partners, which is the core of our portfolio, and healthy opportunities where we can opportunistically leverage our permanent capital basis. In short, the market rewards winners.

Allow me to conclude that we are proud of the confidence expressed by our shareholders, new investors and bondholders, expanding our capital base and available resources with EUR 1.1 billion. We enter the next phase with a robust balance sheet, strong underlying portfolio fundamentals and a clear focus on disciplined capital allocation. Now what prevails is a sense of responsibility. We're rolling up our sleeves to create value for everyone.