NIQ Global Intelligence plc (NIQ) Business

Item 1. Business

Our Mission

We provide brands, retailers and other clients a holistic view of consumer shopping behavior globally to drive mission-critical strategic and operating decisions and facilitate better economic outcomes.

Our Company

We are a leading global consumer intelligence company positioned at the nexus of brands, retailers and consumers. We manage a comprehensive and integrated ecosystem – The NIQ Ecosystem – which combines proprietary data, best-in-class technology, human intelligence and highly sophisticated software applications and analytics solutions (the “Ecosystem” or “The NIQ Ecosystem”). Our unified, artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning powered technology platform aggregates, harmonizes and enriches vast amounts of global consumer shopping data from a myriad of diverse sources, generates rich, proprietary reference data and metadata and provides a global, omnichannel view of consumer shopping behavior – The Full ViewTM.

Our global reach spans 90 countries, covering approximately 82% of the world’s population, more than half of global gross domestic product (“GDP”) and more than $7.4 trillion in global consumer spend as of December 31, 2025. Leveraging our strong NIQ brand, long-term client relationships, global scale, proprietary technology and extensive data and insights, we are positioned as a global leader in measuring, analyzing and predicting consumer behavior in the FMCG vertical, T&D and other verticals in which we operate. Our solutions, mission-critical insights, analytics and software applications are deeply embedded across our clients’ enterprise supporting their strategic and operational decisions, enabling them to measure performance, maintain and strengthen their market positions and drive innovation and profitable growth.

Global consumer spend is estimated at $65 trillion during 2025. Within this expansive economy, the consumer shopping landscape is rapidly changing, creating strategic and operational challenges, as well as growth opportunities for brands, retailers and other industry participants. Consumer purchase patterns have become increasingly “omnichannel” with consumers shopping across a growing number of platforms and channels including brick-and-mortar stores, online and mobile platforms and social-commerce and quick-commerce channels. This rapidly changing consumer shopping “journey” has significantly increased the volume and complexity of shopping and transaction data. Simultaneously, consumers are increasingly seeking a more convenient and personalized shopping experience which amplifies competition among the growing number of consumer brands and shopping channels.

We believe this dynamic, omnichannel, highly competitive backdrop creates significant growth opportunities for The NIQ Ecosystem. Companies increasingly seek real-time access to trusted, neutral, comprehensive and granular intelligence and analytics, as well as appropriate data governance, that enables them to efficiently engage consumers, drive sales, increase repeat purchases and foster loyalty across global markets, which we believe can only be accomplished with NIQ’s global, mission-critical view of consumer shopping behavior. We obtain data on online and offline consumer shopping behavior from diverse sources including retail point-of-sale feeds, global consumer shopping receipts, panels of more than 5.5 million consumers in more than 50 countries and direct partnerships with leading eCommerce players, covering a total of approximately 18 million consumer relationships. We also generate substantial amounts of proprietary data such as insights at specific store and consumer levels and evidence-based recommendations that support our clients’ growth strategies.

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Since March 2021, we have invested approximately $400 million to transform our Ecosystem and enhance our technology platform. We leverage a long history of proprietary knowledge and advanced AI and machine learning techniques for multiple use cases, from ingesting and standardizing data faster and more accurately, to creating significant amounts of granular reference data and metadata, to creating new tools within our software applications and analytics on consumer preferences and shopping trends. Our investment, development and use of AI across our platform enables clients to make better decisions and benefit from a better experience. For example, in 2024, we launched our generative AI tool, Ask Arthur, which is currently utilized by our clients to quickly find information, interpret data, onboard and train new analysts and make informed business decisions.

Our solutions align to two product groupings: (1) Intelligence and (2) Activation.

•Intelligence offerings are comprised of omnichannel measurement, consumer behavior and insights and retailer solutions, which are utilized by both consumer brands and retailer clients. These products help clients to measure their market share of consumer purchases across channels, helping them understand the “what,” “where,” “who” and “how much”—what the consumer bought, who the consumer is, where they shopped and how much they bought. Clients can see their market share by product, by market and by channel, sales volume movements across those same dimensions and pricing and promotion trends. Intelligence accounted for approximately 81% of our revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025 and is generally sold through multi-year or annual subscription contracts.

•Activation offerings are comprised of innovation, brand and media and analytics products that provide clients with insights about “why” consumers made a certain purchase, guide clients on “what to do next” and “who to target” around new product introduction and innovation, pricing, promotion strategy, targeted advertising and other drivers of growth. Leveraging our highly granular unified data and technology platform, our Activation offerings include custom, predictive analytics and reports that our clients use to optimize brand and trade decisions as well as new product testing. Activation accounted for approximately 19% of our revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025. For the year ended December 31, 2025, approximately 73% of our Activation revenue was highly reoccurring revenue, meaning revenue from either annual, multi-year contracts or from a client purchasing the same solution in the same country each year for the past three years. Activation solutions also present significant cross-selling opportunities, as approximately 78% of Activation revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025 came from existing Intelligence clients, while approximately 40% of our Intelligence large and mid-sized clients have purchased Activation solutions, representing an attractive opportunity to increase penetration.

The scale, breadth and depth of our data, combined with our deep industry knowledge, scalable AI-powered technology platform and strong global relationships enables us to provide relevant solutions to brands, retailers, other companies and government entities. Our diverse client base of approximately 23,000 companies spans industries and geographies. We work with many of the world’s largest consumer brands and retailers – including approximately half of the Fortune 500 and nearly 80% of the Fortune 100 companies—as well as clients in high-growth verticals and SMB.

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Our solutions enable executives, sales leaders, marketers, category management teams, media leaders and research and development teams to drive mission-critical strategic and operating decisions that span our clients’ enterprise, including:

•measuring and assessing omnichannel sales performance across markets to provide visibility on which products are sold, who buys them, why, where and how;

•optimizing pricing and promotion to evaluate the impact on sales;

•segmenting and personalizing consumer products and experiences to drive sales conversion and repeat purchases across channels;

•identifying new markets and categories for growth, predicting potential outcomes and executing an effective operating strategy;

•testing, refining and predicting consumer receptiveness to new product concepts and marketing messages;

•monitoring and measuring reviews, searching capabilities and keyword optimization to strengthen online presence;

•managing trade and advertising budgets and enhancing return on spend; and

•guiding executive and Board-level decisions related to incentive compensation, competitive analysis and mergers and acquisition (“M&A”) strategy.

We view our Ecosystem as a driver of value creation for brands, retailers and consumers. As of December 31, 2025, more than 74,000 active users regularly utilized our applications, producing beneficial network effects across our platform. As brands grow using our solutions, they generate additional revenue and value for retailers, leading to increased collaboration and data sharing between us and our stakeholders. As retailers provide more consumer shopping data, we convert this data into analytical tools and insights into consumer preferences and trends. We believe this powerful symbiotic relationship strengthens our platform, enhances personalization and supports clients’ evolving intelligence and AI needs.

Our software, data and people are highly integrated with our clients’ critical workflow and processes, leading to long-tenured relationships. As of December 31, 2025, our top five longest-tenured clients have worked with NIQ (and our predecessor) for more than 70 years on average. We believe the strength of our client relationships, the value of our mission-critical offerings and innovation, and the success of our growth initiatives are reflected in our net dollar retention and client retention rates and was at or above 100% for the trailing twelve consecutive quarters as of December 31, 2025.

(1)GDR represents the amount of prior period annualized revenue we have retained from existing clients in the current period. The calculation reflects only client losses and does not reflect client expansion or contraction.

Our strong client retention supports our predictable and scalable revenue model. Approximately 80% of our revenue was recurring in nature for the year ended December 31, 2025. Visibility into and predictability of our revenue streams is driven by long-term subscription contracts in our Intelligence offerings, and high client adoption rates of our on-demand Analytics solutions, which are our bespoke analyses tailored to specific business objectives. Our subscription contracts are typically two to five years in duration with annual price escalators tied to consumer price indicators. Our on-demand solutions present significant cross-sell opportunities, with approximately 78% of our Activation revenue coming from existing Intelligence clients for the year ended December 31, 2025. Our revenues are well diversified, as our largest client represented less than 5% of total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025.

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Our Transformation

In March 2021, an affiliate of Advent International, L.P., in partnership with James (“Jim”) Peck, the former Chief Executive Officer of TransUnion, acquired Nielsen Holdings’ “Connect” business (the “2021 Carve-Out Transaction”) and subsequently rebranded it as NIQ. While the Nielsen Connect business was attractively positioned in the consumer intelligence market with its leading data assets and attractive business model, it had been experiencing declining revenue and margins. Since the 2021 Carve-Out Transaction, we have undergone a significant business transformation, including making approximately $980 million of organic and inorganic investments, excluding the GfK Combination, to strengthen our business and capabilities and position the company for long-term shareholder value creation. Key areas of this transformation have included:

•Enhanced Management and Personnel: We rebuilt our entire senior leadership team and appointed new leaders to more than one-third of our top 200 executive positions. Our leadership team brings a proven track record of driving value creation through transformation and growth initiatives, including but not limited to Jim Peck, Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”), who previously led successful transformations at TransUnion and LexisNexis Risk Management.

•Established Technology Leadership: We invested approximately $400 million to transform our technology platform into a cloud-based scalable technology platform, with natively embedded AI capabilities and the ability to seamlessly process high volumes of disparate data while lowering our overall cost structure. Our “build once, deploy everywhere” approach enables deployment and scalability of new products and solutions across markets. As of December 31, 2025, nearly all FMCG clients had migrated to our new platform, resulting in significantly higher client satisfaction and consistently increased usage, exemplified by more than 74,000 active users.

•Acquisitions: Since 2021, we have invested more than $580 million in ten tuck-in acquisitions and a strategic investment to address gaps in our legacy business’ coverage (such as eCommerce) and further enhance our analytics capabilities and retailer tools. In July 2023, we acquired GfK, a leading consumer intelligence provider in T&D measurement with a focus on international markets (the “GFK Combination”). The GfK Combination provided several strategic benefits including enhanced scale, expanded total addressable market by geography and increased category coverage and significant cross-selling opportunities and cost synergies. It also represented an opportunity to implement the same operational improvements successfully executed at NIQ since the 2021 Carve-Out Transaction, including, but not limited to: strengthening pricing and renewals, addressing strategic gaps, revitalizing technology innovation and enhancing The NIQ Ecosystem.

•Organic and Inorganic Investments to Enhance Strategic Capabilities: We invested organically to enhance products, expand core capabilities, improve key client offerings and grow our footprint within our current clients, fast-growing SMBs and adjacent verticals. We strengthened Activation solutions for improved performance, timeliness and integration with our core Intelligence offerings to facilitate cross-selling opportunities, leading to approximately 78% of our Activation revenue in 2025 coming from existing Intelligence clients.

•Built Leading eCommerce Capabilities: We established a leading position in global eCommerce and omnichannel coverage through strategic acquisitions and organic product enhancement. We believe that we experienced rapid adoption of our eCommerce solutions. Among our Intelligence clients, the clients who made a purchase of eCommerce solutions in the specific year increased from 9% in 2021 to 29% in 2025, driving 32% year-over-year eCommerce revenue growth while representing an attractive cross-sell opportunity in eCommerce to gain the more than 71% of clients that remain. These proprietary solutions enable us to provide The Full ViewTM of consumer shopping behavior, a critical point of differentiation for our clients.

•Optimized Go-To-Market Approach: We adopted a client-centric approach to sales operations and strategy, establishing a centralized pricing function and standardizing the contract renewal process to instill greater pricing discipline, focusing on multi-year contracts. The strategic renewals process now begins more than a year before expiration and is supported by a new global team dedicated to enhancing retailer capabilities, among other initiatives. Our efforts have improved our net dollar retention rate from 94% in 2020, prior to the 2021 Carve-Out Transaction, to 104% in 2025 for our total Intelligence revenue.

•Operating Efficiency: We launched the NIQ Cost Efficiency Program (“CEP”), which resulted in significant annualized run-rate savings as of December 31, 2025, with additional synergies in connection with the GfK Combination. We continue to enhance our unit economics with our revamped technology platform and expansion of our data acquisition sources, resulting in a significant reduction in Cash Data Costs, from 22% in 2021 to 15% of revenue in 2025. We further optimized costs by expanding our presence and talent in lower-cost regions and enhancing our processes and operations, resulting in lower overhead costs and increased operating leverage and margins.

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Industry Background

The global consumer shopping landscape is vast, highly competitive and increasingly complex for brands, retailers and other businesses which rely on consumer intelligence for data-driven decision making. This dynamic environment underscores the need for our advanced technology solutions and trusted independent insights.

Global Consumer Spend is Large, Highly Competitive, Rapidly Changing and Increasingly Complex

Over 75,000 companies and retailers globally rely on the right market intelligence to make critical strategic and operational decisions as they compete amongst themselves and new entrants annually. Competing for an estimated $65 trillion in annual, global consumer spend during 2025, these companies must navigate a crowded competitive landscape including newer insurgent brands, which represent only 2-3% of companies but account for nearly 20% of growth as of 2023. Market complexity is further amplified by macroeconomic factors such as inflation and global conflict as well as technology advances such as new digital channels and AI. The NIQ Ecosystem is purpose-built to help clients large and small compete and win on a global scale. Our scalable AI-powered technology platform combined with our deep domain expertise distills the complex global consumer shopping landscape, providing clients a comprehensive source of truth of consumer shopping behavior – The Full ViewTM – to enable data-driven business decisions.

Consumer Shopping is Omnichannel

The continued growth of eCommerce and digital channels is transforming the brand and retail landscape, with 25% of all retail purchases occurring online in 2025, driven by convenience, variety and competitive pricing. Omnichannel shopping, which is a consumer who seamlessly interacts with a brand across multiple platforms and channels, including brick-and-mortar stores, online and mobile platforms and social-commerce and quick-commerce channels, accelerated during the COVID pandemic, such that 97% of CPG sales were made by omnichannel shoppers during 2025. To understand this emerging and exploding trend, companies are looking for real-time access to granular levels of data and insights to develop a comprehensive view of consumer behavior, assess growth opportunities more quickly and precisely and predict purchasing behavior. The Full ViewTM, the comprehensive coverage of online and offline consumer shopping behavior provides clients a holistic cross-channel read of the market, enabling them to address their critical strategic and operational needs and optimize their growth strategies across all channels.

Consumer Preferences Are Demanding More Personalized Experiences

Personalized shopping experiences are becoming increasingly important to consumers, 80% of whom desire personalized experiences, and 78% are more likely to repurchase after receiving personalized communications. This demand has led to a proliferation of sales channels, product items and stock-keeping units (“SKUs”) and features, leading to an exponential increase in data related to products and consumer shopping. NIQ is well-positioned to help our clients navigate the “signal” from the “noise” amongst this rapid data proliferation. Our AI-powered models connect insights from decades of data, including millions of product attributes, which can be analyzed and segmented by category, market, single item and consumer profiles. Our coded product information enables us to provide our clients a granular view of consumer shopping behavior, preferences and predictive analytics to craft highly customized, personalized experiences for consumers, including creative solutions for targeted advertising. Leveraging a long history of proprietary knowledge and advanced AI and machine learning techniques, our platform “enriches” the data it ingests, thereby creating valuable metadata that is integrated into The NIQ Ecosystem to power our granular analytics and insights for clients.

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Brands, Retailers and Other Companies Lack Resources or Ability to Leverage AI

Consumer brands and retailers recognize the potential of AI to enhance operational efficiency, elevate consumer experiences and drive growth, but many face challenges related to talent, data readiness, interoperability and trust. Effective AI requires high-quality, well-governed data and systems capable of integrating advanced analytics into existing workflows.

According to a KPMG global study published in 2025, while 66% of global employees intentionally use AI on a regular basis, 61% report having no AI training and half report having limited knowledge on AI. Additionally, according to this study, just over half of employees in advanced economies feel there are adequate safeguards within their organization to ensure responsible AI use, including governance, data privacy and security measures. Despite the clear benefits of AI implementation, the lack of adequate technology and AI talent remains a critical challenge, highlighting the need for brands and retailers to outsource to partners skilled in AI technologies.

We combine human intelligence with extensive AI capabilities and support, enabling brands and retailers to overcome adoption barriers and leverage AIs potential. In the current AI landscape, it is crucial for clients to have confidence in the data governance and stewardship practices of their intelligence providers, ensuring that their information is managed with integrity.

The NIQ Ecosystem

Our Ecosystem is purpose-built for seamless, comprehensive client value creation. We believe it is deeply embedded into our clients’ ecosystems and workflows, driving their pricing, advertising, supply chain, promotion, compensation decisions and other mission-critical functions by:

•combining AI with human intelligence to generate granular reference data, standardizing it across channels, categories and countries;

•delivering differentiated solutions from data collection to client value creation through analytics capabilities, leveraging a large global scale and modern technology solutions that can process, validate and enrich vast amounts of data daily to deliver real-time insights;

•enabling our modular software to serve as clients’ authoritative source for on-demand access to a global, omnichannel view of consumer shopping behavior – The Full ViewTM and provides actionable insights into market share, category developments and consumer preferences; and

•facilitating the seamless rollout of new solutions simultaneously to all regions globally.

NIQ Intelligence, NIQ Your Way and The Full ViewTM are the key strategic pillars of our Ecosystem and describe our approach to delivering client value. The scale, depth and breadth of our data (NIQ Intelligence) is the foundation of our technology platform that delivers on-demand insights and analytics based on clients’ needs (NIQ Your Way), providing clients with a holistic and comprehensive view of consumer shopping behavior (The Full ViewTM). These strategic pillars inform the way we build our solutions that we then categorize under Intelligence and Activation product groupings.

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NIQ Intelligence: Our Powerful Data Assets and Capabilities

Data is the foundation that powers our Ecosystem. Our commitment to data stewardship spans our entire Ecosystem ensuring effective governance and protection and, ultimately, the ability to capture value across the data assets entrusted to us. Our data engine, Connect, drives comprehensive consumer intelligence for our clients across channels and geographies. We capture global consumer shopping data across a myriad of sources including retailer point-of-sale, consumer panels, eCommerce channels and emerging channels such as social commerce to provide a differentiated omnichannel view. Our team of nearly 1,300 data scientists employs proprietary enrichment capabilities utilizing AI and machine learning techniques to standardize, code and categorize raw and unstructured data, creating valuable metadata that informs our on-demand solutions. This “enrichment” process adds features and categories to each coded item: for example, for a carbonated beverage product item, we codify brand, flavor, like zero-sugar, form factor, bottle or can, size, whether part of a package, and if so, which package size, and other features. Our more than 28,000 AI proprietary models guided by our human intelligence with deep domain expertise help automate this “enrichment” process efficiently and accurately.

Our Global Data Sources

We believe our granular data assets are some of the largest, most accurate and most complete granular data assets in the markets we serve. This includes a catalog of approximately over ten billion product attributes, averaging over 40 attributes per product, including color, size, density, packaging and beyond, for each SKU sold. Our proprietary data assets allow us to provide our clients with a comprehensive set of consumer intelligence data and decision support analytics. We obtain data on online and offline consumer shopping behavior from diverse sources across categories such as grocery, drug, convenience, electronic, department stores, pet, beauty, beverage and alcohol, as well as across channels including eCommerce, social commerce and quick commerce, including:

•point-of-sale data from over 8,900 retailers in 88 countries, often serving as a preferred global data partner;

•proprietary consumer panels with more than 5.5 million consumers across over 50 countries;

•exclusive data partnerships, including with Fetch Rewards, from whom we received nearly four billion receipts on an annual basis, up from 103 million total receipts in 2021, from over 12.5 million consumers;

•direct partnerships with, and alternative data reads sourced from, the largest eCommerce platforms; and

•small and local businesses supported by over 12,000 field auditors across 80 countries.

We source several core datasets from our retail partners, many of which are unique and difficult to replicate. Our strong relationships with these partners span decades, built on trust and integrity. Our retail partners entrust us with highly valuable data assets due to our long-standing industry leadership, metadata and proven commitment to data governance and stewardship. Our AI-powered offerings create a symbiotic relationship with clients, by continuously adding, refreshing and refining our data assets. Moreover, our reference data and analysis provide unique insights that clients cannot generate independently, offering a comprehensive market view and detailed, store-level reads. We believe that this capability, combined with our strong industry relationships and significant investments enhance our competitive advantage. We believe we are one of the two preferred data partners for retailers, and the only data partner with global reach and a holistic view of consumer shopping behavior.

Through strategic acquisitions and organic investments since 2021, we have expanded our data sources well beyond traditional point-of-sale. This includes e-receipt collection in 22 countries, direct online digital shelf measurement in 53 countries, and through our panelists and other digital tools, access to clients’ sales and market share data across critical high growth channels such as direct-to-consumer (“DTC”) platforms, social media, digital marketplaces like Temu and Shein and thousands of online retailers.

Our strategic investments have generated significant benefits in data collection and enrichment scale and capabilities, while reducing our Cash Data Costs as a percentage of revenue from 22% in 2021 to 15% in 2025. We believe our vast datasets allow us to offer distinct scope, granularity and detail and differentiated insights that inform clients’ mission-critical strategic and operating decisions.

Data Scale, Breadth and Depth

Our data engine, Connect, ingests, cleans, processes and categorizes vast amounts of structured and unstructured consumer purchasing data. Leveraging a long history of proprietary knowledge and advanced AI and machine learning techniques, our platform “enriches” the data it ingests, creating valuable metadata that is integrated into The NIQ Ecosystem to power our granular analytics and insights for clients. We processed an estimated 4 trillion data records per week in 2025, with an estimated annual total of 173 trillion data records in 2025. The amount of data we can deliver to our clients is rapidly scaling. In 2025, we delivered more than 115 million data pulls covering nearly 127 trillion data points, which is up from 116 trillion data points in 2024. As of December 31, 2025, our data catalog included over 246 million unique product items with over ten billion attributes that describe the items in more detail. Our data catalog is rapidly expanding, adding an average of over 34 million items annually and approximately 1.2 million product attributes daily since 2022.

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Integration of Human Intelligence and AI

Our ability to harmonize data across time dimensions and markets to provide intelligent solutions for clients is a core part of our differentiated offering. We combine human intelligence with our extensive AI capabilities and our ever-growing datasets to identify growth opportunities for our clients. We have a global presence and a single platform that integrates retail omnichannel measurement, consumer panel and other data sources with deep domain expertise. Our team includes nearly 1,300 data scientists, over 2,200 engineers and researchers and approximately 2,400 analytics experts and other industry experts with significant experience in consumer-centric verticals.

NIQ Your Way: Our Unparalleled Technology Platform

Our AI-powered technology platform is designed to leverage our scalable back-end data engine, Connect, to deliver valuable global insights by seamlessly progressing from data collection and processing to intuitive insight presentation in the unified and flexible user interface of our software applications. Our AI experience and our vast training datasets, as well as our combination of human intelligence and AI, enhances every aspect of our operations from data ingestion to insights delivery to provide unique value to our clients. Our global, unified AI-powered technology platform enhances growth with the ability to rapidly and efficiently roll out new products across all markets, enabling us to deliver innovative solutions and meet the evolving demands of our clients.

We deliver a real-time and actionable full view to our clients through our cloud-based, AI-driven Discover software platform. Discover allows our clients to measure online and offline consumer shopping behavior across channels and countries on a single platform, analyze the data with comprehensive self-serve analytics and utilize AI functionality for on-demand analytics capabilities. By combining AI and human intelligence, we standardize and structure the data across our platform, harmonizing it across channels, categories and countries, offering competitive insights, critical visibility into trends and growth drivers and shifts in consumer preferences. This enables granular analyses and informs strategic and operational decisions around product development, pricing strategy, marketing and personalization to drive sales. Our platform’s intuitive user experience empowers our clients to make swift decisions while our scalable infrastructure enables rapid and efficient deployment of new capabilities simultaneously across all regions. Additionally, our leading AI capabilities enhance operational efficiencies, create new use cases, unlock faster insights and enhance data accuracy.

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Scalable Technology Platform

In early 2024, we completed an investment of approximately $400 million to create an industry-leading AI-powered platform. Our “build once, deploy everywhere” approach led to a unified data lake, powered by Connect, for continuous analytics and accelerated product development. As of December 31, 2025, we have migrated all our FMCG clients into this unified, cloud-based platform built on modern architecture to power our growth strategy at enhanced profitability. We have received positive feedback on our new platform highlighted by an increase in our Net Promotor Score (“NPS”) client metric from 13 in 2019 to 29 in 2023 to 38 in 2024, and was most recently 49 in 2025. The number of users of our platform has seen a significant rise, with unique user logins growing from 332,000 in 2023 to 845,000 in 2025. Similarly, the number of data queries surged from 34 million to 115 million during the same period. Our platform also allows us to continue to invest efficiently and profitably to consistently deliver new and innovative solutions that address the evolving needs of our clients. Our technology platform is designed for scalability, return on investment and capital efficiency due to the following key attributes:

•Scalable: expands our datasets and solutions alongside our clients and develop new capabilities more rapidly;

•Integrated: enables a seamless user experience encompassing access to all of our data and insights through a streamlined user interface;

•Flexible: delivers customizable, on-demand analytics and insights on a global basis that are highly relevant for a wide variety of use cases and situations;

•Efficient: lowers our cost to serve clients and release new capabilities across all regions, simultaneously through our “build once, deploy everywhere” model; and

•Powerful: embeds AI models and seamless new product development resulting in faster time to market.

Our unified, cloud-based platform supports our software and AI applications that our clients use to drive their strategic and operational decisions: these applications were continuously utilized by more than 74,000 active users as of December 31, 2025 and our clients generated more than 115 million reports in 2025 using our software applications. Our platform puts our clients in control, delivering a modern, intuitive user experience with build-it-yourself capabilities and visualization tools tailored to what is most relevant to them.

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Powerful Software Applications

Our Discover software platform offers on-demand access to The Full ViewTM, a global, omnichannel view of consumer shopping behavior which is used by most of our clients. This software platform delivers our data intelligence through intuitive and flexible tools our clients use to support their mission-critical strategic and operational decision-making. Our generative AI feature, Ask Arthur, embedded in the platform, provides on-demand access to our data and insights, enabling quick onboarding and training of new analysts and informed business decisions to drive revenue and profit.

Discover, and our other software applications, gfknewron and Activate, are designed to meet the needs of brands, retailers and other companies:

•Brands: As of December 31, 2025, 100% of our FMCG clients used our platform as their primary system-of-record for market analysis, as it integrates retail omnichannel measurement, consumer panel, eCommerce and other data sources. For example, a beverage manufacturer uses our platform to understand sales performance and identify whitespace across online and offline channels to drive its omnichannel sales strategy and growth.

•Retailers: Our retailer clients utilize our platform to manage inventory and supplier relationships, and generate insights from measurement, panel and eCommerce views, enhancing operational efficiency and strategic planning. For example, a U.S.-based retailer uses our platform to manage their supply chain and collaborate with brands to assure on-shelf availability and maximize promotion effectiveness.

•Other Companies: Our data provides several unique use cases to the various other companies we cover such as financial services, packaging and beauty, including understanding of consumer trends for financial investors, extended producer responsibility reporting for logistics companies and insights into evolving beauty habits for makeup companies.

AI-Powered Applications

Our AI experience and our vast training datasets, as well as our combination of human intelligence and AI, enhances every aspect of our operations from data ingestion and enrichment to our delivery of differentiated insights that power clients’ strategic and operational decision-making. Our global, unified AI-powered technology platform enhances growth with the ability to roll out new products rapidly and efficiently across all markets, enabling us to deliver innovative solutions and meet the evolving demands of our clients.

We leverage data from as many as 28,000 AI models daily, which have enriched 199 million items as of 2025 and we have partnered with multiple technology leaders such as Microsoft, Google, Snowflake and Intel to further expand our AI capabilities. All of our client offerings leverage data and models that are built on our AI capabilities. In Intelligence, our software embeds our generative AI solution, Ask Arthur, which enables users to enhance data discoverability, onboard and train new analysts and make informed business decisions. This reduces the need for client support, client reports and custom databases, empowering self-service, quicker access to analytics and improved reporting capabilities. In Activation, our proprietary AI tools, like BASES AI Screener, use generative AI to predict consumer receptiveness to new products, messaging and concepts, reducing project timelines, for example for product concept testing, from weeks to minutes.

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From an operational perspective, we have created AI-powered insight summaries that reduce the need for manual data enrichment, saving time and effort for both our clients and our company. Our AI models power automation in our data enrichment and matching processes, enhancing data depth, breadth, accuracy and relevance. For example, when a new item such as a carbonated beverage is identified from point-of-sale data, our AI models can auto-code details like brand, flavor, size and packaging. Over the last several years, AI has helped to greatly strengthen our auto-coding, as over 80% of items were auto-coded in 2025 compared to 72% in 2020. AI enhances our data accuracy by efficiently matching retailer sales data to products in our granular data assets with speed and precision, unlike slower, error-prone, manual matching. Our platform rigorously trains and tests predictive models, allowing us to process larger data volumes efficiently and cost-effectively. For example, AI automation has already enabled us to reduce the number of manual reports generated for clients by 85% since 2023.

NIQ Full ViewTM: The Most Comprehensive View of Consumer Shopping Behavior

We deliver our clients The Full ViewTM, which we believe is the most comprehensive understanding of consumer shopping behavior currently available in the marketplace. The Full ViewTM synthesizes together our retail omnichannel measurement, consumer panel insights, eCommerce intelligence, as well as multi-country perspectives. As a result, clients gain a comprehensive insight from one “source of truth,” a unified system of intelligence for what consumers buy, think and feel and who buys, why, where and how. These insights enable clients to make better decisions, identify growth opportunities and innovate. The Full ViewTM is delivered through our integrated platform and software applications and is an integral part of our clients’ workflows and decision-making processes by enabling them to answer critical strategic and operational questions, including:

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Our Solutions

Our solutions align to two product groupings: (1) Intelligence and (2) Activation. Intelligence and Activation offerings are highly complementary in addressing our clients’ needs, enabling cross-selling activity and growth opportunities between these groupings.

Intelligence

These offerings comprised omnichannel measurement, consumer behavior and insights and retailer solutions, which are utilized by both consumer brands and retailer clients. These solutions enable clients to measure their market share of consumer purchases across channels, helping them understand the “what,” “where,” “who” and “how much” – as in, what the consumer bought, who the consumer is, where they shopped and how much they bought.

In 2025, approximately 81% of our revenue was generated from our Intelligence solutions. Deeply integrated in client workflows, Intelligence solutions generate mostly revenue that is recurring in nature with attractive wallet expansion opportunity as highlighted by the total Intelligence net dollar retention rate of 104% in 2025. In 2025, approximately 84% of our Intelligence revenue came from multi-year or annual subscriptions, which had a net dollar retention rate of 105%. Intelligence solutions are typically priced based on data volume over a given period or based on the number of seat licenses for access to our software and are primarily sold through annual or multi-year contracts that are typically two to five years in duration. These contracts contain built-in, annual, price and product enhancement escalators. Contract value also varies with the number of countries and modules, such as the number of eCommerce or omnichannel reads that the client elects to purchase.

Activation

These solutions include custom analyses designed to help clients ascertain “why” consumers made a certain purchase, guide them on “what to do next,” and “who to target” around product introduction and innovation, pricing, promotion strategy and other drivers of growth. Our highly granular, unified data and technology platform enables stronger Activation products and more refined targeting of clients. For example, better insights into target demographics can lead to more effective campaigns and higher return on investment on marketing spend. We build these solutions for consistent, ongoing client use, creating a stream of highly reoccurring revenue. The suite of solutions counterbalances during economic downturns, as clients use these analytics to optimize pricing, inventory and assortment planning.

In 2025, approximately 19% of our revenue was generated from our Activation solutions and are comprised of innovation, brand and media and analytics products. In 2025, approximately 73% of our Activation revenue was highly reoccurring revenue, meaning revenue from either annual, multi-year contracts or from a client purchasing the same solution in the same country each year for the past three years. Activation solutions also present significant cross-selling opportunities, as approximately 78% of Activation revenue originated from existing Intelligence clients in 2025. As of December 31, 2025, approximately 40% of our large and mid-sized Intelligence clients, consistently purchased Activation solutions, which represents an attractive opportunity to increase the cross-sell penetration. Activation revenue grows when clients require bespoke analysis tailored to specific business objectives and our strategy is focused on further increasing client adoption of Activation solutions that generate highly reoccurring revenue.

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Note: All figures as of December 31, 2025 unless otherwise noted.

(1)Based on Intelligence Subscription revenue.

(2)GDR represents the amount of prior period annualized revenue we have retained from existing clients in the current period. The calculation reflects only client losses and does not reflect client expansion or contraction.

(3)Based on total Intelligence revenue.

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Within our Intelligence and Activation solutions we offer a comprehensive suite of products that we deliver through our unified software platform. These products are used by a variety of personae and address multiple mission-critical use cases spanning our clients’ enterprise. Below is an overview of our offerings, including key use cases and client personas:

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Our Market Opportunity

We view our total addressable market (“TAM”) through our leading positions as a provider of Intelligence solutions in the Consumer Measurement market and Activation solutions in the Consumer Analytics market, which in 2024 is estimated at $57 billion based on a bottom-up analysis of more than 75,000 global companies. In the consumer intelligence market, we believe our clients are under immense pressure to understand and adapt to rapidly changing global consumer shopping behavior that is increasingly omnichannel and more complex. We also believe this has given rise to strong and increasing global client demand for neutral, independent third-party measurement and analytics that we provide.

Market Opportunity: Intelligence (Consumer Measurement)

We estimate the Consumer Measurement TAM was $18 billion in 2024, with $9 billion of that attributable to FMCG, $4 billion to T&D and $5 billion to Adjacent Verticals. Consumer Measurement involves the AI-driven collection and analysis of data to understand company and brand performance, primarily through point-of-sale, eCommerce measurement and consumer panel data. Our omnichannel measurement, consumer behavior and insights and retailer solutions are part of this market. We have expanded the size and growth of our TAM by entering new channels, such as eCommerce, new verticals, markets and categories. In 2023, we did so by acquiring a leading consumer intelligence player in T&D measurement, GfK, enabling us to apply our technology and advanced techniques to new end markets. We estimate that our consumer measurement TAM has $10 billion of whitespace which we believe we are well positioned to capture. The continued growth of eCommerce provides a growth tailwind for our granular and omnichannel data and analytics as clients seek to understand consumer behavior and make strategic and operating decisions across multiple sales channels. Moreover, penetration rates were approximately 20% in 2024 for large companies with annual revenue of more than $1.0 billion in end markets such as financial services, government, media and advertising and below 10% for smaller companies. Our comprehensive solution suite and flexible technology platform enhance our ability to serve clients of all sizes across various end markets.

Market Opportunity: Activation (Consumer Analytics)

We estimate the Consumer Analytics TAM was $39 billion in 2024, with $19 billion of that attributable to FMCG, $7 billion to T&D and $13 billion to Adjacent Verticals. Consumer Analytics comprises a diverse range of tools and solutions that utilize advanced techniques—including data mining, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, bespoke AI-generated analytics and insights on consumer behavior and target audiences—to drive strategic and operational decision-making. We estimate that this market has $20 billion whitespace and we believe it provides us significant whitespace to cross-sell and upsell our Activation solutions and penetrate new markets. In this market, our AI-powered technology platform and applications enhance our competitive advantage. Moreover, we believe our differentiated innovation, brand and media and analytics offerings will enable us to increase share of growing analytics expenditures from both existing and new clients, particularly for advanced, customized and AI-driven analytics. An example of our continued innovation and AI investment is our BASES AI Screener, which is a generative AI-based proprietary tool that leverages artificial personas to mimic human responses. This product, covering more than 35 categories in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, enables more expansive concept testing and reduces project timelines from weeks to minutes. Further, we believe that the complementary nature of our measurement-based Intelligence and analytics-focused Activation solutions will enable continued growth in the dynamic and rapidly evolving analytics market.

Our Business Segments

We operate our business through three reportable segments: (1) Americas, which includes North America and Latin America; (2) EMEA, which includes Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and (3) APAC, which includes Asia and the western Pacific region. We generate revenue from solutions in two product groupings: (i) Intelligence (Consumer Measurement) and (ii) Activation (Consumer Analytics). Intelligence solutions include a combination of our retail measurement, consumer behavior and insights and retailer solutions, which are utilized by both consumer brands and retailer clients. Activation solutions include customized analytics and predictive models to improve decision making around product, pricing, marketing and supply chain. We typically initiate client relationships through one of our core Intelligence solutions which we typically sell under multi-year or annual subscription contracts granting clients access to our core software and data solutions. Our Intelligence solutions accounted for approximately 81% of our revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025. Approximately 84% of Intelligence revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025 came from multi-year or annual subscription-based contracts and had a net dollar retention rate of 105%. These subscription-based contracts typically contain built-in, annual, price and product enhancement escalators. With the enhancements of our data coverage, product innovation and AI-powered technology platform, we believe that we have been able to consistently increase client satisfaction and execution on our value-based pricing strategy. Individual contract values vary based on the number of countries and modules desired, such as the number of eCommerce or omnichannel reads that the client elects to purchase at the time of initial contracting or thereafter during the contract term.

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Our Competitive Strengths

We believe the following capabilities form our core strengths and provide us with competitive advantages:

•Global Coverage: For more than 100 years, we have advanced the practice of data and analytics to provide our clients with a better understanding of consumers. As a leading global consumer intelligence company, we offer data and insights in 90 countries, covering approximately 82% of the world’s population, more than half the world’s GDP and more than $7.4 trillion in global consumer spend as of December 31, 2025, providing our clients with insights across diverse markets. We believe our extensive reach creates significant differentiation and would be difficult and costly to replicate. We also believe our clients highly value the ability to gain insights into global consumer trends across markets through a single provider, positioning us as a valuable partner.

•Data Scale, Breadth and Depth: The scale, breadth and depth of our datasets are critical to generating differentiated, mission-critical insights for clients, covering The Full ViewTM of omnichannel consumer shopping behavior.

•We manage more than approximately 160 petabytes of data and maintain proprietary databases with over ten billion product attributes, averaging over 40 attributes per product, including color, size, density, packaging and beyond, for each SKU sold and over 246 million unique product items managed in omnichannel and eCommerce retail, which we believe is one of the largest of its kind.

•In addition to data from over 8,900 retailers, we operate one of the largest global consumer panels, with more than 5.5 million panelists across over 50 countries. We collect data from leading eCommerce retailers and valuable first-party data directly from high-growth channels such as direct-to-consumer brands, social and quick commerce and emerging eCommerce platforms, including through our exclusive data partnership with Fetch Rewards, through which we obtain the information of approximately 12.5 million additional consumers. We also deploy more than 12,000 field auditors across 80 countries to collect data from small and local businesses in less densely populated regions, where digital data collection is often challenging.

•Datasets encompass more than 100 years of consumer shopping data, offering a distinct perspective on evolving consumer behavior and market trends. These extensive longitudinal datasets also enable us to build, train and test more relevant and accurate AI models to enhance data capture and insights for clients.

•Unified, Global, Single “Source of Truth”: We synthesize and integrate retail omnichannel measurement, consumer panel data, eCommerce and other sources within our Ecosystem, offering clients The Full ViewTM of consumer shopping behavior. This enables our clients to connect the “what” and “where” with the “who” and “why” of the consumer shopping journey, as in what the consumer bought, where they bought it, who the consumer is and why they bought. By incorporating data from both online and offline shopping and directly reading consumer perspectives, we can validate our insights, enhancing its accuracy and reliability. The ability to access a holistic view of consumer shopping behavior on a single platform across markets serves as key differentiator for our clients.

•Long-Standing Relationships with Retailers: Our strong, long-standing relationships with over 8,900 retailers in 88 countries are a key differentiator, allowing us to source unique and proprietary datasets that are difficult for others to replicate. These partnerships, built on mutual trust and our commitment to data governance, enable us to provide comprehensive consumer intelligence and decision support analytics. As one of retailers preferred global data partners, our collaboration with them enhances our competitive advantage and offers clients a holistic view of consumer shopping behavior worldwide.

•Leading, Global, eCommerce Capabilities: Our proprietary eCommerce data collection allows for in-depth coverage of eCommerce and emerging sales channels, which is a key differentiator and integral component of The Full ViewTM. We ingest data from leading eCommerce retailers, which allows us to provide a holistic omnichannel read of online and offline consumer purchasing behavior. Our leading eCommerce capabilities have led to meaningful new client wins and increased business from our existing clients. Among our Intelligence clients, the clients who made a purchase of eCommerce solutions in the specific year increased from 9% in 2021 to 29% in 2025, driving 32% eCommerce revenue growth year over year while representing an attractive cross-sell opportunity in eCommerce to gain the more than 71% of clients that remain.

•Cloud-Based, AI-Powered Technology Platform: Our AI-enabled platform delivers actionable insights empowering our clients to make informed and efficient decisions. By integrating data from multiple sources, our platform offers exceptional granularity and detail, enabling us to provide The Full ViewTM of consumer shopping behavior both online and offline. The scalability and flexibility of our technology platform allow our clients to produce relevant analyses in real time, while enabling us to seamlessly design, build, launch and roll out new products and features to our clients globally. This also drives our value creation flywheel, continuously growing data and insights, expanding client usage, attracting more data sharing and driving more innovation for brands, retailers and other clients ultimately improving outcomes for consumers.

•Proven, Experienced Management Team and Talented, Global Workforce: Led by CEO Jim Peck, our executive team has more than 150 years of combined industry experience leading data-centric technology companies. Mr. Peck and other members of our executive team successfully executed our large-scale transformation plan and have worked to position us for durable and profitable growth since the 2021 Carve-Out Transaction. Our skilled management team and highly talented workforce with deep domain expertise are valuable assets that deliver the value of The NIQ Ecosystem to clients and our other stakeholders.

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Our Growth Opportunities

Our multi-faceted growth strategy leverages our brand, strong client relationships and competitive advantages as a leading provider of consumer intelligence to capture attractive future opportunities. Our key growth opportunities and strategies include:

•Innovate, Launch and Expand New Products: We aim to expand existing client relationships by delivering innovative products and solutions that meet clients’ evolving needs. Our solutions are scalable across clients, verticals and geographies, and our continued investment in AI-powered technology enables us to develop new capabilities, enhance our existing offerings and expand client share of wallet. Enhanced cross-selling opportunities allow us to capture more of our clients’ data and analytics spend, increasing the average number of solutions used by our clients. Recent examples of our new product innovation include eCommerce Measurement, Omnishopper, Digital Shelf, Revenue Optimizer and Retail Activate, among others. Of our top clients measured by revenue contribution, 94% have adopted at least one of these new capabilities, purchasing two new products on average. We are focused on expanding our eCommerce solutions to new and existing clients and recent efforts increased eCommerce penetration of our 100 largest clients by revenue in the United States and Europe by 38% from 2021 to 2025, resulting in a 40% increase in eCommerce revenue from those clients during the same period.

•Increase our Subscription Revenue Base: We believe our global footprint, innovation focus, enhanced and expanded data coverage and AI-powered technology platform support our ability to maintain high renewal rates and increase Intelligence Subscription contract value through up-selling of additional solutions, modules, reads and regions. Our dedicated on-site client success teams work closely with clients, enhancing retention and satisfaction through our strong value proposition. In 2025, our client success teams generated more than 13,000 sales-ready leads, which we estimate resulted in more than $122.3 million of additional revenue. We proactively engage clients in renewal discussions well in advance, focusing on solution quality and effectiveness, and we also deliver value-added product enhancements to support price increases. Our renewal strategy has enabled us to renew all of our largest clients by revenue that have come up for renewal since the 2021 Carve-Out Transaction, and has led to Intelligence Subscription net dollar retention of 105% and Intelligence total net dollar retention of 104% as of December 31, 2025.

•Extend Retailer Relationships: We have invested significantly to bring new capabilities for retailer clients and believe our comprehensive and granular insights position us for increased retailer collaboration and growth. For example, our acquisition of ciValue added a unique retail media platform for audience creation and measurement. We launched our new Activate platform, our software solution designed for retailer clients, to enable mutual and profitable growth between retailers and suppliers. These initiatives have led to strengthening relationships over the past several years, including with Walmart and Whole Foods. Retailers represent a significant potential growth accelerator as our solutions provide integrated data across a broader set of use cases needed to succeed in an omnichannel environment.

•Increase SMB Client Base and Penetrate International Markets: Through our commitment to innovation and investment, we have positioned our business for long-term growth with SMB clients and within international markets. For example, the GfK Combination significantly expanded our capabilities and international presence and allowed us to apply our advanced analytics to new verticals and categories. We see significant opportunities to add and expand relationships with SMB clients, an addressable market we estimate to be worth approximately $31 billion across 71,000 businesses. Our flexible technology platform allows us to tailor solutions to address SMB clients’ specific needs. We also see significant opportunities to broaden and deepen our footprint in developing markets, including Latin America and Asia Pacific. eCommerce penetration in these markets is growing rapidly and faster than it is in developed markets, and our global coverage enables our growth alongside our existing global clients as well as through new client acquisition.

•Expand within New Verticals: We are committed to broadening our presence by increasing coverage across channels with enhanced data coverage. Within FMCG, we continue to expand across the pet, beauty, tobacco and beverage and alcohol industries. We believe we can capture white space in adjacent FMCG sectors such as financial services, government and media and advertising, which have large TAM that we estimate to be $4 billion, $2 billion and $11 billion, respectively. In 2024, revenue from these adjacent and high growth verticals grew 16% and contributed one percentage point of our revenue growth. Within media and advertising specifically, our granular data and insights allow advertisers to target advertisements with high precision and measure the impact of, and returns on, their advertising spend. We also believe we have the opportunity for expansion into other areas, including healthcare, logistics and FMCG distributors.

•Leverage Strategic M&A: Our strategic acquisitions, including the GfK Combination, ten tuck-in acquisitions and a strategic investment since the 2021 Carve-Out Transaction, have supported our growth momentum. We intend to selectively pursue strategic acquisitions to complement our solutions and datasets, provide access to new markets or categories, enhance our technology and analytics capabilities and strengthen our competitive positioning. We believe this will enable us to increase value for our global client base, drive further innovation and cross-sell activity and enhance our long-term growth potential.

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Our Attractive Business Model

We believe our leading market position, global footprint, neutrality, credibility, scope, quality and depth of our data, robust data governance and stewardship and our cloud-based, AI-powered technology platform will continue to contribute to our long-term growth and strong operating margins. We believe that our embedded, often on-site relationships with our clients position us to recognize future trends first-hand and innovate to proactively address the evolving needs of our clients. We have a highly efficient and attractive business model characterized by the following attributes:

•Mission-Critical Solutions Delivering Significant Value to Our Clients: Our solutions empower clients to make informed decisions that drive multi-billion-dollar revenue and expense budgets and provide critical support at a fraction of the value at stake. By leveraging our data-driven insights and advanced analytics, our clients can optimize their strategies and operations and maximize returns, regardless of market conditions. In both expansionary and challenging times, our tools offer the agility and precision needed to navigate complex and evolving consumer shopping preferences.

•Recurring and Diversified Revenue Base: We have a strong financial foundation underpinned by long-term enterprise client relationships, predictable growth and expanded margins. Our revenue model is predominantly subscription-based, and all of our Intelligence revenue, which represented approximately 81% of our total revenue for 2025, was recurring in nature. Additionally, approximately 73% of our Activation revenue, which represented approximately 19% of our total revenue for 2025, was highly reoccurring revenue. This provides us with strong visibility in our financial performance, allowing us to invest strategically in innovation and growth and generate margin expansion across our approximately 80% fixed cost base. Our revenue base is highly diversified across multiple industries with no single client comprising more than 5% of total revenue in 2025.

•High Client Retention and Net Dollar Retention: Our long-standing relationships with top global brands and retailers, as well as our focus on delivering innovation and increasing value, have resulted in high client retention rates. For example, we have renewed all of our largest clients by revenue, whose contracts have come up for renewal since the 2021 Carve-Out Transaction, providing a foundation for recurring revenues and a platform for growth. Our Intelligence Subscription Revenue, which accounted for 68% of total revenue in 2025, had a net dollar retention and gross dollar retention of 105% and 98% respectively, as of December 31, 2025. For all Intelligence Revenue, we have achieved net dollar retention of 104% and gross dollar retention of 98% for the same period.

•Scalable Operating Model: Our scalable “build once, deploy everywhere” business model, global presence and enhanced technology platform allows us to scale solutions rapidly, lower our cost to serve clients and grow revenue at increasing margins. Our strategic focus on cost optimization and efficiency will continue to expand our margins. Our embedded AI capabilities and expansion to alternative data collection methods and sources have helped reduce our Cash Data Costs from 22% of revenue in 2021 to 15% for the year ended December 31, 2025. We are also reducing personnel costs by expanding our presence and talent in lower cost countries. The reduced operating costs and overhead savings through targeted efficiencies and synergies have strengthened our operating leverage. Our CEP is completed while cost synergies from the GfK Combination are expected to be substantially realized by 2026.

•Strong Cash Flow Generation: Our business model supports strong cash flow generation, driven by our recurring revenue base, efficient cost structure characterized by a primarily fixed cost base and limited maintenance capital expenditure requirements, which we expect to normalize as our investment in our transformation initiatives are substantially complete. We have a proven ability to deploy capital in strategic, value accretive M&A which complements our organic growth and further enhances our financial profile.

Our Clients

We believe our client value proposition is reflected by our large and long-tenured client relationships. As of December 31, 2025, we served approximately 23,000 clients worldwide, ranging from multi-national brands and retailers to SMB. Our clients include approximately half of the Fortune 500 and nearly 80% of the Fortune 100 companies. Over decades, we have grown alongside some of the world’s largest consumer brands. For example, Coca-Cola has been a client for 100 years, Colgate for over 80 years, Nestlé for nearly 75 years in FMCG and we have longstanding relationships with Samsung and Sony in T&D. We also serve new and emerging brands as well, such as Malk, Great Lakes Brewing, SharkNinja and Serenity Kids and collaborate with top U.S. retailers like Target and Walmart, as well as international retailers like ALDI and LIDL. Leveraging our leading positions in the FMCG and T&D industries, we continue to expand within pet, beauty, tobacco, beverage and alcohol, as well as other fast-growing adjacent verticals, including financial services and government media and advertising, to capture significant whitespace opportunity.

Our go-to-market strategy seeks to seamlessly integrate into our clients’ enterprises, embedding our solutions, insights, analytics and software into their workflows and decision-making processes. This integration offers clients significant returns on their investments. We believe clients such as Coca-Cola, Samsung and Procter & Gamble, who each spend billions of dollars every year on trade, advertising and research and development can allocate less than 2% of that spend to our solutions to drive strategic and operating decisions that can have out-sized impacts on their results. For example, our insights help Coca-Cola manage a $2.5 billion trade spend and $5.1 billion advertising budget. In 2024, changes in price, the mix of products and packages sold and the mix of channels and geographic territories where sales occurred accounted for an 11% increase in their revenue. Our solutions help clients capture these kinds of strategic growth opportunities through pricing, product and geographic decisions to drive growth and profitability.

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Our Go-to-Market Approach

Our Go-to-Market approach, encompassing sales and client success strategies, is driven by our commitment to put clients at the heart of everything we do. We focus on anticipating client needs and creating long-term value by aligning our global expertise with local market demands.

Key Strategies

•Regional Sales Structure: Our sales and client success teams are organized regionally: Americas, EMEA and APAC, utilizing a primarily direct sales model to penetrate and expand within our clients’ organizations.

•Unified, Embedded Solutions: Our unified data, analytics and software solutions are embedded into our clients’ mission-critical workflows and business processes. Regularly used by their internal teams across the enterprise, our solutions provide a holistic view of global consumer shopping behavior and serve as gateway to The NIQ Ecosystem, supporting various use cases and category-specific applications.

•Dedicated Client Success: Our highly skilled and technical product specialists, whether on-site clients’ offices or virtually, help clients maximize value of The NIQ Ecosystem. Our associates work closely with clients to help them leverage our NIQ data, analytics and software to anticipate competitive trends, power strategic and operational decision-making and identify growth opportunities. In 2025, our client success teams generated 13,000 sales-ready leads, which we estimate resulted in more than $122.3 million of additional revenue.

We believe our global value proposition and client-focused, go-to-market approach is differentiated in the market given our ability to serve clients’ needs across categories and products in 90 countries. Also, our highly skilled employees and embedded solutions deepen client relationships and engagement with our core Intelligence measurement solutions. As clients grow, they add additional products and market reads to their subscription, and also Activation analytics products to predict and drive innovation. This approach creates opportunities to identify and cross-sell additional products and capabilities to better serve our clients’ needs and to capture a larger share of our clients’ spending on data intelligence. Among all of our clients in 2025, the adoption rate of these new solutions was more than 30%, representing an actionable penetration opportunity of approximately 70%.

We have also implemented a proactive renewal strategy with consistent, value-based pricing, the success of which we believe is reflected in our improved client renewals and retention. Since the 2021 Carve-Out Transaction, our client-focused innovation and other operational improvements enabled us to renew all of our largest clients by revenue that have come up for renewal, leading to Intelligence Subscription net dollar retention of 105% and Intelligence total net dollar retention of 104% for 2025.

Competition

Our market is highly competitive and subject to rapid changes in client requirements, industry standards, new product introductions and improvements of legacy systems. Our competitors vary in size and product focus, but we believe that none matches our scale, breadth and depth. For example, some of our competitors mainly compete in retail measurement in the United States, but have limited presence in international markets, while others focus on consumer panel offerings across the United States and Western Europe, but do not provide retail measurement services. For our Intelligence offerings, we primarily compete with consumer measurement service providers such as Circana, LLC (“Circana”), Kantar Group, Ltd. (“Kantar”), YouGov plc, IDC and SpinsInternational Data Corporation and SPINS LLC. For our Activation offerings, we primarily compete with analytics providers such as Circana and Kantar, and smaller competitors including providers of point solutions and research.

We believe our scale, long-standing client relationships and comprehensive solution suite allow us to provide a competitive advantage and effectively navigate disruptions in the sector. This can be illustrated by recent win-backs of global clients, which were opportunities we were able to seize due to the strength of our differentiated Intelligence and Activation solutions. We believe we compete favorably across several factors, including:

•comprehensive global reach;

•data scale, breadth, depth and accuracy;

•data security and stewardship;

•platform scalability;

•ease of deployment and implementation speed;

•long-standing relationships with retailers;

•client support and satisfaction;

•product innovation; and

•AI leadership.

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Employees and Human Capital Resources

As of December 31, 2025, we employed 38,760 employees worldwide, including over 2,350 employees in the United States. We engage temporary employees, independent contractors and consultants as needed to support our operations. None of our employees in the United States are represented by a labor union or subject to a collective bargaining agreement. We have not experienced any material work stoppages, and we consider our relations with our employees to be good.

At NIQ, our people are at the heart of everything we do. We view our human capital-related initiatives as an ongoing priority. Such initiatives include: (i) implementing a robust talent acquisition approach, including through competitive pay and (ii) offering our employees a full suite of benefits, including health, dental, vision and life insurance, a 401(k) plan (with match) and paid parental leave. We foster a workplace that is diverse, equitable and inclusive. As of December 31, 2025, we employed over 4,370 employees dedicated to technology, AI and data science functions. Our diverse and talented workforce – our human intelligence – is one of our most valuable assets, driving our capabilities in cloud-based technology, AI, analytics and modern marketing techniques. We are committed to fostering a culture of high-performance and innovation and our organization is aligned around five core NIQ Priorities:

•Client at the Heart of Everything We Do: Create a differentiated client experience.

•Re-Invest for Growth: Make smart investment choices aligned with our clients’ needs.

•Data Excellence: Delight our clients with industry-leading data quality, coverage and granularity.

•Market-leading Technology: Invest in, build and deploy the best technology in the industry.

•Principles-led Culture: Invest in our people, capabilities and culture.

A key component of our company culture is shaped by the NIQ Principles, which provide a practical framework for all employees to execute, collaborate and make decisions. Our NIQ Principles are as follows:

•Client Obsessed: Put clients’ success at the center of our strategy and decision-making.

•Driven to Win: Be passionate about being the best at what we do.

•Accountable for Results: Own, solve & deliver as one team.

•Committed to Integrity: Create a culture that makes you proud; treat all people with dignity.

The NIQ principles are embedded in performance management, hiring, promotion and are reinforced throughout the year through workshops and our NPS. Also, employee engagement and inclusion are crucial for unlocking individual and team performance, innovation and productivity. We measure engagement and inclusion using Gallup’s survey methodology and have made it a priority for all people leaders to drive continuous improvement.

We are committed to fostering a high-performance culture of excellence, inclusivity and continuous improvement. By investing in our people and aligning our efforts with our core NIQ Principles and Priorities, we strive to create an environment where every employee can thrive and contribute to our mission of delivering The Full ViewTM.

Intellectual Property

Our intellectual property is a strategic advantage, and protecting it is critical to our business. Because of its importance, we treat our intellectual property, including our brand, software, technology, know-how, concepts and databases as proprietary. To establish, maintain, protect and enforce our intellectual property, we generally rely on a combination of patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret laws of the United States and other countries, as well as certain contractual rights, such as confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with employees and third parties, and license and other agreements with consultants, vendors and clients.

Our registered IP portfolio consists of U.S. and international patents, patent applications, trademark registrations, trademark applications, copyright registrations, copyright applications and domain name registrations. We pursue additional intellectual property protection when we believe it would be beneficial and cost-effective. Despite our efforts to protect our intellectual property rights, they may not be respected in the future or may be invalidated, circumvented or challenged. For additional information, see the section titled “Risks Factors—Risks Related to our Intellectual Property.” We license our intellectual property rights to third parties on arms-length terms, often through standard licensing frameworks designed to protect our syndicated data, proprietary materials and related intellectual property. These agreements typically set forth the scope of use of the licensed intellectual property, impose restrictions on use (including no redistribution, public claims or reverse engineering), mandate certain security obligations and clarify that we retain ownership of all syndicated data and pre-existing intellectual property, with all rights reserved.

We also license certain intellectual property that is important for our business from third parties. For example, we entered into a Trademark License Agreement, by and between The Nielsen Company (US) LLC, a subsidiary of our former parent company Nielsen Holdings Limited (formerly Nielsen Holdings plc), and Nielsen Consumer LLC, our indirect subsidiary, dated as of March 5, 2021 (the “Nielsen License Agreement”). Pursuant to the Nielsen License Agreement, The Nielsen Company (US) LLC, our former parent company, granted us an exclusive license to use certain trademarks and service marks, including “NielsenIQ” in connection with our core business and a non-exclusive license to use certain tradenames and service marks in connection with certain other fields. The Nielsen License Agreement will expire on March 5, 2041 unless otherwise terminated as provided in the agreement.

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Global Responsibility and Sustainability

We lead Environmental, Social and Governance (“ESG”) initiatives, ensuring that our impact resonates profoundly within the communities we serve.

Our Governance, Strategy and Commitments

At NIQ, we uphold responsible business practices through a framework of policies, standards and oversight that fosters an ethical corporate culture across our global footprint.

Our Chief Legal Officer (“CLO”) oversees NIQ’s ESG strategy and leads a central ESG team responsible for driving progress across our priorities. This team works with stakeholders throughout the business to advance our strategy, coordinate cross-functional execution and manage reporting and disclosure efforts. In 2025, we further refined our internal ESG governance framework to strengthen accountability and coordination across functions. This framework defines roles and responsibilities for our sustainability priorities. Our Board of Directors and CEO review and approve key aspects of our ESG strategy and take an active role in major business decisions related to ESG. The Audit Committee of the Board receives regular updates from the central ESG team. The Audit Committee, in turn, keeps the full Board apprised of evolving regulations related to ESG risks and our sustainability efforts.

In 2022, we undertook a comprehensive assessment of the most significant ESG risks and opportunities pertinent to our organization. In 2023, we integrated these ESG-related risks into the company’s overall Enterprise Risk Management (“ERM”) framework to identify action plans and controls. Our Corporate Audit Staff team is responsible for facilitating the ERM program to help management identify, report, manage and monitor company-wide risks and mitigation strategies on a regular basis. Twice a year, ERM assessments are discussed formally with the Audit Committee, our CFO and CLO.

ESG topics are assessed within the ERM framework. Since completing our third-party ESG risk and opportunity assessment in 2022, we have continued to integrate the identified focus areas into our ERM framework, to guide risk assessments, mitigation efforts and action plans. These ESG focus areas are integral to our operational framework and reflect our dedication to fostering sustainable practices that benefit both our organization and the communities we serve. While these ESG focus areas are a blueprint for our ESG commitments and initiatives, we continuously review the relevance of these ESG focus areas on an annual basis to reflect the evolving business landscape.

Our ESG commitments across the identified focus areas include:

•Data Management – We are committed to safeguarding all of our digital information and delivering secure, accurate and relevant market and consumer data, enabling clients to gain meaningful insights that drive informed business decisions and foster growth.

•Business Ethics – We are committed to integrity as the foundation of our business operations. We have established a comprehensive framework of policies and standards to promote responsible business practices and cultivate an ethical corporate culture.

•Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – We are committed to fostering an inclusive and equitable workplace where everyone can be their authentic selves and embedding these principles in everything we do.

•People Management – We are committed to nurturing a dynamic culture that embraces and celebrates openness, collaboration, creativity, equity and inclusivity.

•Environmental Responsibility – We are committed to creating a thriving future by focusing on actively mitigating our environmental impacts and adapting to the realities of climate change. We leverage our unique expertise to support our clients in transitioning to a more sustainable marketplace, recognizing our responsibility to drive positive change for the planet.

To build on these existing focus areas, our company completed a formal reassessment in 2025 in alignment with the principles of double materiality, whereby a sustainability issue is considered material if it presents a significant impact on society or the environment and a significant impact on a company’s value drivers, competitive position and long-term shareholder value creation. This Double Materiality Assessment (“DMA”) informs the evolution of our ESG strategy and reporting in alignment with global standards such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (“CSRD”) and the SEC’s climate disclosure rule, which was adopted on March 6, 2024 and is currently stayed by an SEC order issued on April 4, 2024 pending judicial review. The DMA revealed key financial risks—privacy, cybersecurity, data integrity and climate change—alongside opportunities in energy efficiency and waste reduction, while NIQ’s operations influence energy use, emissions and e-waste.

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Data Management

Overview

We collect and analyze market-level and consumer data, enabling a comprehensive understanding of consumer behaviors and market trends. A portion of NIQ’s consumer data is derived from consumers who voluntarily participate in panels, surveys and research activities, which support clients in making informed product and pricing decisions, assessing brand image and perception and understanding consumer behaviors and attitudes to inform product development, ultimately helping clients reach and engage more customers. In addition to working with this data, we operate in rapidly evolving global markets characterized by shifting consumer-driven market dynamics, the growth of generative AI and increasingly complex data regulations—particularly the expanding U.S. state privacy, security, and AI landscape.

Our data management approach is global in scope and anchored in standardized governance across jurisdictions. In addition to the evolving U.S. landscape, we maintain a compliance posture with the privacy and personal data protection laws in all markets where NIQ operates, such as GDPR in EU/UK, PIPL for China and LGPD in Brazil. We maintain an adaptive posture designed to ensure consistent controls and localized implementation through the NIQ Privacy Program.

For investors, these programs protect revenue quality by increasing data reliability, reducing remediation and rework, supporting client trust and underpinning renewals and long-term contracts. Our governance cadence and control environment are designed to mitigate operational, regulatory and reputational risks that could otherwise impact delivery and margin.

Data Collection and Security

We collect personal data from various sources, including panel members (individuals or households), survey participants, website visitors and contacts through various communication methods. We implement measures designed to safeguard information and ensure its relevance and accuracy, including data minimization standards and retention periods.

Our data security measures include 24/7/365 incident response, threat intelligence, antivirus protection, firewalls, multifactor authentication and access controls. Our NIQ Cybersecurity Program leverages the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) Cybersecurity Framework (“CSF”) and Center for Internet Security (“CIS”) Critical Security Controls (“CSC”), supported by Security Information and Event Management (“SIEM”) based incident response, endpoint detection and response, privileged access management, dynamic/static application security testing, patch and vulnerability management and logical access controls, overseen by the Information Technology Governance, Risk and Compliance (“IT GRC”) Committee.

These controls are designed to reduce incident likelihood and dwell time, protect delivery commitments and sustain client confidence. Our emphasis on preventative controls and rapid detection/remediation supports operational resilience and risk mitigation.

AI Governance

While there has been a recent surge in the use of generative AI, our company has a long-standing commitment to innovation, having integrated machine learning and AI into our backend processes to ensure data is accurately tagged, high-quality and up to date. Our responsible AI approach emphasizes human oversight at critical decision points, documented use constraints and client-facing transparency about AI-assisted deliverables. Prospective use cases are prioritized where automation measurably improves quality, speed or insight while maintaining compliance.

We operate under the NIQ Global AI Policy, which requires use of NIQ-approved tools within a private AI environment, mandates human-in-the-loop validation and prohibits use of public AI platforms or training/fine-tuning any model with NIQ data. Governance is led by the AI Safety, Compliance & Guidelines Enablement Group and the Derived Insights (AI / Machine Learning (“ML”)) Domain Architecture Council.

Our expanded focus on generative AI allows us to explore conversational interfaces, task fulfillment and analytical insights, including BASES AI Screener and Synthetic Panels. To support responsible AI use, we have also implemented updated Data Sharing Guidelines, which expand AI-related client restrictions—no public AI, no Large Language Model (“LLM”) training or fine-tuning with NIQ data and constraints around bot-based extraction from Discover.

For investors, our AI governance reduces model and data misuse risk, safeguards intellectual property and supports scalable innovation in a manner intended not to compromise privacy or contractual obligations.

Adaptation to Market Changes

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unique challenges for our data collection mechanisms. Our company adapted swiftly to evolving market trends in the retail sector, addressing challenges such as the inability to conduct physical store counts and a rapid shift to eCommerce. In 2022, we launched a global analysis to identify and prioritize 21 key markets for reassessment. This proactive approach enhanced our data accuracy through a rolling establishment survey. By expanding this strategy globally, our data reflects current market conditions, enabling clients to navigate changes confidently while maintaining our standards of excellence.

These adaptations strengthened coverage and timeliness in priority markets, supporting product delivery consistency and reducing downstream adjustments in client outputs.

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Data Governance and Quality Programs

Data quality is a shared responsibility across our company. Within our operations, we have established data governance mechanisms along the data lifecycle, which are supported by global data governance teams. These teams monitor progress across all markets and provide guidance on tailored local data practices for compliance, including the specific and technical aspects of managing data.

Our Retailer Accreditation Protocol (“RAP”) ensures thorough data testing and quality assessment for retailers during onboarding, with RAP score refresh cadence and monthly Data Quality Inputs (“DQI”) monitoring per 2025 standards. Pursuant to RAP, we score each retailer’s data during onboarding based on defined criteria, and then use a separate DQI program to highlight risks, which we seek to mitigate through improved inputs from such retailer. Exceptions for onboarding non-compliant but strategically critical retailers are managed through a global cadence and leadership approvals.

We utilize the Quality Control Tower (“QCT”) and intelligent QCT (“iQCT”) for real-time monitoring and validation of field data collection, supported by automated checks, Store-Level Analysis (“SLA”) UI and supervised remediation via Collection Buddy (“CoBu”), our collection assistant. QCT is patented (US, July 2022), providing competitive differentiation. eCommerce data is gathered through secure methods, including encrypted point of sale data and cloud-to-cloud sharing, with rigorous validation processes. Predefined formats and password-protected protocols are applied globally and undergo automated validation upon integration.

For investors, RAP/DQI controls and QCT/iQCT automation reduce input variability and rework, supporting predictable delivery timelines and revenue quality. These programs also drive continuous improvement in supplier performance and data integrity.

Panel Integrity and Supplier Controls

We are committed to safeguarding our data, especially the reliability and integrity of our consumer panels, surveys and research activities. We implement strategic safeguards to mitigate fraud risk, improve sample integrity and protect the reliability of insights delivered to our clients, which thereby reduces reputational and operational risk. We only allow incoming data from approved sources and secure these data transfers through standardized procedures alongside escalation protocols across all borders, ensuring quality and minimizing human error. Our system-generated checks help identify duplication and errors, which assists in ensuring high-quality data delivery.

More specifically, NIQ employs a layered registration and security approach designed to support secure user authentication and fraud prevention, including recruitment fraud reviews, two-factor authentication and digital fingerprinting. This approach combines centralized identity verification and multi‑factor authentication with automated eligibility, deduplication and geographic controls during onboarding and profiling. Collectively, these measures are intended to enhance consumer account security, reduce fraudulent activity and strengthen the overall quality and trustworthiness of survey and panel‑based data used in client analytics.

Regulatory Compliance and Risk Management

We maintain an adaptive compliance posture in response to evolving privacy, data security and AI laws around the globe. In response to the administration’s concerns around sensitive data and adversarial access, NIQ has instituted administrative, contractual and technical controls, including third-party risk management assessments, aligning our compliance program with the U.S. DOJ Data Security Program (“DSP”) Final Rule (28 CFR Part 202), affecting cross-border data transactions involving countries of concern.

Beyond the United States, NIQ applies the same adaptive compliance approach in APAC and EMEA, providing regulatory support as new privacy laws and implementing regulations come into force. This includes, for example, supporting compliance with evolving data protection regimes in APAC such as China (Personal Information Protection Law – PIPL), India (Digital Personal Data Protection Act – DPDP Act), and Vietnam (Personal Data Protection, Law 2025 - PDPL), as well as the Executive Regulations of Egypt’s Personal Data Protection Law (Law No. 151 of 2020) in EMEA. These efforts ensure that NIQ’s global privacy program remains aligned with regional legal developments while maintaining consistent data protection standards worldwide.

Legal and Regulatory Matters

Various aspects of our operations are subject to foreign, federal, state and local laws, rules and regulations, any of which may change from time to time. Laws and regulations affecting our business may change, sometimes frequently and significantly, as a result of political, economic, social or other events.

The following discussion highlights our key areas of government regulation. For additional information regarding the effects of government regulation on our business, see Part I, Item 1A. Risk Factors of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Sanctions Compliance

We are subject to laws and regulations imposed by the United States (including those imposed by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”)) and other authorities outside of the United States that may prohibit us or our affiliates from doing business in certain countries or territories or restrict the type of business that may be conducted by our affiliates.

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As a result of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that began in February 2022, various government authorities, including the United States, United Kingdom and European Union (“EU”), enacted sanctions against Russia and Belarus and certain Russian and Belarusian interests. In response to these developments, we have had to undertake changes in how we operate in Russia and Belarus. While we continue to hold shares in our operational Russian subsidiaries, these entities are locally managed and act autonomously and are overseen solely by management within Russia without day-to-day or other supervision by us. We have undertaken measures designed to limit the provision of services or support to those Russian subsidiaries and the receiving or sending of any financial information to or from the subsidiaries, and we have taken measures to stop the collection or sending of funds to or from Russia. We also currently do not have any non-Russian directors at the Russian subsidiary level.

Data Privacy and Security Laws and Regulations, and AI Laws

Numerous state, federal and foreign laws, regulations and standards govern the processing and protection of personal information, and could apply now or in the future to our operations or the operations of our partners, third-party providers and others upon whom we commercially rely. In the United States, numerous federal and state laws and regulations, including comprehensive state privacy laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, data breach notification laws and consumer protection laws and regulations govern the processing and protection of personal information.

•Comprehensive U.S. State Privacy Laws: Sixteen U.S. states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia, — have enacted comprehensive privacy legislation, currently in effect, intended to provide consumers with greater transparency and control over their personal information by providing consumers in these states with certain rights regarding their personal information and by requiring businesses to make certain disclosures and take certain other acts in furtherance of those rights. An additional three states— Indiana, Kentucky and Rhode Island have passed similar comprehensive privacy laws, which will go into effect over the course of 2026.

•Data Breach Notification Laws: All fifty U.S. states, the District of Columbia and some U.S. territories have adopted data notification laws that may require notice be given to affected individuals, regulators, credit reporting agencies and/or others when certain types of data has been compromised as the result of a security breach or incident. In the event of such a security breach, our compliance with these laws may subject us to costs associated with investigation, notice and remediation, as well as potential litigation or investigations and enforcement actions from applicable regulatory authorities.

•Federal Trade Commission Act (the “FTC Act”): The FTC Act prohibits unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices. Our data processing practices and the security measures we employ to safeguard the personal data of consumers could also be subject to the FTC Act, and our data practices or our failure to safeguard data adequately may subject us to regulatory scrutiny or enforcement action.

•U.S. State Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices Laws: Many states have enacted statutes that prohibit unfair and deceptive acts and practices. NIQ and others in the industry may be subject to these laws with respect to the use and disclosure of consumer personal information.

In addition, certain foreign laws govern the privacy and security of personal data, including:

•The General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (“GDPR”): The GDPR establishes a robust data protection and privacy standard and together with local laws (including the Irish Data Protection Acts 1988-2018) grants EU citizens various rights in relation to their personal data, including the right to access their personal data that is held by a company, by way of a data subject access request. The GDPR imposes operational, data processing and other technical and organizational requirements with which we must comply. These requirements include implementing appropriate measures in place to ensure that EU citizens can properly exercise their data subject rights, and ensuring that adequate safeguards are in place when transferring personal data internationally, both intragroup and to third parties (for example, by implementing standard contractual clauses).

•The UK GDPR and the UK Data Protection Act 2018: In the United Kingdom (“UK”), the privacy and security of personal data is governed by the UK Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK GDPR (as defined in the Data Protection Act 2018, as amended by the Data Protection, Privacy and Electronic Communications (Amendments etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019). These laws establish robust data protection and privacy standards, impose operational data processing obligations and grant UK citizens various rights in relation to their personal data, including the right to access their personal data held by a company by way of a data subject access request. These laws also impose other technical and organizational requirements with which we must comply, including implementing adequate safeguards when transferring personal data internationally, both intragroup and to third parties (for example, by implementing the UK Addendum or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (“UK IDTA”) where required). Additionally, on June 19, 2025 the Data (Use and Access) Act (“DUAA ”) took effect, introducing certain, relatively minor, amendments to the data protection regime in the UK and therefore creating a slight divergence between the EU and UK data protection regimes.

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•Directive 2002/58/EC (as amended by Directive 2009/136/EC) (“ePrivacy Directive”): This directive is transposed into law in each EU member state so local transposition and enforcement can vary. It contains a prohibition on accessing information on a person’s device, such as through the use of cookies and other similar technologies, without informed consent, as well as rules on direct marketing. On November 19, 2025, the European Commission published the Digital Omnibus Package (“Omnibus Proposals”), aimed at simplifying the EU’s digital regulatory framework. The Omnibus Proposals would streamline the rules governing cookies and tracking technologies, potentially removing the requirement to obtain explicit consent for certain categories of cookies. If adopted, these changes could ease compliance obligations around the use of cookies and tracking tools in the EU. In the UK, the ePrivacy Directive was transposed into UK law as the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (“PECR”) which imposes equivalent requirements on our UK operations. The UK’s DUAA made certain limited amendments to PECR, most notably brining its enforcement powers in line with the UK GDPR, so that monetary penalties under PECR can now reach the greater of €17.5 million or 4% of an organization’s total worldwide annual turnover.

The above laws have direct effect in the EU and UK, but also have extra-territorial scope. For example, the GDPR and the UK GDPR apply to processing outside of the EU and the UK, respectively, if such processing involves the offering of goods and services to individuals in the EU or UK, as applicable, or the monitoring of the behavior of such individuals. We have seen a recent trend of data privacy laws globally operating with extra-territorial scope, and data protection regulators enforcing compliance within their jurisdiction by international organizations. Our business activities may therefore be subject to data privacy laws and regulations in other international jurisdictions by virtue of either operating in or offering goods and services in those jurisdictions.

Regulations related to AI technologies may also impose certain obligations and restrictions on our use of data. For example, in 2024, Colorado adopted the Consumer Protections for Artificial Intelligence Act and the EU adopted a new regulation applicable to certain AI technologies and the data used to train, test and deploy them (“EU AI Act”). The EU AI Act entered into force on August 1, 2024, and its requirements will become effective on a staggered basis, between February 2, 2025 and August 2, 2027, with the main provisions due to come into force on August 2, 2026. Classifying AI systems according to risk, the EU AI Act imposes a range of obligations on developers, importers, distributors and users of AI systems, and also imposes prohibitions on certain high-risk AI practices. It also carries a range of enforcement powers for the European Commission’s newly established AI Office to exercise, including fines of up to €35 million or 7% of an organization’s annual turnover for the previous year, and the authority to recall or restrict AI systems and require corrective action. The Omnibus Proposals could introduce future changes to the applicable obligations under the EU AI Act including, in particular, pushing back compliance deadlines for high-risk AI systems.

In the UK, the Government has pledged to implement legislation imposing obligations on developers of the most powerful AI models. This framework is expected to take the form of a principles-based regime intended to foster growth and development of AI technologies, however, there have been delays with this proposal and a UK AI bill is not expected until mid-2026 at the earliest. Sector-specific guidance on AI has already been published by regulators in the UK, including the Competition and Markets Authority and the Information Commissioner’s Office.

AI, data privacy and security laws, regulations and other obligations are constantly evolving, may conflict with each other to complicate compliance efforts and can result in investigations, proceedings or actions that lead to significant civil and/or criminal penalties and restrictions on data processing.

Corporate Information

On January 21, 2025, AI Global Investments (Netherlands) PCC Limited (the “Advent Shareholder”) acquired Flower Road Limited, an Irish private company with limited liability that was incorporated in Ireland on June 6, 2017 as a dormant company. On January 23, 2025, we renamed such entity NIQ Global Intelligence Limited. On June 12, 2025, NIQ Global Intelligence Limited was re-registered under the Irish Companies Act 2014 as a public limited company and was renamed NIQ Global Intelligence plc. On July 22, 2025, in connection with the IPO, NIQ Global Intelligence plc became the direct parent of AI PAVE Dutchco I B.V. (“AI PAVE”) and the indirect parent of other intermediate holding companies, including AI PAVE Dutchco II B.V., AI PAVE Dutchco III B.V. (collectively, with AI PAVE, the “AI PAVE Entities”), and Intermediate Dutch Holdings B.V. (the “Reorganization”). All holders of equity interests in AI PAVE became shareholders of NIQ Global Intelligence plc.

We began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) under the symbol “NIQ” on July 23, 2025.

Available Information

Our website is www.nielseniq.com. We make available on this website, free of charge, access to our press releases, conference calls, annual and quarterly reports and other documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) as soon as reasonably practicable after these reports are filed or furnished. We also make available through the “Investor Relations” section of this website information related to the corporate governance of NIQ, including position specifications for the chair and each of the members of our Board of Directors, as well as for committee chairs; the Corporate Governance Guidelines; the charters of each of the standing committees of the Board of Directors; our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics; and our Speak Up and Non-Retaliation Policy. All of these documents are also available to shareholders in print upon request.

All reports and documents filed with the SEC are also available via the SEC website, www.sec.gov.