The Prague company behind IntelliJ sees its operating profit sink 63.2%

A bigger year with a much thinner profit

If you write code, there is a fair chance you opened IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm or another JetBrains tool this week. JetBrains s.r.o., the Czech company in the software maker's family (s.r.o. is the Czech form of a private limited company), sold CZK 16.0bn in 2025. That is up 6.3% from CZK 15.1bn a year earlier. The figures are the company's own standalone accounts under Czech accounting rules, in koruna, for the calendar year.

The growth is steady rather than spectacular. What happened beneath it is not. Operating profit, what is left after paying for people, offices and everything else it takes to run the business, fell 63.2% to CZK 751m, from CZK 2.0bn in 2024.

Put another way: in 2024 the company kept 13.6% of every koruna of sales as operating profit. In 2025 it kept 4.7%. The margin narrowed by 8.9 pp in a single year.

The sharpest way to see it is to look only at the growth. The company added CZK 943m of sales, and its operating profit changed by CZK -1.3bn. Costs did not just keep pace with the new revenue. They rose by more than all of it. Every extra koruna that came in brought more than a koruna of extra cost with it.

In software, the cost is the team

A software licence costs almost nothing to copy. The money goes into the people who write, test, support and sell the product, and into the offices they sit in. That makes the cost base of a company like this one largely a payroll, and payrolls move ahead of revenue. A team hired to build next year's features, a new support desk, a sales push into a new market: all of it is paid this month, while the subscriptions it is meant to win arrive later.

That is the usual shape of a growth squeeze in software. Wages for experienced developers rise faster than list prices, and a company that wants to keep its engineers pays the market rate. Revenue grows by a few per cent, the cost of the people behind it grows faster, and the margin gets thinner even though nothing is wrong with demand.

Demand, in fact, looks fine. Revenue went from CZK 12.7bn in 2022 to CZK 14.6bn in 2023, CZK 15.1bn in 2024 and CZK 16.0bn in 2025, higher every year. The squeeze did not come from customers walking away.

It also did not come from machines. Depreciation and amortisation, the cost of computers, servers and other long-lived assets spread over their useful life, barely moved: CZK 167m in 2025 against CZK 160m in 2024. The EBITDA margin, which leaves depreciation out, narrowed by 8.9 pp, the same as the operating margin. Whatever pushed costs up sits in the day-to-day running of the business.

There is one more lever in a company that is part of an international group. The profit a local company keeps also depends on how the group prices the work and services that pass between its members. The accounts do not split the rise in costs between staff, services bought from outside and payments within the group, and that split is the figure that would show which explanation applies here.

Below the operating line, the profit disappears

The operating result is only half the story. JetBrains s.r.o. ended 2025 with a net loss of CZK 315m, after a net profit of CZK 2.5bn in 2024. The net margin went from 16.5% to -2.0%.

That swing is bigger than the operating one, and the difference sits in the financial and tax lines. In 2024 net profit was higher than operating profit, so items below the operating line added to the result. In 2025 they took away more than the whole operating profit. For a company that sells worldwide and reports in koruna, exchange rates, interest and income from other group companies are the usual items that live there. The accounts do not say which of them turned.

The balance sheet felt it. Equity fell 47.0% in a year, to CZK 2.0bn from CZK 3.7bn. The loss explains only a part of that drop of CZK 1.7bn; the rest left the way equity usually leaves a profitable subsidiary, through payouts or another reduction of capital. The company still held CZK 1.4bn in cash at the end of 2025, so this is a thinner cushion, not an empty one.

For scale, the operating margin of 4.7% sits below the median of 8.0% across a mixed group of 8 large Czech companies, from McDonald's ČR to the drugstore chain Rossmann, which itself runs on 3.9%. A software company keeping a slimmer slice of its sales than the median shop, broker or factory in that group is the less expected half of the comparison.

Growth that costs more than it brings

For the developers who pay for these tools, none of this shows up at the checkout. The subscription works the same, and the squeeze stays inside the company. What it does say is something about the wider software trade: the product may be weightless, but the people behind it are not, and their price sets the margin far more than the price of the licence does.

For anyone running a business built on people, an agency, a consultancy, a studio, the same test fits in one line. Take last year's change in operating profit and divide it by last year's change in revenue. If the result is small, growth is barely paying for itself. If it is negative, as it was here in 2025, the new business cost more to win and serve than it brought in, and the extra sales are making the company bigger without making it richer.

I would not call this a crisis. Revenue keeps climbing, the operating line is still positive and the cash is there. I would watch the cost line against revenue in 2026, because a business that adds sales and loses margin at the same time is only growing on the invoice.