Tecnotree Oyj

Good morning for all and thank you for joining this TECHNO3 H1 result publishing session. My name is Timo Holopainen and I will act as the moderator during this session. For the start, I will tell few practical details related to this webcasting. The session will be recorded and recording will be made available in our website for persons who were not available at the end to this event. And I hope that this is okay for all participants. It's my pleasure to inform that our key speakers for this webcasting, as you may guess, are our CEO Padma Ravichander and our CFO Inderes Vivekanand. The session has four parts. In the first part, Padma will present the key H1 operational highlights and as well give an update in the strategy topics. Then Indires will present the numbers on more detailed level. After these presentations, we will have question and answer session, and we will answer as many questions as possible within the time limits. You can write down the question on your screens all the time during the session, and hopefully we have many questions. I will do our best to provide the answers, as many questions as possible during the Q&A. that will start immediately after CFO presentation. With this short introduction, I will hand over the presentation to our CEO, Padma Ravichander. Please, Padma, go ahead.

Thank you, Timo. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to TechnoTree. We're proud to host you today. It's one of our first electronic investor meet, and I hope we have many more to come in the future. I am here to briefly talk about our results in H1 and also the strategy for growth, the growth path and the strategy for growth that TechnoTree has embarked on. As you know, TechnoTree started 40 years ago as a Finnish company where we were doing work very close to the telecom operators core network capability in terms of voicemail, SMS, unified messaging. and from there we continued our growth path as the industry grew we grew alongside as a partner to the telecom providers service providers in terms of adding business intelligence customer relationship management, billing, charging capabilities to the core network, moving more and more from the infrastructure and CTIO type relationship to the boardroom of the telecom operator. And today I'm proud to say that the company has several CEO and CMO type relationships globally with many tier one operators. So we actually service about a billion subscribers worldwide with our technologies in 70 countries and employing close to a thousand people and servicing about 90 telecom operators worldwide who use our software. As you can see, our key customer portfolio is continuously increasing. right from emerging markets like Africa and Latin America to the Middle East, to Europe, and now I'm proud to say the United States of America, including certain countries in Asia Pacific. So we have many tier one telecom operators in our portfolio, like the Telenor, the Orido, the Altus, Telefonica, Saudi Telecom, one of the largest significant Middle East operators and so on. in terms of our own product maturity we continue to focus on a product first type of methodology and today i'm proud to say we have industry standardized 220 pre-built modules for the enterprise and as you know the growth in the telecom industry today is more in the enterprise architecture and enterprise service capability Today, our stack boasts of a very good suite of product capability for the enterprise. 50 percent of these modules are completely deployable with low-code, no-code configuration, which means very fast delivery capability, very predictable. delivery capability, and even to a point in some remote locations where the operators have services, a zero touch delivery capability on our platform. With the acquisition of the AI ML capability, Technotree today boasts of 114 patents in the AI ML technology, which I will talk a little bit later about how the significance of it. In addition to that, Technotree continues to focus on ensuring that we are a top leader in terms of the digital transformation capability for a telecom operator. If you can see here, you know, other than Jio and Exeata, who are actual telecom operators, we are the fourth in line in terms of open API standards in the certification leaderboard. And across the emerging markets, I would say we are in the top five providers of digital transformation technologies for telecom operators and digital service providers. The reason why we have embarked on the journey of standardization is as the telecom industry explodes more and more into the enterprise segment globally, They need to aggregate a set of ecosystem technologies to deal with, and the more standardized our products are, the greater and faster is the capability of integrating our product stack into their environment, into their network, and beyond in terms of service capability on our platform. We have won several awards. As you can see, we are the finalists in TM Forum customer experience. We are the world's best in terms of ETOM standards for architecture adherence. We have been recognized by Gartner and also we have real world open APIs, which means we have not only conformed to open standards, but our standards are actually deployed in customer environments and are being consumed by customers overall. So the company's brand image and product quality brand image through high quality and trustability of the product is definitely something that has improved a lot especially over the last five years um Here, I'm gonna spend a little bit of time on the H1 financial results. At a time when the economic and geopolitical situation has been quite turbulent, I'm proud to say that Technotree has demonstrated in H1 a very, very consistent performance. overall and that is really because of the agility that we have adopted in our business. We are very quick to understand environments. Our products cater to a large variety of customers and markets and our implementation capability very close to the customer as well as with a lot of automation has strengthened our financial results and our ledgers. As you can see here, our operating result was very strong, 37% growth year on year to a 9.8 million. And I really believe that this operating result comes with greater product automation, greater digitization of our product, very fast and predictable deployment through configuration, low code, no code capability on the stack. The net sales also grew modestly, even in tough economic times to a 10% growth to 34.8 million. And many of this growth, and I will talk about the key highlights, comes from our existing customers in the Middle East and Africa region, plus new customers who have adopted our stack and growth in the United States for our AI ML business. Our net income has also shown a strong growth of 11%. um to 5.5 million and this is really because we have focused on automation and focused on cost containment despite currency fluctuation pressures um and high inflationary pressures in some of the markets uh we have worked in and that in terms of shareholder equity has shown a strong performance of 81.6 million and a 9.7 percent growth year on year Some of the key highlights in terms of growth, I would say, is the new deals that we won with Utelecom and Omantel, an existing customer. Emtel was a customer of ours five years ago. They came back and reinstalled and signed a new contract with us, which is a win back. MTN and Claro, of course, are existing customers. And in the area of AIML in the United States, we won UnitedHealth, where we are deploying a use case for them and a blueprint for lead generation and next best offers for UnitedHealth, which is a Fortune 3 company in the United States. Radian was something we already announced at the beginning of the year and TELUS is a very large operator in Canada. um we are also implementing aiml capability with claro who's our existing customer so a lot of new deals and cross segmentation in terms of market penetration for our product stack now uh let me talk a little bit about our growth strategy and uh and what we are observing in the market So telecom industry, despite tough market situation has been focused on enterprise growth and serving the enterprise, especially in a post COVID era. And as you can see here, the growth drivers for the industry come in all spans of the telecom industry, right from the core network growth to the edge, where today a lot of the technology and compute power is moving vertically into the edge in terms of customer serviceability and customer experience. So if you look at the growth itself, Definitely around the globe, there is a 14% CAGR projection of growth for BSS and OSS technology, mainly because telecom operators have to modernize their digital stack and get ready for 5G and cloud capability. on their platforms. And therefore modernization and digital transformation of their BSS stack, the software that we provide from Technotree becomes inherently important for their business, especially on the enterprise side. The other growth segment is Cloud. Here you can see that large data, large massive volumes of data is being transacted across the network. If you have to consume so much of information and store so much of data, Cloud becomes an inevitable requirement in terms of infrastructure investment. Therefore, the growth in Cloud capable applications and services and products continues to see a growth of 12.8%. The next area of growth is the 5G infrastructure. Many, many first world countries have already adopted 5G, but they have not enabled 5G services. And the emerging markets are fiercely competing to implement 5G capability and digitize their stack so that they can go beyond connectivity and offer other vertical services on the platform to their subscribers to increase their own revenue penetration and retain their customers across the network. The other area of spend of course, is in IoT and other partner technologies. This industry is rapidly growing mainly because of cloud and 5G to a 22% CAGR. And it's a trillion dollar industry in many verticals. And finally, global FinTech technology markets are also expanding mainly because of social commerce, financial inclusion in emerging markets like Africa and Latin, and it's also seeing a steady growth across the sector. So right from the core network to the edge where services are being rendered right across the spectrum, there is potential for growth in the industry space that we work in. What does that mean for technotary portfolio? We honestly believe we are extremely aligned to these mega trends. The impact of these mega trends means to our product and our stack that we invest more in areas like AIML, 5G IoT, and amalgamation and integration of more services so that the differentiation between the physical world and the virtual world using Google lenses or AR VR type technologies continue to expand. I'm not sure if you knew that Technotree invested in cognitive scale well before chat GPT-3 was released. could understand what was required by the telecom industry ahead of the curve and made a strategic investment in AIML. And today, if you look at data fabric and hyper personalization, it is all about ability to manage massive amount of data and create actionable insights and Goal optimized type of services on the platform so that customers can intuitively decide and have a very personalized experience from the telecom operator in terms of the services that they provide. In terms of lines between thinking and doing, AI ML as a technology is blurring that line. It is really increasing productivity overall in all verticals, including telecommunication vertical, so that our ability to create human-like, near human-like experiences on the platform can be realized, especially using generative AI, which is where chat GPT-4 and further enhanced technologies are moving towards. Finally, I think what is extremely important also is the zero trust security on the network. When you are moving massive amount of data and telecom operators have a lot of personal information about their customers. And in fact, probably the one industry that has the most relevant customer data zero trust security mechanisms, trust and transparency mechanisms become exceedingly important on the network. And towards that, Technotree is one among the first leaders who has joined the Responsible AI Institute in the world. This is a body initiated in the United States. We are members and contributors to this body. creating trust, transparency and governance in the use and application of AI into our technology, providing a safe and secure data capability compliant to European GDPR requirements, American security requirements, etc. on our platform. Finally, obviously, we have gone after some investments to grow the strategy of ours. And those investments are coming in this quarter. This was investments that we initiated as a debt instrument in Q2. And we will be taking a three prong approach in terms of expanding our business footprint with these investments. First and foremost is business expansion. So we need to penetrate the US market and other markets like Australia, New Zealand, Oceania regions. European market, strengthen our presence in Europe as Europe unfolds for 5G requirements and create new customer acquisition capability for our product stack. So business expansion will definitely be an investment for our growth. The second area of growth is to invest in products and technologies that will help us focus on ai ml cloud capability strengthen the digital stack itself in terms of the microservices and the features it offers as we move from emerging markets to emerged markets our capability to satisfy emerged markets enterprise customers in terms of quality of service healthcare is a domain that both cognitive scale and techno tree have invested in terms of an ecosystem play. FinTech, we've already integrated mobile banking and wallet capability into our stack and will continue to grow the financial inclusion capability for social commerce and increase our vast capability in terms of over-the-top services that would help monetize further beyond connectivity to other types of ecosystem capability and services that our stack can lend itself the third area of focus would be corporate and financial focus first it would be to retire the consolidated debts that we have accrued with cognitive scale But more importantly, we have a pipeline of M&A opportunities very similar to our investment in cognitive scale for AI. There are other areas where instead of building, acquiring or merging would be a faster and more nimbler and market timed approach for our strategy. And we would continue to investigate those and announce them as and when they fructify. In terms of growth itself, as you can see, we have multiple areas of growth across many geographies. The BSS telecom stack and product obviously has the highest growth potential in both emerging markets and emerged markets. The fintech industry is growing fast for financial inclusion and integration in emerging markets. The moment stack continues to be a front runner for our digital stack. It is going to unlock revenue monetization capability on our digital platform. And we see keen interests both in North America and Europe and African regions for that ecosystem play and the play capability of a marketplace. Cloud enablement is definitely a criteria for sub brands, MNO, MVNO type capabilities and private networks that are emerging with the 5G and cloud enabled services that would make the whole opportunity for a subscription based or a subscription led capability to grow faster. And then, of course, the AI ML capability is also unfolding very rapidly. In fact, telecom industry is one of the laggards in terms of adopting AI ML, but they have the richest customer data in the world and the most relevant customer information in the world. So the opportunity to apply AI ML to the 360 view of the customer and create very actionable interactions with the customers that can help very quickly to retain customers and cross sell and upsell and monetize greater revenue with the customers is what we are trying to enable. We are working with our existing customers in these areas and unlocking a lot of capability and revenue for Technotree. But more importantly, we are being also observed And we are participating with industry bodies like TM Forum to strengthen the overall maturity model of AIML in the telecom industry. Over the top, we will continue to provide value added services on our stack and strengthen our vast business. And finally, have a lightweight offering on the cloud, a subscription based try and buy offering of our stack, hopefully at technotree.com in 2024 for many of the sub brands and the tier two and three and greenfield operators that would start coming out, especially as 5G services unfold. So what does this do in terms of a strategy? Because we have a broadened portfolio rather than just the BSS stack, we are able to diversify our revenue streams. And by investing in this kind of a transformation of our digital stack, we are able to ensure that we have more predictable revenue coming to the company, as opposed to a very traditional model where we go and we win an order, we sell licenses, we sell professional services, we sell support services, and the duration to complete an order normally takes anywhere from 12 to 15 months. When we move more and more towards offerings like SaaS, AIML, Moments, and Diva, we are moving into a subscription-based economy. And in that subscription model, annual recurring revenue is a more typical way of engaging with our customers, which is smaller chunks of revenue coming more frequently and becoming more predictable in terms of how those revenues are collected and serviced. So this is really what the underpinning uh strategy uh towards uh the investments that we are making on our digital stacks are and as you can see um we are also in the process diversifying our revenue mix while stabilizing our growth and we are achieving that by acquiring new logos as you can see there is a steady stream of new logos this is just half a year results here of new customers 23 new customers have been added since 2018 And while Claro and MTN are very important, very strategic customers who are now adopting many of our newer stack and newer digital capabilities, including AIML and cloud, we have expanded the footprint to many new tier one telcos who are also bringing in a steady amount of revenue. We are also removing our revenue dependency throughout in terms of license revenue by cross-selling and upselling more OPEX-oriented modules in our mix. And we are hoping that these seasonal license revenue capabilities will continue, but they would come back to us as annual recurring revenue in smaller chunks, but more frequently to ensure that the revenue mix is more predictable. over time now you know i just wanted to take a minute to sort of share with you what are the growing tens trends in the market in terms of ai technology ai is attracting a lot of investments all the digital companies in fact 66 percent of technology companies plan to invest in ai to to create innovation for themselves. And therefore, I really believe our investment in AI has been extremely timely. Just to give you a little bit of an understanding, if you take the top seven companies in the world in terms of technology, the likes of Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, you will find that the seven top companies in big tech their growth because of investment in AI and their market evaluation is much higher than the S&P 500 index for all companies put together. The growth that they are enjoying because of their investment in AI, is significantly larger and significantly more accelerated. And I don't know if you've been following the trends of Microsoft, they have done exceedingly well through COVID and beyond COVID. And a lot of that comes from the investments they have made in open AI technologies. So the investments in growing And investing in artificial intelligence technology, generative AI technology is really the future for companies like TechnoTree. So TechnoTree acquired Cognitive Scale towards the end of last year. It was a marriage where we had telecom industry and we have about 70 operators, a billion subscribers that we service on our platform and pouring in the AI ML engineering capability on top of that platform and tightly integrating that capability into Technotree's digital stack only increased our service capability to cross-sell and upsell more experiences digital experiences on our stack and also make our stack more versatile so that the telecom operator no longer just sells network capability but can expand their customer service portfolio to go beyond the network and start offering partner-led other services on their uh platform so that while they are highly localized in terms of services they can bring global experiences to their subscribers. Cognitive also came with some very good US customers like United Health, CVS, Anthem. They are all Fortune 500 companies that they work with in the AIML area. and they also came with 114 patents. These are really mature proprietary models that when we apply these patents to the telecom industry, we will really help the telecom industry create a new level of digital experience and a unique level of digital experience on our platform. To give you a little bit of impact on how the AI ML business has helped our growth, today AI ML growth sectors, we have predicted an increase of 5 million in our revenue potential in 2023. primarily in the telco space, but also in adjacent markets like healthcare, fintech. And there is a product called Trustar for the realty market of the United States, a very, very forward-looking product for banking and mortgage industry, which is also having a very good, attractive uptake in the US market. Cognitive scale came with these capabilities. and this is how we are expanding in the emerged markets in addition to that we were able to add some new orders uh most recently in hedge one one was with claro who is already an existing telecom customer of technotree where we are defining a new capability called a profile of one of the customer and through this capability many many issues that that Claro Peru had in terms of engaging their customers, reducing the churn of their customers, increasing revenue monetization capability of the customers, understanding where new customers will come to Claro. These kinds of insights are being made available through our platform, and that is increasing their revenue acceleration capability. This particular product that we have integrated on our digital stack along with the Technotree sensor platform is now being reused by other telecom operators beyond Claro like MTN, STC. Our existing clients are extremely interested in the work that we have done there and there is a potential for us to provide the same level of capability to our other customers. In addition to that, Radian is a customer that we won a new logo in North America, and United Health is another new logo for our AIML capability in North America. As I said, we are cross-selling and upselling a lot of the experiences we have created on our digital stack with TechnoTree sensor to our existing client portfolio, and there is a very keen interest to expand. To give you a view of what we are building into our stack in terms of intelligence with AIML. And we are partnering with TM Forum, which is the highest standards body for telecommunication operators. We are the first to define what we call the profile of one for a customer where all the information will be hyper personalized in terms of all interactions an operator has with his customers and high levels of personalized recommendations will be made from that intelligence so that the operator can upsell more products and services to their customers. And we believe with this model that we have built, the whole customer engagement maturity model for the telecom industry will get redefined. And that is why TM Forum as a body is working very closely with us uh to to help define this new maturity model in the industry with this um i'd like to say that you know we are very excited about the future that stands in front of technotree i think technotree with its humble beginnings in helsinki has become uh in several emerging markets a household name and i'm sure the brand will continue to grow very strongly with the strategy that we have planned for its growth as a management team. So thank you for listening to me and I'll pass it on to Indresh who will review more in detail the financial performance for the first half of 2023. Thank you.

Thank you, Padma. Good morning, everybody. Now I'll walk through the financial slides. Let me begin with giving a historical comparison from first half of 2020 onwards. The net sales, as you could see in the current year, we clocked 34.8 million, which is the highest in the last four years. The EBIT, that's the earning before interest and taxes, in this first half, we were able to clock 9.8, which is substantially higher than 7.1 we did in the same half last year and was slightly lower than 10.6 we did in 21 and 7.4 we had done in 20. Financial items, that's all the financial interest expenses and the exchange losses. In this current half year, I had to take a loss of 2.9 million against a gain of 300,000 in the last year and 1.5 negative in 21 and 1.1 positive in 2020. Taxes, we had 1.4 negative in this half year, 2.5 last year, 1.4 in the previous year and 1.5 in 2020. The net income, which is after all the taxes and tax financial expenses, net income for this half was 5.5 million, slightly higher than 5 million of last year and 7.7 we achieved in 2021 and 4.8 in 2020. The inflow of cash during the first half has been almost highest in the last four years at 31.5. Last year at the same period, we were able to collect 26 million. Prior to this was 24.1 and 21.9. The order received is something little subdued in the first half of the year at 32.1, whereas in the last year we were able to collect 45.9, 50.7 and 37.3 respectively in the previous years. The order backlog which is the orders yet to be executed, which are available with us, amounted to 68.4 million at the end of H2, H1, whereas it was 72.8 in the previous year, 55 in 21 and 39.4 in H1 of 2020. The earning per share is rounded off at 0.02 in all the halves. On the next slide, I'm presenting the same data to demonstrate how we are growing and also a seasonality in the business of TechnoTree, how the revenues stack up from different quarters since 2021. and also the collections how we are able to make in the steady progress from 9.9 in quarter four of 2022 to 14.4 in the quarter one and 17.1 in the quarter two. Now, I'm also looking at the similar data I'm providing for the operating results, quarter on quarter, how we have grown over the last eight quarters, and similarly the net income, how it has grown in the last eight quarters. At this point, I also wanted to share with our shareholders a couple of points on the exchange issues. As you know that Technotree today is a global company, deals with multiple currencies. We had a devaluation of Naira in the last quarter. The euro has been strengthened against the USD. These exchanges impacted my revenue by about 1.1 million. And I had to take down my receivables by 400,000 euros. Similarly, the exchange rate also gave me a benefit of 300,000 because of the costs were converted at a lower rate. But the net negative impact of Forex during the first half of the year has been 1.2 million. The risks, central banks restrictions are there in many countries where we operate, mainly in the Africa and the Latin America countries. And there are also unstable geographical, economical situation in some of the customer countries we do operate. How we are planning to mitigate that is we are empowering the treasury functions with new financial instruments we have got recently from currency swaps, forward booking in certain key foreign currencies. I also wanted to talk about the current ratio the company is achieving, which is the current assets what I have against my current liabilities, which stands at a healthy 3.9 at the end of this quarter. The other point I also wanted to talk about the account receivable, which is about standing at 32.5 at the end of the quarter, nearly 43% of that were not due and 15% of these receivables were outstanding for more than one year. And of this 4.9 million, which is outstanding for one year, we have made a provision of 2.6 million. The other point I wanted to bring it to the attention of the shareholders at this point of time is we are able to collect almost all the debts, whatever is due. Sometimes there could be a delay because of the geographical situations, but we never had a situation of where we had to write off substantial money. However, as a prudent accounting measure, we have made a provision of 2.6 million against the old overdues. This is the technology balance sheet, consolidated one for the H1 I'm presenting. The intangible assets are basically the products, what we are capitalizing. We also have trade receivables of 29.9, that is net of all the provisions. The other receivables are basically some of the work which we have done, but the billing milestone has not been reached. Two, there are certain advances given for the office spaces across the geographies like deposits. Then there are certain bank guarantees given for some of the customer performances. All those are receivables in the short term and hence classified as such. There are interest bearing liabilities, which is the debt what we took from cognitive scale acquisition. Then on the cash flow, as you could see, the net cash flow from the operating activities has been plus 2.7 in this quarter, which was minus 0.9 in the previous year. At the end of the quarter, I had a cash balance of 10.7 million, which is lower than the 13.9 I had in the last year same quarter. And some of the key risks which we identify internally is the cost pressure, geographic specific inflation. This geographic specific inflation, we operate in some of the very high inflationary countries. To some extent that gets offset when the currency also devalues against Euro to some extent. Then customer diversification and geo expansions. Mitigation, we are trying cost optimization plan by remote deployment and productization on the cloud. Some of the key investments we are looking is investment to retire in large order book and productization. Investment in AIL, AIML, FinTech, and OTT required for diversification from BSS PurePlay. As we already have discussed, we need to invest... much more in artificial intelligence and machine learning for the further quarters as well. On the receivables and currency, cash collection is definitely complicated by multiple factors such as revenue concentration in few emerging markets and long project gestations and intense repatriation efforts are needed for it. The mitigation for that is focusing on organic and inorganic growth in North America, EU and in the Middle East, improved product readiness to reduce the payment cycles and empowering the treasury functions with new financial instruments. Finally, I wanted to share the outlook for the current year, which we gave at the year beginning. We are not changing that. We are still retaining the guidance that our revenue may grow between 7% to 15%. EBIT will be higher by 10% to 20%. Cost rationalization by Q4, which is going to see the benefit by Q4 between 5% to 7%. And our cash recovery is expected to grow between 12% to 18%. So these are all my financial presentations, Padma, over to you.

Okay, thank you, Indresh. Before we go into the Q&A, I just wanna summarize that really, I believe we have demonstrated that there's tremendous headroom for growth for the company, especially in new markets, new geographies, acquiring new customers, because our stack is proven and ready and is also endorsed by our current customers and industry bodies that puts us in a very very unique position in terms of growth capability in addition to that because we have worked with emerging markets we have balanced many of the geopolitical and other adversarial conditions that have existed in terms of economic situations in in emerged markets. And we have a very globalized view of leveraging both growth and revenue and managing cost pressures in our offerings. So that puts us in a very unique position and almost a niche position in terms of our ability to address our own personal aspirations for growth combined with our global positioning of our products and services. And, you know, I often humbly say that most people can give up relationships. They cannot give up network or their mobile phone. Communication is integral part of every human being today. And it has become more integral part post-COVID in terms of how we communicate with each other, how we conduct our business and so on and so forth. So we belong to an industry of essential services. And as that industry penetrates further and further, both in the consumer and in the enterprise markets, The value for technology products and services is bound to grow, being part of an essential service offering. So I believe that we are definitely in the business critical offering realm of the industry. Finally, because we are a global company and we are operating from multiple geographies, both low cost destinations and servicing high productivity and high complexity and sophisticated services in emerged markets, we are able to very effectively manage the cost pressures that we face. Our leadership has proven many people in the company really work in this company because they love what they do. In fact, we were rated the happiest company to work for in the beginning of this year. We have employees who have been in the company for more than three decades, who are highly technical and competent and are respected by our customers for their capabilities, and a very proven leadership and management that runs the organization. And we have demonstrated a consistent performance in terms of of our financial results as Indresh has explained to you today. So all of these things put together, you know, really is a compelling value proposition, I believe, for the investors in terms of where TechnoTree is today and how TechnoTree will emerge as the future unfolds. Thank you. So Timo, would you...

Thank you, Padma and Indires, for the insightful information you shared with us. Now it's time to go to the questions and answers. Unfortunately, we have a rather limited time, more than 10 minutes, but we will take as many questions as we can during this time. The first question, Padma already covered a little bit, a question about the CCD, that the country will now get some funds and can you share something more detailed on this? What is the plan, how to spend this funds?

Yeah, so I did answer that and maybe I can go to that exactly, that slide. Thank you, Timo. It's really a three-prong approach in terms of expanding the strategy that we have set out for the company. It's really an exciting space to be in. And I believe this measure of investment that's coming in will serve us well in terms of our ability to realize the strategy. There are three strategic areas where we will focus. One will be business expansions into newer markets and penetrating United States and Europe for our BSS stack and beyond that for moments and FinTech and cloud capabilities. uh the second area of focus uh will be uh and through that of course acquire new customers uh so through the geographical expansion we're already seeing a lot of new customers coming in because of the aiml product suite and their uh serviceability in the healthcare space The second area of investment is on new product offerings. Here we will be very measured and very strategic in terms of our investments in cloud technologies, in AIML technologies, in MVNO, MVNE technologies. We're already servicing and we have been talking to a lot of 5G private network providers that are coming in and they are cross industry. They're not just telecom operators who are getting spectrum licenses. These are manufacturing companies. They are in shipping and sort of logistics type of companies that require digital capability to conduct their businesses. and therefore we will do measured r d investments to expand our footprint and integrate more aiml into the digital stack to service adjacent markets while continuing to service the telecom operator and help the telecom operator integrate more service capability through partners through our moments and marketplace platform to move the value proposition from just providing core network connectivity services to more enriched, personalized digital services to their subscriber base. And we are talking about a billion subscribers that we are addressing in this market space. And the third area of focus is obviously to focus on financial, corporate and financial areas. One is to definitely consolidate the debt that we have accrued, a small amount of debt when we acquired cognitive scale, we would like to retire that debt. given the current interest rate pressures. The second area would be merger and acquisitions. I already mentioned we have a pipeline of potential M&A capabilities. We will continue to evaluate and announce these as strategically as they unfold. So this is really what we're trying to do.

Okay, thank you, Padma. One request is that we have quite many questions, so I know that there is a lot to tell for the audience, so let's try to keep answers limited with the time. But then it's a little bit related to the next question that if technology buys companies, are you interested in competitors or purchasing new technologies?

Well, we will be extremely careful. If you look at how we have integrated cognitive scale from day one, we are focused on a very tight and value-based integration of the company. And that is very important in terms of realizing and harnessing the potential of an acquisition. Today, I don't think I can answer that question very clearly because it really depends what the value proposition of a competitor is or a value proposition of a new product company is. And we will evaluate the ROI. We will evaluate the integration challenges. We will evaluate the customer base and the markets that they are bringing. And we will make a judicious call on that.

Okay, thank you, Padma. Then a little bit about still on acquisition part, that cognitive scale case, that how much revenue you estimate get from acquisition of cognitive scale, if you think about the 2023 and then following year? And it's as well, maybe not in the same answer, you could cover a little bit that how this merger is ongoing and integration with cognitive scale.

So Coglative Scale relatively was a smaller company. They had about 50 resources, but they had 114 patents. They had really penetrated a lot into the AIML engineering capability. They already were part of the RAI, the Responsible AI Institute. They were contributing to standards for AIML engineering capability. And in terms of the technologies that they had used to build out the product, there was a lot of synergy to the technology stack, our digital technology stack. So our ability to seamlessly integrate their products and services into our stack was one of the biggest criterias for us to have engaged in this merger and acquisition. uh it has fared very well and as you have said our current position is we we believe a minimum of a 5 million new revenue potential from north america is possible in this in this year 2023 beyond that we are making a lot of investments in terms of making the aiml stack telco grade telco ready And we are seeing a lot of excitement as well as requests for our AIML capability with Sensa by our existing customer base. So these investments are, you know, and order backlogs that they can spawn are very attractive to us. And we believe it was a very good investment for us. And the integration is, I would say, now complete.

Okay, thank you, Padma. Then we have an additional question from Roni Peuranheimo, an interest analyst. The question is that you have invested heavily in research and development in the past quarters, and you are expecting the investments to grow in the future as well. How do you measure the return of investment for these investments financially? And are they mandatory investments to stay competitive, or do you consider them as growth investments? And how will these investments boost revenue streams, such as annual recurring revenue and cloud-based subscription models, as stated in the report?

As a company and as a product company, we are extremely cautious in the way we make our investments. I will answer this question. I'll also ask Indresh if he wants to add to it. We have been extremely proactive, agile, in terms of how we have made investment decisions on our product stack. As you can see, we have a healthy order backlog and to retire that order backlog, we do have to make R&D investments as we move from emerging markets to emerged markets, as we move from on-prem capabilities to cloud capabilities as we move from license models to subscription-based try and buy models on our platform. As we make these transitions, and these transitions are very much part of our strategy, we will have to continue to invest to expand the capability of our product stack. All of these investment decisions are made by an investment board that evaluates the investment completely, not just based on technology capability, but also based on the order backlog, the customer requirement, etc. So I really believe that we are making very prudent decisions when it comes to product R&D investments. And I'm happy to say the return on those investments have been very, very good and healthy.

Okay, thank you, Padma. Then we have Valtteri Rossi from Danske Bank asking several questions, and I believe that these are mainly to interest you. So, we could go through this one by one, maybe to keep the structure over here. So, you highlight improvement in receivables, but it seems that the trade and other receivables balance has not decreased since quarter one. Why are the collections not improving?

So I don't think that's a right statement. The collections have definitely improved as I showed that we collected 37.1 million in this first half, which is the highest in the last so many years. I think we should not confuse the other receivables as a trade receivable. They are not. They are all the other receivables consist of many parts. One is only the unbilled part where I do the work and based on the IFRS, I recognize the revenue. But with the customer, I will have a different billing milestone, which I build when they are achieved as per the billing milestone. The other receivables also constitute, we have offices globally, we need to pay deposits for those offices on rent, it includes that. It also includes whenever we have some large transformation, the customer expects us to give some sort of performance guarantees for which we need to deposit the money with the banks. So all these are included in other receivables. So where we should concentrate is where we have the accounts receivable which are built and that has come down substantially in this half. So that is my honest submission.

Okay, thank you, Inderes. Then there is related to financial expenses. Those were 3.7 million in Q2. Why these are so high? What explains it?

So financial expenses does not necessarily mean it to be an interest, which is normally understood in most of the markets. In our case, financial expenses also includes the cost of repatriation of money from different geographies. As we know that we work in some of the most difficult markets and some of them countries do have exchange regulations and a long gestation period. And if I need to convert it, I'll also incur certain conversion charges, which could be substantial in certain cases. So these 3.7 million represents cost of repatriation, cost of exchange losses, and a small amount which is pertaining to our debt in cognitive scale acquisitions.

Okay, thank you, Inderes. On the outlook, can you clarify the expected significant cost inflation and margin erosion pressures in H2? Where does it come from and how confident are you in your guidance?

So while I can talk about the money part, probably Padmavishastu can add, the cost pressure mainly comes from the employee cost which gets during the countries where we work because of the inflation pressures in those countries. But we do have a certain normal hedge in those countries because the currencies also most of the time fall in line with the higher inflation rates in those countries. So there is already a small net of safety built in where in spite of the higher cost there, because of the inflationary pressures, I still do not get hit very badly. And the second one, as a plan of our cost optimization, which Padma has explained in her earlier thing on the investments in our R&D and other things, that is going to facilitate a faster deployment of my products and technologies, and also what we call as a touchless deployment, which are going to improve my cost optimization. And these are the things, in spite of such a challenging environment, gives us the confidence that we will be able to meet the guidances what we have already provided for.

Okay, thank you. Then there is one additional question from Valtteri related to currency. And the same question has been asked from the other participants. The net result was impacted by one time currency devaluation in Nigeria on the cash balances. from local operation and continued hyper-influencer trends in Argentina. Can you clarify how the devaluation impacted in the P&L and cash flow? Are these breakdowns?

Yeah, I already, I think, gave the specific numbers, but I can still reiterate that. We have multiple contracts in multiple currencies. We are a global company. Nigeria devalued its currency by more than 25% during the last quarter. This has both short-term and long-term impacts. In the short term, we did feel the impact on my bank balance there and the receivable, the hit of which we have already taken. And in the long run, we feel that a freely convertible Naira will have a positive impact on the repatriation cost and the cash collection. Further, this may also allow us to expand our business in that country. Further, one point I want to clarify is almost all our business contracts are denominated in USD or in Euro and any short term necessary provisions that are required that have been made to cover them in our financials.

Okay, very good. Thank you, Indres. Then still questions for you. Now you are like really under the pressure, but how has the announced cost efficiency plan proceeding?

Probably I think on the action point, maybe can I request Padma to expand because that is her domain where she is championing the cost management.

Yeah, so many companies cut employees. We have been very careful in how we invest in employee strength across the globe for Technotree, very measured in the way we acquire talent pool to work in our R&D. While doing that, we've also been a product first led company. So a lot of the investments we make in product is for automation, for digitization, for faster and more predictable deployment of our technologies. And it is really through that agility that we have been maintaining and we measure those costs almost on a weekly basis so that we ensure that the highest level of productivity, the highest level of automation is achievable by our talent pool that we have acquired. So I think significantly, these are some measures. We are continuing to monitor how costs are developing in different markets. We are global as well as local. So I call ourselves local, which means that in certain markets where we require talent pool, we invest in those markets as long as the costs are favorable to us. And so those talent pool serve those markets, but they also expand and serve other markets for us from a lower cost destination perspective. So number of measures overall, the results speak for themselves in terms of how we have performed in the net results. We've shown a positive growth, which clearly explains how we have managed costs. We have to continue to invest in R&D. The investments have to be strategic and timely. So we will watch the cost development very carefully. And I'm hoping we will see more gains towards the later quarters of this year and early parts of 2024.

Okay, thank you, Padma. Then a specific question of the structure of the order book. How much technology order book or turn hour is coming outside of telecom operator field? Could you share the percentage?

It's not something I have a ready answer right now. I will defer that question.

Okay, thank you. Then one industry related question. What do you see being the next disruption in the industry and how you see that being? Is it as well the opportunity or can you identify one disruption what you see?

It's not any one disruption that we will have to track. It's a multi-pronged set of disruptions that are happening. And I spoke to this already in terms of how the growth in the industry is happening overall in the strategy session that I dealt with. Definitely 5G and cloud explosion is happening. While a lot of markets and geographies have implemented cloud, have implemented 5G. The actual realization and monetization of 5G is yet to come. And it is going to be very, very disruptive in terms of moving more and more services to the edge by integrating IoT type capability. Telecom operators are bound and forced to go beyond providing plain connectivity type services and in the 5G and cloud realm move into other ecosystem kind of play, which is where we have our marketplace and moments capabilities for multi-industry integrated digital experiences and services through AR, VR type integrations. And the whole economy is going to be definitely a digital economy where banking and FinTech is going to be the undercurrent in terms of how social commerce, e-commerce, all commerce will get delivered across the globe. So I think we have strategically invested and continue to expand in these areas because these are the trends that we are observing.

In the same question, are you open to communicate with the SpaceX and Starlink as well in this disruptive environment?

So we are doing some early work with private networks who have interest in satellite-based telecommunication capability in emerging markets as well as in some emerged markets. I am not privy to discuss the opportunities, but definitely our technologies are ready and capable of handling those kinds of service offerings.

Okay, thank you. And then maybe a very short comment on your competitive environment. How is the competition at the moment?

Severe, as always.

Okay, it was a very good answer on the spot. I think so that we are now exceeding already the time, but maybe there is a time for one last question that please answer shortly. What is... What is your vision for DECNO3 in five years?

Wow. Well, obviously the very best. I think it's one of the greatest companies I have worked for and I continue to work for. We will have a complete global footprint. We will be serving top tier customers, not only in the telco space, but beyond. um our product stack and our capability will be market leaders and we will be the happiest company to work for

Okay, thank you, Padma. So I think with these words, it's time to conclude the Tecnotree H1 2023 result webcast. Thank you very much for your active participation, for all members. And please stay tuned and follow our investor relations webpages and social media channels, and feel free to contact us through email and with questions that were not addressed during today due to time limits. And next step is that our quarter three results will be published 27th of October. So it's already worth to book that in the calendar. So from my side, have a nice rest of the day and enjoy the coming weekend. Thank you again and goodbye.

Ketos, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.