Asetek A/S

Hello, and welcome to the ACETEC AS Q4 2021, an annual 2021 financial report and earnings call. Throughout the call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a question and answer session. Today, I'm pleased to present Andre Erickson, CEO, and Peter D. Messon, CFO. Please begin your meeting.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everybody. Yes, it's March the 4th, 2021, and we welcome you to this Q421 earnings call and the, of course, the annual earnings call also. I'm Peter Madsen, I'm the CFO, and I have with me here in the room André Eriksen, who's the CEO. Good morning. Good morning. The way this is going to work is that we will go through the presentation as usual, and then, as the operator said, there would be a verbal and oral a round of questions if you decide to do so otherwise on the website in front of you you should have access to where questions and answers a section where you can type in your questions and we will see those and we will address those at the end of the call the board met yesterday last night and they processed the the annual report and the quarterly report and the presentation that we're going to give you now they are all available on the website uh of acetech and have been sent out to the oslo stock exchange at this point with that andre we shall start with you with the highlights so operator please shift forward two slides one more thank you yeah so uh where the dust settled was a 21 revenue of just shy of 80 million dollars so 10 growth

and an EBITDA of an adjusted 7.2 million. Worth noting though, is that our core business actually had a revenue growth of 13% and close to $73 million. Q4 revenues of 18 million compared to a record quarter last year or the year before, sorry, of 28 million. Our gross margins for Q4 were 42% compared to 44 the year before. An EBITDA adjusted of 0.7 million compared to 7 million in Q4 2020. And of course, the operating expenses reflect our investment in simsports, which we did not have the year before. We have had an encouraging market debut for the simsports, especially the reviews have been Yeah, very positive. And that has been encouraging to experience, of course, because we went to market with a very unique value proposition and that has definitely paid off. For 2022, I think everybody can understand it's a very different climate out there right now. Certainly not become easier over the last couple of weeks. So where we have estimated is minus five to plus 15 and on the bottom line between minus one and five and of course this is reflecting the global situation as it is right now i'll get back to that later change the slide please you can see that so if we look on the gaming and enthusiast market specifically For 21, after a few bumps up and down, we settled within our latest guidance. And if you look at our core business again, we are in fact or we were in fact very close to our long term goal of 15% as we settled at 13%. So even in a very, very difficult year, that what turned out to be a very difficult year, Our core business was more or less in line with our long term ambitions here. I would say we are still hit a lot daily of various supply chain challenges, shipping challenges, logistic challenging, US tariffs shortage, you know, GPUs curbing our demand in the sense that If our OEM customers cannot get the components to build their PCs, they are not pulling. Simple as that. So we are juggling this and nothing has really changed over the last year. But that also means that things are not falling apart because it is more or less the same. It's difficult for me to sit here and say, when will we see any light ahead of the tunnel? But this is the situation we've tried to build into our, let's say, 22 guidance and that this situation will continue for some time. And then we hope that by mid end of the year, it will start to clear up. If it happens sooner, the result will be better. If it happens later, the result may be what we predicted or worse. We simply don't know at this point in time. But our outlook is what we communicated earlier, a long term goal of an average 15% growth per year. What we do in our end and what we have done, and I think I've been clear about during the last year, to us, it has not been an option not to ship to our customers. So we have prioritized getting components in inventory, getting products in inventory. And I think that has paid off because when we have seen spikes in demand and when we will see that in the future, we are ready for it. Whereas if we did not have components, then no matter what happened on the demand side, we would not be able to meet it. And just a note on the tariff, we are actually working on, we can take more in the Q&A if you so desire, but we are actually working on getting products manufactured outside of China, Malaysia to be more specific. That's progressing. And at least for now, the sims sports activity are not, let's say, doomed by US tariffs simply due to the fact that we do the final assembly and let's say the enough value add in Denmark that we can claim the products are built in Denmark. And as such, we get rid of the tariff. If some of you should be smart enough to think, why don't we do that with liquid cooling? The short answer is that we are shipping millions and millions of these and bringing these to Denmark would never be a good idea. So therefore, the same sport and the liquid cooling is not really the same animal in this sense. Next slide, please. So just a brief look at the EBITDA margin and the It's as we have said before, it's it's obvious that when revenue goes down, it looks worse. And when revenue goes up, it looks better. And I think it's also clear that if we take out HPC, the world also looks better. And for sure, the same sport investment obviously comes with a cost. Next slide, please. So despite the situation we faced last year, it is actually, and I think that's after all important to remind ourselves, that it was a record revenue. It's our biggest revenue ever. And as you remember, we had a very strong start to the year actually. And the demand was crazy. At some point, we actually saw a growth, three digit growth rates for the year. And still, we kept our guidance from my perspective, at least fairly conservative. But then, of course, we were hit by something completely outside of our control. And at least from my seat, it was impossible to predict. And what we had hoped was some sort of recovery and stabilization in Q4. And I think that's also what we saw. And that's really, let's say, paving the way for how we look at 22. It's, of course, a broad range from minus 5 to plus 15. But what it really comes down to is whether, let's say, the situation around us will heal to some extent. And because just to give you a very real life example, we have a very large OEM customer. And for those of you who are intimate with our business, an OEM business to our partner to us is somebody who's building in our products into their product. And we have a very big one who is giving us very large forecasts and have been for a long time now. And they have the demand. They have the end user demand. But what happens often is that before they actually get to pull our product in their warehouse, they actually see component shortage of some sort from somebody else in the supply chain, and then they don't pull our product. So even though there's demand, even though there's inventory, we cannot get rid of our product. So that's why this is so difficult to predict at this point in time. And we had to come out with some assumptions. And as I said earlier, what we have assumed is that We do believe that, for example, the COVID shutdowns, I believe the Winter Olympics shutdowns, that's what I prefer to call them, will be over relatively soon. I expect that the component situation will improve somehow. And I don't I don't personally believe the shipping situation will clear out anytime soon, especially because the big shipping companies, including the Danish one, don't necessarily have an interest for that to happen. So that's not baked into our assumption here. And then, of course, the Ukraine Ruslan war right now, it does not affect us. But what we will see a few weeks, a few months from now, of course, is impossible to speculate in. And of course, the income is obviously following the top line. So therefore, we have a big range there as well. Next slide, please. Thank you. So if you look at this slide that I will not go through in detail because I've done it so many times, but it's more or less how we are organized. But one thing I would like to highlight is that if you go to the right side of the slide, you can see in Xiamen where we have our current manufacturing and staff, and you can see our office in Taipei, a little further south, a little further southwest, we actually have the Malaysia operation. And our ambition is Q2, Q3 this year, we will be able to ship products from there and thereby avoid the US tariff completely on these products. It has been long underway, and it has been because it's not a trivial decision to make, because moving things there do come with a penalty, both in terms of shipping times, lead times, and cost. And like everyone else, we had, of course, hoped that the US tariffs would disappear, but we have realized that that's probably not going to happen. So now we have made the firm decision, and we are working on it now, actually. Next slide, please. So just a very brief highlight of how our business is construed. On the left side, you can see an open PC. That's where we're selling into the do it yourself market into enthusiasts who are building their own PCs. The way we do that is through a number of partners who are selling under their own brand and most of the times in a co branded situation. Then we have gaming and performance PCs, which is the example I mentioned before, you have PC builders who are building in our product, and then they sell it under their own brand. Let me just rule out a huge misunderstanding that I keep getting again and again. And again, I think I have been very clear, but apparently not clear enough No, we are not exiting the high performance PC business. That's what pays the bills, keeps the light on. And there are a lot of investors asking questions still why we are leaving the HPC business, which they think is the high performance PC business. It is not. They are not related. They are not even remotely related. So let's just once and for all make it very clear that we are keeping our core business and we keep selling to high performance PCs. Then we have the same sports business, which is also under, let's say, the more the larger gaming and enthusiast umbrella. And then on the right side, we have the data center business where, as stated before, we did exit the HPC part of that business. But we are still focusing on the data centers as such. Please move two slides forward. So it's very difficult to draw any big conclusions from the number of launches we are doing with customers. And normally it's a good key indicator. But in these times where the only thing that's secure is change, then it's difficult. But what we're trying to show with this slide is that, as you can see, we are still launching a high number of new products. which of course is showing confidence both from our customers and from us that there will be future demand also. And we keep investing in product development and the same for our customers. Next slide, please. Just some key statistics here. We are currently shipping to more than 20 customers and Top five represented 83% in 21 versus 81 in 2020. And I think that is also very clear that when we have top five running our business, so to speak, of course, it's material if one of them or more of them are not pulling. But on the other side, again, the pattern we see right now is across the board. There's not one customer standing out and saying, Hallelujah, this is just running great and then everybody else is suffering. It's the same across the board. Of course, the largest OEMs, so the largest PC manufacturers, they do have an advantage in the sense that they do have better access to some of the critical components, but still they cannot ship what they have demand for. And our ambition, of course, is to increase, let's say, customer concentration over time. And I think Razor and Sapphire are both good examples of that that we launched in Q4. Next slide, please. Just two examples of new customers. On the left side, we have Razor with their handbow series, which has been off to a good start. That's nice. Same with Sapphire on the right side of the picture, where we ship both with their AMD Toxic graphics card as well as they have launched in December a standalone CPU cooler. Next slide. So looking a little bit more strategic on the G&E business, the goal, as always, is to further develop our leadership and thereby grow. And the way we're going to do that is, of course, continue to invest in R&D, product development, getting more customers and widening the customer base within the OEMs and PC space. Of course, old school branding and marketing also to build up demand. And if we look at how we're doing so far and how will things look or how are things looking into the future? And I think we focus on what we are best at in that space. And that's liquid cooling. And that's what we keep doing. But we also focus a lot on, you know, keep doing innovations. So it's not just always a liquid cooler, but it all sorts of innovation around the product help the customers differentiate, etc. And then, of course, our key mantra is the performance, quality and reliability of our products. That's what I personally believe is really setting us aside from the rest. Yeah, let's take next slide. And the next slide. So our new business area, that has of course also been a different climate to roll out a new strategy and roll out a new business, but it has been good. The team, I would say most importantly, the team has really performed. It has been difficult. And when I say difficult, it's, of course, always difficult to penetrate a new market. It's always difficult to specify new products, come in as the newcomer and actually make a difference. And then there are, let's say, big technical challenges also. As an example, on one of our products that we have not launched yet, We have now redone the PCB layout three times because every time we believe we have a CPU or a chip we can use, then for whatever reason, we run into shortage problems, although we did secure in advance that we would not. So there's a lot of back and forth and back and forth. But if we focus on our if we focus on our pedals, we are rolling out as as we had planned and hoped for. we are, we actually started shipping the other day. So we are shipping now. And it's the pedals, the high end Invicta pedals we are shipping, we are already and have been for quite a while developing steering wheels and wheelbases. We entered an exclusive agreement with, I would say perhaps the most well known motor supplier within simsport in China. And they then will manufacture to our specs, we have done the design of industrial design, we have done all the electronics, all the software, all the firmware, and then they are doing doing the internal, let's say mechanical layout. So that's a that's a very nice deal. And we have planned to launch later this year. And I think I can say from our perspective, we will meet those deadlines. The question is, will we run into some, let's say, unseen or unknown component shortages that we don't know? But it's progressing to plan. We are also progressing on the Pagani licensed products that we also expect to release later this year. And I would say both for me personally and also for Acetec, it has been a big gamble to go into this market. I had the belief, I still do, now it's no longer a belief, now it's a proof, that my team had the fundamental skills to pull this off within mechatronics, so mechanical design software and hardware. I had an idea that we could, and now we are doing it. So that's actually nice to see. For those of you who may not have seen the reviews we have gotten of these first products, I would encourage you to go to our website and find the review section on the SIMSport and then see these reviews. Let's put it like this. If the sales will follow the reviews, this is already a good decision. The reviews have been outstanding. That's the shortest and most precise way I can see it. Pretty much every reviewer, I think there's been 10 so far. Pretty much all of them said these are the best pedals that they have ever tried. They have recognized that's a lot of innovation, that we are doing things differently. We are not just a rip off or knock off of others. And so that's something that we're really happy about. In terms of volume and revenue, I understand you are all very interested in that. Please respect that this is a highly competitive market right now. And for competitive reasons, I don't really have a big desire to talk a lot about it. But what I can say and what I want to say about the revenue and the pipeline is that it's at least meeting our own expectations. And I think that's the most important. If we look at the strategic development for this business, that's, of course, different from the liquid cooling business, because on the liquid cooling business, it's about maintaining our leadership. So that's more, let's say, farming where on the same sport, it's more hunting. The whole idea here is that we want to come in and want to get a big piece of the pie. That's the ambition. And the way we're going to do that is that we are riding on our expertise from the liquid cooling side of the business. And we are going to develop products that are different to the rest. We're going to innovate. We're going to protect these innovations. And while we have launched into this market, I would say at least two other competitors have come in. But it's also very obvious that what they do is they copy the others and see if they can beat them on price. That's not what we want to do. That's not what we are doing. What we want to do is we want to innovate. We want to come out with new features, new products with our own design and still beat them on price. That's the ambition we have. I think it's fair to say that it is even in these circumstances, this is a growing market. We can look at our biggest competitor. That's also a listed company. And of course, we can see they are struggling as well with the same issues that every business is struggling with right now. But fundamentally, it's a growing business. Yeah, on the development and outlook, I pretty much just said our strategy, and that is what we are going to stick to. And of course, the plan from our side is to launch as many new products as we can. And that will be the plan for the next two, three years, at least. Next slide, please. Yeah, one more. So as I already talked about on the first slide, the growth on the G&E products was actually 13%. So that obviously means that something else has not grown as expected. And that's, of course, the HPC part of the data center business. And we are looking at a $5 million loss from that business. Of course, we would rather spend those money on something else. And that is what we are doing. So this is pretty much water under the bridge. I just wanted to show you the graph. Next slide. So to recap on the data center business, we pulled out of HPC and that's another big misunderstanding, I think, that's out there still. that that means that we have given up on the data center space. That's actually not true at all. And we are working on it every day. We have employees working on it every day, both on the technical side to keep improving our technologies and keep preparing for when it will happen. And it's difficult to report this on a quarterly state because you cannot measure it in an Excel spreadsheet. But we are in dialogue with the EU constantly, and we do see progress still. If we don't, you'll be the first to know. I promise you that. But we still have reason to believe that this is going to happen. And I don't want to speculate in other people's misery, but I think it's fair to say that at least in Denmark, and we all know that it's not a Danish thing, but at least in Denmark, If Russia shuts down the gas supply, we are in big, big trouble. And I think it's worth reminding ourselves that just with the Danish data centers, we could have heated the three or four largest cities in Denmark by free and green power, not being depending on anyone else. So I hope unfortunately it's a sad situation, but I hope that situation will actually make the politicians wake up even more and say, OK, perhaps it's not the best idea to be depending on Russia for the next two decades of heat. So there is progress on the data center side and not something I can put in a spreadsheet, but enough that we keep spending time on it. And yeah, I think there's no reason to repeat what I just said. So let's skip this slide and then move into the financials.

Perfect. Thank you. And one more slide, please. There you go. I don't have a lot of comments this time. Q4 was a rather usual, uneventful quarter, especially comparing to Q3, which left us all a little bit frustrated, I believe. $18 million of revenue leading us to $80 million on the top line for the year as such. That's a 10% increase year over year. The record year is actually also stated out and it's within guidance. If we compare quarters to quarters, it's a little bit difficult. I would argue comparing Q421 with Q420 because Q420 over a year ago was an extraordinarily good quarter, both on the top line. But also further down, you can see that the total operating expenses in 2020 and Q4 2020 had not started being impacted by our investment in sim sports. So if you compare quarter over quarter, it's almost unfair because the earlier quarter in 2020 is not impacted by this investment in sim sports. So again, revenues $80 million gross profit in for the full year 21 of $33 million versus 34 the year before. And I'm coming back to gross margins later. Total operating expenses. Pretty much on par, I would say, for the quarter at $8.1 million and 32.5 for the full year 21. If we pull out, and I know I'm at liberty to do this right now, but otherwise... I cannot do that out in the real world. If I pull out the investment in sim sports and I pull out the one off cost we had associated to withdrawing from the HPC data center niche, then our overhead expenses increased by 9% in the full year 21 over 2020. And out of those 9%, I believe two or three came from the Forex, the increase of the price of Danish currency. year over year so not a big increase in total operating expenses i would argue year over year operating income for the year is 779 000 which is within our guidance from october which was between zero and two million dollars i believe it was of course a much lower numbers compared to the year before but again within guidance um so that's where we are there income before tax for the year 1.4 million dollars which is also as expected I would believe total comprehensive income for the year minus 400 000 and an income per year of 5 cents for the year as such um before I leave this slide here I'll just point to the To the ASP, the average sales price that has actually gone up a little bit in Q4, mostly because of product mix changes. We are not really in charge, you could say, of which products we are selling specifically in which quarter. And in this quarter, the mix came out in such a way that the ASP, the average sales price is relatively high. Next slide, please, where we focus on the gross margin. Good news here is that the gross margin in Q4 is higher than the sub 40% gross margin that we saw in Q3. You will recall a quarter back and we spoke about frustratingly high shipping expenses specifically to this quarter. We have worked around that issue actually a little bit better than I had dared hope, which is driving up our gross margins for this quarter has to do with Both the way we are shipping, we were able to do some tricks and there were changes, I should say, in the way we are shipping to our customers. And that actually had effect already from late Q3. We've seen that more in Q4. But first and foremost, as we also indicated after Q3, we've been able to pass on a good chunk of the higher shipping cost over to our customers, and that drives up our gross margins. The overall picture, if you look from left to right on that piece of graph, there is still that the gross margin in 20 were extremely high, and that was driven primarily by foreign exchange rates, which have been unfavorable to us all through 21. And that is what has been driving down the overall gross market levels to near the 40 point mark than it has been before. Going forward, we expect the plus 40 mark to be kept within. Next slide, please. Quick glance at the growth and the balance sheet remains strong. We had $23 million in the bank at the end of the year. And on the right-hand side, equity of $48 million, meaning 64% of the total balance sheet. Strong balance sheet as always, flexibility it creates and it looks as it usually does. One more slide, please. Just a very quick look at the strategies. We continue to build our strategy on the financial side on our three business legs, the gaming enthusiast, data center, albeit in a lower position for now, and then the new list after sim sports. Strategy looks as it is.

andre over to you on these final slides change the slide please and the summary yeah so just to reiterate um or sum up or what you prefer calling it going forward we expect uh and hope still to see a 15 percent of the growth that was our five-year plan from from last year and i would argue that when the world hopefully recover, then we can start to look into this in, let's say, more detail and more granularity and see what can we actually pull off with hopefully a very successful simsport business and hopefully a very successful gaming enthusiast business and then further out also a successful data center business. But for now, we stick to our guns of what we have communicated previously. And Our growth expectation is trying to take into account what we see around us. We have seen an encouraging, let's say, start for sim sports business. We have started shipping and we will going forward, of course. And then the development of new products is also heavily underway, and we will hopefully see a big rollout of new products already this year.

Perfect. Then one more slide, please. And then we'll hand over the microphone to the operator who will start out the Q&A session, please.

Thank you. And if you do wish to ask a question, please press 01 on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing 02 to cancel. Our first question comes from the line of Yiwei Zhou from SCB. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Andrea and Peter. Thank you for taking my question. I have a couple questions here. I'll do one at a time. Firstly, looking at the growth guidance, for you to deliver the 15%, the high end, could you maybe comment on how much would this be driven by the same sports? Any comment would be appreciated.

No.

That was your answer. Is it fair to assume this is still sort of your expectation that the same sports will make a meaningful contribution in in late part of 2022? We have seen you have, I mean, the launch has been quite aware on track. And I mean, you now have started shipment of the pad already. Is it fair to assume this will already start to make some sales contribution from Q2 this year?

Yeah, of course. And I'm not trying to play games here, but I really don't want to tell the competition what we're doing and how we're doing. It would be counterproductive to everybody on this call. Trust me. And what I can say is that we have now been taking pre-orders since November, as you know. And that's not really a completely true statement because yes, theoretically it was open for pre-orders, but it was obviously when we launched the reviews that the pre-orders really started to take speed. And we have a good pipeline of pre-orders that we are now going to fulfill. We are, by Danish law, not allowed to charge people credit cards until we actually ship. That also means that none of the orders that we have gotten are actually legally binding until we have actually shipped and charged people's credit cards. On top of end users, I have not checked today, but my guess is we have already established 10 resellers. And what I can say is that to become a reseller, you cannot just list our product on your website and say, now I'm a reseller. You actually have to buy a physical palette full of products. I think there's 40 or 50 pedal sets on one palette. And what I can also say is that we are measuring the pipeline in thousands already. in terms of volume, not in terms of dollars. And that's what I'm going to say for now about that. One thing to keep in mind and that we have not understood the full picture of yet is that we did have a special pre-order pricing. So we have increased prices quite substantial. And how and if that will reflect in the sales, it's simply too early to tell.

Okay, great. Very helpful. And then, in terms of reporting structure, will you separate the same supports from the G&E business or you will put them together in terms of the revenue?

Yeah, I think it would make sense for everyone that we separate them because just to say it as it is, it has not been a successful investment if we see a huge decline on the liquid cooling side, and then we try to repair that with Simsport. So we obviously believe in transparency. But I also believe that we have to hit a significant revenue. And I think when we hit $10 million in revenue, what I'm saying 10%, but it's pretty much the same. Yeah, but that's more or less the same. So I would say that with our growth ambitions for this year, we are very close to 100. So if you say 10% of that, that's close to $10 million in revenue. And hopefully that will happen soon.

Great. Thanks. And here, my last question is on the gross margin. You have mentioned expecting the gross margin to stay above 40%. Could you maybe elaborate a bit on the gross margin level for 2022? Are we expecting a sort of lower gross margin than 2021? And maybe the drivers here, how much impact would you expect from the FX movement?

I think I have actually done a very decent attempt on explaining what challenges we are seeing. And I think that's where I'm going to leave it.

Okay, fair enough. There are so many components to play with, so it would be... From our perspective, we would appreciate if you can can provide a little bit more of granularity and quantify maybe a little bit more.

I understand you appreciate that and that's a pure exercise. I am not going there. Please respect we are living in a very insecure world where we are now talking a span of 20% and what you are trying to figure out here is doing whether the margin is going up 0.2 or 0.3%. I'm not going there. Sorry. Thank you.

And the next question comes from the line of Johannes Rees from Opus Capital. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning, Andre. Good morning, Peter. Also a couple of questions, if I may. First on the losses of the HPC business, how much this loss will come down this year because you reduced costs, you have some extra costs for the adjustments. How much, maybe still depressed sales level, you can reduce the losses from this site in this year?

That loss should pretty much be zero because we have cut down the organization. Yes, we still maintain a handful of employees, but that is in the detail department of the numbers.

Okay, only the question was because there was still a high loss in Q4 in the charts.

Yeah, but keep in mind that's where we executed it. We executed as far as I remember by the end of Q3 or in Q3 and then with people having severance, etc. We can't just let people go from one day to the other. So that's also what we communicated back then going into 22. We should pretty much be over that.

Then on the Simrace business, will you increase R&D and maybe the efforts to bring up the business in sales and marketing in this year for more investments compared to last year?

It's very tempting, I would say. But we actually try to keep it flat. And the way it works is we are still a fairly small company, as you know. And I would say we are right now swinging between 20 and 30 employees. And that depends on almost the daily load we see between, for example, the data center business. We have some projects going on there. And if people cannot utilize their time full time, then they help in the same department and vice versa. So it's fluctuating a little bit up and down. But for now, we are trying to keep it flat because it would be insane if I said that we could make a profitable business from the first year because we cannot. But what I would like to do is to build a profitable business and short term also. And I don't believe we are missing out on anything. As I explained earlier, we are, of course, depending on component situations, etc. But I do believe that this year we would be able to come out with between two and four steering wheels or five steering wheels. I do believe we can come out between one and three wheelbases, etc. That's a pretty good pace, actually. So I think right now we stick to what we're doing. I think we have been very successful on the marketing side also. We have of course invested in it, but I also think we have gotten a lot of bang for the buck on the marketing side.

That leads to the following question. I realize that even the stronger absolute and even relative increase was not in R&D, it was in SG&A. Is it also a strong increase marketing cost for the Zimrace business? yeah there was a significant increase in both r d and marketing and marketing is a significant i'm sorry so oh sorry the states are marketing but there was even absolutely strong increase 40 percent percentage-wise that's driven primarily by the sim race business yes yes it's driven by the race business yes Okay, super. Maybe on the simrace business also, you mentioned about 10 resellers. What's your target for this year? How you will build further the channels? How important is direct versus indirect sales going forward?

That's, of course, something that we are learning as we go, because I don't think there is any precise formula. And as you may remember, our largest competitor, they don't really have a channel. And then all our minor competitors, as I call them, although they are bigger in revenue than we are right now. But I take the courtesy of believing that we will outgrow them. But they only have a channel almost. So I think that we are trying to take an intelligent approach in the sense that we will not be flooding the market with resellers because we also want our resellers to be successful. And we want our resellers to co-invest in this. And if we just take Germany as an example, if we got 20 resellers there, nobody would care. So on the other side, we don't give exclusivity, but we try to stick to, let's say, a few and large local resellers. And then on top, if people want to, they can always go to our website and buy directly. That's the way we see it right now. Our very small sales team, I would say on the simsports business, they are trying to focus on identifying these resellers, what would be great for us, what would be good going forward and in the longer term and trying to build relationships with them. So that's the strategy we are currently pursuing.

And on the pricing, you mentioned you have increased surprises after the Yes, pre-launch maybe prices you had. Are you still in the ranges you discussed or mentioned, the three areas of maybe a starting product, a mid-size and a high-end product? Is it still around this figure as you mentioned? I think since the high-end was close to 2,000 or so, the low-end was some hundreds. Is that still the case or have you increased the prices above these levels?

I would say on the pedals, on the high-end pedals that we have just launched, we are, I would say, compared to the direct competition, I would say we are still lower priced. We have increased prices because we believe we can, but also reflecting the world situation right now, or put in another way, if the component situation and the shipping situation recovers, then for sure we would be able to lower prices on the high end from where we are right now. Just as an example, a lot of these components are, of course, built in China, and we are flying them home because if we had to wait for ship, we would not be able to sell anytime soon. It would be Q2 or Q3. So there we are taking some extra cost, as I said, very early, both on the liquid cooling side and here we prioritize to be able to ship and then on the on the follow on products. So let's say this is the super high end. Then we are coming with a more mid end set of pedals later this year. That's already communicated. And we are actually, by the way, going to make a pre launch of those as well. So people will be able to place pre orders, I would say relatively soon within weeks. And in terms of cost projections, we are spot on where we should be, both in terms of cost and sales price.

And to your bread and butter business, GME, despite all the headwinds you have faced, you have quite holed up your margin without maybe Q3 quite nicely. How much do you assume to hold some margin in this year? Or have you given all these uncertainties and risks, made some, how should I say, some cuts in the expected margins compared to the history because of all these uncertainties on the cost side?

What I can say is that what we communicated for many, many years, that as long as we are above 40, we are happy. And of course, in good times, we are not happy with 40. And in bad times, we are happy with 40. So that's how we look at it. And I can say that there is huge focus on gross margins, both in the management and in the sales team.

Okay. And MBDA margin follows clearly the gross margin. So if you hold up the gross margins, um in in the gaming and interest just businesses you stay although uh above 20 percent uh in your core uh uh business uh yeah okay great oh thanks a lot thank you and i don't know for the audio questions i'll hand it back to the speakers

Perfect, thank you. Then we will direct our attention to the questions that we have arrived via the website. There's one that pertains to our guidance here. Is it fair to assume that you have zero data center revenue in your guidance, i.e. that your underlying guidance is this and that? No, it's actually not fair to assume that we have zero data center revenue in our guidance.

Yeah, I can elaborate a little bit. As I said, when we announced our retirement from the HPC business, we are of course not leaving our customers out for dry, because then it will be the last time we see them. So there is, in fact, an amount of data center revenue that we are going to see this year. It's not big enough that we believe it's worth talking about, but it's not zero. And I don't know what it is at this point in time, but we are, especially with two larger customers, trying to, let's say, settle on what they need for the rest of, I would say, for the rest of their program. And then we have promised them that we will ship and build

Then there's a question related to energy prices. We've seen higher energy prices. Has that increased the interest in the general data center market? It comes back to your own comment earlier today, Andre.

No, it has not. I think it's worth reminding ourselves that the reason why no one is successful in the general data center market is because that the data center operators, they care more about standardization than they care about energy prices. And therefore, that's the very reason we need the political, let's say, help. We need legislation. And I think the political interest is bigger because of the energy prices and the energy situation. But for data centers, no. Good. And then there's a final question here. Perhaps you should refresh it. You said you're making progress on shifting parts on the manufacturing outside of China. Could you please give a bit more color on the timeline when we could expect an impact on the margin? This is pure guesswork. What I'm saying now, well, it's an educated guess. If we are successful in getting it implemented during Q2, I think we will be able to see something in Q4. And I think if we are successful only in Q3, then I think we will be able to see the benefit in Q1. And the reason is there's, of course, a delay because there's a thing called inventory and lead times on the C. But the plan is Q2, Q3. And then you could say we as a company should see the effect immediately, but of course not until we can book it as revenue.

And the last question, just briefly, to what extent are sales from SimSport included in the guidance? Of course, the SimSport is included in our thinking about the guidance, but at least I believe it's too early and there are too many uncertainties to start talking about how much and extend and all that.

Yeah, the way I read the question goes back to when we actually did our five year guidance where we had a business called Datacenter also, but there was no business called SimSport. So, of course, seen in that light, the SIMS board should be on top. But what I tried to say before is, For now, we stick to one guidance that says 15% on average. And then as soon as the world normalizes a little bit, then I think we have the data points and the intelligence to actually talk more intelligently about what do we expect from the different businesses. Yeah, I think what we see right now or what we communicate right now You should really pay attention to my wording that we are trying to take into account how the world is right now. Yeah.

Perfect. And I've been refreshing the screen here for a number of times and no further questions have come up. So with that, I'm just reminding you that the reports are available online, and that actually also includes our sustainability report. We've been working quite diligently with that subject throughout the year, and there's a report for you to read. And with that, we conclude the webcast here and say thank you for your interest in E-City. Thank you.

This concludes the conference call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect the line.