BlackBerry Limited

Good morning and welcome to the BlackBerry fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2026 results conference call. My name is Betsy and I will be your conference moderator for today's call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen only mode. We will be facilitating a brief question and answer session towards the end of the conference. Should you need assistance during the call, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn today's call over to Suzanne Spira, Senior Director of Investor Relations, BlackBerry. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Betsy. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to BlackBerry's fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2026 earnings conference call. Joining me on today's call is BlackBerry's Chief Executive Officer, John Giammatteo, and Chief Financial Officer, Tim Foote. After I read our cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements, John will provide a business update and Tim will review the financial results. We will then open the call for a brief Q&A session. This call is available to the general public via call-in numbers and via webcast in the investor information section at blackberry.com. As part of today's webcast, presentation slides will be displayed. The slides are also available on the investor information section at blackberry.com, as will the replay of today's call. Some of the statements we'll be making today constitute forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of applicable US and Canadian securities laws. will indicate forward-looking statements by using words such as expect, will, should, model, indeed, believe, and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are based on estimates and presumptions made by the company in light of his experience and its perception of historical trends, current conditions, and expected future developments, as well as other factors that the company believes are relevant. Many factors could cause the company's actual results or performance to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These factors include the risk factors that are discussed in the company's annual filings and MD&A. You should not place undue reliance on the company's forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements are made only as of today and the company has no intention and undertakes no obligation to update or revise any of them except as required by law. As is customary during the call, John and Tim will reference non-GAAP numbers in their summary of our quarterly results. For reconciliation between our GAAP and non-GAAP numbers, please see the earnings press release published earlier today, which is available on the Edgar, Cedar Plus, and BlackBerry.com websites. And with that, let me now turn the call over to John.

Thanks, Suzanne. And thanks to everyone for joining today's call. BlackBerry finished the fiscal year with another strong quarter, delivering double-digit top-line growth and marking the eighth consecutive quarter of improving gap profitability, capping two full years of significant progress in the fundamentals of the business. When this new management team was appointed, we promised to turn around, to transform BlackBerry into a profitable growth company. And I'm pleased to report that we've done exactly that. These are not just data points or even a trend. but a consistent track record of delivery. The turnaround is complete, and the BlackBerry story is now a growth story. QNX delivered another rule of 40 quarter, rounding out a rule of 40 year. We achieved the second consecutive record for revenue in the quarter, exceeding the top end of the guidance range at 78.7 million, representing 20% year-over-year growth. The nature of the business means, sorry, building on a solid and underappreciated Q3, we believe QNX is as strong as ever. Revenue was driven by a record quarter for royalties and development revenue had its best quarter of the year. We are delighted to report that QNX royalty backlog continues to grow, increasing to approximately $950 million. We added significantly more into the backlog than we recognized in the P&L this year. The backlog provides Q and X with a line of sight to ongoing multi-year durable revenue growth that few companies enjoy. Consistently adding backlog year after year, significantly above the rate it is recognized in the P&L, is a key indicator of future revenue growth potential. This is not a business that is slowing down, but rather one that is compounding, powered by our continued leadership in automotive and growing momentum across physical AI, robotics, industrial, medical, and emerging markets. The royalty engine is just getting started and we're more excited than ever about the future of QNX. It is important to reiterate that QNX's growth should not be judged from quarter to quarter. The nature of the business means that design wins aren't evenly spread and therefore neither are development tool purchases. Further, the majority of revenue we secure from a design win will come once it moves into production, which is often two to three years in the future. As a result, some quarters like Q1 tend to be seasonally softer, while others such as Q4 are typically much stronger. We saw this last year. Q1 grew at a single digit rate year over year in fiscal 2026, but QNX still delivered 14% growth for the full fiscal year. We expect a similar cadence this year. Despite that unevenness from quarter to quarter, based on our strong backlog, pipeline, and operating leverage, we expect QNX to remain a Rule of 40 business for fiscal year 2027. Therefore, it is important to focus more on the strength of our full year growth, the continued expansion of our backlog, and our growing design wind pipeline, all of which points to QNX remaining a solidly double-digit growth business. Our QNX strategy is underpinned by our automotive leadership. This past quarter, we demonstrated that with a wide range of design wins in multiple domains. Our largest win of the quarter was with a tier one supplier for the Chinese market, where QNX will be deployed on Chinese chip maker Exera's SOCs in a range of smart sensors for use by a number of leading OEMs. Trident remains a large, valuable, and growing market for us, demonstrated by this win, which comes on the back of several other significant wins in recent quarters. We continue to demonstrate our leadership in the digital cockpit domain, including a major win with one of the world's top five automakers based in North America. We were able to successfully upsell the customer to a broader range of our product portfolio for a platform that we expect to go into production this year. We also secured a significant ADAS safety system design win in Europe with another top five OEM that is deploying a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset. In addition to the progress in our core auto strategy, we have two key growth accelerators that offer significant upside potential. The first is the move up the automotive software stack beyond the core operating system into the middleware layer with our alloy core platforms. This platform combines QNX's safety-certified operating system and virtualization with our partner Vector's safe middleware to provide a pre-integrated, safety-certified, lightweight and scalable foundation for a number of key domains throughout the car. Alloy Core reduces software integration overhead for OEMs, accelerates their development, and frees them up to focus engineering resources on differentiating customer experiences in the app layer. We continue to work very closely and effectively with Vector and remain on track for general release of the product this calendar year. While, as expected, we haven't secured any design wins for Alloy Core yet, conversations with several leading OEMs, including Mercedes-Benz, are progressing well. The platform represents an opportunity for significant ASP expansion compared to the revenue from selling the core operating system. Alloy Core could be many multiples of that. The second growth vector where we're seeing significant traction is the general embedded space. Currently, approximately 20% of QNX revenue comes from non-auto verticals, and the addressable market opportunity is massive, potentially larger than for automotive. The technology we've developed for auto is intentionally highly adaptable for use in adjacent verticals, and we're investing in go-to-market to drive adoption. Sales cycles in these verticals are often relatively long, but the pipeline we've been building is starting to convert, and fiscal year 2026 delivered wins in several of our target verticals. This past quarter, we secured a significant win for our general embedded development platform, or GEDP, to be deployed in industrial automation controls for a major North American OEM. This was one of a number of wins in industrial automation, which is a key target vertical. We also secured a number of wins in medical instrumentation, including with Johnson & Johnson, where QNX OS for Safety will power a new AI-driven heart pump. Robotics represents one of our most exciting long-term opportunities as we stand to capture growth in physical AI. We are building pipeline momentum and expect this vertical to become a meaningful part of GEM growth over time. QNX has already proven itself as the platform of choice for physical AI, given its large footprint in all levels of autonomous driving. The car is the most complex consumer device and is essentially a robot on wheels. We believe our strong partnerships will support this growth. Recently, Arm announced its new Arm AGI CPU for use in physical AI. And during the launch event, CEO Rene Haas identified QNX as one of its foundational software ecosystem partners in support of their aspirations in this space. We also have strong relationships with other leading Silicon providers, including Nvidia and Qualcomm, who are also pushing into physical AI, and we believe these partnerships help position us well for future growth. Now, moving over to secure communications. You know, just over a year ago, the secure communications division was barely discussed. In fact, at the time, it was viewed as a drag on our overall story, a business in transition as we focused from a broader cyber portfolio to our core strengths in mission-critical secure communications and digital sovereignty. Today, the situation has changed considerably. This past quarter, Secure Communications delivered a near Rule of 40 quarter, a result that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago. We believe it now represents under-recognized value within our portfolio. Revenue was strong at 72.5 million, exceeding the top end of our guidance by 12% and delivering 8% year-over-year growth. Digital sovereignty, the desire for governments to retain critical data and communications on sovereign solutions hosted and operated in country, is no longer a buzzword. Instead, it is a budget line item for governments worldwide, and we are winning in this space with a demand environment that has seldom been stronger. Together with rapidly growing defense budgets among NATO allies and beyond, the Secure Communications Division is benefiting from meaningful tailwinds. SecuSMART, our military grade encrypted voice and data platform delivered a strong quarter with revenue growing meaningfully year over year. This performance was primarily driven by sales to the German government. where SecuSmart is a key and trusted supplier, meeting the very demanding certification requirements of the German cybersecurity authority, BSI. Our investment in the platform to support iOS devices, in addition to Android, has driven a significant market opportunity for us with the German government, and we see a strong pipeline of opportunities as we head into fiscal year 2027. Outside of Germany, we were thrilled to announce a multi-year extension and expansion to our contract with Shared Services Canada. SSC is the Canadian government agency responsible for delivering and operating IT infrastructure and digital services for most federal agencies. As part of the deal, the Canadian government has significantly expanded its number of SecuSmart licenses. This will help drive a strong start to fiscal year 27 with meaningful revenue from this deal expected in the new fiscal year. Other wins in the quarter included NATO and the Malaysian anti-corruption establishment. UEM continues to stabilize. Although full year revenue declined year over year, the renewal rate continued to improve and the value of multi-year deals increased by 47% year over year. In Q4, we secured a number of new logo wins, particularly by capitalizing on the BSI certification in Germany and where UEM is sold in conjunction with SecuSmart. This quarter's wins were global and included the IRS, the German Bundesbank, the Council of the European Union, the Netherlands Ridge Waterstat, as well as Switzerland's Bank Julius Baer. Ad hoc, our critical events management solution had a solid quarter and full year recording double digit year over year revenue growth for Q4 and high single digit growth for the full fiscal year. This past quarter, we secured expansions and renewals with a number of customers, including the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Department of Treasury, as well as a new logo win with Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Key metrics for the secure communications business indicate an inflection point. Annual recurring revenue, or ARR, for secure comms increased by 2 million or 1% sequentially to 218 million, which is 10 million or 5% growth year over year. Dollar-based net retention rate, or DBNRR, also improved by 2 percentage points sequentially to 94%, one percentage point higher than in Q4 of the prior year. Another reason we're confident in the durability of BlackBerry's growth is the competitive moat we enjoy across our QNX and secure communications businesses. This moat is multi-layered and importantly addresses the concerns investors have today about AI and software models. Let me give you three reasons why we believe our moat is durable. The first is that our QNX pricing model is different from traditional seat-based SaaS models. The majority of QNX's revenue is consumption-based, primarily driven by royalties tied to the number of high-performance systems powered by QNX in cars, robots, and other intelligent edge devices, rather than seat-based licenses. Second, our software is embedded in the most demanding, highly regulated, safety critical use cases imaginable, where users lives depend on the software working exactly as it should. AI is probabilistic by nature, meaning outputs can vary, but the QNX platform is deterministic. delivering the same result every time without exception. That distinction matters enormously when our software controls a vehicle safety features such as adaptive cruise control or autonomous drive. We have built deep trust with customers through decades of flawless execution backed by certifications such as the rigorous ISO 26262 standard for functional safety. The stakes are high and the cost of failure could be catastrophic. And the benefit of replacing a proven certified platform for a marginal price saving, in our view, is not a trade-off that any responsible OEM will make. As a relatively small portion of the bill of materials, we see the risk and reward equation heavily skewed to our favor. The third is cost of delivery. QNX's scale across the automotive and other verticals drives a cost of delivery advantage that individual OEMs attempting to build and maintain their own solution, even with AI tools, cannot match. On the secure comm side, our products are deployed in mission critical, highly regulated, highly sensitive environments. The license to operate in those environments comes in the form of hard earned certifications, which assess people and processes as long as long standing customer relationships that take years to build. Far from being complacent, We see AI as a net tailwind for our business rather than a threat. 2NX is positioned to be a critical enabler for physical AI where there is zero margin for error and learnings from our leadership position in demanding automotive environments serve as a perfect blueprint. Further, in the hands of our R&D experts, Powerful new AI tools increase productivity, accelerate development cycles, strengthen our competitive advantages, and enhance the operating leverage already embedded in our model. Touching briefly on licensing, licensing revenue came in at 4.8 million, slightly below guidance due to quarterly variation in returns from pre-existing arrangements that are not indicative of any change in the underlying business. And with that, let me now turn the call over to Tim, who will provide further details on our financials.