Napatech

Hello and welcome to Napa Tech 2021 half-yearly report. Today I'm pleased to present CEO Ray Smets and CFO Heine Thorsgaard. Please go ahead.

Good morning. I'm pleased to welcome you all to Napa Tech's 2021 half-year report presentation webcast. I'm Ray Smets, CEO of Napa Tech. I'm located in Copenhagen today and joined by Heine Thorsgaard, our Chief Financial Officer. Today's half-year report for 2021 was released earlier this morning on the OSC and is available on the investor relations page on our website at napotech.com. For your information, a recording of this webcast will also be available on the Napa Tech website as soon as possible later today. Given the resurgence of the global pandemic we've seen, I hope you're all staying well. We here at Napa Tech are completely healthy. Next page, please. As always, we want to be available to answer your questions. We'll answer your questions at the end of our presentation via text, which you can submit on the webcast page using the button below the presentation. We can take your questions on the phone if you prefer, too. If you'd like to ask a question, follow the instructions on this slide. Next page, please. Please note that this presentation contains forward-looking statements that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ from those discussed in forward-looking statements. Next page, please. So let's get started. During this presentation, I will present our first half 2021 business highlights, including a summary of key financial achievements and an update of how Napa Tech is doing within the SmartNIC market. As always, Heina will provide a detailed review of our first half and Q2 financial results, and then I will disclose what our expectations are about the 2021 outlook for our business. Next page, please. Same as in Q1 2021, Q2 and first half 2021 have been on track and as expected with both growth and profitability. We delivered first half revenue growth of 5% year over year in USD against a very strong first half last year. We've been guiding that our growth would be lower in the first half of 2021 due to the stronger compare. We forecasted this because our expectations of timing of revenue from several key large OEM accounts. If we were to remove one of our biggest clients who had a slower start as expected in first half 2021 from our results, the rest of our business grew at 23% year over year for the first half 2021. We generated solid gross margins of 71.8% in Q2 and nicely within our guided range. This is a continued validation of our value proposition in the marketplace. On the earnings front, overall earnings were significantly up and growing year over year, demonstrating the overall strength of our business from the top line to the bottom line. With these results, we have delivered 11 quarters in a row of year over year revenue growth adjusted for the 2018 sale of the underperforming Pandian product line. And we delivered a combination of year over year revenue growth and profit for the fifth quarter in a row. One of the key areas we are carefully watching is the general industry supply chain challenge for semiconductors and other vital technology components. We have strived to stay way ahead of this worldwide challenge by pre-purchasing hardware components to ensure that we have them in place to support our planned revenue goals in the second half of 2021 and into 2022. So when it comes to free cash flow, which Heiner will talk about in a few minutes, we put working capital into action to protect our supply chain, which resulted in negative free cash flow for first half 2021. Although this wasn't expected at the beginning of 2021, we have shown resilience with how we have managed this to the best of our ability. Next slide, please. To provide a little more color using several key metrics, take note of the chart on the left. First half 2021 revenue was 15.1 million USD, which is up year over year and up over the prior first half periods. Due to foreign exchange headwinds in first half 2021 from USD to DKK, we were down in revenue in DKK as a result. However, the same foreign exchange headwinds on revenue were tailwinds for expenses. On the right side, shows that with well-managed expenses, we delivered record earnings, which demonstrates our business leverage and our potential for long-term profitability. We did all of this with another unpredictable year of challenges and distractions so far. All in all, our performance in the first half shows that we delivered as promised, but we are now operating within the new normal, We still have some employees working at home virtually, and we have a global travel suspension in place for employees unless approved by me for the safety and security of our employees, customers and partners. But productivity is strong and we are hiring new engineering and sales talent to keep on pursuing the big opportunity that sits in front of us. Next slide, please. So now let's talk about the opportunities that we are pursuing. Next slide, please. Napa Tech builds SmartNICs, which are the devices displayed in the middle of the slide. They are made to easily plug into any standard server, which are now the fundamental building blocks for all networks, clouds, and data centers. These SmartNICs are built with a super powerful reconfigurable microprocessor called an FPGA, which when combined with our software, accelerates applications across multiple application segments, such as cybersecurity, monitoring, infrastructure, cloud and edge, and mobile. These application areas require more and more compute power to operate, perform faster and securely. The demand for higher performing compute for these applications creates demands for SmartNICs. But the key strategic advantage to our success is Napatech's software that runs on these SmartNICs that delivers the real value to our customers. The software provides the features that make our customers' software solutions work better, smarter and more securely. But when it's married to our hardware, we add the benefit of FPGA hardware performance to accelerate these applications even further. Next slide, please. So how does Napa Tech grow within a fast-growing programmable SmartNIC market? In an oversimplified way, we want more SmartNICs that we build, that little card in the middle of the slide, to be deployed inside as many servers, that large box on the right-hand side, as possible. Together, they are used to solve network application acceleration challenges. We designed SmartNICs and SmartNIC software that deliver network application acceleration solutions in 5G mobile, the cloud and edge, networking, cybersecurity, and financial services. Our solutions will keep getting faster to serve the growing demand that comes from increased network speeds from 25 gig to 100 gig and now pointing towards 400 gig. Our customers benefit with improved TCO in their data center by making servers more powerful. That way, the data center needs less servers to do the same work, lower cost to power and condition them, and reducing overall cost to deploy and operate. Next slide, please. In our business, we believe growth is optimized when we engage multiple paths to the markets that we serve. This requires us to build new partnerships to get us there. That is why we've been working hard in 2021 to put the right partnerships in place and then executing them to get them to revenue. As we presented previously, our announced partnership with Lenovo is noted as an important step for Napa Tech. Lenovo is a top three server maker with a long standing deep relationship with the kinds of customers that we want to get access to. In this partnership, we have been testing our latest solution focused on virtual networking with key end user customers of theirs. We are expanding our newest link virtualization SmartNIC software designed to accelerate apps and services meeting the most demanding virtual requirements of 5G mobile telecom operators and cloud service providers to meet the needs of their target end user customer base. Napa Tech estimates that the revenue potential of this design win to exceed $10 million over the life of the product once orders begin from their end user customers. Together with Lenovo, we are fully engaged with several customer testing efforts right now, and our ambition is to achieve a design win potentially in the back end of 2021 and ramping product volumes into 2022 and beyond. Another key partnership we presented is with Silicon, a well-respected industry-leading provider of high-performance networking and data infrastructure solutions. Napa Tech Software will power the Silicon SmartNIC which is based on the Intel FPGA SmartNIC IPU reference design. This is a partnership to bring Napitech's link virtualization software combined with Silicon's leading Intel FPGA SmartNIC to the market. We continue to work with our friends at Silicon and we'll work hard to help Silicon target use cases and win new businesses together. Napitech's partnership with Acronix was kicked off a few months ago back around the Capital Markets Day presentation and continues to take shape. We jointly announced a partnership with Acronix to create solutions that combine their Speedster 7T FPGAs with Napitech software to deliver the optimal mix of price, performance, and power, and feature set for SmartNIC designs. Acronix is a leader in FPGAs and embedded FPGA IP, offering high-end FPGA-based data acceleration solutions designed to address high performance, compute intensive, and real-time processing applications. As we get this moving, we intend to create a win-win in an effort to provide a feature-rich, high-performing solution to a growing set of data center, cloud data center operators, 5G mobile telecom service providers, enterprise data centers, and government agencies. And we expect that this will give us better access to the opportunities that are growing in the hyperscale and service provider 5G markets needing higher speed from 100 gig and higher. This is a sampling of the efforts we're working on. but not to exclude our longstanding deep relationships we have with Intel and Xilinx too. These kinds of strategic partnerships take time and effort to pull them off. Then it takes time to make them win. We expect them all to be winners for Napa Tech in terms of new revenue streams in the future. And we expect to demonstrate an initial win in the coming second half of 2021. Next slide, please. As I like to show every quarter, Here's a sampling of the logos of customers from all over the world who put their trust into purchasing Napotex SmartNixon software in Q2 alone. I've categorized our logos into the key market segments like networking and security, telecom and cloud, government and defense, and financial and technology or other. We had important sales in all of these segments, with solid recurring business customers in the networking and security category, including key growing customers like IBM, Live Action, VIAVI, Neox Networks, Arteza Networks, and Polistar, just to name a few. This is where speed and security against evolving threats are paramount. On the telecom and cloud side, we, among others, continue to see business with Facebook, and we are building business momentum with key service providers like Orange, NTT, Vodafone, Cedmi, Auger, and OEM partners selling service provider solutions such as Nokia and Mobileon. In these domains, higher speeds and the need for better performance is driven by 5G, increasing security threats, and the need for greater visibility and faster packet processing. I'm also glad to see the business activity in the government and defense segment, which has been a growing focus area for us over the last couple of years, with returning OEM customers like Ryan Mittal and Accelio, and one of our newest customers, Ceiling Tech, all serving the cybersecurity defense market, but also end users and other customers like Airbus Defense, Raytheon, Rockwell, Harris, and several of our newest customers, one called Provices Corporation, providing high-performance software-defined radios, and the preeminent Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. In these use cases, mission-critical apps need higher performance with zero packet loss, but with the greater network visibility and control that we provide with our smart things. In the fintech or other category, we continue to earn business with key OEM customers like Pico, Velocimetrics, and Refinitiv, and end-user customers like Bank of America, Handelsbanken of Sweden, the Eurex International Exchange, and Capital Group, one of the largest investment management firms, as well as Jump Trading, which is focused on algorithmic and high-frequency trading. We are also deployed in a use case where many people enjoy their coffee at Starbucks Corporation. Overall, we're pretty pleased with the customer wins in Q2, which is seasonally our slower quarter of the year. And as we build momentum, as the year matures, we're looking forward to the second half. Next slide, please. As we reported before, we like to keep our investors updated on the latest news of the overall NIC market and specifically the smart NIC market. Our goal for showing this information is to assure our investors that we are approaching a large and growing market with plenty of headroom to thrive and grow. In the latest report showing results at the end of Q1 2021, the total overall NIC market is expected to approach $2.8 billion this year, growing at about 21% year over year. This new report reiterates forecasting for 2025 of $5.6 billion. In total, the overall market over this period will grow at a healthy 19% CAGR through 2025. In this total NIC market, Napa Tech continues to be reported as a top 10 player in the overall NIC market in Q1 2021. And we continue to be viewed as a nimble specialist that has proven world-class renowned ability to serve the highest performing needs in the network application acceleration market. Focusing on the programmable NIC market on the right-hand side of the slide, It's the orange bar at the top of the bar chart. Napa Tech holds a higher ranking among the growing and evolving mix of companies here. In this grouping, there are two kinds of companies. There are the large self-build players, namely Microsoft and Amazon, who up to this point don't buy commercially, but prefer to make their own programmable NICs for their own use. And the other kinds of companies are vendors who make smart NICs for companies to buy and deploy. That's where we sit and that's where we exist in this part of the programmable SmartNIC segment. Napa Tech ranks number six among the vendors. The SmartNIC market is growing faster than the overall NIC market at 26% CAGR due to increased spending by target customers like the ones we're doing business with already and other ones that we are targeting. And they need products that we are developing and deploying. We grow in this market by winning new designs and building pipeline, growing partnerships, and expanding channels to get access to more and more customers. As we execute our product and go-to-market strategies, we aspire to approach the long-term growth rates of 30% or more per year in this area. We are also carefully tracking the progress in the server market where analysts have been reporting strong performance in 2021 so far. That's great to hear. However, they also report that demand for data center compute would have been much stronger had it not been for the semiconductor supply shortages. These analysts are seeing a strong indication that shortages in the CPU substrate materials and other components are having an impact on the service supply in 2021. We're watching this because our NIC market could be negatively impacted if our customers cannot buy servers that they need to install our products. Next slide, please. Since when I took the role as CEO of Napa Tech a little over three years ago, I promised to keenly focus on our core competencies in building software on FPGA-based SmartNICs. Also with this, we have been executing on a three-pronged strategy to grow our business, and this strategy has served us well. Just to reiterate, our plan for growth is to focus on our product strategy where one, we expand our core product revenues with new competitive features, Two, we grow new product revenues with new inline features to access new firewall market opportunities. And three, we gain traction in the fast-growing virtual use cases with addressable market needing apps deployed as a virtual instance on a virtual machine, such as in the 5G mobile or cloud and edge domains. This multi-pronged approach assures we are building core revenues on a solid foundation and expertise while enthusiastically building new revenues in areas where we think we can win. Next slide, please. Now let's go to the financial details. I'd like to turn the call over to Heine Thorsgaard to review more details about our second half and first half 2021 results.

Heine. Thank you. Slide 15, please. Revenue in USD in Q2 was up 4% compared to Q2 last year, but due to the weakened US dollar, revenue in DKK fell 5% compared to 2020. For the half year revenue in USD was up 5% compared to last year and amounted to 15.1 million. In DKK revenue in first half amounted to 93.2 million compared to 97.4 million in 2020. Gross margins in Q2 ended at 71.8% down 3.4 basis point compared to Q2 last year. Gross margins in first half of 21 with 70.9% down 1.1 basis points compared to last year. Our staff costs and other external costs in Q2 amounted to 29.9 million compared to 27.5 million in Q2 last year. For the first half of 2021, staff costs and other external costs amounted to 60.3 million compared to 61 million last year. EBITDAQ in Q2 amounted to 3.4 million compared to 9.4 million in Q2 last year. And EBITDAQ for first half of 2021 amounted to 5.8 million compared to 9.5 million in first half of 2020. Staff costs transferred to capitalized development costs in Q2 amounted to 5.2 million compared to 2.4 million in Q2 last year. And 11.6 million for first half compared to 6.2 million in first half last year. EBITDA in the first half of 2021 amounted to 17.4 million compared to 15.7 million last year and EBIT amounted to 7.6 million compared to 4 million in first half of 2020. Results for the period in first half amounted to 11 million up 8.5 million compared to first half of 2020. Slide 16 please. NIT cash flows from operating activities in Q2 amounted to negative 0.9 million compared to positive 14.7 million last year. For the half year of 21, net cash flows from operating activities amounted to negative 13 million compared to positive 18 million last year. End of Q2, net working capital was 36.6 million compared to 13.6 million end of Q2 2020. In Q2, our working capital grew 9.7 million and compared to end of Q2 last year, our inventories are up 17 million. As we've mentioned, we have proactively been sourcing components for some time due to the uncertainty around the supply chain. And this conscious choice is reflected in the network and capital levels. Net cash used in investing activities in Q2 amounted to 3.5 million compared to 2.5 million in Q2 of 2020. And for the half year, net cash used in investing activities amounted to 10.4 million compared to 5.8 million last year. Free cash flow in first half of 21 amounted to negative 23.4 million compared to positive 12.2 million in first half of 2020. Cash and cash equivalents end of Q2 21 amounted 38.3 million compared to 69.9 million at the end of Q2 2020. Now back to you, Ray.

Next slide, please. Thanks, Heine. Now let's turn our attention to our outlook for 2021. Next slide, please. We continue to carefully assess our situation as 2021 matures with respect to business momentum, the realism of the changing nature of the pandemic and the world market, and our ability to execute on our goals. Therefore, we are reiterating our stated guidance for 2021. We remain committed to our previously published outlook for 2021, where we build near-term revenues and long-term growth. On the revenue front, we expect revenue to be in the range of 210 million DKK to 230 million DKK. As we stated and obviously notable from our first half year results, timing of revenue is expected to be significantly stronger in the second half of 2021 compared to the first half of 2021. We are confident in performing well in the second half of 2021 for several key reasons. First, we have better visibility to our second half 2021 pipeline And we feel confident that we have sufficient targets and opportunities to deliver on the expectations for second half 21. Secondly, we expect to deliver strong sales performance from direct and channel sales who've reported momentum in each of our key focus areas. And thirdly, we also believe in winning new revenue in the range of $1 to $2 million from our recently announced link virtualization solutions via our announced partnerships, which I reviewed earlier. And we've been building those all year. This kind of revenue does not, I should say this kind of revenue does take time to develop and build momentum. And we know there are some risks associated with timing. However, the feedback we're getting from these partnerships gives us the expectation that we are within reach of these new opportunities. So yes, we are going for it. We expect gross margins to be between 70 and 72% for the full year 2021. And we continue to focus on product cost optimization and maintaining our product value in the marketplace with ongoing investments and competitiveness of our products. We expect our staff and external costs in 2021 to be in the range of 125 to 135 million DKK. And we expect transfer capitalized development costs to be in the range of 20 to 25 million DKK. And we expect depreciation and amortization to also be in the range of 20 to 25 million DKK. We expect EBITDA and EBIT to be in the range of 22 to 30.6 million DKK. With performance in the middle of the guided ranges, EBITDA and EBIT will be 26.2 million DKK. We remain vigilant about the impacts being felt across many of the markets today due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but we feel good about our ability to execute and we believe we're managing our business through these impacts of the pandemic as well as possible. Next slide, please. So in conclusion, we are striving every day to build a company that's deeply rooted in what we do best, and that's building innovative FPGA-based SmartNIC hardware and software solutions that solve real-world problems today, accelerating applications and improving the economics of the data center. We're looking to unlock opportunities within the expanding 5G networks and supporting the growth of apps running in the data centers. Over the years, we have delivered a combination of stability, growth, and positive earnings, and in doing so, We build a good prospect for investment for our investors. Our increased focus on building key partnerships promises to support our goal of expanding into new parts of the market. We will always strive to give you a realistic view of what we can achieve, and then we are committed to find a way to beat it. Next slide, please. And now I'd like to invite Heine to join me to take your questions. If you'd like to ask a question, you can submit it now on the live webcast page using the button below the presentation, or you may dial into one of the phone numbers on the screen where an operator will assist you and take your call and put it into the queue. Please keep your questions to one or two per caller, and we will do our best to respond to as many text questions as possible that we receive. Operator, do we have any calls in the queue?

Thank you. 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. While we are waiting for questions being registered, let's start with the written questions. Ray, please go ahead.

Okay, operator, thank you very much. I appreciate that. We do have a handful of questions that are texted in, so we'll jump into a few related to our second half visibility. One question is, with results reported in the first half of 2021, you have a large objective for second half. Can you further comment on visibility of your pipeline for second half? And another question that I'll combine in here is, what do your OEM customers communicate in the second half? If I understood it correctly, you have good visibility from OEMs. Do you see pent-up demand already in Q3? Those are very good questions, and I'll try to cover all of the aspects of that to give you guys a good sense for second half. So as you know, historically, our second half tends to be stronger than our first half. in 2021, it will be no different. We've been reporting that since the beginning of the year, and we feel pretty good that we judged that very accurately. Also, in conjunction with second half being our strongest half of the year, Q4 is our largest quarter, and we're just now getting a better view of what could be possible in Q4 as well. So our pipeline visibility for second half is obviously underway. We're in the middle of Q3 and getting a good look at Q4. And we feel very confident that we have sufficient pipeline and sufficient targets to deliver on our objectives in the second half. We do tend to have a higher dependency on end user activity in the second half, especially in Q4, and that does have a shorter life in the pipeline. So these activities with the end user pipeline activity tends to be a little bit short and our visibility tends to be a little bit weaker, but so far so good in terms of what we're seeing as we enter the middle of the second half of the year. And on the OEM front, we do think that we'll be back to more of a standard normal business volume in the second half compared to the first half. As I had commented, one of our large OEM customers had a relatively slow start. So I think from a visibility perspective, we feel pretty confident with what we're seeing in the second half. Sales is reporting positive momentum as we move through Q3. And although nothing's guaranteed and obviously forecasts are subject to change, we're watching and executing this second half very carefully and we feel very confident about reiterating our guidance. So thank you for that question. Operator, do we have any calls live that we should take? We do have other text messages here waiting.

We have received one question over the phone so far.

All right, let's take it.

Yeah, the first question is from Andres Knufsen at SEB. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Good morning, guys, and thank you for the update. And great to hear that you're in Denmark, Ray. Yes. Two questions. First of all, could you elaborate a bit further about the progress with Lenovo? And then secondly, if you would also, if it's possible, to add some further color to this OEM, as you said, that has been a bit slow in H1.

Thank you. Sure, sure. Thank you for the questions. And it is really nice to be in Copenhagen. So a little bit about the Lenovo relationship. Thank you. Thanks for that question. It's obviously a very important key strategic relationship, as I commented on in the presentation just a few moments ago. And we've been working with Lenovo very carefully and very diligently for quite a number of months now and reported this official relationship earlier this year. We are in the process of testing with multiple customers. The process with Lenovo is they are our customer and they have their end user customers that they bring to the table offering their solution built on the nap tech design. The testing process is underway. These are very rigid schedules. If you're familiar with how China does their annual kind of vendor selection process and PO process, it's a very structured and laborious process, and you just have to go through the process in order to achieve success. Each and every customer that we have been testing with Lenovo, which should be an indication of activity, which is a good thing for us to report, they all have different sets of needs. Not every single use case is identical. The good news is our solution is attracting the attention of their end-user customers in certain subsets, and we're working towards achieving results through the testing process. It is a very interesting time to do this, of course. We're doing this all remotely. All of it's going very, very well. These are complex lab environments that are not easily set up remotely. The good news is we have local China employees that are working with Lenovo to make sure the testing processes go well. We have two end-user customers that are currently in the spotlight, both in the telecom and the cloud sector. We have testing going on currently in Q3 and into Q4. And so we have this process continuing in the second half. And we're focused on expecting to get to an initial PO with one of these efforts. Probably we'll start small and then probably larger in the year after. This is very typical. It does take time. Design wins of this type and this complexity do take time. But the fact that we've entered the testing process, that's a major milestone and indication of progress with this relationship. And we are hopeful and ambitious about getting our first purchase order there. And certainly we would endeavor to achieve that before the end of the year. So that gives you a sense for how we're doing with Lenovo. So great question on us. And on your second question regarding the OEM. So obviously we consider the OEM relationships kind of our A plus revenue relationships. We love the end user relationships, of course, but the OEMs give us a little bit of a look ahead. That's one of the benefits we get with the OEM relationships. OEMs take time to develop But once you actually win the relationship with the OEM, you tend to have a revenue arc that exists for three to five years. And many of our OEM customers have been loyal customers for a number of years. So we have close relationships, but they don't all operate the same way. They all have different fiscal years. They all have different fiscal Q4s. They have different cadence in terms of how they order. So all of the OEMs do have their own kind of cadence of productivity through the year. And we get to know that over time. And we do have some expectations when we do forecasting what we typically see. And then we actually receive forecasting from the OEM customers. And we always endeavor to get three to six month visibility from our OEMs. So in the case of the large OEM that we reported started out a little bit slow, we had an indication that that would be the case in the first half. We mentioned that if you remove that OEM from the numbers in the first half that we would have granted about 23%. So that should give you an indication that that's a fairly large and important OEM to us. We don't see any negatives with their business. This is just normal kind of changes in how their business is operating. They're continuing to operate very well. We're doing some very, very good work with our current designs and moving into new designs. And we expect that OEM to continue to be very interesting and productive and growing for us as we move into the future. And we have a view of what that looks like in the second half. Obviously, we do have forecasts from OEMs, and that's why we're reiterating our guidance for the second half. So thank you for that question. Very good. Operator, we should take a question from text. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, just thank you for the elaboration. Yeah, thank you. I didn't know you were still on the line. So thank you very much for the question.

Thank you. We haven't received further questions at this point. So back to you.

OK, we do have a couple other text questions here that I'll try to cover. One came in and I'll just read the question and then I'll comment on it. Do you believe in consolidation in the market and what would be Napa Tech's take on that? So, of course, as we've been reporting about the market, if you look at the total market space for NICs, we exist in the faster growing programmable NIC segment. When you look at the vendors that participate within the NIC market. You see very large, very mature players in this particular space. And then you see some smaller players like Napa Tech that are emerging, especially in the faster growing, newer part of the NIC market called the programmable NIC market. So when you look across that market, some investors may recall, I call this the wild, wild west of the NIC market. It is not consolidated like the other two portions of the NIC market. The basic NIC and the offload NIC market is highly consolidated. There are significant share owners in those particular parts of the market and consolidation has occurred over the years for them to achieve that. The programmable NIC market, in my opinion, is ripe and ready for consolidation. We have large players and small players participating in this market growing at different rates. And it's a fast-growing part of the market. So my take on that is that we'll probably see some changes. We saw Xilinx acquired by AMD. Of course, we saw Altera acquired by Intel. As that consolidation has occurred, we're going to continue to see changes in this marketplace as smaller companies are considered either buyers or sellers in this place. So your guess is as good as mine, but we're keeping our eye out on this market. There is a question that just came in regarding the FPGA market. So I'll just read the question and between Hein and I will answer it. The overall shortage of FPGAs in the market, will this have an effect on Napa Tech's revenues or will this lead to new business opportunities? We also have a question regarding commenting on cash and capital, working capital development in the second half of the year. I think this question we can kind of take, I'll take the first half and maybe Heine can take the second half. As we reported, we put working capital to work. We've been watching very carefully and evaluating the component supplies that are necessary for the hardware portion of our product offer. We knew that there was a problem in the supply chain market since last year, but we called it right. We anticipated that this shortage would get more acute. And of course, in terms of FPGAs, We didn't want to get caught so-called with our pants down, obviously being a very important part of the component of our product offers. We have seen lead times dramatically increase on FPGAs. We have a close ecosystem strategic relationship with our FPGA supplier, so we get premium access to that as much as we can. But the good news is we have been putting working capital in place to acquire the components necessary for us to build our products. We've done a super job doing that in preparation for second half. We took a decision a couple of months ago to deploy more working capital to secure component supply into 2022. This is a first for us. We've never had to buy this far in advance, but we had the cash to do so. And I think we made a great decision to put it to work. So overall, the answer to the question is the FPGA shortage should not have an immediate impact to our revenues at this time. And Heine, I'd like you to comment on any sort of comment on cash and working capital development as we get into the second half related to the cash update that you provided.

Sure, thank you. As noted, we've increased our net working capital over the last couple of quarters. And if you look at the cash flow statement, you'd also notice that If we eliminate for the changes in working capital, we would have been producing a positive free cash flow. At the current level, we expect our working capital basically not to increase in second half and consequently also expect a positive free cash flow in second half. I think that's... to comment on cash flow.

Okay. All right. We have another texted in question. It's a little complicated and I might need some help on this, Heine. So let me read the question out. I think between the two of us, we can answer it. It says, the last five years, Napa Tech has not grown at all given you reach your forecast of 220 million DKK for revenue. And the growth rate has been declining in USD terms at the same time your market grows with almost 20% annually. It implies you could lose relevance. How do you reflect on this development? So obviously over the last five years, we've gone through a migration of product strategy and direction. I think it's most relevant to evaluate our company over the last three years as we've accelerated our investment in the SmartNIC market. We obviously are watching this market very carefully. We understand the growth rates of this market change almost on a quarterly basis, but the good news is the programmable NIC market continues to be a growth market. The programmable NIC market also has two large self-build players within that market that to some degree obscure the long-term forecast of what that growth rate will look like. And also, there are different portions of the market, subsegments of this market that address different use cases, specific use cases that comprise the entire market. We focus on use cases in the networking, the cybersecurity, and the virtualization part of the markets, which we believe we are in the best position to address and provide us what we believe is a significant growth opportunity within this growing market. So we're focusing on our core competencies. We're going long here. We're going to continue to foster our development and our expertise in the packet capture part of our marketplace, which which delivers, we believe, a very nice growth curve as we continue to invest in that. But we're actually investing more heavily in in two new areas that are faster growing parts of the market. We call one the inline portion of our opportunity. which is a kind of port to port forwarding technology, which gets us into a higher capacity solution, such as in the firewall market. And then also moving into virtualization, which is where we can activate use cases within the 5g market as well. It takes a little time to get into those markets. Those markets are beginning to grow as we speak and Napa tech is beginning to knock on that door. So we continue to have a very confident posture. about our long-term strategy, and we look forward to the next five years with great optimism. So thank you for that question. Heine, would you like to comment on the next question? There's a question that's been texted in regarding our inventory and our gross margins in the short term.

Sure. The question is, will your inventory buildup affect your gross margins in the short term? I'll Our gross margins vary from quarter to quarter due to the product mix changes. In the quarters where our software features are adding more value, so the high-end products are dominating the revenue, our gross margins tend to be higher. The actual build-up of inventories, the purchase of components that we've been pursuing for the last couple of quarters will not affect our gross margins. So we expect, as iterated on the guidance, that we would see gross margins in the level of 70 to 72%. continuing in the next couple of quarters with the few normal variances that we have. So basically no effect from the inventory build up expected on the gross margins.

All right. Thank you for that. Operator, do we have any calls on hold?

Maybe as a quick reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press 01 on your telephone keypad. We have not received further questions. I will hand back to you.

All right. It does not look like we have any other text questions, so I guess we'll bring this to a close. I'd like to thank our viewers and investors for your confidence in Napa Tech. Thank you very much to everybody. Thank you to the Napa Tech employee team. And we look forward to reporting further as we get into the second half. Have a great day.