Napatech

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Napa Tech Q4 2024 IMS. My name is Seb, and I'll be the operator for your call today. If you would like to ask a question after the presentation, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad, or you can submit a question via the webcast. I will now hand over to Lars Boilersen, CEO of Napa Tech, to begin.

Good morning, I'm Lars Boilesen, CEO of NABATECH. I'm pleased to welcome you all to the NABATECH's presentation for the fourth quarter and full year of 2024. Joining me today is our Chief Financial Officer, Heiner Torsgaard. Our fourth quarter and financial year 2024 report was released earlier this morning on the Oslo Stock Exchange and is also available on the investor relations section of NABATECH's website. For your information, a recording of this webcast will be available later today. Slide two, please. There will be a question and answer session following the presentation. During and after these prepared remarks, you may submit your questions via text on the webcast page, or we take your questions on the phone. If you'd like to ask a question, please follow the instruction on this slide. Slide three, please. Please note that this presentation contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risk and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ from those discussed in forward-looking statements. Slide four, please. With today's presentation, I complete my full first year as CEO of Navitek. I'm looking forward to today's presentation to share what we have accomplished and where we are heading. Today's agenda will cover four main areas. First, we'll provide a business data summary for the fourth quarter and full year of 2024 with focus on the major news items that show progress by Navitek towards achieving our goals to transform our businesses. Next, we will provide a business outlook that shares information about the opportunity ahead of us. We will then provide detailed information on the fourth quarter and full year financial results. We will then conclude with a question and answer session open to the attendees of today's call. Slide five, please. We have made considerable strides in meeting important milestones of our strategic plan that strengthen our position as an early leader in the emerging and evolving market for programmable NICs. This includes both improving our core business in the second half of 2024 and making measurable progress towards new design wins that underpin our growth aspirations. While some of our operating targets for the year were not met, we are pleased that our core customers are returning to long-term historical norms And we signed four new interesting high-volume design wins in 2024 that combined give us confidence in achieving our growth ambitions. Slide six, please. Our priority for 2024 has been to execute a strategic plan as it underpins our long-term growth aspirations. To achieve those goals, we remain focused on three key areas, and I would like to share with you a few details from each pillar. First, in our strategic plan, we had to service our valuable installed base of customers who are the early adopters of programmable NIC solutions. They are proving ground for the technology and the value that our solution brings to their network and businesses. I'm pleased to report four notable items on our existing and mainly packet capture business. We have met these customers' needs in product fulfillment, technology development, and professional services. We have captured many new design wins in their product upgrades. We are working with many of them in securing new design wins based on our new offering. We have worked closely with all of them, including our largest, to gain visibility and confidence that their consumption has remained high and they are nearing completion of the inventory reductions. Second, we had to accelerate our engineering in software and hardware technologies that extend our products into new areas that align with the highest projected growth segments for Navitek solutions. We successfully were able to add the necessary resource to our organization. We did it cost effectively and according to plan. Finally, we continue to develop an ecosystem through partnerships that expand our go-to-market reach via marketing, business development, and sales, enabling us to win new design that would be challenging to achieve on our own. These partnerships include technology leaders in hardware, software, and other IP, none more important than Intel and Altera. It also included an array of application and services companies. Those products and solutions require next generation server platforms powered by programmable NICs. Turning to our results in Q4 and calendar year 2024. Revenue for the quarter was 5.4 million US dollars and 16.8 million for the year. Course margin for the quarter was 65% and finished the year at 68%. The gross margin in Q4 was impacted by a planned write-off loss of old components due to the end of life of a 13-year-old product line. The net gross margin for Q4 was 75% if we exclude these old components. Our full year was impacted primarily by two of our largest customers burning through inventory build-up during COVID. Had those companies been at historical norms, we would be reporting significantly different results. Our fourth quarter revenue was also impacted by low order from our biggest client. Most of our other clients were back to normal levels like we also saw in Q3. Later in the presentation, Heine will provide... Next, I would like to highlight some progress towards growth from our new solutions in the emerging programmable NIC market. In the first half of 2024, we extended our collaboration agreement with Intel Atera for next generation programmable NICs, including smart NICs and IPUs. This project was done in cooperation with the NAPA tech announced tier one server manufacturer. Throughout 2024 and into 2025, our expanded R&D team has been ahead of schedule in building these new products and solutions for the Tier 1 server manufacturer. So this Lighthouse client could evaluate and ultimately develop their new products later this year, creating new sources of revenue for Navitek in 2026 and beyond. Our R&D team has delivered multiple stages of early access and prototypes units to this lead customer, allowing for their testing and validation in parallel to our ongoing development. As a result, today we are involved in four plus individual projects with this lighthouse prospect. For the remainder of 2024, we saw continued validation of the emerging market opportunity from industry megatrends that consistently brought forward new application and use cases, all increasing the demand for programmable NICs beyond hyperscaler cloud operators. This has had an impact on our business as we have secured a record-breaking number of new product design wins within our existing packet capture business. outside our existing business we also secured four high volume design wins in 2024. this included unlocking the opportunities at the already mentioned tier 1 server manufacturer also an artificial intelligence and machine learning provider, Myrtle.ai, a big data analytics firm, SigmaX.ai, and in Q4, we won a new design win with a European security provider who are targeting 1,000 to 2,000 units annually in peak production. We anticipate others making their design decisions in the near term as well. In total, we achieved 36 design wins in 2024 across all programmable NICS portfolio hardware and software with the potential to consume 40 to 60,000 units when in production. These notable strides toward our design win goals are the launchpad to new volumes of demand for our programmable NICS solutions. In addition to new design wins, we continue to expand our pipeline of opportunities across an increasing base of customer types, application and use cases. I'm also pleased to report that we expand our company leadership to support Navitek's next phase of growth, most recently with Shannon Pullin joining our board of directors. Shannon is no stranger to Navitek. Our work together began many years ago with Shannon in his role as vice president and general manager at Intel Altera. As today concludes our 2024, we will remain confident in our vision, goals, and plans to achieve them. There are undeniable signs that programmable NICs are changing the way modern data centers are designed. The early adopters have already decided and many of them have standardized on the Intel Altera architecture. The mass market is emerging in the wake. While we know that it takes time to secure new design wins and move them from ideas to production, we know also how adventurous our starting position is from our own long history combined with the boost provided by our partnership with intelliterra as each new segment of the mass market unfolds nabatech has made the investments in people products and partnerships to be in the best position to capitalize on this new demand slide seven please We welcome many new followers of NABATEC today. As we both reflect on 2024 results and set our inspiration for 2025, it is helpful to make a moment to outlay where NABATEC fits in modern data center network designs and how it related to the opportunity opening to us. Navitek's products are critical for server performance. The image to the right labeled F is a standard server. Servers are the primary system in modern data centers and are used to deliver the applications, services, and revenue to business in cloud, enterprise, telecom, and government networks. Historically, the most important part of the server were the central processing units or CPUs. The CPUs from companies like Intel act as the brains of the server and are labeled E in this image. The CPUs are surrounded by memory labeled D, memory stores data, including network traffic for the CPUs to process. A new and well-published area inside of servers are the expansion slots shown as C. These expansion slots are the most often used today for acceleration cards based on the GPUs or FPGAs for artificial intelligence, machine learning, training, large language models, and more. NABATECH's products are increasingly being evaluated for use in these locations. And finally, the slots labeled A and B show the network interface cars, or NICs. In this image, two of NABATECH's NICs are shown. NABATECH builds a new type of NIC known as programmable NIC. Together with Intel, NABATECH is developing two types of programmable NICs, including smart NICs shown in B and infrastructure processing units, or IPUs, shown in A. Napotex programmable NICs plays a crucial role in modern data center and server design. They are the sole link between the outside cloud and enterprise networks, providing access to critical CPUs and GPU resources that deliver artificial intelligence, security, and other service. Slide eight, please. Programmable NICs started to take off when introduced by hyperscalers in order to deal with the explosive data demand hyperscalers experience in the data centers. Their designs changed the performance, capabilities, and economics of network design. These groups grew at enormous scale and drove much of the early market demand for programmable NICs. These benefits, however, were not in any way relegated to these early innovators. The same benefits are now in demand by network operators of other types and scale. Intel Altera is a leading provider of smart NIC and IPU solutions to many of the top hyperscaler network operators, where they have grown significantly and at a fast pace. To expand beyond the small number of large volume hyperscale operators, Intel Altera has partnered with Navitek to provide complete commercial production grade solution to the mass market beyond these early adopters. Several megatrends are igniting a new wave of applications and use cases that are creating demand from the next wave of customer types. Let's describe some of Intel Altera's and Navitek's potential target segments outside hyperscalers. First group are OEMs who build network appliances and servers. While the hyperscale operators build their own network appliances, switches, routers, NICs and servers, the OEM build their own branded solution for sale to the mass market who are not going to build their own solution from components like the hyperscalers. The second group has emerged are the tier one or next wave of cloud operators. While the hyperscalers are often defined as a small group of eight, the next wave operators have numbers in the hundreds of thousands and deploy a massive number of servers and appliances with largely the same product and technology requirement as the hyperscaler network operators. As cloud architectures have shifted from an all-cloud to a hybrid multi-cloud architecture, server and appliances solutions based on programmable NICs have emerged within Fortune 500 enterprises. Telecom operators, largely in their 5G mobile packet core networks, require programmable NICs for their user plane functions or UPFs, and within their telco data centers. Many performance latency and security sensitive applications with government and defense networks have also emerged. And finally, in the long run, Fortune 5000 enterprises are envisioned to deploy programmable NICs as more of the applications and use cases created by these segments become turnkey and generally available. The use case of fueling the growth of programmable NICs within these customer types were described in a recent industry analyst report from Delora that predicted generative AI will drive Ethernet and adapter and smart NIC market to surpass 16 billion by 2028. While it is still early in this market, There are clear signs of the industry megatrends unlocking new applications across different customer types, increasing a demand for programmable smart NICs and IPUs. Slide nine, please. Several industry megatrends require a new architecture for networks and data centers and the servers and appliances used to build them. And within these new servers, a new type of network interface card is required, a programmable NIC. Artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of network and communication. AI applications, services, and use cases now projected to make up most new server deployments. These servers require the network connectivity to reach into the processors being used for AI, often called the front-end network, which is an ideal home for programmable NICs. These backend networks are also ideally suited for programmable NICs to deliver high performance, low latencies, and adaptable processing required in rapidly evolving standards to support new AI implementations. Cloud and edge computing are the genesis of programmable NICs. Adopted by nearly every hyperscale cloud operator, programmable NICs are used to provide the highest performance and lowest latency for tenant services, including offload and acceleration for storage, network, and security services for virtual machines and containers. 5G mobile infrastructure is architecturally specific on standard server technologies that require programmable NICs over standard NICs to meet the user scalability requirements, in addition to the stables of high performance and low latencies. While the telecom sector have experienced low IT spending over the last few years, the last few months have brought rays of sunshine from telecom buyers and the vendors that serve them. Several suppliers of solutions for mobile packet core have begun to roll out their new offerings. The cybersecurity market offers a wide set of applications and use cases that benefit from programmable NICs. And this segment has been one of the most successful for Navitek in the past, making it an ideal target to expand our legacy packet capture solution to meet the new requirement in this high-growth and high-volume market. Financing services has also long been a hotbed of programmable NICs, especially those based on FPGA technology. Navitek has more than 50 leading customers in this segment. Our legacy packet capture solution delivers great value in smaller segments, and are being enhanced to extend it into larger and higher growth segments among these users. Big data analytics is relatively new and an emerging area for programmable NICs. One recurring theme within IT is that users and their applications are generating record amounts of data, and that data is expensive to create, transport, store, and analyze. Programmable NICs address the technical and financial challenges in each of these areas. Monitoring and recording of so much data in flight is a critical requirement for regulator and compliance, quality insurance and more. With nearly every aspect of business and personal communication online in some form, monitoring and recording applications are on the rise. Long a key area for Navitek packet capture solutions, this segment is generating new design wins for Navitek legacy and new products. As you consider each of these seven megatrends, two themes emerge. A common requirement for high performance, low latency, programmable solutions are a necessity for server connectivity in modern data center designs. Navatech's long proven history in packet capture designs is a baseline that is winning new valuable designs in that legacy use case, but is also being expanded upon and enhanced to take into new applications and services for new and old customers alike facing these industry megatrends. Slide 10, please. We just showed you in the previous slides that there is going to be a big programmable SmartNIC market outside hyperscalers. We also showed you that this market expansion is fueled by the many big megatrends. In addition, Navitek already has the needed programmable SmartNIC technology. Navatech has been delivered programmable NICs into NIST segments within monitoring, recording, fintech and cybersecurity during the last 15 years. These deliverables has all been programmable NICs in application required and narrow but important set of features called packet capture. Those same important features are baseline requirements in the new segment. Our R&D effort have been to expand and enhance those features with new capabilities to allow our programmable NICs to be deployed where they have a history of winning and also in the higher volume and higher growth segment that are emerging. Beyond our packet capture legacy business, we are deeply involved in engagement for network-based firewalls, microservices, server-based firewalls, AI infrastructure, multiple storage opportunities, encryption and decryption, and a big range of 5G mobile designs. We aim to continue a stream of new design wins in 2025. Based on our work in 2024, we continue to see validation from prospects, customers, partners, and industry analysts that increase the market projection for Navitex products and solutions. This provides all the inspiration and motivation we need to press forward with our plans. Slide 11, please. To support our aspiration of becoming the leader supplier of programmable NICs to the mass market, our people, capital, and partnership investment have been laser focused on this area. Our product strategy has three primary areas of focus. We are application driven. As just shown, there are no shortage of application or services across a few customer types that require programmable NICs. NABATECH is investing in the hardware and software development that are required from a combination of the largest number of education from the largest and highest growth areas. We are software focused. Make no mistake, we sell programmable NICs. We are a NIC company, but our most defensible. Strategic advantage is our software. We have more than 20 years of valuable NIC software IP built exclusively for FPGA based NICs that are used in a number of valuable NIC segments for programmable NICs. Those packet capture NIC features are largely or entirely acquired in many of high growth segments we are targeting. Our software investment has been developing the incremental features and capabilities that are needed to allow them to win in new segments. We are hardware independent. That simply means we build the best programmable NICs based on the leading technology from Intel and Altera, making sure our software IP is available on programmable NICs in the SmartNIC and IPU configurations. All of the product announcements you have seen from Navitek June 2024 were new SmartNIC and IPU hardware platforms and software packages that powered them. In the third quarter, we introduce N3070X programmable SmartNIC. The new 400 gigabyte N3070X AI SmartNIC is based on the latest technology from Intel Altera. The SmartNIC is engineered for the challenging demands in artificial intelligence, infrastructure, as well as traditional SmartNIC use cases. Network operators evaluating early network architecture for AI have been challenged by vendor logins based on proprietary InfiniBand and RDMA over converged Ethernet implementations. Napatech's solution conformed to a vision for a standardized Ethernet infrastructure utilizing Ultra Ethernet. It has a creative design that allows it to be operational configured with an Intel Cyan CPU, converting it to a high-performance IPU. The product was first promoted at the recent Intel Altera Innovator Conference held in October and the headquarters in Silicon Valley. Also in the third quarter, Navitek released our linked-in-line production-grade software solution on an Intel-based NT400D13 programmable smart NIC powered by Intel Altera Agilex 7 FPGA. This software enables 5G mobile network operators to offload and accelerate their user plane functions. The new offering provides an improvement of more than 60% over previous solutions, helping operators to dramatically reduce the cost, size, and power requirements when delivering 5G service to an increasing number of subscribers. Slide 13, please. In addition to our core business, 2024 was heavily focused on R&D projects to build the new hardware and software products that allow us to begin structuring new design wins in 2024 and 2025 that allow our new designs to begin ramping production in 2026. And we have positive news to report on each front. Our current business continues to provide a solid base for more than 400 buyers in the last two years. Our pipeline continues to expand. Both organic Navitek and Intel Altera-sourced opportunities are being added on a regular basis. Our pipeline consists at a record level of opportunities and value. It includes both programmable SmartNICs and IPUs being developed in our partnership with Intel that are powered by our innovative software packages. In Q4, we record eight design wins in cybersecurity, monitoring and recording, 5G and other telecom use cases. These designs have the potential to deliver more than 3,500 units per year in peak production beginning as early as 2026. In total, in 2024, we secured over 36 new project and product design wins from new and existing customers. and from many of our customer types, application and use cases shown today. While design wins are long and complex, we measured important mileposts that indicate progress toward the end goal of moving opportunities from programs and projects to production solutions. The improving base business plus constantly expanding pipeline of opportunities and early success in new design wins provide great optimism towards realizing our growth ambitions. Slide 14, please. In the next two slides, I'd like to briefly highlight examples that stitch together today's information. In both examples, industry megatrends are unlocking a new application and use case that require a programmable NIC that is best served by Napotex products powered by Intel Altera. The first is known as AI infrastructure. Artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of networking and communication. AI application services and use case now projected to make up most new server deployments. These servers require the network connectivity to reach into the processes being used for AI, often called the front-end network, which is an ideal home for programmable NICs. These same AI server pools now have a backed network mesh that provides the scale-out connectivity among the AI processors. These back-end networks are also ideally suited for programmable NICs to deliver high performance, low latencies, and adaptable processing required in rapidly evolving standards to support new AI implementations. Navitek is working on several high-volume design win use cases with leading suppliers of AI in favor of a solution based on standard servers and their own custom AI silicon. Slide 15, please. Navitek has provided three recent disclosures about our solution for 5G mobile packet cores, often referred to as UPF offload and acceleration. The announcement can be found on our website on January 18, February 11, and February 18. The slowdown in telecom spending is well noted and has impacted many IT vendors in 2023 and 2024. Across other areas of our business, we are seeing signs of a solid turnaround for 2025 and hearing similar news from partners in the same space. To that end, we are also seeing leading hardware and software vendors lining up their solutions to place their own bets on standard servers with programmable smart NICs as the platform of choice for the telco and private network operators of 5G networks. In the pictures shown above, the blue NIC represents the many locations within a 5G public or private networks where 100 to 1,000 programmable NICs may be required to meet the performance, latencies, and user scalability requirements for UPF applications. The first announcement was for a complete solution from a5g networks a leading provider of distribute and 4g 5g core network software running on a dell xr 8000 standard high volume server powered by a nabatech programmable nick based on intel fbga technology The second announcement featured a complete solution based on Druid Software, a leading provider of private cellular network core software solutions for enterprises optimized for Red Hat Device Edge and NABATEX programmable NICs. The third news released last week disclosed another complete solution based on Contran's popular ME1310 multi-access edge accelerated by Navitek's programmable NIC to optimize the 5G core application from TrueMind's software system. The combination of these disclosed solutions shows some of our top suppliers of solutions in these markets, lining up to place their bets on the demand for these solutions and to be ready when the market unfolds. Navitek's effort in this space go beyond these three recent news items with more than 20 hardware and software customers and partners in place. Slide 16, please. To conclude today's presentation, I invite you to visit Navitek in one week at Mobile World Congress. If you plan to attend the event, we do have guest passes available for you. We would love to host you at our booth to speak with our experts on hand. We will be showcasing our complete line of programmable NICs and the top use cases for them in mobile and telecom networks, including 5G packet core, UPF offload and acceleration, network and application performance monitoring, cybersecurity, signaling, gateways, lawful interception. In addition to two of the compelling and powerful complete solutions that we discussed, we will be shown in the booth featuring leading global leaders, Dell and Red Hat. Slide 17, please. And now I'll hand over the presentation to Heine and he will go through the financial data.

Thank you, Lars. Slide 18, please. Revenue in Q4 was up 11% compared to Q3 and amounted to 37.7 million DKK and in USD to 5.4 million. After the slow start of the year, our revenue has been growing each quarter throughout the year and with the Q4 performance, we are now close to a yearly run rate of 22 million USD. Compared to 2023, our product revenue for the full year of 24 was down 22%, but we see clear signs of improvement in the market, especially within the US finance and telcos market segments. Adjusted for the end of life product costs, our gross margin in Q4 ended at 75%, and the adjusted gross margins for the full year of 2024 ended at 71%. In 2024, we retired versions of our NT20 and NT40 SmartNICs that were introduced from 2014 to 2016. Altogether, we've shipped more than 40,000 units of these products over the last 10 years. Our staff costs and other external costs in Q4 amounted to 44.8 million compared to 43.2 million in Q3, compared to 2023, staff costs and other external costs for the full year were up 20% in 2024. This growth in costs follows our plan to accelerate our development activities significantly and bring new products to the market quickly to serve the increased design pipeline. EBITDA and Q4 amounted to negative 17 million, which was an improvement compared to Q3. For the full year of 2024, EBITDA amounted to negative 86.3 million. Slide 19, please. Net cash flows from operating activities in Q4 amounted to negative 32.9 million and to negative 102.8 million for the full year of 2024. Adjusted for the working capital development, net cash flows from operating activities in Q4 were negative at 8.9 million. Net cash used in investing activities in Q4 amounted to 3.9 million compared to 3.5 million in Q3 and 2.5 million in Q4 of 2023. Net working capital at the end of Q4 was 98.6 million. The net working capital reflects our inventory of new products ready for immediate delivery. Cash and cash equivalents at the end of Q4 2024 amounted to 64.3 million compared to 42.4 million at the end of Q4 2023. Back to you Lars.