Yubico AB

We've got a great start to the day. Sitting with me is Kamilla Öberg, the CFO of Ubico. We're gonna do a short presentation related to today's release of the interim report. And as usual, we start with an overview of the company. And I know that several of you have heard us present this before, but for those that are new to the table, we figured we should start and explain a little bit what we do. So I apologize if you've heard that part before. Then I will hand over to Kamilla, who will talk about the Q2 report. It's all news in that section, so say the best for last, and then we'll do a quick wrap up and open up for questions. So let's dive straight into it. I hope you can see the presentation, if you're not able to see each other, and just a high level of what Ubico is as a company. We typically highlight two things that we're very proud of. One is our core product, the UViKey, and the important security issue that it addresses and mitigates. It's about securing logins, which is one of the key problems when it comes to cybersecurity. Stolen login credentials, depending on what study you look at, is a major factor in somewhere between 80 and 90% of all the hacks being reported. So it's a critical problem, and our product offers a very clear solution to that problem, and we're very proud to talk about the fact that for those customers that have implemented our product with the new protocols, they've experienced exactly zero account takeovers, and we wanna keep it that way and keep investing in having the leading product, staying ahead of the hackers and the competition. So since the inception of the company about 16 years ago, we've sold and deployed about 32 million UViKey. I hope you've all seen what they look like, pretty much like USB stick, but they're about securing logins. We have had a focus, and that's the second part that we typically like, to highlight on selling into major enterprises and government and public sector. This means that we have a very impressive list of customers. Some 30% of the Fortune 500s are already using our products to some extent, and if you look at the Global 2000, the share is about 28%, we'll get back to that. And so with this focus, we've focused on larger customers. In total, we have about 4,500 business customers, and millions of individual users, but the bulk of the volume is to internal enterprise use within public sector and large enterprises. Terms of size of the business today, we're 459 employees, a little bit more than 400 employees, posting revenues about 2.1 billion during the last 12 months. And despite the fact that we're a proud hardware-based company, most of our investment and most of our focus is on developing software, and this has enabled us to maintain healthy gross margins pretty consistently in excess or in the range of 80% throughout the years. And that's Ubico in a snapshot. Diving down a little bit more about our product and the product that we're so proud of, fundamentally it's about getting YubiKey into the hands of users. What needs to be remembered is that we're offering fundamentally a key, there always needs to be a lock at the other end. And when we started the business 16, 17 years ago, we had a pretty basic key that only fit into one type of locks. Since then, we've invested a lot in building a more versatile key, a Swiss Army type, Army knife type key that fits into all the relevant locks. And this means that today, users within an enterprise environment can use our YubiKey to authenticate and log into all relevant enterprise solutions. This is partly about the functionality on the actual key and the firmware that goes on there. And it's partly about integrations that we have made into other systems. It used to be us doing all the heavy lifting there, making sure that our keys fit into more locks. And now we find out oftentimes afterwards that someone has built support for the YubiKey in their platform. And that's of course very encouraging. So we've established a, we've been part of building an open standard with the Fido Alliance, which is now growing very rapidly at that type of authentication. But we've also created a little bit of a standard in saying, oh, if you want to log in securely as an enterprise, what do you use? Well, you use the YubiKey. So that's the foundation of our success and what does success look like. If we flip to the next slide, please. Well, these are highlighted, on the next slide, we highlight some of the brands that are willing to be public references for us. Some of our major customers, you can see that it starts with a lot of tech companies and that's where we started our growth. But lately, the fastest growing sectors has been financial services, public sector, manufacturing, et cetera. So it's a pretty broad base. It's still, the majority of our sales is still in the US, but now sales are really picking up, especially in Europe and to some extent in Asia pack. And we're very proud of our customer list and we work very closely with them, with our biggest customers to understand their needs as we develop our products. If you look at a more statistical look at the customers, it's, the next slide illustrates an important part, which I already mentioned, which is that we have this focus on big customers, I a large share of our revenue is from the biggest companies in the world. One way of measuring that is, okay, so how many of the biggest companies have started using our products? And it's encouraging to see that we have growth there. If you look five years back, about 12% of the global 2000 were existing customer bars in 23, as we exited 23, it was about 28%. So there's growth that I should say though, that in most cases, it starts with a small deployment for high security users or a specific user case, for instance, within call centers where they can't use their own cell phones, et cetera, for authentication. So that's typically how we start and how we get our foot in the door. And then it's about expanding from there. So we have a very high repurchase rate. As we talk about the numbers and as we analyze them, it's important to note that we have two different business models. One, which we call the perpetual sales, which is essentially a one-off sale where you buy the hardware with a perpetual license to use any associated software. And it's a very durable product. So that means that it's a one-off. We also have a subscription model or a service model where you instead, where we commit to delivering at a working authentication solution for our customers. And then it's typically a three-year license to use our products to secure, to authenticate for the customers. Even before we launched the subscription product, which was launched about four and a half years ago, we had sold a lot of repeat purchases. We've looked at this in different ways. And one way to illustrate it is that if you look at our biggest customers in 2018, our 50 biggest customers, sorry, our 25 biggest customers, what did their repurchase rate look like on a yearly basis for the next five years? And the median customer had an annual repurchase rate of almost 120%, i.e. if they bought 10,000 keys in 2018, they bought 11,900 in 2019, another 11,900 in 2020, et cetera. And there are two reasons for that. One is what I just mentioned, the land and expand strategy. So even if it's our biggest customers, typically there's a lot of room for growth within the user base. As we start with high security users, then we expand into a broader population, in some cases reaching 100% of the employees, depending on the type of the business. So that's one part. The other part is that there's the kind of inherent, even on an installed base, with a perpetual motive, people would typically repurchase 25, 30% on an annual basis, partly because of customer, sorry, employee attrition, people losing their keys, but as importantly, to get the latest functionality by buying the latest version of the product. So we see a lot of repeat business, and this is something which is important for maintaining our growth, that we work closely with customers and see that growth. And finally, to highlight, in a summarized view, what the customer base looks like. As I mentioned, we started working primarily with high-tech companies in the US. Today, we see a much broader set of customers. So it used to be that we could only sell into high-tech companies. Now with a more versatile key, we can be useful to a much broader set of customers. The next step, of course, would be to expand, not just to the biggest companies and public sector, but also to get into the hands of smaller, mid-sized companies and consumers to a much larger extent. Great, I think with that, I'm gonna hand over, no, before I hand over to Camilla, I should do some highlights from the quarter summary, and then Camilla will go into details. We're very pleased to see that we saw another quarter with strong order bookings growth at about 66%, so very close to the pattern we saw on Q1. It's also encouraging to see that now we're translating that order bookings to a larger extent into revenue, i.e. we're delivering to our customers so we can recognize the revenue from those order bookings. It was important for us that we released a new firmer version in May. That always comes with some risk in terms of customer acceptance. It was a successful release, and it's important that it enables new functionality that we can develop further. One example would be the pre-reg that we've launched, but we're also working closely with Microsoft to make sure that our product is more easy to deploy and use within their environment. On the more formal side of things, we had our first AGM as a publicly listed company. Two major items I'd like to highlight there was the election of Jaya Baloo as a new member of the board. Jaya brings in a vast experience as a security professional working in commercial and public organizations in the US and Europe, so I think she will be really helpful for us as we think about how we can improve our product offering. And also we had an approval of the long-term incentive program that was proposed by the board. Final thing, we're proud to be setting standards and kind of setting the bar for what strong authentication should look like. And of course, within our niche or within our segment, we're a well-recognized company, but it was interesting to see that we were recognized as one of the most influential companies in the world by Time Magazine, which means, I think that highlights two things. One, the importance of cybersecurity, and second, that we've established a really strong position in an important segment of that market. Yeah, with those highlights, at the risk of stealing thunder from Kamela, she will go into the details of the quarter.

Thank you very much, Mattias. And just to perhaps remind some of you, or also for you who are new on this call or to the company, remind you that Ubiquitous is very much a US dollar-based company in our business, but we are reporting Swedish corona, so that is good to be aware of or have in mind. And also that we transitioned into IFRS accounting and reporting and also changed to a functional-based P&L format as of a Q1 report. So that is what we have with us still here. So as Mattias said, we have a strong quarter on the growth side and a solid profitability. On the bookings, we grow with the .5% to 673 million. There is also a large share of renewals in that light blue subscription bookings. You see there is a growth year over year on 136% of the subscription bookings. That reminds them that it's a large share of renewals. We'll come back on that. On the net sales, we see now also that the good order bookings, the last quarters, also fall through into the net sales. So the growth is now picking up to 36%. And it is driven by the perpetual sales. As you can see, that the subscription sales is quite much in the same level as it was a year ago. The gross profit margin, stable on 80%, and this then is including the employee costs as in the gross margin, related to functional based P&L that we are using now. And on the profit side, the EBIT is also stable. We are running on around 21% EBIT margin from 97 million up to 131 million, and very similar to the profitability last year. And then we will deep dive into the booking. There we go. You go into the booking side. And we have this quarter, last quarter we didn't have any effects from local currencies, but this quarter we see that we had the 65% bookings growth turns into the 63% in local currencies. So quite a still small, still quite small difference there. The bookings growth was driven by the diverse customer base as said, good momentum in the financial sector, major tech companies where they see the largest orders coming from. But also we see that the European defense sector is still very relevant, and also that Europe as such is growing faster. The subscription booking amounted to 142 million compared to the 60 million last year, and also then becoming a larger share of the total bookings, 21%, this quarter compared to 15% last year. And we also see then that in this subscription bookings, we have a large share of renewals. The largest among them are large financial customer where we have a renewal with an expansion. And then we also had a renewal with a large US government agency on the same level to say them. Moving over to the net sales, we see now that we are increasing the growth rate to 36%. Looking at local currencies, it's quite small difference to 35%. The subscription represents .7% of the net sales, which I said is the same level as last year. So our net sales is very much driven by perpetual sales right now. And also as said, we have also on the net sales side, we see that EMEA or Europe is growing faster than the other regions. That is really nice to see. On the ARR side, we have increased with 18% since a year ago, and adding around 11 million in ARR, net ARR I would say versus Q1. Good to see is that we are turning ARR trend positively again, as we had a short, small dip in Q1. Adding to the ARR for this quarter is a new long-term contract, which was closed in Q1, and also this higher volume renewal within the financial sector. Though we can also say that for this quarter, there is not the full effect from those days. We will see more coming from that in the future. Looking at the EBIT side, we have a stable profitability as said. The gross profit grow to 493 million, Swedish krona, and we are running on very stable 80%. Have done so for quite some time, if you look also historically. The EBIT is growing to 131 million, and with the same level of margin as we had a year ago. The cost side is driven a bit from sales expenses, and that's of course due to that we have very good order bookings, so that is directly paid out, and is a cost on our P&L. The long-term incentive program also, sorry, missed it, but there are some rebuilding in this building. I hope we can continue. The long-term incentive program was approved in May, where we granted these PSUs in June. There is a cost for that in the P&L, even if it would be paid by shares, but for one month it was a cost of 6 million, Swedish krona, and that is also that we will keep with us now the coming 36 months as well, just to be aware of that, as that is a new cost. We had some unrealized currency effects from our balance sheet, affecting the profit negatively. Minus 7 million this quarter, minus 5 million comparable quarter last year. Not so much to say about that, I think. And then we go over to the cash flow. We had a good cash flow this quarter, operating cash flow of close to 120 million. We have breaking, broken the trend, sorry, for our inventory build-up. As you can see, if you recall last year, we have invested quite much in building up our inventory, both from securing components, and also securing our ability to deliver to the increased demand, and being able to deliver large shipments to large customers when we receive the orders. We are in good shape, and you see now that we have a bit decline in this ratio between inventory and 12-month rolling net sales. So a small reduction from 30% to 29% now versus Q1. We still had a negative cash flow effect from the inventory on minus 29 million. But in total, the net change in working capital was very close to plus minus zero, so that is good. Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period was 678 million, so we have really built up the cash. And net cash at the end of the period was 645 million, that meaning that we had interest bearing liabilities of close to 60 million, where of leases is 27 million, and thereby saying that a real loan, sorry speaking, interest bearing loan, is currently on 32 million. Yeah, I think that is on the cash flow and the numbers, and I hand over to you again, Mattias.

Thank you, Camilla. Sorry about the noise. Hopefully we can pause the construction work going on for a short while, but that was what happened in the background there, not a cybersecurity attack. But the importance of good cybersecurity and the threat remains very high and continues to grow. And I'm very happy that we are able to provide one of the most effective and cost-effective mitigations to that threat. So that is of course the underlying, well, that's the foundation for our growth. As it impacts different sectors, we can see now that the financial sector has been growing in importance to us. And I think it's kind of an obvious, the obvious reason for that is that hackers go, some types of hackers go where the money is, and banks and other financial sector actors are an obvious target for that. We have historically been very US-focused, and the US continues to be our biggest market, but it's very encouraging to see that it's not just, our product isn't just applicable to the US market and its customers, but it's actually something which is, there is demand for worldwide. We have had a very successful quarter in the MIA region. We have a strong sales team there now, which sets us up for continued growth. Of course, the most important thing is that we can have a positive impact for our customers. And to have a positive impact, our product needs to get out and deploy it to the users. So that's why we're investing so much in making it an easier experience to both deploy and use our products. And there's much more to come, and to say about that in future quarters is about the technical development that we're doing. But one of the important foundations was the thing that we highlighted earlier about releasing a new firmware version in May, which sets us up for new functionality and a better customer experience fundamentally. And again, it is very encouraging to see that we're becoming more known outside of just the cyber, the cybersecurity experts. It's an important market. It's an important segment that we're in. And I think the Time Magazine recognition is just one indication of the fact that we have a product which is of interest and applicable to a very broad set of users. So we're only at the cusp of making sure that we can have, realize our vision of making the internet securing for everyone. Started with the high tech companies, now going more broadly with beginner prices and public sector and over time impacting even individuals. That's what we aim for. With that, we'd like to wrap up the presentation part of this meeting and open up for questions. If I remember right, we should start with the phone questions in terms of order.

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Prijak Savinovich from Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Hi guys, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions and a big congrats. Very impressive figures again. I think we could start maybe if you could discuss a bit more on the bookings level. You're obviously executing really well. Understand that 65% growth is not something we should extrapolate. So if we look a little bit on Q1 and Q2 for this year, it's been growing substantially. Could we, it would be helpful if you could give any comments to how Q3 has been the start of the third quarter and if there is potentially an element of orders that you expect that maybe to land in Q3 or Q4, which ended up landing now in the second quarter or the first. Any more clarity there would be super helpful.

Sure Prijak, thanks for attending and for a good question here. Of course, when it comes to Q3, I'll have to get back to you on that as we release the Q3 numbers. But talking about the first half of the year, what's really encouraging to me is that it's not dependent on one single order, one single customer or even one single industry. It's pretty much across the board, both when it comes to industries and geographies. And also it's not that we saw a very high growth up until April and then it kind of tapered off. It's pretty consistent throughout the first half of the year, which is also encouraging. I think I know where your question originated from if we saw some early orders being pulled in earlier than what was the case. And I think I highlighted that as we presented Q4 last year that we were then able to pull in a few things that we didn't anticipate would happen until 24. I don't see a lot of that during these first two quarters. It's been pretty much, things have developed organically and it's been broad-based growth.

Okay, that's very clear. And then the new firmware update which you rolled out this quarter, can you see any specific patterns with customers ordering more in anticipation of this release or holding off purchase until it was live? Is there anything of that sort?

Great. So that's something that I think we talked about in an early quarter. It's hard to predict how a new firmware release will hit because there's some effect of some customers don't wanting to place an order or get deliveries if there's an upcoming release because they wanna make sure that they get the latest version. And for us, other customers, they've tested and validated a certain version and then they wanna make sure that they get the version that they tested. So instead, they will wanna order as much as possible and get delivery of as much as possible of the old version. Those two effects pretty much netted out for this release. I didn't see a strong move either direction, IE that we had lower or higher orders because of the firmware release. The only place where there was a small impact which always happens is on e-com sales, especially e-com sales through Amazon platforms where there's some natural delays in stocking up as we release a new version, which means that we were out of stock for a short period of time because of this release. So a really small overall impact, but a little bit of an impact on the e-com sales, i.e. some lower sales for a period of time because of the firmware release.

Okay, and then just the final question then on, you made a restatement on regarding subscription revenues historically, if you can go through what triggered this, what is this, what happened? And then, yeah, basically that.

Yeah, this is related to a couple of old sales orders and typical accounting error. So we found that there were a couple of old sales orders that we had closed and moved over to new sales orders, but unfortunately, the revenue continued to build up in the background during a long period. So as you have seen, this is actually as far back as 2022 and has been running up till when we found it now during Q2.

And this is of course very embarrassing. I think we've contained the problem and made sure that we don't repeat that mistake. And to clarify, those were related to a few older subscription orders that have moved to a newer version, but because of an accounting error, we were still recognizing revenue erroneously on those.

Yeah.

Okay, that's super helpful. Thank you very much for all those answers.

Thank you, Predrag. The next question comes from Eric Lindholm Rogestel from SEB. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning, everyone. Couple of questions from me. I have to echo Predrag. Congratulations on the strong folder. And then starting on perhaps the ARR here. So you break down the growth here in the quarter around 11 million sequentially. I believe you had a small customer churning out, buying professionally instead of subscription. And then there was some renewals and increased ordering with some customers. But I mean, can you give some sense on how you see growth in ARR going forward? Thank you, I'll start there.

So what's important to note there is that when we report ARR, we reported on contracts where we started recognizing revenue. So we don't report ARR based on that the customer has signed a contract, but it's that the delivery of the service has started. Just a clarification there. As you mentioned, and as Kamil also highlighted, the biggest bookings in terms of subscriptions during the quarter were from already existing customers that renewed and also made expansions of their use of user audience. And I think in one case also upgrading the version of subscription that they had. So that in terms of dollar value, that's the most important contributor to the growth there. Then of course, we continued to sign on new customers on this and that's important for future growth. But in terms of dollar value, the largest impact was from these, from renewals and expansions among existing customers.

Perfect. And then, I mean, you've previously discussed sort of creating the capability for your customers to provide utilities to their respective customers as a big area of potential. I think it sounds sort of very promising. Can you talk about the investments needed to do this and any sort of potential timeline on when we should start to see this driving your orders and sales?

Yes, I'll speak some of it and then we'll have to get back to with the actual proof in the putting eye, the numbers. But as you say, we are seeing some encouraging development when it comes to getting to our customers and customers and users. We've highlighted the financial sector as a one which has been growing rapidly for us and we're now in several early stages with the banks, both in America, Europe and APJ, looking to deploy it with their customers, i.e. banking customers. This has not had a big impact so far on our revenue, but given the size of that opportunity, I think if we play this well, this could be a significant business for us and also a really tangible way to help individuals in protecting their assets, not just banks but individuals of course. And in terms of investment, it's a very different type of user scenario than internal enterprise use. It comes with making sure that the onboarding is very seamless and very easy. It comes with ensuring that the bank's customer support can respond to the customer questions. Comes with ensuring that the entire experience for the customer is a smooth and a positive one. Also in identifying where do you start, what type of user segments do you start and essentially providing a solution for these banks that are our customers. And this will require a bit of investment in terms of developing collateral, in terms of developing best practices, in terms of hiring people who can support this effort. And of course, it's not all will be charged as costs, so that will potentially drive some sales costs in the future, but I think that's a very viable investment to make. So I think we can have a real impact in this area. Still, it's very small, it's in test phases and some smaller deployments, but it's an area where we see a lot of interest. So yeah, I'm excited about that.

Excellent. And then some questions on the cash flow here in the quarter. So, I mean, you mentioned the inventory as a percentage of sales, perhaps, coming down slightly, but still having some inventory build up. How should we sort of think about inventory to sales going forward? And also, I wanted to ask on CapEx. CapEx was quite high in this quarter. I mean, is it anything, any one-offs in this and how should we, you know, it's all of the cash flow from investing activities related to CapEx, or is there anything else in that number? Thank you.

So firstly, on the inventory, we have had the reason why we did it, you know it by now, and we think that we are on a good level and that we are now more on growing into the costume, as I used to say. We will continue to probably use some more cash also during the second half, but I mean, we should continue to grow top line more than we continue to grow the inventory. That is our ambition. So that's how we are thinking on that. So it should continue to go down, how long it will take, but we are on a too high level right now for a long-term target. On the CapEx side, we have, when we introduced IFRS, there were a couple of consequences of that. One is of course this with leases, our office leases, but also that we are activating or capitalizing commission cost for large subscription contracts. And this is what happens. So what you see in the cashflow for the quarter, you can say half of half is actually real investments, so to speak, where we are continuing to ramp up and investing in our production capabilities. And also, so partly it has been taking some here in Q2. We are continuing investing. It's nothing that is huge amounts. And it's more something that you can see. We will continue to gradually increase our capacity. As each expansion is not a very big investment, so this will be a fairly smooth investment journey. Although of course some quarters might be higher. And the other part in what you see in Q2 is then related to contract assets or costs for acquiring contract assets, as we call it, in a tangible asset in the balance sheet now as a result of the IFRS transition. So that will be when we see large subscription contracts, then we will see an effect in this as well.

So to be very explicit, we have set a bar of... 5 million

US dollar is the bar for when we actually look into the subscription contract and catch the commission for that contract. And the depreciation of that asset will be the same then as the contract.

And to be even more explicit, that applied to one quarter during the quarter.

Yeah. That's

very clear. Thank you.

Okay, you're welcome.

The next question comes from Joakim Gunnel from DNB Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. So can you perhaps just, I mean, in light of the stellar bookings numbers, seen in recent quarters, can you say anything about when you would see your current production or manufacturing set up become a bottleneck or is there still considerable room to grow with the current set up with contract manufacturers and that they're all provisioning?

Yeah. Given how we've structured our manufacturing, I don't see huge bottlenecks when it comes to the production. We have a sell by sell approach when it comes to the molding and we have good capacity when it comes to the electronics mounting. So of course there's some time to get new cells up and running typically a six month period because we typically wanna upgrade our automation and make improvements as we get a new cell up and running. But this is a modular and very scalable approach. So I don't see an issue there. I should mention that we, as I think I've highlighted before, we had a scare when it comes to the component supply in the past. And that's one of the reasons why we built up the inventory for components ensuring that critical components, semiconductors so we don't run out of stock. Now we have a buffer there which would worst case even enable us to switch to different platform if needed. But on the macro level, the squeeze for semiconductors that eased somewhat and also we have good inventory level so that shouldn't be holding us back to scale up manufacturing either.

Perfect. And could you also just comment a bit on the current levels of Salesforce productivity, go to market efficiencies and basically the opportunities to further scale your sales initiatives going forward?

Yeah, if you look over a long period of time, we've had a pretty consistent percentage. So the cost of sales and marketing has been pretty consistent over a long period of time compared to our revenue. It's been about the same proportion. How we can scale better there is by getting more leverage in our -to-market, by getting more channel generated sales, by working with partners, by getting sales to end users through some of our biggest customers. However, in the short run, making those improvements or scale our reach further will short term most likely incur some extra costs. So it's gonna be a while until we can see a better scaling in terms of the percentage spent on sales and marketing compared to revenue, but there's room for improvement there. Then if you look quarter by quarter, of course there are swings compared to revenue. We had a higher sales and marketing cost this quarter because of that, except for the really huge orders we incur the cost of mission at when we book the order and then revenue takes some time to come through, especially for subscription bookings, but even for larger perpetual orders. And those are more quarterly things, but long-term we need to work on getting more.

I'm just filming for you. And then with the pre-cash, we used to be the choke point, but now that also, now we can also take that box basically in Q2. Can you talk just a bit about how you think about your capital allocation frameworks now that you are accumulating that cash in a quite considerable fashion?

Yeah, as Camilla mentioned, one of the principal uses of the free cash flow we had in the past year, year and a half has been to build up inventory levels, both of components and ready products or ready to ship products. And now that area of investment is, we've reached the level where we wanna be there. And of course, as we scale the business, there will be some continued growth there, but it's not gonna be a kind of a proactive, bigger investment. So the two areas where we see the best use of our money going forward internally would be within product, where we have some interesting product development opportunities that we wanna invest in. Some of that will materialize as cost instantly and potentially some will have to be put on the balance sheet, but in any case, that will require some cash to make sure that we can invest in the product development that we're looking to do. And that's the bigger area. And then as I mentioned, we are both establishing ourselves in some certain new geographical markets. That's a smaller cost and use of cash before it starts generating revenue. And then more structurally, we'll be investing a little bit in making sure that we can get a more leveraged sales model, as I mentioned, working with channel, working with sell through. So those are the two main areas of usage for our cashflow in the short run. Longer term, and we feel that we have good returns of investment given the strong growth we're seeing within the company and hence the guidance that we won't be paying dividends for the time being. Longer term, the money belongs to the shareholders and we will of course act accordingly.

That's clear. The final one from me relates to, I mean, this is not apples to apples, perhaps a question when it comes to you at Ubico, but the global disruption caused by crowd strikes out of sheer. Do you think that could potentially hinder organizations willing to consolidate also MFA solutions to only one vendor? And then, I mean, with you as the category leader in this space, could you see a risk that we increasingly see some sort of like dual sourcing when it comes to a loss authentication as well?

Sorry, I missed the last part of the question. Do you see some risk? And then there was a word that I missed. If you could just repeat the last part of the question so I don't get it wrong.

Yeah, no, sure. I mean, do you think that the disruption caused by crowd strike and they have this, I mean, very strong position of what is single platform and vendor for a whole lot of organizations. Do you think that organizations will increasingly start dual source for the solution and could that also impact your position if they dual source MFA?

Yeah, for our biggest customers, there is, for our biggest tech customers, I should say, we already see some of that risk that they don't wanna be dependent on a single supplier and they think they can do everything themselves. So they test the waters on developing their own solutions without mentioning any names. We've come across that. For more, for companies that are not in the high tech industry, developing their own solution is not really an option. In most cases, in those cases, I would rather point to another trend, which is that the cybersecurity market today, there's a very complex threat. The threat vectors are very complex and you see a large amount of different players in the industry, hundreds or even thousands of companies. And at the macro level, it's not unreasonable to think that there's gonna be some consolidation. We wanna make sure that we don't become in such a small segment that someone goes for a platform provider then instead. So we wanna make sure that we expand our product offering to remain very relevant because we, again, and also that we work well across all different systems. So we don't create a bubble where our use case gets more limited. So it's kind of a dual thing. There's some potentially among bigger customers wanting to dual source to mitigate risk, but on the other hand, there's this macro trend of consolidation that I think we'll see over the next five years or so in the cybersecurity market.

Very interesting. Thank you both and thank you for a great quarter. Thank you.

Thank you, Joakim.

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad.

I'm not sure if we have any more phone questions. I'm hoping you can hear me. We have received only one written question so far. And the question is, seems to be very strong increasing interest for cybersecurity that can lead to new competition. Do you see any new players yet? That's a great question and a little bit along the lines of what Joakim said. Joakim just asked. I would say this, that the biggest competition that we'll always see out there is what we call good enough security. The challenge that we're always facing and the challenge for customers to deploy our products is the fact that it is hardware-based. There's some complexity involved in that. You need to get it out into the hands of users. So from a deployment perspective, a software solution is typically easier. Software solutions are easier, but they're not at the highest level of security that we offer. So we definitely see a lot of new solutions and new attempts in the broader authentication space with software-based solutions. I think among very security conscious individuals and organizations, it's still established that we offer the highest level of security. Within the open protocol that we've been part of establishing what's being promoted as pass keys, FIDO Alliance standard, reducing new competitors in that space. That's typically within a single protocol use case. What I mean by that is that it's a key that only fits into one type of locks. So as a customer or as a user, you need then to have a very straightforward IT infrastructure for that to be relevant. So yes, for particular use cases, we see new competitors popping up within the open protocol, but when it comes to covering the typical enterprise use case, yeah, of course there's competition, but in particular for more kind of legacy-based solutions like different smart card vendors. So we don't see a huge shift there at this point. Long-winded answer to a short question. And during that time we've received a new question that I'll turn to. This SEK value of sales which are recurring is down .3% -over-year and 3.4. Despite the SEK value of booking which are currently nearly doubling on, how have you had cancellations here? The biggest part of that is that the overall sales number is growing. So in terms of absolute numbers, there has been a little drop, but not as significant as 4.3 percentage points. But the big thing there is that subscription sales is based on contracts that are up and running and start producing revenue. So there is definitely a lag between before that 21% share of order bookings being in the subscription category, before that translates into revenue. We did highlight in Q1 that there was a big customer that made a renewal but with a more limited, no sorry, that was after the end of Q4. At the end of Q4 there was a big customer, subscription customer that did a renewal, but for a smaller population base they had essentially let several employees off and therefore they reduced that number. And since it was such a big customer that had the effect that the ARR, which is based on revenue, I contrasted up and running, not bookings only, that dropped in Q1 and now it started growing again in Q2.

Yes, and also remembering when we see these large subscription contracts, when there is a renewal, of course it's very visible in its booking, but if it's still the same volume, it actually doesn't affect the ARR. If we would not have received the renewal, it would have been a drop in the ARR instead. We're happy for those renewals, absolutely. And also when we see large bookings that we are talking about in the subscription, you see the booking and that is for three years and we had even one for five years, meaning that it will take a long time before these bookings actually also totally turn into revenue. So there is a quite big lag on the subscription bookings.

Thank you. The next question is a good margin print this quarter. Is there anything seasonal or one-off? Should we assume it remains around this level for the back half, all things being equal? The way I interpret it is the net margin, which was at, remind me, 21%. Yeah, there's nothing seasonal in the sense that it swings in Q2 because of seasonality there. If anything, the only thing I'd highlight too, which is a little bit more one-off is, but you should keep in mind as you look at the margin that since most of the commission gets recognized as cost based on order value, the sales cost as a percentage was a little higher than this quarter than what would have been the case if bookings and revenue grew at the same rates, but nothing really seasonal in there. And the next one, are you able to share the SEK value of commissions, which was capitalized in the quarter? I can't find the summary in your interim report, thanks. So it's not in the interim report. I think the closest we can get there is what Kamala just mentioned that of the capitalized, the exact term is investing activities amounted to 15.9 million. I think you mentioned that about half was related to investment in manufacturing and half of it approximately was related to the commission cost being capitalized for that big subscription order. I don't have a more exact figure than that. Great, the next one, if subscription bookings that last three years reflect the gradual rollout of keys across an organization and expand, is it fair to assume that after three years, customers are likely to renew at lower volumes because their staff already have keys. So the only renewals are that need for headcount growth or loss key. No, that's not the case. When the three years expire, they need to renew for all their users, not just added users. The right to the service expires after three years.

Exactly, so it's important to remember that the subscription services and the prices for that is not related to number of keys explicitly, but it's related to number of users. So that is this. When you still have the same number of users or hopefully you have been growing even, then that is reflected in the subscription.

Renewal, yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, we're reaching the top of the hour and I think we've covered the written questions. So unless there are any last minute takers, we'd like to wrap up this call. Thank everyone for attending. And of course you're welcome to contact RMS Relations with any additional questions or comments. And we'll be back in about three months, if not before. Looking forward to that. Have a great day.