Yubico AB

Welcome to the Q3 report presentation for Ubico. As mentioned at the start of the call, on the call today are Camilla, Ubico's Chief Financial Officer, and me, working as Ubico's Chief Executive Officer. And we'll start with a short recap of our company to give some background before we dive into the quarterly So Yubico, we're active in the advanced multi-factor authentication sector. And we're a proud hardware company. The core product that we have is the YubiKey. For the last 12 months, we posted sales of approximately 2.3 billion Swedish kronor, or about $220 million. We're about 470 employees. And in spite of us being a hardware-based company, we've been able to maintain healthy gross margins over the years, pretty consistently in excess of 80%. And the reason for that is that most of our development, most of our product offering is really the software that goes on the hardware. And there are typically two things that we want to highlight as the things that we're really proud of when it comes to our company. The first one starts with the product course, the fact that our product addresses a very real and tangible need for our customers. There's a high level of cybersecurity threats, and those customers that have been using our products have experienced zero account takeovers. So that's, of course, the foundation of our success. Based on that success, we've to date sold and deployed more than 30 million YubiKeys, and our focus has been on selling into some of the world's largest companies and organizations. We have about 5,000 business customers today, and as an individual and as a consumer, you're even able to buy our key online, but our focus is on working with large companies and organizations. And today, already some 30% of the Fortune 500 companies are customer of ours. So to dig a little bit deeper and talk about our product, what is it that we do and what problem does our product solve? to the next slide please so fundamentally what we're selling is a key and a key is only helpful if there's a lock at the other end our key is used to ensure that there is no account takeover it's used for safe logins to access data information and systems and we've invested a lot in making sure that our key fits into all the relevant locks out there so it covers today the authentication requirements for that are found within a big organization or company, whether it's for remote access, whether it's for privileged access, whether it's used for different types of system access. We've spent a lot of time making integrations and building support for all the systems out there. And we have developed what we like to call Swiss army knife type key, i.e. a key that fits into all the locks, meaning that a company can use this for all the authentication requirements within an organization based on the protocols or functionality that is on the key and the integrations that we have made with the different systems. And the fact that we find this usability and that it's easy for the user to use our product with the highest level of security, that's the foundation of our success. If we talk a little bit more about the customers on the next page, we can see a subset of our public references. And it's worth noting perhaps that you see a lot of high tech companies there. That's where we started our growth journey, working with the largest tech companies in the US. But today we have a very broad composition of customers across a wide range of industries. And to go from the visuals into the statistics, if you want to flip to the next slide, please. As I explained earlier, we sell our product to a very wide range of customers. You can even buy it as a private individual. But our focus in terms of our sales offers to date have been on working with the largest accounts. And if you not just only talk about the Fortune 500, but instead the Global 2000, today already about a quarter of them are customers of ours. And that share has increased over time. Back in 2018, it was about 12% of the Global 2000s, today it's more than a quarter. However, our penetration among our existing customers, if we compare the number of keys deployed compared to the number of employees, is still very low. Typically, we start with a small subset of users, PAM users or a call center or people with access to all the critical areas, and then we expand from there. So even if we've landed a lot of big accounts, the big opportunity is expanding within those once we've got our foot in the door, so to speak. And we do have two different business models. Coming up, we'll get back to that when we talk about the quarterly results. We sell on a perpetual basis where we outright sell the key with a perpetual license without any additional cost to use any associated software. And we also have a subscription model. But no matter the buying model for the customers, we see a lot of repeat business and very loyal customers. And one illustration of that is that if you look at our biggest customers and what their repurchase pattern look like every year, if we take a five-year perspective on that, pretty consistently, we see that we see annual repurchase rate in excess of 100%. Part of that is, of course, because of that expansion that happens once We've landed a big customer, but part of it is that they want to make sure that they have the latest version of the key, that they find out new use cases, and that they want to cover for employee attrition, etc. We've also diversified our customer base, as I mentioned earlier. We started out with high-tech, so five years back, about two-thirds of our sales was high-tech. In 2023, high-tech was still our biggest sector. representing almost a quarter of our sales. But this year, it's actually even been eclipsed by financial services, bank and insurance companies by a small margin today being our biggest sector. So in summary, we have some very large accounts as our customers. However, the journey has often only started with those accounts and we see a lot of opportunity to upsell within the existing customers. In addition, of course, to buy, to attracting new customers. all the time. So that's a little bit of a background about our company and our business. And then going then into Q3 and some things to highlight. We feel that Q3 was a very strong quarter. We'll get into the details shortly, but high level, we feel that we've had strong growth in order bookings, which converted into strong net sales or revenue growth. And because we're able to maintain a healthy margin, healthy gross margin and we have cost control that turned into a good profitability and we were able to translate that profitability into strong cash flow. So overall we feel that this was a strong quarter and we're very pleased with the results that we've got. We should highlight as we did with the security advisory that we released on September 3rd that there was a vulnerability that was found in our previous versions of our YubiKey. rated this as a moderate severity vulnerability because you literally had to have physical access to the product for an extended period of time. You needed to rip off the plastics, you needed to apply advanced machinery, and in most cases, even know the associated password and PIN code, and then you could theoretically make a copy of that and skip the original key once remolded back to the original user. In reality, and this is definitely a vulnerability and it shouldn't have been there, but in reality, I think very few customers saw this as a big security threat we've been in contact with the major customers and it's been a very moderate or minor i should say impact so it didn't really have much of an impact this quarter long term it's of course very important that we're able to maintain both high security but also strong transparency when it comes to the security and the integrity of our products So another thing that we'd like to highlight other than, of course, the financial numbers is that we're seeing strong growth across a broad set of customers. So it's not just one geography or one sector or one specific customer that stands out. It's been broad based. There are two sectors that were particularly strong during the quarter. It was the public sector and high tech. And it was broad based among those sectors. One thing that we'd like to highlight is, as mentioned earlier, the majority of our sales is for enterprise use internally. But we're seeing more and more signs that our customers want to take our product to their end users, in particular among banks. And it was released during the quarter that we've initiated a cooperation with the largest bank in Central and Eastern Europe, the largest bank in Poland. PKO Bank was now built in support for use of FIDO and YubiKeys. in their online platform and recommending their customers to use YubiKeys to ensure their accounts don't get hacked. This is, of course, a motion that we're really happy about. It's still early stage, didn't have a large impact on our revenue, but we're running now a number of pilots together with our customers to get to end users. That to us is the best route to getting to end users and consumers working with customers and partners. And finally, on a more admin point, We have announced a nomination committee in preparation for the 25th annual general meeting, but that, of course, didn't have much of a financial impact for the quarter. With that background, I'm going to hand over to Camilla, who will go through the details of what I feel is a solid quarter.

Thank you very much, Mattias. Yes, it feels quite strong when looking at the numbers. So on the order bookings we see a continued strong growth, 53% year-over-year growth, but in local currencies even more, so close to 58%. Notable is that subscription share is 15% of the total order bookings, which is the same level as last year. But of this 89 million we have in subscription order bookings, Actually 62 million is related to renewals. So where we have customers that are now starting on their second contract period for subscription. On net sales, we also saw a good growth, as Mattias said. The order bookings are coming through to net sales. So we saw a growth year over year of 45%. And in local currencies, even 49% subscription share declined year over year. And that is due to that even stronger development within the perpetual customers. And so the subscription share declined from 14% down to 12% this quarter when it comes to the net sales. On the gross profit side, we are happy to see that we have a stable gross margin, 81% this quarter, and as you have noticed, we are around 80-82% during the quarters here on the gross margin. On the profit side, despite that we are continuing investing in R&D and sales and marketing, to secure also the business going forward. We see a substantial improvement in the EBIT from 16 million up to 111 million. And of course, that is related to the volume growth that we have seen this quarter compared to last year's Q3, which was an unusually weak quarter, we should say. Looking deeper into bookings. We see that here in this chart that the Q3 bookings is substantially higher than last year, and year-to-date we see a growth of 61%, so it's fairly even over these first three quarters. So we grow from 1,865,000,000 to, sorry, from 1,155,000,000 up to 1,862,000,000 year-to-date in bookings. And I said this is the first year with renewals of the subscription contracts. And looking at the TCV, 56% of it is related to renewals. And year-to-date, there is 56% year-to-date. I would say. And of course, we're happy to see that these renewals are coming through as a confirmation from our customers that they really have trust in our security solution and want to continue. The share of subscription bookings for this quarter is the same level as last year, as said. But year to date, we have increased the share actually to 18% from 12%. positive and the order bookings and this quarter it came from a diverse customer base and Largest orders from public sector major major tech companies, but we also see continued interest from European defense sector in in the market here and Looking then deeper into the net safe as well we see the year-to-date net sales amounted to 1.7 billion and And there was a growth now year-to-date close to 34%. Subscription sales represented 12% versus 14% last quarter. And of course, this decline is then contrary to Booking's development, as you see, that we had actually increased the share year-to-date. But because we have the stronger development at Perpetual, where we see the net sales coming through directly and also that we have an effect of renewals and which is not new revenue then and we also see that the larger larger contracts with longer contract periods also we see that geographically we see an increasing a diversity so we see that EMEA is and also Asia-Pacific is actually growing more than America's and becoming a larger part of the total sales. On the ARR side, we have a growth of close to 15% compared to last year and are now running our subscription yearly value of the subscription portfolio of 293 million. at the end of September. So this is measuring the yearly value of a subscription portfolio at the end of the quarter. So it's kind of a future-looking revenue stream with the current contracts. On our profit side you see really a hockey stick here coming up on the rolling 12 months. uh so with the volume growth that we have now and the stable gross margin uh really supports the the growing profit so and now leaving as you see the quite weak q3 last year behind us we get this increase in the rolling 12 months ebit from 360 million up to 411 million actually um We also have investments in the R&D and in sales specifically as we are a growing company and the need to continue to grow our organization and with our people. Our adjusted EBIT margin was 18.8% this quarter compared to 4% last year's quarter. And you see here also looking at the EBIT, we have adjusted EBIT and we have the EBIT and this is the quarter, the only quarter we have had Q3 last year where we actually have a one-off item that is related to the merger between ACQ Bure and Ubico a year ago in September last year where we had some transaction related costs total of 93 million that is included in last year's EBIT, which was negative of 77 million. We mentioned the ELTI program. We have the PSUs here because it is kind of a cost increase. This program was launched in June. We commented it also in last quarter's report. This is the first quarter where we see three months effect of it and the reason why we commented is that the impact is higher due to we have our own financial targets as measuring the performance of this PSO program instead of having the share performance as target and thereby the cost that we're recognizing is three times higher approximately. And with this month we also saw an unrealized currency effect of negative nine million in this quarter. The first half of this year we have had quite minor effects from currency changes. And finally looking at the cash flow which is also a nice story as Mattias said and as You remember, we have talked about during last quarters that we are investing in our inventory. We started to build up the inventory from a very, very low level 2022 and during 2023 and up to Q1 actually this year to both reduce the risk we have in the business when it comes to critical components and if they would just have a hiccup when it comes to deliveries. So that's the dark blue part of this chart. But also as a growing business, we also need to make sure that we can deliver quickly when we get large orders. So we have strategically built up the inventory during these last quarters. But as you also see, we are now continuing the downturn of the ratio between the inventory levels and the rolling 12 months net sales. So we have the peak in Q1, 30%, declining Q2, 29%, and now we're going down to 28% at the end of this quarter. And the net working capital, changing working capital is negative this quarter, 74 million. Except from that, we also increase our inventory in absolute numbers this quarter as well. We also see growing accounts receivables due to strong billing. And we also see effects of subscription contracts that we have been invoicing earlier this year that we are now recognizing the revenue and having a negative impact on the cash flow. But despite those things, we see a strong operating cash flow of 67 million. We have a cash and cash equivalent position, which is strong, 727 million. Net cash at the end of the period, 676 million, and thereby we have some interest bearing liabilities of 51 million, where 22 million are office leases. The rest then that's an external loan that we have which will be amortized in full during December So that is pretty much the financial Numbers for the quarter and I leave back to you Mattias Thank You Camilla just to wrap it up real quickly so what's going on here I think we've delivered solid growth for four consecutive quarters now and

That's of course driven by some tailwind in the market. The cyber threat level is very high. And as I think I was able to highlight earlier, we do offer a solution, which is a very tangible and cost efficient way to mitigate one of the major threat vectors when it comes to cyber crime. Again, to repeat myself, when you look at meta studies of cyber attacks, you will find that in 80% of the cases, compromised login credentials was a critical factor. So by ensuring that you have strong MFA, you are addressing one of the major cyber threats out there. So that's kind of the underlying market dynamics that are working in our favor. That's even faster propelled by the AI enabled attacks that we're seeing on a broad basis now. And as I highlighted earlier, The bulk of our revenue and our focus when it comes to sale remains internal enterprise use, but we find it very encouraging that our customers are now, in an increasing number of cases, taking our products to their end users and that could be an important revenue source in the future and an important way for us to even help individuals and consumers up level their security. Part of that, too, is that we're active to ensure that we can not just protect logins, but even protect users. To do so, we need to cover the full life cycle of a consumer, and that's the light I see the efforts that we're making when it comes to different projects for identities, especially in Europe, where we're working with the EU DI wallet initiatives. And finally, I'd like to highlight the fact that we have started our structured CSRD work. More to come there. And of course, fundamentally, we feel that our product does have a positive impact in protecting identities and making people safe online. But of course, we want to review our business and see how we can ensure that we run our business properly from an environmental, social, and governance perspective. More to come there. So I think we've built a solid base for future growth and we're quite happy with the quarter. With that note, we'll open up for questions and I believe we'll start off with some of the questions, some of the people standing in line wanting to ask questions. Over to.

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 £6 on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Joachim Gunnell from DNB Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and good evening, Mattias. So our favorite topic on these types of calls tend to be how the current quarter has started. So I'll give it a shot. I mean, we're halfway through Q4 now. Q4 was a very strong quarter last year on bookings and to grow versus that higher basis, of course, is our main question here. So just take us through what gives you confidence to actually grow the bookings versus that higher basis. and tougher comparables, and then perhaps also discuss the pacing of Q3 bookings momentum, how that progressed on a month-over-month basis throughout Q3.

Thank you, Joaquin. As you know, we don't provide guidance on a quarterly basis, and as you also noted, we did have a record Q4 last year. I think we reported an excess of 80% growth that quarter, which means that comparables look much more challenging. On the positive note, though, as we just talked about, the market trend is definitely working in our favor. And I would say that given that we have, again, a very broad-based growth in Q3 across several different geographies, industries, and customers, and we see a lot of repeat business from existing customers, that should set us up for continuing on a growth trajectory. So I'm optimistic about our ability to continue to deliver growth.

That's helpful. And taking a step back and looking a bit forward here. So Microsoft Entra's enablement of 5.2 pass keys of January 2025. In my world, that is a true hurdle remover for a potentially very large user base of organizations to go from good enough security with apps to also step up their game with YubiKeys. So can you just provide some quick thoughts, how you envision that opportunity unfold for you, both in the short term, but also long term?

I agree with you. This does help. I mean, the most common use case for YubiKeys, which is used, as I mentioned, across a wide range of service-operated systems and devices, but it's no secret that the most common use case is in the Microsoft environment. The fact that they're issuing these mandates and that we're seeing a growing realization that security, to have strong security, you need strong MFA. This does set us up for growth. And I mean, there's nothing new when it comes to the security level, but it's more the fact that now it gets easier to implement our solution. And there's a stronger realization that a solution like ours is needed. So this is definitely an enabler for continued growth. And Microsoft is a huge company, and it's difficult to always know where they're heading. But this, to me, indicates that, yeah, this is definitely a positive development from our perspective.

Encouraging. Final question for me, coming back to a topic we've also discussed, but you have a very healthy balance sheet here and the cash flows also compounding nicely here. So can we discuss just the ongoing M&A appetite and the consolidation amongst U.S. cybersecurity players? I think like two companies was out just in conjunction with the Q3 results announcing a potential sale of businesses here. So just talk a bit about your thoughts on the best possible uses of this capital you have in the business, whether it's to invest more in the business on an organic basis, instead of some sort of dividend or buybacks, or even potentially pursue M&A to take a step up in the value chain, or what would a dream acquisition look like for Ubiquil?

Sure, I'll try to address that question. As you know, we have a stated policy that we won't pay any dividends for the foreseeable future. And the reason for that is, of course, that we see a lot of growth opportunities in the market. Whether we're going to execute on that based on organic growth or through strategic acquisitions is a little early to tell, but we're definitely analyzing how we can grow our solution to help our customers based from the stronghold that we have. I may have mentioned on earlier calls that the feedback we're hearing from our customers is that once they've implemented our product, they don't have a problem with compromised logins. However, what they're really looking to do is to protect their users. And to do so, we need to cover the full lifecycle of a YubiKey deployment. So there are a number of opportunities to expand our footprint either through organic development or through potential acquisitions but we'll have to get back to you with a more firm answer on that joaquin but i agree with you there's lots going on in the market we have a very solid balance sheet and we shouldn't there's more growth to to be seen thank you very much that's all for me the next question comes from pre-drag savinovich from carnegie

Please go ahead.

Hi, Mattias, Camilla and Alexandra. Can we discuss the PK Bank partnership? You mentioned it a few times in your presentation, but you also mentioned potential others as well during this call so far. Do you have others which have not announced? Do you have other potential banks or insurance companies that are

the pipeline due to be launched soon how should we think about this sure so with pko bank poland's largest bank what's what's really nice about that was that they were very public with this initiative It's a little hands off though. I mean, they've built support and they're recommending their customers, but it's really left with the individual users to decide on what authentication method they want to use. So it's not exclusively using YubiKeys in any shape or form. So the story is really that when we look across the different bank pilots and projects that we're running right now, they all look very different. Some are only targeted on specific network individuals or commercial users. Others are more broad like the PKO Bank initiatives and others have identified a slightly larger set based on kind of a use case where they want to start testing this. Again what's nice about PKO Bank is that it is a very public case and they're referenced that way. For the others we'll have to get back to you on the deployments there, but we also over time want to standardize our offering there because what's important is, of course, that we see a success as this gets deployed, that we have high pickup on the customer side and that they get a good user experience. We need to be a little directive to make sure that you identify the right users, that you offer a good UX to support the customers as they uplevel their security.

Right, but it does sound like you have other partnerships in place which are not publicly announced based on how those contracts are structured.

Correct.

Okay. The EU NIS2 Directive and the US National Cyber Security Strategy Do you see this supporting you already now as a tailwind or can this be a further catalyst for bookings going forward when these respective organizations announce a firm roadmap or process? So we conclude this is how cybersecurity process should look like and will that trigger more deal for you? Do you think?

I think we're already seeing tailwind and I expect to see more tailwind. Sorry, I was interrupted there. So we already see tailwinds from it, and I think we'll see even more tailwind from what's going on on the regulatory side. However, there's no one silver bullet there. It's more kind of a general increased awareness of the need for strong MFA and the resulting regulations and recommendations. So it's not just one piece of legislation which makes the world of difference. It's kind of a general motion that is driving demand within our segment.

Okay, very clear. And finally on pricing, what is your strategy on making increases here? I always thought of Yubikeys being a high-value product that offer a lot of bang for the buck. And considering the growth you have in bookings and sales, Are you offering this a little too cheap, maybe?

Historically, what we've typically done is we haven't done, with a few exceptions, any type of inflationary adjustment on the pricing. We typically like to increase prices when we offer more functionality or a new version. But the even more important part is wanting to make sure that our customers buy the more advanced product. As you may be aware, we have a single protocol key, which is competitively priced because that's more open to competition. But when it comes to our more advanced versions, including the FIP certified versions, that comes at a higher cost because of the higher functionality and the higher certification you have there. The other part of that is that we want to develop our subscription offering to make that the enterprise-grade product, and that comes with offering unique functionality and services that are only offered on a subscription basis. I'm not saying we're going to abandon our perpetual sales, but we want to make sure that we develop our subscription offerings and more enterprise customers realize that that delivers the highest value to them. That offers an opportunity for us to adjust our pricing.

Very good. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Good luck.

The next question comes from Erik Lindholm-Rogestal from SEB. Please go ahead.

Good morning. I wanted to follow up on Joakim's question to start with on growth rates. This year has been strong, of course, 62% organic water growth year-to-date. comp next year will definitely be tougher at least. But I mean in the light of this do you think you can sort of sustain your long-term growth target next year as well or will this be tough to achieve? Thank you.

Thank you Erik. As you say this is arguably our fourth consecutive quarter where we're reporting really strong growth. So, of course, the bar goes up. However, I feel that given that it's a very broad composition of geographies, segments and customers, I don't feel that this is a one off. So I see no need for us to revise our long term goals based on the fact that we've had higher growth now for a 12 month period. So I think we're able to continue growing and no need really to revise the long-term growth targets.

All right. That sounds encouraging. Then on the subscription offering, you talked a bit about maybe making some tweaks to sort of accelerate growth here. Can you perhaps... I mean, growth has been a bit slow there. Is there anything you can mention in particular that you're doing to...

yeah tweak this offering and make it grow more again thanks so there are two sides of that one is short term uh the share of subscription uh compared to perpetual sales is to some extent determined by the segments that are strong in a particular quarter and even if it was broad based we highlighted that in particular public sector and high tech was strongly scored. And when it comes to high tech, unfortunately, we haven't been able to convince a lot of our more traditional high tech customers about the value of buying it on a subscription basis. So there is some customer composition part of explaining the subscription sales pattern. However, like you say, for this to be more attractive, we need to offer new functionality. Today, the only unique functionality which is only offered on a subscription basis is the integration we have with Okta enrollment or pre-reg as we call it. Over time, we will develop more features and functionalities, which only lends itself to sale on subscription basis. And another important part of that is that we want to be a partner as we sign up a subscription customer, making sure that we assist them with a successful deployment and management of the install base. So that goes beyond the pure physical product and the core functionality. They're kind of lowering the thresholds and making sure that you have a successful and speedy deployment, enrollment and maintenance of install base. So we want to add software and services part of the subscription offering. More to come there, but I agree with you. We want to go down that journey, but it should be based on what the customers feel that this is the most, this is the best way for them to get the highest.

Okay, sounds encouraging. A final question from me. I think you touched on this a bit, but I mean, your EBIT margin has been around your midterm target now for two quarters in a row, and you're growing very fast. steadily. I mean is there anything that indicates that you wouldn't be able to sustain this level going forward or do you have any major planned investments coming up? Thank you.

So as I think Camilla highlighted we did not capitalize any R&D cost during quarter and we haven't done so in the past either. So our investments in the building our product in the future are really charged as cost today. And we want to make sure that we maintain our R&D spend at a level which sets us up for success long term. And I think we're at a level which is pretty good there, but we may even increase that a little bit. When it comes to scaling, yeah, G&A has pretty consistently been going down. Sales and marketing has been a little bit more stable, and it probably will be stable for a little time, but over over if you take midterm so in a couple of years I think there's opportunity for us to drive down our sales and marketing cost as we were able to explore indirect sales model more effectively today most of it is direct so I don't see any reason for why we shouldn't be able to maintain our margins but I similar to the earlier question by you Joachim there are also some adjacent markets that we may want to explore and then it comes in two different ways either it's organically that we develop this which may require investments or that there's an M&A track for getting specific functionality or specific competence but yeah we'll have to get back to you on that great will be exciting to follow thank you

The next question comes from Thomas Nelson from Nordea. Please go ahead.

Hello and thank you for taking my questions. I have two questions. First, in this quarter we saw increased sales in EMEA and Asia Pacific. Can you elaborate on your strategic projects in these regions and are there any particular industries or partnerships that you're targeting? And second, your inventory levels came down to 20% of last whole month sales. What would be a long-term level you would like to see in terms of inventory as percent of sales and when do you expect to get there? Thank you.

Thanks, Thomas. I'll start and then I'll ask Camilla to help me out on the second question. But to start with our go-to-market approach in me and APJ, In EMEA and APJ, as a reminder, we are pretty much exclusively working with a two-tier channel model, which means that we do have salespeople who engage with the bigger customers, but all businesses run through the channel. We found that that actually has worked out really well in certain markets where you get a reinforcing effect as you start working deeply with some value-added resellers. The most obvious example is within the German automotive industry, where we started working with our great customer BMW a long time ago, and our channel partner there is now very active in making sure that we expand our reach in that market, which we're super happy about. So we want to do more of that, making sure that we identify the right Vistis, but also the right value-added resellers, and become better at enabling them more quickly. That said, though, we also want to make sure that we have sales reps that are able to work directly with the customers because the big deployments that we have and the big customers we have typically are complex enough for us that it makes sense for us to have a direct involvement. But we want to make sure that we can enable our partners to cover most of the customers what we call the commercial customers, without any direct engagement from our end. So I think that model is working really well within the DAC market. We're seeing a lot of growth now in the UK and in France. More of developing that model is how we think about approaching EMEA and APJ. So that's the first part of the question. The second one, yes, as Camille explained, we did build up, practically build up our inventory levels both on components and ready products to ensure that we have security in terms of our ability to deliver and also to be able to deliver for large departments on short notice. And as Camille Olsen mentioned, we have seen that level, even though the absolute numbers are still growing in terms related to the last 12 months sales, it's actually come down a little bit. We don't have a specific target for that. But rule of thumb, Camille and I feel that we probably should be in the 25 to 27 percent range long term. There are individual quarterly swings based on sales. large deliveries of components, whether they happen early in the quarter or late in the quarter. Right now, it seems like a very smooth journey down. There could be individual swings there, but I think we're still a little high, but no real major level changes that I anticipate there, but perhaps it should come down a little bit. Camilla, I'll hand it over to you for more details there.

Thank you, Mattias. And I think you covered it very well. It's not much more to say, actually. We'll continue the journey downwards. Might vary depending on how, especially the next sales in the quarter or certain shipments, timing effects, etc. But continue downwards, but just a couple of percentages, perhaps. We will absolutely prioritize that we have the ability to ship and meet our customers' demand and also for larger orders where they need a quick deployment.

Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you.

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

Hi again. Just a quick follow-up. You've provided this on a quarterly basis, the number of keys sold in your presentation material, and it was, I think, 33 million here to date. In Q3, you had the number 32 in your Q2 presentation. And I would assume that there's some rounding here. But when I look at your bookings number in relation to that, call it incremental new keys sold, it would imply that there is a step up on either the value that each new key bring in relation to where it has been in recent quarters. So are you seeing, even if you aren't raising prices, the way you answered question, are your customers going for more advanced solutions from you? Are you seeing any such trend here or am I reading too much into this figure?

Thank you Joakim. Quite frankly I think unfortunately you're reading a little bit too much to it. This is more as an illustrative number. So the fact that we've only adjusted by one there's some running out there and maybe it should be plus 34. It's a plus in front of it. So it's only a level where we're definitely sure that we're not overstating it. That said, though, there is a long-term trend of our customers going for the more high functionality and therefore more costly versions of our products. So we have seen an average sales price increase long-term, but I wouldn't infer it from the overall number. That's more illustrative to show kind of the impact we have in terms of how big the deployment is. We'll have to talk about whether we should be more precise in reporting that number or whether we should be even more, let's say, rounding off and have it at the nearest 10 million, because we don't want people to draw too many conclusions on that number on the overview page. So apologies if we've caused some confusion there.

At our worst, I'll go back to sleep. Thank you.

All right.

There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions or closing comments.

Exactly.

Yeah, there are a number of written questions. Maybe we should read them out and take them one by one. Yeah. Start from the bottom. So the first one says, congratulations on a strong Q3. Thank you. Two comments. Could you confirm that the negative EBIT result is only driven by the 68% dilution due to Bure acquisition. Camilla, do you understand the question?

I can say like this. I think this is a mix-up of two parts, perhaps. The negative EBIT in Q3 last year, yes, that is driven by the transaction costs. Perhaps this is related to EBIT per share. Looking at adjusted EBIT and EBIT per share, yes, the increase in number of shares, that is totally related to the dilution in connection with the merger when quite many more shares were created or issued.

Great. Thank you, Camilla. Second comment. We would like to congratulate you on releasing your cryptographic library. This is a huge de-risk from industry who might be affected by industry-wide issue and the Ubico product would stay immune. We believe this aspect is not well understood by investors. Thank you. I agree with you. I think it's really important that we have a robust, secure architecture. And this is part of that effort to make sure that we're in control and on top of all the risk factors that are introduced by suppliers and making sure that we understand the risks that are associated with our products. So I agree with you, this is an important feat. Then we'll move on to the next question, which is in Swedish language. Congratulations on a strong quarter. Thank you. Given that this is your first year as a publicly traded company, As commented today, you have a pretty high level of volatility and fluctuation when it comes to cash flow, inventory and working capital. How would you want to work with this going forward? Would it be suitable to set explicit targets around these measurements to increase the visibility and transparency as a fast-growing company. I hope my translation was okay there. As you know we only have communicated three long-term One is on the growth, that it should be long-term at least 25% growth on revenue and 20% on profitability on EBIT level and that we're not planning to pay any dividends for now. We agree that it does make sense for us to be perhaps a little bit more explicit about certain aspects of our business. because we realize that we are new as a publicly traded company. I think when it comes to setting more detailed targets is probably not the right way forward, but I want to make sure that we're transparent about how the development looks and what you should read into it. And I think you highlight cash flow, inventory and working capital are definitely areas where we need to up our game when it comes to how we provide that transparency on what to read into the numbers. I think, however, from my perspective, Camilla did a pretty good job in explaining that just now. So please feel free to provide input with us on how we can improve in how we communicate so that you can understand our business.

I'd just like to add one aspect there also when it comes to the working capital. The inventory we have talked about But the other part there is of course related to customer receivables and also then our deferred revenue related to large subscription contracts. And as we are addressing the enterprise market especially and working with the largest customers that you have in the world, and then of course we see some of these large contracts and when we do those billings at the stage as we are now in the size we have now then that will have timing effects on our balance sheet and our cash flow we try as much as to be as transparent as we can when it comes to describing but it's it's very difficult for us to to to yeah set a model for how this should be looked at going forward. Of course, over time, increasing the portfolio of subscription contracts, bigger portfolio of more customers, et cetera, et cetera, then this will even out over time. And therefore, as we grow, I expect it to be less fluctuating. But where we are now in the coming years, I expect that we will continue to see these timing effects over the quarters, which are very difficult to foresee. And as we don't really see that we have any specific seasonal effect in this either. It's more timing effects.

Let's make sure we're transparent, but I don't think it makes sense to provide guidance on those metrics. Great. The next question is, why did you not make the market aware of the hacking incident when it was first made aware to you in April 2024? I understand the question as the security vulnerability, because I'm not sure that anyone really got hacked, but there definitely was a security vulnerability in the product. The reason for why we didn't go public as we first learned about this, just to take a step back, this is an industry-wide problem. that was because of a vulnerability in the Infineon chip. So the first ones that were notified about this vulnerability was, of course, Infineon. And they notified us once they'd, I think we even heard directly from the hackers sometime after that. And then there was a process of establishing whether this was a real vulnerability or not. And then we went through what's called a responsible disclosure process. now there are depending on the severity of the vulnerability the process looks different but we followed a generally accepted industry-wide process for making sure that we could mitigate any negative effects and of course i mean theoretically we could have gone live as soon as we found out and communicated this but that would effectively have meant that we couldn't be part of any responsible disclosure in the future because people wouldn't trust us anymore. So yeah, long answer to a short question, but yes, we did abide by a responsible disclosure process, which was set by the supplier that was experiencing this vulnerability in this case. I'll move on to the next question. Given that this was your first quarter with subscription renewals, What was your retention rate as a percentage of contracts which were eligible for renewal? How much churn do you expect from subscription contracts? To be clear, this was not the first quarter where we saw subscription renewals. The first subscription was actually happened back in 2023, in Q3 and Q4 2023. However, we are seeing contracts coming up for renewal. And overall, we see a very high renewal rate. But in some cases, the user population or the use case has changed. So we have seen a few cases where the user population went down because simply the number of employees had decreased quite significantly. We had one instance of that in Q4 2023. On the other hand, I think it was in Q1 2024, we had an existing customer that made an early renewal and expanded the user audience. So you saw a renewal, but an expansion at the same time. Overall, there are only very few customers that haven't renewed their contracts. And in most of those cases, it is because they have been part of some M&A activity and that they're moving to either a different authentication solution or that they want to convert to outright buying the because of policies within the merged entity. But those are relatively rare and few. So we see a very high, I don't have an exact percentage, but we see a very high renewal rate of our subscription contracts. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Camilla?

No, I think it's crystal clear.

Great. The final one I'll hand over to you, Camilla, fully. Oh, actually, there's one more, but the next one I'll hand over to you. How is your bookings metric defined? You define it in your report as total value of bookings received during the period. But this doesn't actually spell out how bookings are calculated.

Okay. Yes. And this is the total contract value we have in the contract. signed with the customer, and we are booking the total contract value the period where we actually have the signatures on. So then when we take the booking as such. If there are options or so, we are not recognizing them as bookings until we have a confirmed extension or usage of an option. And then that's a new booking. That means also, of course, that for subscriptions, we take the full booking value, the full contract value over the time, maybe if it's three years or four years or five years. Therefore, it could be quite high and thereby also taking quite some time before all that value is actually turned into revenue in the P&L. I hope that answered the question.

It did for me at least, hopefully it did. The final question of the written questions that we've got. European sales have now grown quicker than America's for the last two quarters. Do you expect this trend to continue? Is Europe growing quicker because it is a less penetrated geography than the US, or is this a transitory impact from the NIS2 directive? Correct. We see European sales growing more quickly than sales in the Americas. the past two quarters and and if you take a look at an even longer time period say five years that is also very much the case i do expect this trend to continue i think the biggest reason is because we're seeing very similar threat levels in europe compared to the us and americas and our penetration is much lower in europe so as we build up our ability to sell and deliver in europe It's realistic over time to think that we would get similar penetration levels in those different markets because fundamentally the threat level and the technology used is very similar. Of course, there are some directives and there are some initiatives when it comes to regulation that drive particular deployments and use cases. But overall, I would say it's part of the broader trend with an increased cybersecurity threat and the fact that our product addresses an important aspect of that. And we are less penetrating in Europe, so I expect this trend to continue. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Camilla?

No, I agree with you fully there, and I don't have anything more to add.

Thank you. Just one final comment from me. A market where we have even lower penetration is Asia-Pac. that is one that should grow at an even higher growth rate going forward. At least that's our ambition. Right, I think that wraps up the written questions and we're four minutes past the hour. So unless there are any final questions, I think that's a wrap. Thanks everybody for listening in. Looking forward to connecting at least in three months time when we'll deliver the full year report. Yeah, that's a wrap for us. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening and let us know if you have any questions and you can reach out to us always and we'll try to respond to it as quickly as we can. Thanks so much.

Thank you very much.