Cyviz AS

OSE:CYVIZ

Earnings Call Transcript

[Espen Gylvik, executive]

Hi, and a warm welcome to the first earnings call of 2025 for Cyviz. As you can see, I am here today alone. Our CFO, Karl Peter, is unfortunately down with a heavy fever. So I will try to take you through today's presentation.

So we'll go through Q1 on a high level in a brief. Some business highlights, of course, the Q1 financials, a bit on priorities and outlook going forward. And then at the end, as we always do, open up for questions.

So Q1 normally is a soft quarter in our industry, but I'm pleased to tell that we have still managed to provide a solid quarter. Strong growth in both revenue and order intake in a quarter, we define as quite turbulent with a lot of unpredictability when it comes to both tariffs and oil prices and political instability in the marketplace.

And as a global company, we will touch into that in more or less all of the regions we operate in. So we are pleased and happy to see that we continue to grow our business and the underlying business is still moving well. So revenue ended at NOK 136 million, which is up NOK 29 million or 27% compared to Q1 last year.

Gross profit of NOK 74 million with a 54% margin, so still a pretty strong quarter when it comes to margin despite that it's significantly lower than Q1 last year, which was an abnormal quarter where the majority of products we shipped and pulled as revenue was largely our own with very significant high margin. And as you remember, it balanced out to Q2 and Q3 last year. So pleased with the 54% margin in the quarter.

EBITDA is still on the positive side with NOK 1.2 million. As I explained, the margin last year was abnormally high. So we are a bit down from NOK 3.9 million last year and continued to drive positive uplift in order intake compared to last quarter, NOK 29 million up, which is 23% increase.

So overall, a solid quarter and if we look at the rolling 12 months for the company as a whole, you can see that quarter by quarter on order intake is more or less stable, and it resonates quite well with the order intake last year and the order intake this year and some of the projects that we have done in between that levels out.

Gross profit positively moving also in a rolling 12-month trend from NOK 295 million to NOK 315 million, which is a 7% uplift. And the same we can see on EBITDA despite that the EBITDA isolated in Q1 was slightly lower than last year. So a 6% increase on that. And the 3 parameters on top, when we went public, we went out talking about a CAGR of 30% for us as a company. We're still rolling around 37% on order intake, more or less spot on revenue and slightly higher than 30% on gross profit.

So the gross margin trend continues to be positive, and that is also despite that we haven't started to capitalize fully on the 2 new business lines we talked about during the Capital Market Day, our core tech kit through partners and the new software platform, which is a pure SaaS-based business.

But it comes as a consequence of the effect of the professionalization we have started like 18 months ago internally, where we are really, really trying to tight up everything we do and how we spend money. And also the way we control projects and agree on what projects we say yes to and what projects we normally let pass. So it drives larger projects with larger accounts and an increase in the ARR part in Q1.

And we have also started now to see customers starting to ask and require for 2-, 3-, 4-year type of agreements, also on people and capacity as part of the ARR development. And as we have tried to explain over years now, the gross profit, as anything else, do fluctuate because the majority of what we do are still largely project business and project sales. So it might swing and fluctuate between quarters.

So it will have impact on the mix of what we ship and what we install and how we send things out in between quarters. But through a year, it tends to level out. And in the graph underneath, you can see the impact and the effect of some of the gross margin in 2024, which went above average target trend. And now it's reversal into 2025, and we expect it to continue to like level out on a normalized type of gross margin, which is still in the high end in the industry as such.

Some of the highlights in the quarter. Happy to see and announce that we have now started to get some traction in our Middle East and APAC region. With new clients also in the Saudi market and, finally, also starting to traction on clients and the investments we have done on a very low scale, but still in the Indian market. Defense critical type of vertical for us, especially related to, I mean, NATO and Europe, and the expected increase in defense budgets across NATO and Europe, so happy to see that we pulled in another deal in the quarter.

Aker BP, one of our 3 largest accounts continue to invest and buy from us, so happy to see that continue. The same we see inside the Middle East market with Ministry of Energy and SEC. So SEC is one of those top 3, 4 customers we have, continue to invest largely in meeting rooms and operation centers. And the journey with Microsoft and their Envisioning Theater rollout globally continues, and that will continue through, I mean, the majority of 2025.

And then we have started to regain traction with Accenture; historically, one of the largest accounts we have had. And now seeing that they're moving in and starting to upgrade and the refresh on some of the solutions they have. If you look at the order intake by region, Europe was by far the strongest region inside the quarter, followed by Middle East and APAC. And then North America, who had a very soft type of quarter in the region.

But I do -- and we do expect the North American market to level out during the second quarter of the year so that when we do the second quarter presentation, you would probably see a more balanced type of pie chart between those 3 regions.

Quickly on the financials. As we said, NOK 29 million growth in revenue, 27%. Rolling trend at NOK 624 million versus NOK 555 million in Q1 last year, which is an increase of 12%, quite significant and the trend points in that positive direction. We do anticipate the same trend moving into Q2. Gross profit ended at NOK 1.9 million growth, which is 5%. And the gross margin 54% versus 67% as we talked about last year, which was an abnormal quarter when it comes to gross margin.

The EBITDA we talked about NOK 3.9 million short of Q1 last year, but the rolling trend is more or less in par or slightly above 2024. And the bookings, 23% growth and the rolling trend more or less balanced with what it was Q1 last year. So one short note, I think when we talk about bookings, we also talk about pipeline.

And the pipeline growth is continuing to develop quite positive across all the verticals, and I think the type of strategy we did 3, 4 years ago to like expand verticals and the marketplace has also allowed us to balance any type of unstability and happenings in the marketplace so that we can trade if it slows down inside federal, we can move more of the efforts into the corporate space and vice versa.

Cash flow, a bit on the soft side in the quarter, largely driven by a couple of things. Account receivables for some of the larger projects in certain markets that payment goes a bit slow. And we also had to do some additional ordering of equipment and build up inventory for project delivery early into Q2 that took a hit on the cash and the FX rate of NOK 6.3 million. So in sum, that takes us to a minus NOK 17.6 million.

We do anticipate that the cash flow would balance out through Q2, where we expect a significant increase also in delivery and revenue that will transfer into a more balanced operating cash flow when we wrap up first half of the year.

So if we think about outlook, so how do we think and how do we see the market develop. And I think everyone is quite aware that it is unpredictable. Not just in our industry but across, I think, every industry. Hard to predict how the market will look like 2, 3 weeks ahead. And Q1 has been, in particular, challenging to try to plan. We do have a strategy. We are quite focused on staying with that strategy and doing what we can do best and try to be quite prudent and focused on that.

There are 3 key things for us beyond what you see here on the slide. The underlying business of the company is performing well, and Q1 is a good example of that on revenue and order intake. We are halfway out in Q2 and the type of trends we see for the second quarter looks promising, despite whatever tariffs and other things that are thrown into the marketplace. So we see the core business developing well.

We definitely see an increase in requests within the defense sector, especially in Europe and across NATO members as part of their increase in defense spending that would not just be related to weapons and bullets, but also technology to modernize. And I think as a company, we are better positioned with our referrals with our NATO certification on secure solutions for mission-critical operation centers and control rooms to really capitalize on those investments over the next years to come.

So we anticipate that defense sector would be a key growth area during this year and far into 2026 and beyond. And then, of course, the start of capitalizing on the Cyviz Core Technology that we now enable a partner ecosystem to take out and deliver to customers to expand the marketplace. And also allow us to reach a lot more customers than we can do with our own people. We do expect that to start paying off early second half of the year.

We already have 8 dedicated partners signed up to take that out in the marketplace as well as the new software platform, which is the key element of the transformation we have done as a company to really start pulling in a SaaS-driven SaaS-based business model. And that is the key component for the 2030 type of outlook of reaching a NOK 250 million ARR as a company.

And today, we have -- out of Q1, we have signed agreements with 16 partners. And as of today, we are at 19, we do expect 2, 3 more partners coming in the remaining part of the second quarter. And the important thing now is not adding 5 or 10 or 15 additional partners, but enable these partners to go out and plug and sell that out to customers.

And the type of ripple effect from a SaaS point of view would be when these are plugged with customers and they connect that to all the rooms the customers have, that's where the type of subscription revenue should start kicking in for us as a company as well.

So profitable growth and cash management, scaling through the partner ecosystem, which is the key, key element for future growth. And then, of course, really be positioned and capitalize on the increased defense budget in Europe and within NATO. And I do anticipate despite any challenge coming in, that as a company, we are better positioned to deliver on that growth journey than most companies in our industry.

So with that, I say thank you, and let's see if there is any questions.

[Espen Gylvik, executive]

[Foreign Language] Sorry, I need to translate that into English. So what happened with reporting on ARR?

So as we said during the Capital Markets Day, we will start reporting on ARR when we get to the Q2 earnings call, as we stated also during the Capital Markets Day. So we need a system that we have now in place and make sure that we have 100% modeling in place so that whatever we report on recurring revenue, is fact-based and correct. Hence, also not doing anything after Q1, but start reporting on that after Q2.

Okay. How do you look at growth for 2025? And what type of speed on growth can we expect the next 2 years?

Okay. And let me try to see if I can answer that quickly. We have our internal budget for 2025. They are definitely driven by an expectation of solid positive growth across all financial KPIs from order intake, revenue and EBITDA.

As of today, which is like mid-May, even though there is a lot of unpredictable things happening in the marketplace, I think we have a solid plan with a good team of people that continue to do what they do best every single day. And I think if I look at pipeline and expectations into Q2 and beyond, today, I'm still confident that we will be able to deliver on our internal growth targets for 2025.

When it comes to '26 and '27, as we said during the Capital Markets Day, we do, at some point, expect to flat out the core type of part of our business. And the majority of future growth on top of that would be building blocks coming from partners selling our core tech kit, where they build Cyviz solutions to customers beyond what we can reach and also the SaaS platform that will drive subscription or ARR revenue with much higher margins.

So I think we are still very solid positioned across those type of marketplaces we work in to continue to be confident with the plans we have presented, and I don't see anything today that necessarily would indicate that, that would change.

Yes. So someone asked, can you comment on high cost related to employees have left in Middle East and APAC?

So I think there has been 2 senior resources over the last 18 months that have left in the APAC region, one was one of those senior executives where we had an agreement where we had to have a sort of like a sign-off agreement, so that has cost connected to the agreement or the employee agreement as such. For any others, I'm not sure if we have had any type of additional high cost on people living in that region.

How comfortable are you with the liquidity situation in Cyviz?

So liquidity and cash management is like top of the agenda, it has been through all of 2024. It's definitely there in 2025 as well across the EVPs running the regions, the finance team and myself. And we always work with plan A, B and C internally to like always have a plan to balance if some projects move into another quarter, and we get some sort of like delays in payment terms.

So we are still confident that we can run our company with the expected growth targets we have this year with the current type of cash and liquidity situation we have. But important, again, to reiterate, it swings by quarter largely because the majority of our business is still project-driven.

So it depends if customers are ready as planned to receive stuff or it slides over to another quarter and you might have some sort of gliding or sliding periods where we need to balance the cash to make sure that we can invest to grow.

What measures are taken to improve profitability?

So those are -- I mean, the same measures we have talked about over the last, I think, 1.5 years. Professionalizing everything we do, which is like an internal type of operational way of looking at how we run our business, making sure that no dollars falls between shares, controlling the large projects from start to finish quite rigid, tracking it, reporting on it, so that nothing, I mean, drops to the floor.

We have twice a year discussions with our third-party vendors, when it comes to payment terms, margins, prices, et cetera, to make sure that we always have the best prices on everything we buy. That gives us the ability to maintain relatively high gross profit in average.

And of course, increase gradually through second half of this year into 2026 with partners selling the core technology, which is our own software and hardware that has much higher gross margin in average than when we sell complete solutions and bringing in third party components ourselves.

And of course, the subscription level with partners to customers that has a very, very significantly much higher gross margin for every single deal. So the operational professionalism internally making sure that we have tools to track so that we don't lose out. We qualify every single deal above $0.5 million where I'm involved, the CFO is involved, so we secure payment terms, margins, everything before any offer or contract to a customer is sent out.

And the 2 new business models do serve as the baseline to increase gradually the profit margin and the gross margin as a company. There is no concern among our customers when it comes to the balance sheet, nothing at all. I mean -- and I talk to most of the large customers on a regular basis, and that is never ever a topic for discussion.

Let me see if there is any more questions here that I haven't addressed. Well, I think I've managed to get through, hopefully, it looks like that. So if there are no additional questions, then I would, on behalf of myself and Karl Peter that really wanted to be here, but he is down with a fever, say thank you for the participation.

And as all of you know, if there are questions after this or beyond, feel free to reach out to Karl Peter or me. We are largely always available to answer your questions. And then see you when we do the Q2 earnings call a bit later this year. So with that, thank you all, and I wish you all happy day.