Micro Systemation AB (publ) (MSABB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Welcome to MSAB. Just want to check that you can hear us loud and clear. If you could just give us the thumbs up in the chat, that would be great.

Thumbs up, okay.

So we're ready to start. So I'm going to hand over for an introduction to our CEO, Peter Gille.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Q2 reporting. So the quarter was kind of stable compared to last year. We ended up at about SEK 80.5 million in sales, which is a slight -- very small increase compared to the same quarter last year. However, we have had some headwind in terms of currency. So if we adjust for that, we had a growth of about 8%. And we also have an order that they actually got committed from the customer, but it ended up with one of our suppliers who couldn't deliver the order to us. So with that in mind, I think we had a better sales than we reflect in the report. The costs have increased, and Tony will go into that more in detail, but they are on track exactly what we are planning. As we have said, we are investing both in marketing and in our development of the products then, and that's going according to the plan. So nothing is outside of the plan basically. If you look on the regions, we continue to have good growth in APAC, and we foresee also that, that will continue. We really, really see that APAC has good potential. In EMEA, we have the impact of the big order. Otherwise, the sales was on the level we expected. There are some issues with reduced budgets in EMEA that I will talk a little bit about later. In the U.S., we are very happy to announce that we got the first contract on UNIFY, our new product that we have a number of prototype customers, and now we also have the first [ XRY ] customer who has really bought the product in Canada. And the pipeline looks really good in the U.S. with strong interest. If we look on the product side, as mentioned, our investments in XRY Pro, where we have very, very good Android capability today, the best in the market according to ourselves. But we also now have increased capabilities in iOS, FFS, which really makes it a state-of-the-art product. And we can also see that in the sales that it's the best-selling products in all regions, basically. UNIFY, we released that last quarter. We now have the first contract. We're looking forward to get more contracts for UNIFY, and we will also continue to develop functionality for UNIFY going forward. We also launched our MK4 kiosk last quarter, and it's been well received. And we see some existing customers that will upgrade to the MK4 kiosk, but we also see potential interest from several regions in new projects where they want to invest in this [ kiosk ]. Here, we are the leaders in the market, and we think that this will be a growth enabler going forward. In the market then, there are some public cuts on the budgets. We can see that very clearly, also a shift from some of the administration budgets over to defense, which is natural with kind of geopolitical situation we are in right now. In U.S. it's not so much about the cuts. It's more about the uncertainty that the administration has caused with a lot of people being fired or dismissed and it's also unclear with who takes decisions and so forth. So it's been kind of a stop in the momentum there, but we think that, that will sort itself out during the coming quarters. And now the big beautiful bill are in place. So it should also be budgets in place for investing. And we know, for instance, that our products fits very well into what the Trump administration wants to do, both in terms of defense and border security, which is big customers for us in the U.S. Yes. I think that's good enough. I'll leave the word to Tony, who will go through the financial summary.

Thank you, Peter. So looking at the net sales, we reported SEK 81 million for the isolated quarter of Q2 and about 95% of the revenue is in foreign currency, which has impacted the revenue outcome in the second quarter. A growth of 1.8% is reported, and that is compared with the corresponding quarter last year. Currency-wise, we have a currency adjustment basis on the growth. So the growth corresponds really to 8% adjusting for the currency. As Peter mentioned, we received a significant MK4 kiosk order in the EMEA region worth more than SEK 10 million, and that one was postponed due to external delays in the supply chain. However, the end customer sent the order to our partner in Q2, and we are expecting the order in the near future. On a rolling 12-month basis, sales amounted to SEK 407 million, which we will compare with the same period last year that amounted to SEK 397 million. Net sales in our company are quarterly driven and normally related to the customers' year-end closing date, where APAC had their year-end closing in June. Sales growth in APAC was in line with our expectations, while EMEA and Americas performed below expectations in Q2. This was partly due to the delayed order, but also due to changing political landscape, which added to the short-term uncertainty. License renewals account for a larger share of sales in the second quarter, and that is a pattern we see in the Q2 normally. And it deviates from our full year forecast where license renewals represent 47% and new sales 53%. Next slide, please. So gross margin. Gross margin remains at a high level. We expect some upgrades during the second half of the year to our new MK4 kiosk, and that is also expected to drive increased COGS for the second half. However, a full year expectation is around 92% to 93% in gross margin. Operational costs are in line with our plan, where we are investing in increased market activities. We also see increased consultancy costs compared with the first half last year. However, those consultants has the main part of it been replaced by permanent staff, which means that we expect lower cost for the consultants going forward. There's also one-off items affecting comparability since there was a reversal of restructuring costs in Q2 as well as we had the former CEO compensated in Q2 numbers last year, which affected the comparability. So finally, EBIT-wise, the marketing activities, the consultant costs and the one-offs sums to a net of SEK 60 million and explains the main difference between half year this year and the half year -- first half year last year. Balance sheet remains strong, which continue to enable a good foundation for growth. An investment in iOS FFS has been made. This product is fully functional and was capitalized the 1st of June with a depreciation period of 5 years. And in addition to this investment, an investment of SEK 2 million in an Android [ Expert ] is ongoing and are expected to be capitalized during the third quarter. Otherwise, there are no ongoing investments for the moment. Closing cash position is SEK 90 million. Compared with the same period a year ago, the difference in the cash position is mainly due to investments made over the year and a negative outcome for the first half of the year. The company historically has its strongest quarters in the second half of the year, which is expected also this year. This is expected to strengthen our cash position going forward. There is no remaining cash out due to one-offs or restructuring in the balance sheet at closing date, and the balance sheet is totally debt free. Peter?

Yes. So to sum it up, when I started here 12 months ago, I said we were going to invest for growth, but the growth will come later. We can now see at least the costs, the investments that we are doing, both in increasing our brand recognition in the market -- on the side here, you can see a picture from the biggest fair in this market where we participated, and we went all in for that fair. So we are raising the awareness for the brand and for the products and also the capabilities that we have in our Star product, XRY Pro. We are really pushing that both investment in the product capabilities, but also in getting the market to understand how good this product is. And it takes time to get the market -- to get the product working really well with the best functionality in the market and to get the market to understand that and then get the market to buy that. So that's why you see the growth of the revenues here being postponed. As I said, 12 months ago, we should see the growth coming now in the coming 12 months. The frontline is also another area where we really have invested and released the new product, and we continue to have the best customer support in the market, which are -- we know that our customers really appreciate. So our strategy remains exactly as it's been the last 12 months, and we are doing what we told the market that we shall do. If you look on the quarter, the net sales was very slightly higher than last quarter last year, but we also had some currency headwinds, and we had a big order that would have changed the growth quite dramatic that we see now in Q3 instead. But we see that the customers likes what we are doing. So the product improvements we are providing to the market, they like it. The XRY Pro is now the best-selling product in all our regions. And we have also added the capabilities for iOS. We think we are very well positioned for the defense market and also for the border control market, and we think that, that will be a growing market going forward. So -- we will continue to focus on increasing the brand recognition and the product recognition in the market. And we think that, that will give great results going forward basically. That's it.

Okay. So that brings us to the Q&A. If you have any questions you would like to raise, feel free to put those in the chat. No questions so far. Okay. That appears to be all crystal clear. So with that, I think we can close. Thank you for joining us.

Yes. Thank you all. Have a great summer period. See you next call.