Pexip Holding ASA (PEXIP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Pexip's Q4 earnings presentation. My name is Oystein Hem, and I'm the CFO and Interim CEO of Pexip. For today's presentation, I will be joined by our Chairman, Michel Sagen; our SVP of Business Management, John Thorneycroft; and our Sales President for Americas, Karl Hantho. The presentation will last for approximately 40 minutes, followed by a Q&A session. The presentation is webcasted on our webpage under the IR section, and a recording will be made available after the presentation. Questions can be submitted through email at [email protected] or through the chat. With that, I'm happy to introduce Michel Sagen, our Chair of the Board.

Thank you very much, Oystein. Good afternoon. Earlier this week, we announced the appointment of Trond K. Johannessen as our new CEO in Pexip. It's been a thorough process, and the Board is very pleased and excited about the results. I'll share why I'm excited and why I think Trond is the perfect fit for Pexip. Firstly, Trond has a lot of experience in commercial scaling of complicated tech businesses, both organically and through M&A, and he's done that globally. In Tomra, a Norwegian recycling company, most famous for its high-tech reverse vending machines for bottles and cans, Trond was responsible for building from the ground up a second leg of the group, recycling and sorting solutions. Today, this business unit represents 50% of Tomra's revenues, about $500 million. Trond is used to a hands-on approach in working with customers, partners, and has a solid understanding of the full value chain. In Embron Group, a conglomerate of tech companies, both hardware and software, where he currently is Group CEO, he has contributed to doubling the revenue and quintupling the EBITDA, mainly through organic growth. The second reason for why we think he is a good fit is, as we learn to know Trond in the process, we understood that there was a very good cultural and team fit. People who have worked with Trond say that he's a team player, helps people develop and perform their best. We think he fits well with the Pexip culture. Thirdly, we saw a good fit between Trond and the leadership team here. He will contribute to strengthening the leadership even more. I think both parties will learn from each other, and this will accelerate execution. We also think his fresh view on our company and industry will be useful. We very much look forward to welcoming Trond as a member of the team when he joins the company in May. Now, before I hand things back to the team, I wanted to say a big thank you to Oystein for leading us as Interim CEO since August. He will remain Interim CEO until Trond joins and will revert to his role as CFO after that. Oystein, you've done a fantastic job. The Board is very thankful, and we look forward to continuing working with you in the coming months and years. With that, I hand things back to you, Oystein. Thank you.

Thank you, Michel. And a warm welcome to Trond. We are excited to have you join the Pexip team. So where is Pexip today? Pexip is a global technology company with more than 500 employees spread out across the world. Our R&D and software development teams are located in Europe across 3 main hubs, while our sales and marketing team is global as is the market we address. We are proud to serve more than 4,000 large organizations across enterprise and public sector. We have a clear focus on large organizations and solving the most complex needs in our industry. We serve our customers together with our partners, and they enable us to scale better and ensures that our product integrates well with the rest of the customers' IT stack. Our success with large organizations and the strength of our technology is a key reason for why our net retention rate is at 101%, showing that we retain our customers and the ARR we bring in for the long term. These strengths of a uniquely capable team, how we work with our partners across our ecosystem, and our unique technology is why we have been able to build a subscription base of $106 million in ARR and why we are seen as a challenger in our industry. Our competitive edge comes from unique technology, which is world-leading in 2 important areas. Pexip has the best transcoding architecture in the world. It is from this capability that we get our unique interoperability capability. This is why Microsoft and Google have partnered with Pexip to deliver interoperability to their customers. It also gives us the ability to run AI algorithms in the cloud, which gives us the opportunity to tap into more smart capabilities than anyone else. We also have the ability to run on any compute platform. We can deliver an easy and scalable cloud service, which is unrivaled in our niche, and we also have the ability to deliver a completely air-gapped solution on the customer's own data center. This is why our capabilities in data privacy, control, and security are unique. It's the focus on where we are unique and where our technology shines that drives our success, whether it's in video infrastructure, where Pexip supports interoperability across more video endpoints and across more video platforms than anyone else in the industry. It's in critical meetings where the most security-conscious organizations are moving to Pexip, and it's in video enablement where the world's leading telehealth service, retailers, financial institutions are running their customer experience on Pexip, thoroughly integrated into their own workflow with the open Pexip API. Pexip enjoys clear competitive differentiation in all of these 3 segments and keep on winning major customers in all of them. Looking ahead, we are now at the verge of a new video economy. Over the last 2 years, end-user adoption of video has gone from almost no one to almost everyone. Our claim is that we have not yet seen the impact of this disruption. It will transform our offices as all meeting rooms will need to be video enabled to adapt to the hybrid workforce. But it will also transform our economy. As organizations tap into the opportunities that arises from almost everyone being used to video and increasingly expecting that services are delivered using video. Meeting your doctor or your adviser from home or from the office is far more flexible than traveling to do so. It's far more efficient for everyone involved and it's a more sustainable way of doing business. This transformation will raise the bar for how video services are delivered. As we shift mission-critical workloads to video, security and reliability will become absolute requirements. Pexip is very well positioned for these shifts as we will see in the coming years. It's a different market for Pexip than what we saw in early 2020, which is something we are now realigning our business towards within our 3 business areas. This is something we're seeing higher traction on, but it's also a change where we will explore and learn in the years to come. Now over to Q4 and our recent highlights. Firstly, we are delivering financial results, taking us towards our growth ambitions. This is in the form of ARR growth, which is now at 30% year-on-year and in Q4 where we closed a strong Q4 with seasonally strong revenues of NOK 266 million in revenue, together with a more balanced investment level. This gave Pexip a positive EBITDA for Q4 of NOK 10 million, or 4% of revenue. We also have some exciting operational updates that position us well for revenue in the future. Pexip is now available in Azure Marketplace, which will enhance our already strong relationship with Microsoft and take that to the next level. We have launched a new offering in Enhanced Room Management, which will give us further upsell opportunities in the video infrastructure and help us completely displace the incumbent provider. John will give more flavor to both of those. I also want to highlight that we are now officially in progress on our FedRAMP certification. This will be a major driver as we double down on our success in the U.S. government space. Karl will give more flavor to this in a minute or 2. With that introduction, I give the word to John Thorneycroft, our SVP of Business Management. Welcome, John.

Thank you very much, Oystein. Good afternoon. I'm John Thorneycroft. I look after business management at Pexip. And as mentioned, as part of our new 2022 focus to really succeed in our 3 new business areas, we are rationalizing our development efforts to make sure everything is focused to drive innovation in these business areas where users have such complex needs. And today I'm here to highlight a few examples of those recent innovations. Our most immediate focus has been on winning in our video infrastructure market. And as mentioned, I think the key innovation here is the introduction of Enhanced Room Management. This should be seen as an addition to our Enterprise Room Connector, which is our most successful product to date. Essentially, the Enterprise Room Connector offers the vast majority of the service needed to run a video meeting room. It offers the software to enable calling, interoperability with Teams in Microsoft, easy One-Touch Join workflows, branded launch screens, reporting and more. This makes it a very effective solution to power a wide variety of video room endpoints across the whole estate belonging to an organization. What this -- what our new product Enhanced Room Management adds to this is the ability to upgrade and look after the software that powers these devices. This is typically still being offered by the original manufacturers of those devices. And so being able to offer it ourselves, which is something that our customers have been asking for, gives us 2 major advantages. One, it enables us to, as Oystein mentioned, complete our relationship with those customers and displace that last piece of the relationship that was still with the vendors; and two, of course, it enables our vendors and ourselves to take -- our partners and ourselves to take a larger share of the revenue, often offering a revenue uplift of up to 10% to 20% on those customers where we're able to sell it. If we then move on, we see that when we see other innovations. So one innovation, which is particularly important, both in our critical meeting space, but also in our video enablement space is our delivery of a SAML integration to offer better authentication. Authentication is a key theme, both for secure meetings but also within the health sphere, for example, where it is essential to be clear who someone is before discussion starts on their health status. The new -- the new SAML integration enables us to make direct use of commonly-used authentication platforms such as Okta, BankID, and the Azure Active Directory to authenticate users about its services and give our users and our customers the peace of mind that the right people are online. And we continue -- we will continue to enhance our capability in this area. A final very practical example of an innovation which has real benefits in one of our verticals is far end camera control. This is a service by which it's possible to use our software to take a degree of control of a camera at the far end of the line. This has a particular use within health, because the physician can take control -- while doing remote diagnosis can take control of the camera at the patient's end and focus-in on particular areas, enabling more rapid diagnosis of the condition. One thing that Pexip really brings to this upgrade is its ability to work with large numbers of devices. This is particularly helpful in the health sphere because what we see in health is that it's often characterized by a huge variety of equipment being used, both on the side of the physician, but certainly also on the side of the patient. And we see this innovation of far-end camera control already proving to be very useful and being deployed to some of our larger healthcare customers. We're not just innovating in the sphere of pure technology. We're also innovating when it comes to go-to-market. And now we're pleased to announce that Pexip software is now available on the Azure Marketplace, which is Microsoft's rapidly expanding platform for purchasing business applications. This is great news for us on a number of levels. We're obviously very pleased to have another confirmation that Microsoft see that our portfolio fits well next to theirs and can be sold well with theirs. It's also a great practical benefit. Being present on the Azure Marketplace extends our reach. It offers all of our regional theaters, a fantastic and efficient way to transact with new large customers. We can often -- it means that we can drive their sales -- we can drive sales with them, new sales, without needing to worry as much about the complex procurement and billing issues. That's really typically already been dealt with by Microsoft, and we can make use of that by transacting through their platform. We expect that all this will drive our growth. And to give you a bit more of a flavor on how that happens in practice, I'd like to hand over to the President of our fastest-growing sales theater, Karl Hantho.

Great, John. Thank you very much. Very excited by the 3 focus areas and the exciting advances we made with that Microsoft relationship. As John mentioned, my name is Karl Hantho. I lead Pexip here in the Americas, and I'm invited to talk a little about Q4. Q4 was our best quarter in 2021 with regards to the sales to net new customers. We had 9 sales in excess of a $100,000, 6 of which were in the commercial segment, which we're very excited about. And I think this continues to -- and I'll share some content here, pardon me -- to support what we're seeing more globally around our penetration of large enterprise customers where they now represent in the $100,000 a year and greater segment 55% of our business. Let me just drill down into a couple of the wins that excited me in this past quarter, and first let me talk about Shared Services Canada. Shared Services Canada is the IT services arm for the Canadian government. They support some 400,000 federal employees. They've got some 7,500 video systems that they manage. They are a Microsoft Teams organization, and where they saw value in Pexip and what we've helped them to achieve is: one, they wanted to continue to use the video endpoints, the video systems, but they needed to move off of their aging infrastructure. So we're helping them to protect that investment moving to Pexip. They also had an interoperability challenge between those endpoints and video systems, and their Teams environment were providing that interoperability capability. And thirdly, we're now a meeting service that they can use when they want to have a service that doesn't require any plugins or downloads. So this is a great emerging relationship. We're really excited to do business with the Canadian government. The second is Charter Communications is a large U.S. telecommunications company. They employ about 100,000 people. They are a WebEx shop. And the challenge they have is that video conferencing is an essential, critical business application for them, and they can't afford any downtime. And so in the event that WebEx goes down, they needed to have an alternative. What they saw in Pexip was the ability to deploy our software into their data centers for an immediate failover capability in the event that WebEx goes down. Again, this is an exciting relationship that we expect to grow with Charter. And thirdly is Trinity Health and Trinity Health is a large Catholic healthcare organization that supports some 22 -- or services some 22 different states. And they had a business issue with respect to how their video systems and their Microsoft Teams environment work together. They looked to us to help solve that problem. What made us unique with Trinity Health is while they had a bias towards cloud services, their security team was extremely focused on making sure that they met the requirements of Trinity Health. In that environment, what they saw for us was the ability to deploy Pexip Private Cloud as a means to give them what was a cloud service but met the requirements of a highly-secure capability. And in addition to that, they get invited to a lot of different kinds of meetings and they wanted the simplicity to be able to join those meetings from those end points without getting lost. So they have also leveraged our One-Touch Join capability for that seamless meeting experience. So those are 3 exciting wins that we had, but I guess before I get off the theater, let me also talk about an exciting news that we shared last week that is going to open up new market opportunities with the government sector, all in federal, state and local, and with law enforcement, and that was our success at becoming FedRAMP In Process designated. So, first of all, what is FedRAMP? FedRAMP is a U.S. government program that standardizes security assessment and authorization for cloud products and services used by the federal government. And in fact, for executive agencies, it's a mandatory requirement. Pexip has not had the opportunity to participate in this large part of the business, and it will completely complement the work that we've been doing with regards to our success in the defense department, leveraging our self-hosted solutions with customers like DISA, like the U.S. NORTHCOM, and NASA. We expect to get We expect to get FedRAMP authorized by the end of the year, and we're already having conversations with customers in that regard. Last I'd say is that we are the first Microsoft interoperability capability to be certified as FedRAMP In Process. So lots of exciting stuff to come on that. And on that note, let me turn it back over to Oystein for your part.

Thank you so much, Karl. In terms of people growth, we continue to strengthen our team, in part through the acquisition of Skedify in which we added 30 talented individuals to our team. As such, the rest of the growth in people was on a more modest level. This is in line with our strategy to increase profitability. Still, it's worth highlighting the strength of the team that we have built, which is now 3x as large as it was at the end of 2019. This is an investment in growth, which we'll capitalize on in the years to come. Moving on then to our recent sales and financial performance. In terms of Q4, we added $6.6 million in annual recurring revenue for the quarter. We continue to win Fortune 500 customers and large public sector organizations. On the negative side, we have seen that the increase in COVID-19 restrictions during Q4, as well as delays in deliveries of video systems for our customers have delayed purchases of Pexip. Those deals remain active, and we have a record-high number of proof-of-concept projects running. This puts us in a good position for 2022, but we do expect to continue to see the same uncertainty in Q1 as return to office continues to be uncertain across the world. For Q4, we also saw a positive impact from the acquisition of Skedify, which we announced earlier this last year and added in excess of $0.9 million in annual recurring revenue. In total, that means for the full year, we grew with USD25 million or 30% year-on-year. Looking at geographies and products. The development in Q4 was overall in line with previous quarters. Americas is growing the most of all of our theaters, and we're very pleased to see that we keep on getting more and more traction in the U.S. This represents a huge market opportunity for us. In relative terms, the growth in Americas and EMEA is contributing with about the same dollar amount and are both important growth drivers. Asia Pacific keeps on being a growth opportunity for us and is increasing its contributions. In terms of products, we continue to see that the growth in Pexip as-a-Service, our Software as a Service offering is strong, as we have customers that, especially on video infrastructure, who have many already chosen to deploy a SaaS platform such as Microsoft Teams or Google Meet very often choose this deployment option for Pexip. On this page, we show the split of growth for new and existing customers. The majority of the growth over the last 12 months is from net new customers and is at 29% year-on-year. That means that $24 million out of Pexip's ARR is from customers that were not customers of ours 12 months ago. We continue to be successful in recruiting new customers. We're particularly happy to see our net retention rate over the last 12 months being at 101%, and that the investment and extra efforts in customer success is giving results with a churn of 9.7%. This is supported by our strong growth in large customers, where we enjoy a significantly lower churn rate of 3%. Moving on to the P&L. In terms of recognized revenue, Pexip delivered NOK 266 million in Q4 of 2021 compared to NOK 229 million in Q4 of last year. This takes the full year revenue to NOK 806 million. Starting with Pexip as-a-Service, the revenue is recognized over the time of the contract, and it's following ARR growth quite closely. The customer portfolio acquisition, which we announced early in Q4 is now closed, but that did not have a significant revenue impact for Q4. In the self-hosted software area, we have quarterly variations due to when contracts are delivered and renewed despite the recurring revenue model. Here, we grew 11% to NOK 177 million for the quarter as Q4 is a seasonally strong quarter for self-hosted software. In terms of gross margin, our cost of goods sold is at NOK 18 million for Q4. As announced, we have worked to modernize our platform during 2021, and I'm happy to see that we are now capturing some of the efficiencies from that modernization. Q4 has a seasonally high gross margin of 93%, taking our full year gross margin to [ 90.4% ]. For operating costs, the main cost element for Pexip remains its salary and personnel expenses. In Q4, this was NOK 157 million adjusted for option-related costs. Share option-related costs amounted to NOK 1.1 million for Q4 and is somewhat lower than normal due to reversal of accrual of social security costs. In Q4, we saw a significant pickup on other OpEx. Part of the increase is related to external services, both related to M&A and R&D development for the quarter. In addition, we have an increase in marketing spend and travel spend as restrictions on travel were relatively limited for the first part of Q4. This allowed us to do a series of partner and customer events, boosting pipeline and sales activity. In total, Pexip delivered an EBITDA of NOK 10 million or 4% for Q4. This is down from NOK 50 million in Q4 of last year. We had an increase in gross margin of NOK 35 million, while the increase in operating costs are in total NOK 75 million. This is a reflection of the significant investments that we have been doing in building our growth capacity and our organization throughout 2021. Overall, the positive EBITDA in Q4 is due to strong software revenues and also reflecting the somewhat more balanced investment level that we have had in the second half of 2021. This is the driver for why we landed on a full year negative EBITDA of minus 15%, well above our guidance for the year, which was a negative 25% to 35%. In terms of cash flow, a positive EBITDA adjusted for share-based costs contribute positively. In Q4, we had a large negative contribution from working capital, mainly as a result of an increase in trade receivables. This is normal seasonality for Pexip as we invoice a substantial amount late in Q4. The acquisition of Skedify also contributed negatively on cash flow with NOK 48 million. Investments contributed with a negative NOK 28 million, which is a bit higher than previous quarters, as is normal in Q4 and lower than Q4 of 2020. We are also today announcing that we're initiating a share-based -- a share buyback to cover future obligations related to share-based compensation, as we see this as an attractive option to reduce future dilution. We have a solid cash position to fund this buyback program and our future growth. To summarize Q4, we continue to see solid top line growth with a continued ARR growth of $6.6 million in Q4, which takes us to 30% year-on-year growth. In terms of revenue, we delivered NOK 266 million for Q4, resulting in a NOK 10 million EBITDA. We continue to have strong operational momentum. We've built a stellar team both on the go-to-market side and on the R&D side. And we are very excited to have our new CEO in place and we're looking forward to his leadership. In Q4, we also made an important acquisition with Skedify, strengthening our offering in video enablement. In light of Q4 and 2021, I'm happy to update our guidance for 2022. We see that we are now closer to profitability than we expected at the start of 2021. And we are updating our short-term profitability guidance. For 2022, we expect to be between minus 15% and minus 20% for full year EBITDA margin before returning to positive EBITDA during 2023. Our midterm revenue and profitability targets of reaching $300 million by the end of 2024 and having a 25% plus EBITDA margin and growth rate in 2025 remains unchanged. Looking ahead, we are very well positioned for market shifts that we see coming over the coming years. The disruption of COVID-19 and the explosion of video usage has opened new opportunities for Pexip compared to what we saw early in 2020. Now we are realigning our business towards these 3 new business areas. However, it is a change where we also need to explore and learn. And we see that this means that the growth will be more back-end loaded than what we had envisioned in 2020. While we build traction on these 3 business areas, we have reduced the pace of our investments to keep our commitment on being profitable during [ 2023 ]. Now we also have a strong team in place. And when the growth accelerates again, we will have a more balanced approach between the trade-off between growth and profitability than we had in 2020. This is why we have a positive outlook for 2022, and we maintain our confidence in reaching our targets of $300 million in ARR by the end of 2024. Still, we do see that Q1 is going to be more challenging due to continued uncertainty on return to office and delays in video [ hardware ] deliveries, delaying projects. This is highlighted by a single contract that will reduce ARR by $2 million in Q1. We have strengthened our partnership with a key partner and changed our mutual business model. And while this will impact ARR negatively in Q1, we do expect it to have a clear net positive impact for ARR in 2022 if you consider the full year. As I just covered, we are starting our return to profitability, benefiting from strong revenue growth and a more balanced investment level in 2022 compared to 2020 and 2021. Last point before we go to Q&A. We have our Annual Report coming out on March 31, with the Annual General Meeting following on April 21. Before that, we will release our Q1 ARR update on April the 7th before having our Q1 quarterly presentation on May 12. With that, I thank you so much for your attention, and we will open for questions. This session will be led by our Director of our Investor Relations, Mirza Koristovic. Mirza, welcome.

Thank you, Oystein and the other presenters today. My name is Mirza Koristovic, and I'm Director of Investor Relations at Pexip. We will now go into the Q&A session, and I will take you through it. We have received questions through email and through the chat function. So, Oystein, first question. Can you please elaborate on the strategy to reach 25% EBITDA margin, and how will the cost side look after reaching the employee goal?

I think for Pexip, what's important to remember is that we are a software business and we have a 90% gross margin. And it's even higher than that if you look at our business with self-hosted software. As such, we are a highly scalable business. And so as we now have built a strong team both on R&D and on sales, we have the capacity to grow our revenues significantly before adding additional costs. That's not to say that we will not invest in both 2022 and the years to come, but that will be to increase our growth, not to defend what we already have. This is why it's possible for us to continue to grow and become profitable in the years to come.

All right. And the next one is on the Pexip, the potential of Pexip. The Norwegian markets does not seem to appreciate the potential. Have you ever thought of listing on another market such as the U.S.?

I think those are assessments that both we for management and the Board does on a continual basis, but it's not something that we are actively discussing at the moment.

All right. And there is a shareholder who is concerned about the dramatic stock price fall over the last months, and is wondering how the leadership team will ensure that the market understands the real value of the company?

I think what we as management, first and foremost, need to do is to continue to drive results for Pexip. And I strongly believe that as we as a company continue to deliver strong revenue growth, return to profitability that, that is something that will be rewarded also in terms of our shareholders. So continue to drive real shareholder value is our first and foremost priority. I also think that we need to continue to also educate the market about where we are strong and what we can do, both in presentations such as this and in other investment -- investor relations activities.

And despite seeing lower costs and less recruitment going forward and thus lifting your 2023 EBITDA margin guidance, you maintain your 2024 USD 300 million ARR target. Could you explain this connection? Is the -- is it the Azure marketplace availability and expected FedRAMP certification?

I think both of those have the capability to increase our growth. I think in the 3-year period, they had the core driver for our growth is the market dynamics that are driving our 3 business areas. On video infrastructure, that area will benefit from people now returning to the office. And what we expect and a lot of the others in the industry expect will need to fit out their offices to tackle the hybrid workforce. We will use video much more also in the office compared to what we did in 2019 and earlier. That's a big driver for our biggest business area. Similarly, on critical meetings as video is now really becoming a must-have in terms of your meetings, that also influences how meetings are being done in sectors that have super high requirements on data security. We see that from our customers in the government, both on the armed forces and in other parts of government and in certain areas within the private sector. Thirdly on video enablement, I think we are now going into a world where doctor visits, meetings with your bank, meeting with other advisers, they will increasingly happen on video. That is the focus of our video enablement business area, and we see strong growth for that business area going forward. I think that is why we believe that we have a strong ability to reach our target of USD 300 million because we are very well positioned to benefit from those trends.

You report a quite large quarter-over-quarter improvements in gross margin. Is this due to the sales mix in the fourth quarter of '21 or is it a new fixed cost element that is being scaled?

So it's a combination of the 2. But I think at core, the vast majority of our cost of goods sold are related to our Software as a Service area. And as such, in quarters where we have strong software sales, you will see a lower cost of goods sold in percentage of revenue. Still in absolute terms, we were able to reduce our cost of goods sold from Q3 to Q4 despite higher traffic on our service and despite higher revenue. The reason for us being able to do so are the modernizations and the investments in our platform that we did in Q2 and Q3.

Can you please elaborate on the negative $2 million ARR impact you expect in the first quarter of '22 due to change in business model?

While I can't go into detail about a specific partner contract, what we have done is that we have realigned our business partnership, so that we have a better shared value of the upside that we're going to create going forward. While this will drive an increase in ARR for us during 2022, for the first quarter, it will lead to a negative minus $2 million in annual recurring revenues. So for us and for our partnership, this is a net positive, even though it in the very short-term, it's a negative development in annual recurring revenue.

And why don't you upgrade the long-term profitability target if you are seeing better profitability short term?

I think our assumption for the long term, so in 2025, we expect to be in a situation where we want to pursue a balanced growth on both of them having a 25% plus EBITDA margin, but also having a 25% plus growth. That growth will need to come from continuing to invest and continuing to add talented people, both in sales and in R&D. We've shown as late as 2019 prior to COVID-19, that we are able to have that balance between a high EBITDA and a high growth rate. And that is what we're aiming to return to at the end of this investment period.

All right. And even though you cut the plan for new hirings and tilt the strategy, you still think you can deliver on the previous ARR guidance, including the timing of it. Could you discuss how do you bridge this?

I think I covered some of it in the earlier question. But at heart, that is supported by the basically improved market outlook for video in general and especially for the 3 niches where Pexip really shines.

Yes. Were there any one-offs affecting profitability in Q4?

Not any sort of extraordinary one-offs. So Q4 as you saw also last year is a strong revenue quarter for us as we have high software revenues because we do a lot of renewals in Q4, and hence, we deliver a lot of software, and we then book a lot of revenue for that software that we sell. So we sell and deliver software typically on a 1-year basis, so that you get a subscription for your 1-year period, and that is typically done in Q4 for many of our enterprise customers. That's the big driver of revenue, which was the big driver for profitability in Q4.

And when it comes to churn, do you have any more color on it on expectations going forward, especially for 2022?

I think there are good reasons for us to be able to improve our churn on a structural level going forward. One, we see that we are growing the most with -- within the segment of large customers. In that segment, we have substantially lower churn than overall. We continue to grow strongly within video infrastructure within critical meetings and within video enablement, while other areas are shrinking. And as such, we have lower churn in the 3 areas where we're growing compared to other areas. So that will also help us structurally improve churn going forward. Thirdly, we have invested a lot and we are continuously developing our methodology on customer success. So how we make sure that our customers not only buy from us the first time, but really find the value that they're looking for and really adopt the platform and grow with us and make sure that they get value from that. That's also been an investment that we have been doing since 2020 and is something that we expect will make us even better in how we maintain and upsell our customers.

Okay. And I think this will be the last question, you -- because we have covered most of the topics that are being asked. You previously mentioned that you have experienced increased competitive pressure on video infrastructure. Do you think that this could put some pressure on ARR growth in 2022?

So I think we continue -- apologies. I think we continue to see competition on video infrastructure and it's our biggest market. So as such, it's an important one for Pexip. We are now with the innovations that John mentioned, with being FedRAMP certified in the U.S. with having access to procuring through the after-marketplace, also combating that through increasing our own competitiveness. And I expect that both we and our competitors will continue to battle that out in 2022.

All right. I do not see any more questions. So that concludes our Q&A session. Thank you for your attention, and have a nice day.

Thank you so much.