Yubico AB (YUBICO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Yubico Q1 2025 Report Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to CEO, Mattias Danielsson; and CFO, Camilla Oberg. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to Yubico's Q1 report analyst call. With me today, I have Camilla, Yubico's CFO, and I'm Mattias Danielsson, CEO at Yubico. And we will start by describing the company and its market a little bit, then talk a little bit about the highlights from Q1, and then we'll dive deep into the numbers of Q1 and finishing up with a Q&A with direct and written questions. So with that, we'll dive straight into it. To give a short overview of Yubico's company. We are the company behind YubiKeys. That means that you -- which are used to protect your logins. And since the company was founded back in 2008, we've sold and deployed about 38 million YubiKeys. So we're a proud hardware company. But since the -- a lot of the value that we're providing to our customers protecting their accounts lies in the software that we provide with the hardware, we're able to maintain healthy gross margins pretty consistently in the 80% range. We've grown, had a growth journey over the past 15 years. Over the last 4 years, we've grown by an average 40% per year. So today, over the last 12 months, we've had net sales of about SEK 2.5 billion. We have some 500 employees. And if we talk about what we're really proud of, there are 2 things that I want to highlight. One is our product and the fact that it addresses one of the major threats when it comes to cybersecurity, protecting logins. And we're very proud of the fact that those customers that have implemented our product and the modern protocols, they've experienced 0 account takeovers, and we, of course, want to keep it that way. The other part that we're -- so we're very proud of our product. The other part that we're very proud of is the customers that we're working with. You can buy our keys online and use it to protect your own personal accounts, but our focus has been on selling into large enterprises and public organizations. And we have about 5,000 large and small and midsized companies and then millions of consumers using our product, including some of the most high-profile security-conscious organizations in the world. So that's us in a snapshot. And as I mentioned, what we do is that we protect logins through what's called MFA, multifactor authentication. Specifically, we're in the most secure way of protecting your logins, i.e., advanced authentication. I mean, the most common way to log in is still using user name and password. If you want to increase your protection, you add a second factor or a multifactor in addition to the password, something that you -- not just something that you know like a password, but something that you are, biometric, or something that you have, for instance, a physical device. And there is a growing realization that if you want the highest level of assurance, the highest level of security, you need a hardware-backed multifactor authentication solution. And we're the leaders when it comes to modern multifactor -- hardware-based multifactor authentication. The best definition we've seen of this market currently is that the market for advanced authentication in the worldwide is about $5 billion. And comparing that to our sales numbers, that means that we have only about 5% of this market. So how can we maintain that we're a leader? Well, we are the leader in modern hardware-backed MFA. There's still a lot of legacy solutions out there. Most of them are smart card-based. They offer good security, but what we offer is a unique combination of good usability and user experience combined with the highest level of security. With the increasing cybersecurity threat, the overall cybersecurity market is growing quite rapidly, and advanced authentication is growing -- estimated to be growing at 14% worldwide, and we are seeing an increase in market share there, which means that there's plenty of room for growth for us going forward. We mentioned quickly that we offer a unique combination of usability and highest level of security. And what's unique about YubiKey and the solution that we're offering is that it means that you can use the same device for secure login across all relevant systems. So we've invested a lot of money in making sure that our key fits into all the relevant locks out there, so to speak, meaning that you can use it for any type of device, whether you're using a laptop, stationary computer or a cell phone or an iPad, and you can across -- use it across all the different software solutions that you're using, across operating systems and across systems that are used by all enterprises today. And this means that you don't need a whole different set of authentication solutions, but you get the highest level of security across your organization and across your use case, which means that unlike historic safe solutions for advanced authentication, this is one key that fits into all the relevant logs. Part of that is making sure that there's a lot of functionality on the key, and we spent a lot of time developing the key over the years. And the other part is making sure that there are good integrations with all the major use cases, different vendors and different devices. And we have invested in this and built an ecosystem, where the YubiKey is ready to use for most applications that you find out there. So we're very proud that based on this that we've been able to attract as customers some of the largest companies in the world. Our focus has been on selling directly to large enterprises and government agencies. And if you look at the -- sorry, the Global 2000, already some -- almost 30% of them are existing customer of ours. However, our average penetration rate among those customers is still very low. Typically, we start with high security users and only over time, we scale into a broader deployment within those customers. So there's definitely a lot of room for growth within the existing customer base. Our best estimate of the penetration we have among our Global 2000 customers, i.e., measuring the number of keys deployed with the number of employees within this organization is still only in the 6% range. So there's definitely a lot of room for growth. Good news is we see a lot of customer loyalty. So we have 2 business models, and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we get into the numbers. We have what we call a perpetual sales model, i.e., outright buy the key and you can use it internally with the associated software. We also have a service model, where we support customers as they deploy the keys and you instead subscribe for our services over a typically a 3-year period. No matter the business model, we see a lot of repurchase from existing customers, to the extent that our -- when you look at the perpetual model, our average annual repurchase rate is in excess of 100%. Why is that the case? It's not because people lose their keys. Of course, there's a little bit of that, but the majority is that we grow within our existing customers, i.e., that they not just cover for their employee attrition, but more importantly, that we expand the use case within existing customers. We started out working only with very security conscious and very techy customers. We started working with the leading tech companies in the U.S. But over the past 5 years, we've broadened our customer footprint substantially. So to now -- today, we see a very balanced set of industries using our products, but with a focus on security conscious organizations and security conscious and threatened groups within those organizations. But the biggest industries today for Yubico on the customer side are financial services, public sector and then high tech being the third biggest sector. As we think about how we can grow going forward, we've communicated 2 financial targets. One is on the growth, where we've said that our midterm, so in a 3- to 5-year perspective, we should attain an average annual growth rate of at least 25%. But we also want profitable growth. So we are targeting a 20% EBIT margin combined with that growth. And to accomplish that, a lot of it is really about taking our technology to masses and taking it to a broader user audience, meaning expanding our reach within new geographies and new types of customers. We want to make it simpler to use our keys, to buy and to use our keys because the biggest hurdle is not that people don't want the highest level of security, it is the additional hassle that comes with rolling out and maintaining a fleet of hardware-based authentication. It is much easier to roll out software, but it doesn't come with the same level of security. So the more we can do to make it simple, the better. And then longer term, we also want to evolve our customer offering. Our authentication solution is used in a broader cybersecurity landscape, and there are some obvious areas for growth that we've identified as we can expand our offering to existing and new customers. So with that, we feel that there's ample opportunity to invest in our business. So in the medium term, again, we've said that we will not pay any dividend despite being a profitable company. Real quick, we have had a focus on big customers, and you see on the image to the right some of the public reference that we have. If we talk about specific customer developments during the period, there are a couple of things that we want to highlight. One is Landeshauptstadt Munchen or City of Munich, which have made public their use of YubiKeys within their organization. And this is an interesting case for us because we see a lot of demand for the public sector. And it's not just the security organizations or departments of defenses, it's actually protecting citizens and public organizations throughout the spectrum of public sector. So we're very proud to be working closely with the City of Munich here, and they've agreed to being a public reference and even showing how our keys are being used internally, which sets us up for continuous growth within public sector, including municipalities across Europe. Another thing within the public sector that we're very proud of is our continued engagement with a lot of Canadian authorities, both large and small. And one of our key competitive factors there has been our ability to support our customers. They've come to realize that they need us at the highest level of security, and we are the ones, who are able to support them as they roll it out to a broader set. So that's important that we're able to take on customers that are not perhaps in the tech sector and still support a successful deployment on a rapid basis with the customers like Canadian authorities. And finally, we've highlighted before, but it's another great success story we've had in the past, where we've now -- we're now working with 3 out of the 4 major U.S. telecoms, supporting them as they increase their security stance. As you may be aware, several of the largest U.S. telcos had intrusions and security issues back in '23 and '24, and we're very proud to be part of the solution for these organizations as they up their security stance. More to come there. And with that, we'll just do a quick wrap-up of other important events for the quarter. Overall, I'd say that Q1 was a quarter, where we were able to deliver solid results. We had growth very close to our 25% target. We had profitability a little bit lower at about 15%, but I don't see any long-term reasons for why we shouldn't get to 20%. We had some one-offs, including a company conference, and then we had an impact on the quick currency exchange movements, and a high cost for LTIP during Q1. So I feel we have good profitability. However, we did see a softening in demand in the sense that we are engaged with a lot of new and existing customers, but we saw some hesitation towards the end of the quarter because of growing concern about the macroeconomic environment. Now with all these tariffs, the direct impact of those are very limited on Yubico because we do most of the value creation locally for U.S. customers in the U.S. and for non-U.S. customers from Sweden. But the indirect effect in terms of big customers thinking about making investments with perhaps a 5-year perspective in mind, we see then extended sales processes, and that did have an impact hitting our order bookings for the quarter, and we're seeing continued uncertainty going into Q2. On a positive note, we were able to announce on April 15th after the close of the quarter that we've been able to attract Snejana Koleva to start as the CFO of the company. She is still bound by her current employer, but will join us no later than in October. And on more an admin note, today, we'll host our first AGM as a company listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm main market. So all shareholders are welcome to join us later today for our first AGM in that capacity. With that, I'll hand it over to Camilla to go into the financial details of the first quarter.

Thank you very much, Mattias. And as Mattias said, this quarter has been characterized or affected by the turbulence we have seen in the world, especially during March, which also delayed some decision-makings when it comes to order bookings and also gave a large impact on currency development with U.S. dollar, which became very weak. The U.S. dollar is now actually, looking at it through April, on a level which we have not seen since 2022. So of course, this is a big impact. But looking at that as on the net sales, we see a solid growth. We are growing at 25%. And looking at the subscription net sales, we are actually growing about 40% year-over-year. And looking at the gross profit, there, we see the effect of the currency development, where we see pressure on the gross margin. We are reducing gross margin from 80.7% to 78.4%. On the profit side, the underlying profit, we feel are stable. But of course, the currency development from the gross margin here is also flowing through to the EBIT. And we also had our all company conference, which we have mentioned in the report, affecting the results as well. And excluding that extra cost, we are actually ending up in an EBIT margin of 19% versus the 17% last year, if we look like-for-like. On our ARR, this is the yearly value of our subscription portfolio as at the end of the period. We are growing that as well in 25% during the year or year-over-year rather. Looking deeper into the numbers, starting off with the bookings and our subscription bookings, and we ended up here with a decline with 10% compared to last year, affected by this turbulence and there are customers in security on how they will be impacted of all the changes going on out there. We see subscription bookings half or close to half of the last year, SEK 58 million, versus SEK 104 million last year. Then we should remember that we last year actually closed a quite big subscription deal, which was 5 year, which is unusually long for us as well. So it was a tough comparison. We saw on the largest part of the subscriptions are actually new contracts or add-on contracts compared to that we have had specifically during last year. So now we are actually adding new revenue in a bigger -- a larger context than we had done before. So that is really positive. And we continue to see the strong growth and interest from the public sector, the telecom and from the high-tech sector. The reduction or decrease in order bookings that we see in this hesitation around from our customers, it is fairly widespread around the globe and around the sectors. Looking deeper then into our net sales, we see net sales had a growth of 25%, as I said, 22% in local currencies. The subscription sales went from SEK 56 million to close to SEK 80 million, growing 40% year-over-year. And last year's Q1, you see is a bit lower in this slide than Q4 the year before and that we had a larger impact from churn during Q1 2024, which is also a reason why we now see when we look at the net sales a bigger growth than the ARR as such. We see continued demand also when it comes to the net sales is contributing from a wide set of sectors, the high-tech, public and telecom coming here as well. And also, from our regional geographical spread, there are minor differences compared to last year, as you see here, with Asia Pacific a bit lower. Looking at the ARR side, we see a positive trend in the quarter and a growth of 24% year-over-year. This quarter, we added SEK 21.6 million since the end of last year. And as I said, new contracts across different segments and with new revenue contributing to that, so positive. Continue to the profit side. And gross profit affected by the FX, as I said, 78% versus 80% last year. We believe or estimate that is around 1 percentage points to 2 percentage points that affects on the margin here. EBIT was growing to SEK 92 million from SEK 85 million, and we had this EBIT margin of 15%, affected by this all company conference of SEK 26 million, which is the biggest contributor to the increase in our administrative expenses year-over-year. And adjusting for this, we see that we have an EBIT margin of 19%, which we think is a quite strong underlying profitability. Despite also that you see that we have our LTIP programs, we launched one program 2023. We launched a new program 2024. That program is more expensive from IFRS accounting perspective due to that we have our targets connected to financial targets instead of the development of the share price.

But the dilution is identical.

The dilution is identical. So this is just the IFRS accounting, which affects this. And here, you also see that we have an additional cost of SEK 16 million to the quarter. Unrealized currency effects contributed with SEK 7 million or SEK 8 million. It was less than last year, where we had SEK 14 million. Perhaps you have also noted already in the report that we have a big negative financial net result on minus 20 -- what it was, SEK 3 million or something. But there, we also have as we have U.S. dollar in our bank balances. And here, with the large drop in the U.S. dollar by the end of the quarter, we see a negative revaluation effect of SEK 28 million in the finance net.

Essentially, the dollars that we hold in our Swedish companies.

Absolutely. Yes, exactly. And then looking deeper into the cash flow and our financial position. We had a close to 0 change in net working capital this quarter, an increase in inventory in absolute numbers, but that was also offset by customer prepayments from subscription contracts. We had an operating cash flow on SEK 44 million compared to SEK 33 million last year. It's plus 33%. And we have a strong financial position with cash and cash equivalents at the end of the quarter on SEK 852 million, and that is a growth of 48% compared to Q1 last year. Net cash at the end of the period, SEK 805 million. The only thing we have still as interest-bearing liabilities is the financial leases or the leases of our offices. So we don't have any other bank debt or so, which we had last year. Inventory levels, we have focused quite much on and of course, are still focusing on. And looking at this quarter, we were on 29%. The inventory levels were 29% of the rolling 12 months net sales. That is a decrease from 29.7% at the end of 2024 and also a small decrease versus where we were in Q1 last year. So yes. So I think that was about the numbers. I'm giving it back to you for summarize.

Yes, and I'll try to summarize an interesting quarter. Well, as I think we -- Camilla has demonstrated, we saw a quarter with what I feel is solid financial performance when it comes to net sales, when it comes to EBIT, cash conversion and managing inventory levels. I think we -- that means that we could see solid performance. However, there is this question mark on market uncertainty, where we saw delays at the end of Q1 and a continuation of cautiousness among our customers going into Q2. We're very optimistic about the company's long-term performance still because what we're seeing is very vivid customer engagement across both existing and new customers. But the challenge is, okay, when do they pull the trigger on going to a major deployment. We're actually seeing a really nice inflow when it comes to small and medium-sized orders, where there is not as much attention to making a major investment. When it comes to the bigger scale-ups, that's where we're seeing a slowdown in execution when it comes to sales. It's hard to predict how that will pan out in Q2. As all of you recall, the initial reaction to the April 2 announcement was very negative. But since there's been some positive news along the way, but it's kind of changing day by day. If anything, over the past couple of weeks, perhaps the macro is looking a little bit more positive. Hoping to see that translate in an acceleration of sales process going into Q2, but it's too early to make a prediction there. On the strong side, though, I feel that we have a lot of leverage to pull. We have an agile organization. We're able to shift resources and we're able to shift our production capacity, making sure that we create value close to our customers, which mean that we should be resilient, both to macroeconomic changes and to any tariffs. And the underlying demand, the need for strong cybersecurity and the threat level is there. And it's been proven that our solution is one of the most effective ways to mitigate the biggest cybersecurity threat out there, which is compromised login credentials. So we remain very bullish about our opportunity to have a positive impact on the world and to be able to translate that into strong financial results over time. With that, we'd like to hand over for the Q&A session. I think we'll start with people on the calls making questions, and then we'll go to written questions. Over and out.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Erik Lindholm-Rojestal from SEB.

Yes. So I wanted to start on the order bookings. They're sort of clearly weak in the quarter, as you mentioned, and some customers are delaying investment decisions. But you mentioned that you see very vivid customer discussions here. Can you sort of characterize how these look? Is it any sector specifically that is driving demand here or driving the slowdown? Yes. Let's stop there.

Thanks, Erik. Just to comment on the overall picture, just to confirm what you said, yes, we did see a slowdown towards the end of the quarter, which has a big impact because a normal quarter, you see almost close to a majority of the orders happening during the last month of the quarter. So the uncertainties introduced in March did have an impact already -- did have an impact in Q1. And like you say, when it comes to larger deployments, we do see some hesitation in kind of crossing the line there and making sure that you commit to a larger investment. For a major deployment, when it comes to rolling out a new authentication structure, a typical customer would probably have a 3- to 5-year perspective in mind. And then when there's uncertainty, it becomes a question, do we want to incur this cost or make this investment now or can we push it a little bit? So that effect has a negative impact on the -- which is visible in the order bookings in volume. When it comes to the number of orders, well, the good news there is that we're seeing continued strong interest and lots of ongoing customer conversations. It's just that they're taking longer than we had anticipated and what would be the normal case. It's hard to say that there's a just one sector or one geography when it comes to those middle-sized orders and customer conversations. It's still very broad-based. But with the biggest industries being, as Camilla mentioned, financial services, public sector, tech and with telco as a quick runner up there.

All right. And the sort of very -- I think you said vivid customer discussions. I mean, have you seen any orders that you hoped would come in Q1 that has now materialized in Q2? Or is there still sort of an equal amount of uncertainty here in Q2?

Of course, I mean, if they take longer, yes, some of them have transpired into orders in early Q2, but we're seeing that uncertainty and slowdown so far in Q2, i.e., that people are reluctant perhaps to go ahead with a major investment decision. However, for the smaller orders, they keep coming in. And when it comes to customer engagement, it's not like we're -- they're pulling out of the investment. It's just delays as far as we can tell.

All right. And perhaps a final question for me. I mean, you spoke about sort of low penetration with large existing customers. Are you still seeing strong growth with the existing customers here? Or I mean, I guess the slowdown is maybe mainly related to new customer intake and large new projects? Or is that fair to say?

No, I don't think it is because even with existing customers, in many cases, it's going from, say, 2,000 users to 50,000 users, and that's a significant investment. So those would be exactly those cases where we're seeing more extended sales processes than we normally do. So it's not just new customers because new customers who are just buying 500 units, that's an easy decision to make, but it's when you make a larger investment and a larger deployment, that's when things, where we've seen a pattern of slowdown discussions. So if anything, I would say that it's scaling up which takes longer.

The next question comes from Predrag Savinovic from Carnegie.

Starting on the gross margin, if you can discuss in a bit more detail the moving parts that make you weaker in Q1 relative to Q4 and best guess on if the margin is equal, weaker, higher given current FX crosses in the second quarter and onwards?

Thank you, Predrag. And yes, as we said, the gross margin this quarter has really been affected by the stronger Swedish krona. And this, of course -- I mean, we have sales in Yubico AB which is in U.S. dollar but turns into Swedish krona directly when we invoice and when we ship. We also see -- it was unusually drastic drop going from above SEK 11 per U.S. dollar in the beginning of the quarter and under SEK 10 per dollar at the end of the quarter. And as we also have the larger part of the revenue in March, we got a higher pressure on the gross margin there. Looking at Q4 as a comparison, as you said there, there we had a currency development in the other direction. So it was going from like 10-ish 30, 40, something like that, up to above 11 at the end of the quarter. And there, also, we carried with us a revaluation of the inventory end of December 2024, which positively affected the gross margin, and we had an unusually strong gross margin in Q4. We didn't have any revaluation effects in Q1 actually because the average -- looking at the average of the FX for the last 6 months, it's fairly -- it was fairly stable. So it's this volatility, which has created perhaps for us an unusual large pressure in that sense. And I mean, the level we are now in April or the average Swedish krona versus U.S. dollar, it's on the same level, as we saw in the beginning of 2022. So of course, looking 1 year back or 2 years back, we are comparing with a completely different FX rates in that sense. And we should also remember that we have close to 90% of the sales is in U.S. dollar, independent in which country is selling, and the rest is euro. So of course, what happens there is also affecting us.

But taking a step back, if you look at Q4 in last year, I think we had 84% and we did indicate at that time that, that was unusually high because of FX effects. This quarter, we're at 78% and change. Longer term, I've been with the company for 15 years. I know that even when we had a dollar exchange rate at 7, we were able to maintain gross margins in the vicinity of 80%. So I'm actually optimistic about our ability to get to that level longer term. But there will be individual swings depending on short-term currency effects.

Got you. That's very clear. And can you say something about how the start of the second quarter has been? I'm assuming in the commentary around bookings, one could assume that Q2 has started in a similar way, that's something you're seeing in the figures? Or is it -- I mean, based on kind of the in-quarter seasonality, is it too soon for you to say...

It's exactly that.

Any review on the second quarter?

Yes. It's really too soon to say because even though we're almost halfway through the quarter in terms of how a typical quarter looks like, we're -- yes, we haven't gone far because typically, it is very skewed towards the end of the quarter in terms of order bookings. So this is more a comment that we're seeing this uncertainty and hesitation to commit to larger investments. And it's too early to tell really whether that will continue into the remainder of the quarter. But yes, there hasn't been a drastic shortening of sales cycles so far during Q2. So that delays and extensions that we saw towards the end of Q1 has continued going into Q2. That's why we want to kind of guide on that, that we will have to wait and see how things transpire in terms of the macroeconomic conditions.

Okay. Super. And to what extent are customers pausing Yubico order specifically? And to what extent is it a larger system upgrade, where Yubico is one of several vendors such as a software upgrade of something and then you are included as well. I'm thinking about how -- what does it look like on the client side?

This is not scientific, but based on discussions with individual customers that I've had. My impression is that for more short-term investments or short-term costs that don't have a longer-term impact, there, it's more volatile. I think you'll find -- in our case, as I mentioned, you don't decide on a major change in authentication platform and then change it next month. So it's like a 5-year plan. There's -- I think you'll find without having any evidence from other suppliers, but based on customer conversations that, okay, we're going to do this, but is this the right month to pull the trigger on making this type of investment? I think I would expect that, that applies to other cybersecurity vendors that have more of a long-term platform offering.

Okay. And finally, I mean, previously, you have discussed enhancing general sales processes and from someone looking at the business from the outside, I mean you have a category-leading product, but there is improvement potential from sales and marketing. If you can discuss what you are doing here and what you're thinking about doing here to improve the sales and bookings process going forward?

Yes. And we hired a new CRO, or Chief Revenue Officer, last year. And some of the things that he's embarked on now is just with the perspective of how can we make those scalable, how can we make it less dependent on 1 or 2 big swing deals, and that comes in 2 major areas. One is building up a more solid channel program globally, where we will see more channel-generated sales and where we enable and double down on select channel partners, not just in Europe that we've done for a long time, but also in the U.S. So that's one. But it's going to take some time, and that would actually drive a little bit of cost as we invest in building that channel model. The other area, where we made a lot of progress during the last 6 months is that we've set up what we call a commercial sales team. This is more of a volume-oriented business, so more on winning midsized companies, a couple of hundred thousand dollars and where there's more velocity. And again, as you build up that type of organization, you incur some additional costs. But longer term, we feel that this is the right path to go and should make us get more leverage in the sales and marketing cost of our business.

The next question comes from Thomas Nilsson from Nordea.

Looking at order bookings, they grew by 66% in Q1 2024. So you were coming up against pretty difficult comps now in Q1. Could you talk a bit about the composition of the order book? And also given the decline in order bookings, do you expect sales growth in 2025 to come in, in line with your 25% growth target or below? And in that case, how much below?

Thomas, I must admit that I lost you halfway there. So the first question was on the tough comparisons in Q1 2024. And then...

Yes. And also, if you could talk a bit about the composition of the order book and given the decline in bookings, do you expect sales growth in 2025 to come in, in line with your 25% growth target or below? And in that case, how much below?

So there are several parts of this question. When it comes to the composition of the order bookings during Q1, comparing it to a "normal quarter", we see high level about the same volume in terms of deals in excess of, say, $100,000. But what's missing compared to a normal quarter are the really outliers, the big deals, where we haven't had as much success in closing those before the end of the quarter. And there's good and bad in that. What -- if you want to see the glass as half full, the encouraging part of that is that we're seeing continued activities and a good inflow of deals that are midsized. But of course, the negative is, okay, there's delays and we didn't get the big deals across the line. Now what impact can that be expected to have for the full year with a big caveat that there's a lot of market uncertainty, and we don't provide guidance on a yearly basis. We've said that we should grow by on average 25%. It's interesting to note that in spite that we actually saw a contraction in terms of order bookings through the quarter, we were very close to reaching our long-term targets or midterm targets for growth on net sales during the quarter. And as we mentioned, we had some orders in Q4 2024 that spilled into Q1 and some of those orders will even spill into Q2. So we have a bit of an order backlog that we can execute on. So I don't -- based on what I'm seeing now, I don't see a massive impact on net sales because of the delays in order bookings that we've seen so far. It's really too early to tell for that. We'll have to get back to you on in Q2. But we -- I mean, we've all been with the company for quite a long time, and we've seen individual quarters where order bookings didn't quite meet our expectations. But when you combine that with looking at the net sales, that's when you get the full picture. So I'm still optimistic that we'll continue working with our big customers and get them across the line during the year. And I have -- one of your questions, sorry, Thomas, if I -- because there were a lot of questions in one there. I'm not sure if I lost you, Thomas. I'm not sure if we have more...

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

Great. We'll turn to the written questions, and we'll start with the first one, and I'll read out the question and then try to respond to it. The first one says, has the macro environment affected your customer decision-making the same among new customer as well as current customers adding more user? Or is the current customer orders more stable? The way I read it, do existing customers, do we see a slowdown in getting across the line for a major deployment with existing customers? Or is it more when it comes to new customers that are taking longer? And if I read the question correctly, it's actually across both new and existing customers, where we're seeing a longer -- an extended sales process. And the reason for that is a new customer is often a smaller deployment, say, 500 or a couple of thousand units, and it's an easier decision to make. So if we have an existing customer that has only deployed, say, 1,000 YubiKeys or that have 1,000 users, then the decision to go from 1,000 to 100,000 users, that's the more difficult sales process, and that's the one that has taken an extended period of time. So it's actually across both new and existing customers, where we're seeing postponed decision-making when it comes to larger orders. I hope that answered the question. The next one is, well done on your results. Thank you. Please, can you go over your booking expectation for the rest of the year? You mentioned that Q1 was characterized by cautious decision-making. Is this from new customers or existing tied with the mentioned churn rates? How happy are you with the current churn rates? Well, thanks for what I actually feel are strong financial results for Q1. And as you say, and I think I responded to it, for the latter part of the question, well, when it comes to buyer cautiousness and delayed sales process, it's actually both for new and existing customers. The first one, please, can you go over your booking expectations for the rest of the year? We don't provide any guidance per se year-over-year when it comes to bookings. What we've set out as a financial target is to grow net sales by 25%. And even if we don't -- even if there is no one-to-one relation quarter-by-quarter, of course, it's the order bookings that will translate into net sales. It's too early to tell really whether we'll have a year with a lower end compared to our financial targets, where we'll come in below it or we will come in above it. I think the underlying demand is definitely there, but given what -- where we're at right now, it's hard to predict really what the remainder of the year will look like. A follow-up question. Last quarter, you pointed to big customers delaying purchases for a sales miss. Did these customers buy in Q1 or not yet? Actually, what we did in last quarter when we announced it was that we had, in that quarter, a significantly higher order bookings value than net sales -- than we had net sales. I think the gap was to the tune of SEK 140 million. And we said then we had customers that went ahead and pushed the button in terms of committing to an order, but they wanted to take delivery in 2025, and that's actually what's happened now. That's why we see a bigger net sales number this quarter than an order bookings number, partly because of those customers then taking delivery of orders placed in 2024 and getting delivery and therefore, us recognizing the net sales in Q1. And there's some of that which will spill over into Q2 too. And a new question. Inventory has been declining over the last couple of quarters, but it was up in Q1. Any specific reasons? Actually, that's not fully the case. In Q4, inventory levels grew, again, tied to postponed deliveries. It grew in absolute numbers in Q1, but comparing it to last 12-month sales, it was actually down from, I think, 29.7% to 29%, not a major difference, but I think that's pretty much aligned with what we've said that we still feel that 29% is a little on the higher end. It should probably be in the 27% range without there being a specific target on it. But the reason why we have inventory levels at a certain internal target is that we want to make sure that we can, a, ensure supply of critical components for our manufacture; and b, be able to deploy quickly for those customers who want to take delivery on short notice. So that's why we need to have a certain level of inventory level. And for that -- to have -- be at that inventory level, we probably need to be at about 27%. So we're not quite there yet, but over time, we've moved from, I think, we peaked at something like 30% to 29% -- up -- down a little bit and then up to 29.7%, if I remember it right, in Q4, and now down to 29% at the end of Q1. I think that wraps up the written questions, too, unless there is a final question. With that, I'd like to thank everybody for attending this presentation, and please feel free to reach out to our Investor Relations with any follow-up questions. And looking forward to connecting with you later in the quarter and then, of course, as we deliver the results for Q2. Wishing you all a great day. Thanks.

Thank you.