Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to TomTom's first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We'll be facilitating a Q&A session towards the end of today's prepared remarks, at which time, if you would like to ask questions, you may do so by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If at any time during the call you require audio assistance, feel free to Press Star and zero, and the conference coordinator will be happy to assist you. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to your host today, Claudia Janssen, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin. Thank you.
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to our conference call, during which we will discuss our operational and financial highlights for the first quarter of 2020. With me today are Harold Goddijn, our CEO, and Taco Titulaer, our CFO. We will start today's call with Harold, who will discuss the key operational developments, followed by a more detailed look at the financial results from Taco. We will then take your questions. As usual, I would like to point out that Safe Harbor applies. With that, Harold, I would like to hand over to you.
Thank you very much, Claudia. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today. The start of 2020 has brought unprecedented times to all. COVID-19 has impacted how and where we work, but it has not changed the focus of our company. Taco will provide further information on the financial highlights later during this presentation, and I will now discuss our response to the pandemic and our key operational highlights for the quarter. The COVID-19 impacts our automotive and consumer revenue, but we do not expect a material impact on our enterprise business. Automotive revenue arises principally from vehicle sales, and they are sharply impacted by factory closures. Consumer revenue is impacted by a steep decline in demand, and that is caused by a combination of closed retail stores, retailers reducing inventory, and people not driving.
Recovery will depend on how quickly economic normality is restored, including vehicle production and end-user demand, which is currently uncertain. Given the nature of our business, nearly all of our employees can perform their work from home. With health and safety of our employees and partners as our highest priority, we acted fast to enable remote working, and that has enabled us to sustain our engineering development activities and customer service levels. Our employees have responded well to the new situation. We are maintaining productivity, and we are fulfilling customer commitments. The year has started well for automotive and enterprise orders, including new business expansions of and extensions of existing contracts, and we believe that our investments to improve our location technology products are delivering to plan. Because of our strong debt-free balance sheet, we have the resilience to maintain our course despite the current uncertainties.
We are, of course, carefully looking at our cost base and avoiding expenses where possible. In the next slide, I want to give you a short overview of operational highlights for 2020. As I mentioned, we're excited with the progress we've made in both winning new deals and expanding on existing partnerships. One of the deals we could announce today is for our Maps APIs business in an expanded collaboration with Verizon. Verizon is integrating our Maps APIs and SDKs in location service offerings, and that powers a broad range of applications and a substantial developer community. Related to our automotive driving, automated driving activities, we announced earlier in the quarter a successful demonstration of fast, high-definition map building methods, in a joint effort with Toyota and Denso.
At the outbreak of the pandemic, we opened up our traffic reports and APIs to governments, researchers, financial analysts, and journalists to better understand the effects of the lockdowns in the various geographies. The data were widely used and reported on. This concludes my part of the presentation. I'm now handing over to Taco.
Thank you, Harold. Let me make a couple of comments on the financials and outlook, and then we'll go to the Q&A. In the first quarter of 2020, we reported group revenue of EUR 131 million, which is 23% lower compared with last year. The lower group revenue is mainly due to the impact of COVID-19 and the anticipated decline in consumer. Location technology business, which represents roughly 70% of our group revenue, decreased 11% on year to EUR 91 million. Let me go through the details one by one. Automotive reported revenue was down by 24% to EUR 50 million in the quarter, and operational revenue was down by 2% to EUR 85 million. The year-on-year reported revenue decline is as a result of higher deferral rates in the quarter in combination with lower operational revenue following factory closures.
For some automotive customers, revenue is recognized over time based on the estimated total contract value, which has decreased based on the anticipated impact of COVID-19. This has led to higher deferral rates.
Enterprise revenue was up by 10% to €42 million in the quarter, reflecting increased revenue from new and existing customers. Consumer revenue was down by 40% to €14 million in the quarter. Retail closures and factory closures during March accelerated the anticipated decline in consumer, reflected by declines in both consumer products as well as automotive hardware revenue. Gross margin was strong at 78% during the quarter, an increase of six percentage points year-on-year, a result of larger proportion of high margin software and content revenue versus hardware in our revenue mix. Total operating expenses in the quarter was €180 million, an increase of €46 million compared with the same quarter last year. Of this increase, €40 million related to the increased amortization expense resulting from the change in the estimated useful life of the map database implemented from Q2 2019.
The free cash flow from continuing operations was an inflow of EUR 14 million in the quarter. The inflow is driven mainly by cash inflow from a stronger collection of receivables during the quarter, combined with a lower payout of variable employee expenses compared to last year. Our deferred revenue position is now EUR 395 million, compared with EUR 369 million at the end of 2019. Automotive deferred revenue increased by EUR 37 million. Releases in both enterprise and consumer partly offset this increase.
The deferred revenue balance in automotive is now at EUR 315 million. At the end of the first quarter of 2020, we reported a net cash position of EUR 432 million. The share buyback program announced at the end of 2019 began in the beginning of March. As a precautionary measure in the current economic environment, this program was suspended at the end of March until further notice.
By that date, we had purchased approximately 2 million shares for an amount of EUR 70 million. I would now like to comment on the outlook. As previously communicated, given the uncertainty in the market, we have withdrawn our full year 2020 guidance. Automotive and consumer revenue were both negatively impacted in the first quarter, and we expect this trend will worsen in the second quarter. We plan to continue executing our long-term strategy and associated R&D activities, but we will take some measures in the SG&A area.
Overall, we expect that 2020, the free cash flow will be negative. We'll provide updated guidance when we can reliably estimate the duration and consequences of the current situation. With our Q4 press release, we reiterated our midterm guidance for our location technology revenue and our free cash flow. At this point, it is too early to make amendments to this midterm guidance.
Operator, we would now like to start with the Q&A session.
Yes, sir. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you have questions, please press star and one on your telephone touchtone. If you wish to be removed from the queue, please press the hash key or pound sign. If you are using a speakerphone, you need to pick up the headset first before pressing the numbers. Once again, if you have questions, please press star and one on your touchtone phone. We have a couple of questions that came through, sir. We'll now take our first question. This comes from the line of François Wouters. Your line is now open. Please go ahead and ask your question.
Thank you very much, gentlemen. I have a couple, and maybe one for Harold and one for Taco. The first one for Harold is, you mentioned in the release and your remark as well, that you had a good start of the year in terms of orders. I just wanted to know what kind of products you're talking about. Do you think you are gaining shares? Just to get more color around this kind of good start of the year would be very helpful. That's my first question.
Yeah. François, thank you very much. Yeah, we've seen substantial interest in our new navigation products for the automotive industry. Traditionally, our technology was mostly embedded. We're in the process of moving all of our services online, for online delivery for connected vehicles. Importantly, also with an offline fallback facility. That technology is maturing nicely, and we have found traction in the market for those products, and that has resulted in some deals in the first quarter of this year. We're very happy about that, and it's a confirmation that we are on the right track with our product development roadmap.
It's not just in automotive. We also seen some activity in enterprise business as well. I think the importance of the Verizon deal is not to be underestimated. It's a breakthrough deal for us. Verizon has been a customer, but they're now taking our APIs instead of uncompiled map content. I think that's an important one as well. We see further traction for our APIs enterprise business, especially on the West Coast. We're very encouraged by that as well. All that in combination with long-term strategic accounts, traction again in automotive, take up of our new technology products that will be ready somewhere next year, but for which we are writing orders already, gives us all the confidence that we need to continue our investments in the areas that we think are strategic.
The COVID-19 situation, of course, is a tough one because we don't know how long it's going to take and how long it will take to fully recover from the levels of business that we've seen before the pandemic. The underlying business is solid and sound, and that has made us also decide to keep going where we're going, avoid cost where we can, but not compromise our ability to deliver against the product roadmap and our strategic priorities.
That's very helpful. Just follow up on that before asking Taco my second question is, in terms of enterprise, it's always very difficult to model the long term. It seems that in the last two years, you are very successful with Microsoft, now Verizon, and a couple of new deals. My question is, what changed in the last two years after this acceleration of deals within enterprise? What makes you getting more deals, in your view?
Well, it's a number of things. They're partly commercial. I think we're good partners. We work well with our partners, collaborative, commit to I think that's an important part of the success. I think fundamentally, it's the underlying technology that gives our customers the confidence that they're choosing the right partner. Those are important deals. They're lasting for a long time. It's not easy to switch. You need to deal with partners that are transparent, reliable, but are also deploying modern software technology principles and have a modern stack. I think our map making platform is one of the things where we have a lead that inspires confidence. There's real end user benefit from that to be gained as well. You add it all up, and we are successfully expanding our business both in America and globally in the automotive industry.
Within automotive, do you think you are gaining market share at the moment?
Yes.
Okay. HD maps?
Yeah. HD maps, it keeps going, and we keep working, and we announced that some R&D work with Toyota and Denso, where we do online, on the spot, immediate map making based on video and cameras on board of cars. Very cool stuff that's happening and where we are maturing the pipeline and so on and so forth. The introduction of fully automated cars has been pushed further out. The applications that car makers is looking for now are closer to, more an increment of what we're already doing with cruise control and lane guidance and that kind of things, where HD maps will start playing a role. The fully automated driving car is going to take longer than we all had hoped. The business for HD maps will continue to develop gradually over the next two, three, four years.
That's great. Thank you, Harold. Maybe Taco quickly on the free cash flow guidance that you gave. Just that it's going to be negative in 2020. I understand there is a lot of uncertainty, and I totally understand. Could you run through the different scenarios that you may experience in 2020? Without giving a clear target, just to help us run through the drivers of the free cash flow for 2020 would be great. Thank you.
As Harold already explained, the enterprise revenue is relatively not affected by COVID. For consumer, it is different because it is related to end user demand, people driving less and not going on holiday or less than normally. Retail closure is also limiting the accessibility of our product. For automotive, there's a direct correlation between factory closures. The royalty reports that we receive are coming from the factory, so when cars are being shipped out of the factory, the OEMs report those royalties to us. In a period where factories are closed, our revenue stops. If factories are producing on lower capacity, our revenue is lower. The modeling for automotive is directly correlated, based on the number of weeks that these factories are closed or not operating at full capacity.
Yeah, that's all I can say about it, and you can model every single scenario you like, obviously. We are hopeful that during Q2, we see an uplift again in the automotive production volumes.
Okay. Any range you could give for free cash flow? Like a range, even if it's wide, could you provide that or?
I don't want to go there at this point, no.
Okay. That's fair. To respect, for example, Q2, to have a big negative in Q2 and then unknown later, or is it going to be more like unknown through the year, but not necessarily bad in Q2? If you understand where I'm going.
Well, Q2 will see negative cash flow, and Q4 will probably see a positive cash flow. Yeah, the Q3 is a bit of a question mark.
Okay. You said Q2 negative, right? Sorry, I didn't get.
Q2 is negative. Yes.
Yeah. Okay. Okay, that's it. Thank you very much for your answers.
Thank you. We will now take our next question, and this comes from the line of Marc Hesselink. Your line is now open. Please go ahead and ask your question.
Yes, thanks for taking the question. Firstly, I would like to come back on that strong order intake, the strong momentum that you've seen since the start of the year. On the other hand, you also have the negative effect of where you have to adjust your backlog a little bit because of the lower car volumes. Could you indicate what currently is stronger? Is your backlog still growing since the beginning of the year, or is it in decline at the moment?
Sorry, I didn't get your question. Could you repeat that, please?
Yeah. If I'm correct, there are two things driving the backlog. One, actually the order intake, which you already elaborated on, that's pretty strong. There's also a negative effect on the backlog, if I'm correct, that because there are lower volumes at the moment, you also have to decrease the expectations of car volumes in the future. What is a stronger trend at the moment?
The former.
Yeah.
The order intake is a lot bigger than the reassessment of the current orders.
The big push behind it is that new contracts or the extension of the contracts or the extension of the contract, which two of those?
All of the above.
Yeah. Order intake is strong. That leads to a growing backlog order book.
Yeah. If you look at the backlog, there are three elements. One, if you look at the delta of the backlog, there are three elements. One is the reported revenue in the period. That was quite modest. Then you have the reassessment of the future revenues, and then you have new order intake. The last one, the new order intake is by far the biggest.
Okay, that's clear. On automotive operational revenue, to get a little bit of a feel to help us with our own modeling, what is the run rate, rough numbers, post-COVID-19 and pre-COVID-19? Are we down like 50% or what kind of magnitude should we think at the moment?
For automotive?
Yes, for the operational revenues in automotive.
Well, the way to think about this operational revenue is that when factories are closing down, the whole thing stops. All car factories or nearly all car factories that are producing cars with our software and content stopped producing cars at some point in March.
That has a direct impact on our billings. There's now talk that car factories will start producing again, albeit at a lower level. We've seen news from Renault, a couple of other car makers who are either preparing to bring their machines and their production lines online, or are committed to do so already. We expect that manufacturing will start in April, even at some factories. That in May, that will continue. We don't expect those factories to run at full capacity, but they will slowly ramp up their capacity. We don't know to what extent the whole supply chain is affected. It's not just our components that go in, but also a lot of other manufacturers need to bring their supply chain online. There will be a gradual restart of production capacity.
Once that is at full capacity, then we need to look at the end-user demand effects that come into place. Those are harder to predict. What the economy will look like in 2021, of course, is the all-defining question. From a financial perspective, 2020 will not be good. Let's face it is impossible to call this a good year. On product development, on order intake, long-term outlook, we still believe that we can produce a good year from that perspective, and we're fully in position to pick it up in 2021, when we hope everything is back to normal. What the state of the overall economy will do to car demand is, of course, the EUR 1 billion question that we cannot answer at this stage.
That's very clear. Thanks. Final question is the part that actually you have the visibility on enterprise. It seems to have a good start of the year and a nice contract with Verizon. What kind of growth rate, rough number should we think for the full year?
Well, I think the revenue that we report in Q1 was a good indicator for the further quarters in the year. It's quite stable sequentially as well. Year-over-year, we see a bit of increase compared to the increase that we saw also Q1. EUR 41 million in Q1, that is the run rate, and maybe at the end of the year, we are a couple million EUR higher. It will start with a four.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. We will now take our next question, and this comes from the line of Wim Gille , your line is now open. Please go ahead and ask your question.
Yes. Thank you very much. Sorry if I ask questions that have been asked before, my line got cut off a few times earlier in the call. First of all, on the contract wins with OEMs, you're referring to new or contract extensions, but more importantly, also new deals with both new applications as well as new clients, i.e., new OEMs. Can you give us a bit more granularity on where you have been winning these contracts without naming the actual client, obviously? Can you give us a bit of feeling on what type of product? Is it mainly the new software applications that you've launched earlier in the year? Or is it maps? Is it traffic? Europe versus U.S.? That we have a bit more feeling on which corners you're actually winning at this point in time. Secondly is on enterprise.
Obviously, a lot of questions already about the growth, but indeed, it appears that you've passed the inflection point here, growing double-digit rate in Q1, already coming from a strong or a high base. What's been driving this growth? Is it the Verizon extension and some other kind of new deals, or is it existing clients that do more work? Is it uncompiled maps or is it Maps APIs? Maybe on the Maps API, I've got a few follow-up questions, but let's start with these two questions.
Vince, thank you very much. Difficult to give you a lot of detail, but I think the most important thing for us, and I think for TomTom, is that we see significant deal flow now on the new technology. That is, I referred to it earlier in the Q&A session. In fact, we have two type of customers. We have West Coast customers who are kind of pulling us ahead in terms of our technology. We have a more conservative automotive customer base, with embedded applications, broad variety, little standardization, and generally speaking, high cost to serve per contract. What we're seeing now with the new technology is that car makers are moving online as well. They've now come to the view that it is harder and harder to deliver a good end-user experience if you're only running embedded software.
We have initiated that change more than a year ago. It is time that we switch gear and put all of our efforts on online delivery of our products. That was in time. We are now sufficiently developed in our products that we're winning significant deals on the technology. Longer term, this is very important, because the cost to serve will go down. We get more uniformity in our product offering. The difference in what we need to build for Maps APIs and automotive applications will get narrower. There will more commonality in our APIs and our product offering. That prepares us for a more engineering and software-driven approach to innovation, with less variety, more uniformity, and generally speaking, better products.
The fact that we won those contracts in the beginning of the year for that online delivery of our product portfolio is very encouraging, because it will prepare the way for a better product, more mature, better user experience, lower cost to develop, more benefit of the scale we have in automotive and enterprise will come through as a result of that. We're very happy that we have those early proof points. We believe that will help other OEMs to follow the same trajectory. As a result, we will be looking at a business that will be simpler, and with a more uniform product portfolio going forward.
Does it also make you more effective in basically competing against Google in this particular case?
Absolutely. That we started that development was a, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, was a direct reaction to developments in the market. OEMs had to follow through as well. They've long been preventing us from delivering our products online because of cost. They now accept that that is no longer a strategy they can stick to and need to follow the mainstream in order to satisfy their end customer with experiences that are compatible to what you get on a mobile phone. We started that development. It's taken up. There's good proof points that it's all working. Now we also have the commercial proof points that car makers are coming to us for online products as well.
Very good. Maybe on APIs and enterprise. At the Capital Markets Day, you already alluded to the fact that API is kind of the, let's say, future revenue stream for enterprise. At least it's a new area for you guys. During the Capital Markets Day, the revenues you generated from map APIs was still relatively limited compared to the revenues you're generating on uncompiled map. Can you give us a bit of feeling where you are now in that transition? When can we expect map APIs to become a meaningful revenue stream? Can you maybe share some data points, how many map API calls do you get on a monthly basis, and at which rate it is growing?
Yeah. I think we're doing very well in the enterprise business. There's proof for that with the deals that we did with Microsoft, of course, who are using our APIs for their location technology products. The new contract with Verizon is another proof point. There's a long way to go, especially in the independent developer route. That's where we're lacking strength. We need to improve there. That's one of the areas that we have on our to-do list, is to also make product offerings that are compelling for the independent and developer community. We have a little bit of traction there. That's clearly an area where we can and will improve.
Very good. Maybe on, lastly, the widely publicized Huawei contract. Basically, developers on the HarmonyOS platform can access your APIs now. Do you see any traction on the developer community on that particular platform?
I cannot answer the question. I need to refer that to Huawei to answer that. That's commercially sensitive, so I'm not in a position to answer that, Wim.
All right. Understand. Then maybe lastly, with respect to HD Map, is there any indication or do you have any feeling on whether or not this crisis, which obviously is leaving deep scars in the automotive industry, if this crisis will have an impact on the OEM's roadmap towards autonomous driving, and in a similar fashion, will it impact the roadmap for HD maps? Can you just remind us on when the first, let's say, level 2 vehicles will enter the market in generating meaningful revenue streams on the HD map side?
Well, I think you cannot underestimate what happened to the car industry at this stage. For car makers to fight their way back out to position, the hole they're in at the moment is priority number one, two, and three. There's limited bandwidth now to think about the wider, longer term strategic implications of what has happened. I think it will take some time for the dust to settle and then to analyze what the impacts are on the longer-term roadmap and product development cycles for car makers. It's clear that this comes at a bad moment when there's a lot of transition going on already in the car industry, and this is not helping. We can only hope that production will resume relatively quickly. I think there is indications that that will happen.
It will take a couple of weeks, maybe months, for the whole supply chain to get adjusted to the new normal. We will start to get visibility on end user demand and on the more longer term strategic implications. I think it's a bit too early to call at this stage.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. No further questions have come through at this time. You may continue.
Okay. Since there are no further questions, I would like to thank you all for joining us this afternoon. Operator, you can close the call.
Yes, ma'am. Thank you. That concludes our conference for today. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.