Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Asetek fourth quarter 2019 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star and one on your telephone. I would like to advise you that your conference is being recorded today on Wednesday, the 26th of February, 2020. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Peter Madsen. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Annette. Good morning everybody. We're coming to you from Denmark, Aalborg, today, where our board met last night, and they approved the three reports that we released this morning: the quarterly report, the presentation that we're going to give you now, and then the annual report that they submitted to our annual general meeting, which is going to be on April 22nd this year. With that, we are ready to go through the Asetek Q4 2019 results. Again, my name is Peter Madsen, I'm the CFO. I have here with me André Sloth Eriksen, our Founder and CEO. Good morning, André.
Morning.
The way we're going to run this today is that we will go through the presentation, and then as the operator Annette said, we're going to have a Q&A session where you can either post your questions via the web app that you are probably in front of. There should be a place somewhere to submit questions, and we will answer them at the end of the presentation, or you can stand by and present your questions verbally via the operator system. With that, André, over to you.
Yeah.
Highlights.
I'll dive right in. We reported a Q4 revenue 19 of DKK 15.7, compared with DKK 60.5 in the same quarter last year. Well, the year before nowadays, so it's 2018. Gross margins of 43% compared to 42%. A Q4 EBITDA adjusted of DKK 2.6, pretty much more or less the same as Q4 2018. Revenues of DKK 54.3 and an EBITDA adjusted of DKK 6.2 for the year, compared to DKK 67.3 and DKK 9.4 in 2018. Our cash increased just shy of DKK 6 million, and as most of you know, we released that we're going to supply our liquid cooling to a global server OEM. The segmentation of the business is more or less the same as it's been for a while now that our G&E market accounts for 95% of the revenue, with an EBITDA margin just shy of 30%, and the data center is the rest.
We still believe that the data center will be a long-term and hopefully an exponential growing market one day, but I will get back to that. If you look at slide four, the bars are, of course, reflecting the numbers I just gave you, but what they're also reflecting is the high market volatility that's just associated with this business. As such, we have decided to actually cease our guidance for quarterly levels because we cannot predict how the quarters are going to look. Going forward, we will be guiding on the full year only. Of course, we will report on the quarters, but the quarterly guidance is not really helping anyone. Diving into the gaming and enthusiast segment, I think it's not a surprise to anyone that there's macro and industry headwinds coming our way. Well, coming everyone's way, I guess.
We have the trade issues that are not resolved. We have the Brexit uncertainty and obviously the potential effect of the coronavirus. As you know, or some of you know, we came out with a stock exchange release recently saying that the coronavirus has not affected us and that our exposure is more or less the same as the rest of the industry. That still stands. It's not like there's been any positive or negative development in the meantime. Up until now, we have been relatively unaffected, but what's going to happen in the future is obviously impossible to tell. Obviously these things are influencing our markets and our end users. On top of that, and as I alluded to in the last presentation, one of our large OEMs has significantly reduced their purchase.
At the beginning of the year, last year, we thought it was more or less the same as everybody else because of the trade wars, but they were sticking out. We have now also realized that they have actually started to buy from one of our competitors. Obviously that's affecting us also. At that topic, if we look at our top five customer revenue split, the top 5 normally accounted for more than 85%, and right now we're down to 81%. Of course, that's something we're looking to, well, basically making a healthier business, so we like the number going down. Of course, we don't like the number going down if it's only because a customer is going away, but I think in this case, the picture is more nuanced.
Obviously, we are monitoring the situation and assessing the IP situation at all times. One change that we've talked about before also, but we are going to see an even stronger impact from in 2020 and going forward, is that we are developing our business model a little bit, and it's actually pretty simple. If we take an example with the retail packing. When a customer buys a product from Asetek today, we are developing everything including, for example, the retail packing. Believe it or not, the retail packing is an expensive component. With our growth margins, it's obviously difficult to tell a customer that they have to pay a 40% markup on a packaging. We have decided If customers want to keep, let's say, overpriced retail packaging from Asetek, of course they can. For larger customers, they are buying in bulk.
The same goes with a lot of the, let's say, commodity features such as LED lights, et cetera. It's not a place for Asetek to make a lot of money. It consumes a lot of resources. We are cutting those features away. We leave it to our customers to develop their own industrial design. We focus on what we are good at, that's liquid cooling. Of course, it will have an impact on our ASP. Our ASP will go down, but on the flip side, our margins will go up because now we can charge the margins that we deserve and that we have earned on what we are good at, liquid cooling. Then it's up to our customers to, let's say, to develop the commodity parts.
There's a lot of good things about it, because it also makes our customers capable of, let's say, differentiating themselves from their competitors. There is also a risk to it that I want to highlight that's not listed here. The risk, of course, is the execution on the customer side. Hypothetically, we could be in a situation where we've developed everything, but the customer is not ready. Then, we're kind of hanging there. It's not something I fear, because if I feared it, we would not have done it. I just want to mention that, of course, there is a risk. In terms of the branding or the co or dual branding strategy, nothing has changed. We are obviously still looking at that and getting our brand forward. Those two things are absolutely unrelated. Just to expand a little bit on that.
Historically, we were completely OEM. We developed the products as our customers wanted it, and they got it in their box with their branding. What we're doing now is more or less the same. However, what we're also doing is we're focusing on getting our brand adopted and getting our brand in front of the end customer as well. Can we move forward. The goal, of course, is to dominate the gaming and enthusiast liquid cooling market. I think that's needless to say. The way we do that, we believe is the best is to focus on, as I said before, what we are good at. That's liquid cooling, performance, reliability, not to mention quality. Quality is a big one. As it is right now, we have co-branding agreements in place with seven of our big customers, meaning that we are getting in front of the end user.
We are connecting directly with gamers and enthusiasts via our CoolNation forum. The whole idea, of course, is to monetize the Asetek brands. We have currently more than 25 OEM customers, and we are reducing single customer dependency. We started in 2019, developing, let's say, more specialized and high-end products, and we expect to release them here in 2020, which will confirm our position in the market that Asetek is the standard in liquid cooling. Just a couple of examples from the branding or dual branding. When AMD launched the Ryzen 3950X processor, they actually made a statement that their goal was to push the performance to the limit, and liquid cooling was the enabler for that. As you can see, there is a statement about Asetek and our cooling solutions.
As you can see, there is an Asetek logo just next to the AMD Ryzen logo. On the next slide, a little bit on the branding. What you see on the picture is the ASUS Strix LC 2 40 RGB cooler, where you can also see the Asetek logo on the front of the box. We have more or less similar agreements with ASUS. This is an ASUS product, EVGA, NZXT, Dell Alienware, Gigabyte, ADATA, and ZADAK. As you also saw before, we have done promotions with AMD on the Ryzen launch. We believe that these co-branding programs are working very well. They are well-received both by the OEMs and the public. The public in this context is both the press and our end users. Swapping a little bit to the data center business.
The global sustainability agenda obviously is a driver for us. None of us can open a news or a paper or a media without somebody talking about carbon emission reduction, et cetera. Of course, as we have kind of counted on, it's blowing in our direction. That doesn't change the fact that the market adoption is still slow. I still believe we need public requirements and standards to trigger this, to really get the exponential effect. One big step on that route, of course, is the design win that we just announced with a global OEM. I cannot say much more than you already know at this point in time. I can say why. It's pretty simple. There's no OEM out there that would like to have their own product plans pre-announced. That's why we cannot mention the name. The name will be public.
What we think we know is what we have given you already, and that's a forecast that indicates a revenue potential of $45 million over the course of the assumed product life. The reason why I say assumed product life is that it's not really in our destiny to say when one of our customer's products has end of life. It could very well be that they will last longer. It could also be it lasts shorter. I don't believe that to be the case, though. This is what we know. We expect the products to be released before the year-end 2020, and then, of course, we will all know more about it. That being said, I'll give the word back to Peter to talk a little bit about the financials, and then I'll be back shortly.
Sure. Thank you. I'll start out by commenting on the quarterly income statement, and then I'll go to the annual statement, and then work my way through in that way. Starting on the top line, revenues in this quarter were pretty flat compared to the fourth quarter of 2018, 5% down. Most of that decline comes from the data center, where we have pretty much, in Q4, half the shipments of the comparing quarter last year. It's not unusual, though, to see fluctuations in revenue, especially on the data center side, and actually also on the gaming enthusiast side, as André said before. Gross margins, I'll come back to those in a minute. Going further down, looking at the operating expenses, they're pretty flat also. Look here, by the way, how you can see that we have transition shifted our resource consumption from data center towards gaming enthusiasts.
If you're looking at data center spend, last year it was $1.9 million, now it's down to $950,000. The other way around, the gaming enthusiast spend is up from $1.2 million to $2 million. It's the transition we've been talking about for pretty much a year now. We've been helped a little bit, though, I have to admit, by the dollar-Danish krone exchange rate. The Danish krone has been 6% on average cheaper than last year. Since around 2/3 of our expenses are expensed in Danish krone, of course, that does have an impact. All in all, a flat development in operating expenses. That then takes us down to the bottom line, where we have $1.2 million of EBIT, earnings before interest and taxes, versus the same amount last year.
All in all, I have to say it's quite an uneventful quarter, which is not a bad thing to us at all. Looking at the year as such, starting again on the top line here, you can see the decline in revenue. We had, I think it was 19% decline in revenue as announced from 2018 through 2019. That's $ 13 million. On the other hand, our gross margins were up a little bit. We were on an average gross margin last year of 42% versus 39% the year before. That means that the shortage in revenue, which was $ 13 million, turns into a shortage of gross profits of $ 3 million. Overhead expenses, same picture as before, meaning that it's flat and that has shifted towards gaming enthusiasts.
Then taking that all the way down to the bottom line, the $ 3 million that we were missing in gross profits is also pretty much missing on the bottom line, meaning that we have a bottom-line EBIT, $ 1.9 Million versus $ 4.4 million the year before. Just a few words on the gross margins. 90% of our revenue comes from the gaming enthusiasts. That means that, of course, that is the segment that gives us the most impact on gross margins. That's the blue, very flat line on the top. You can see there, it's quite flat. For the year last year, the group total was 42.9% versus 42.1%. Really flat. I believe for the last five quarters, we've been above 41% in gross margins. Quite nice.
We had an increase in the margin levels around Q3 of 2018, so just prior to what you can see in the diagram here. Since that increase to above 40, we've been quite flat. Gross margins from data centers increasing significantly, it's still too early to announce the victory here. It's still very fluctuating quite a lot, up and down. Shifting to an annual cash generation overview, I know this is a little bit of a complex diagram here, if we start looking at from the left, you have three years' worth of cash contribution, where you see the black bars is the cash holdings at the end of the year, starting back in, what does it say here? Year-end 2016, and then going through 2017, 2018, and 2019.
You can see how we have a contribution of, for example, 2017, $16 million coming from Gaming Enthusiast. We spent $7 million as a contribution to the data center market. We have the other components also impacting cash flow, like investments and working capital. If we just focus over on the right-hand side, where it's 2019, you'll see that there is indeed a contraction of the business here, which of course comes from the lower revenue in Gaming Enthusiasts. Primarily, we had $14.6 million of contribution coming from Gaming Enthusiasts. We then spent $4.2 million on the data center business. Look how that number is significantly lower than the years before. Both in 2017 and 2018, we spent 7.2-ish, $7.3 million on the data center business. This year, in 2019, we are down to $4.2 million.
Also of interest here is that the investments, the CapEx, is down from both in 2017 and 2018, a level of around $4 million, it's down to $2 million. Finally, and least of interest here, is the working capital, where we have a positive working capital impact in 2019, which is of $2 million, versus a negative in 2018 of $5 million. That comes from low inventories, low accounts receivables, and higher accounts payables. Our cash conversion cycle, which is the number of days from when we initially pay out to buy components until the day when we receive the final money from our customers, is down to 11 days, where it was 41 days in the year before. That leads to a balance sheet. This has to take the prize for the most boring slide. We've seen that quite a lot.
It's a very solid balance sheet, a lot of cash on the books. We are definitely ready to see what it's take on, whatever the future will throw at us. Financial priorities, you've seen those also. From my chair, from the CFO chair, we have, of course, a target, a goal, of continuing to grow profitable and create a solid financial platform. We have certain tools to obtain those goals. There are no differences in those tools compared to earlier, but of course, they differ from segment to segment. There are different tools from Gaming Enthusiast to what we do over on the data center business. Of course, my work is also focused on cost optimization, overhead optimization. We certainly make sure and work diligently to make sure that we get the best out of the resources. Finally, it's about cash flow improvement.
As you saw on the slide before, we have been working on cash conversion throughout 2019, and we are in a good solid position on that. With that, André, going back to the summary and outlook.
Yes. As mentioned, we are looking at a small change in our business model to support our customers' own customization. We are focusing on delivering core technology, which is liquid cooling. Of course, as I said, that business model will have a change in revenue. On the flip side, it will give us better margins. On the bottom line, I'm not sure there's a big difference. With what's going on around the world also, we expect to see a 5%-10% revenue decline this year, still with a net positive result for the year. I'm not sure that there's a lot other to deduct from this, that as we look at it, the year could very well be pretty flat. In terms of the coronavirus, of course, I cannot predict the future. It's impossible to say what's going to happen.
Right now, it's not had a big effect on us, but whether it will have going forward, it's impossible to say. I also think it's very small things we can do to mitigate it. It's just the state of the world right now. In terms of the OEM design win, of course, I hope that we will launch this year. I hope it will have a positive impact. In my view, we have taken a rather conservative approach to how we see the year, and I think it's a wise thing to do, everything considered. I think that's pretty much what I have to say. I know Peter has a small update here that he wants to make.
Yeah, that's right. I just want to come back to the quarterly income statement. I forgot to talk about a topic here. André, he said that we've ceased guiding on revenues on the segments. We used to guide pretty much quarter by quarter and very detailed. We've stopped that. We will also stop reporting on details of the two former segments. We have simply spent too much of your time and our time talking about a segment that has been quite small. By doing that, we have also revealed too much information to competitors and customers and vendors, et cetera. We will still talk about revenue historically in the two segments, but we will scale down significantly on the detail levels on the overhead and the margins, et cetera. That was just a side remark on how we're going to report going forward.
We'll show you the details here in Q1.
Yes. Obviously, we are still going to report orders, et cetera. It's not a big change. With that, we would like to call on our operator, Annette, to host the Q&A session. We also have some questions on the map here that we can do after the verbal Q&A. Annette, please take it away.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our question and answer session. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A queue. This will only take a few moments. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the hash key. Once again, please press star and one if you wish to ask a question. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. There are no audio questions at the moment. Please continue.
Okay. Thank you. We received a number of questions online, and we'll simply start from the top. Question from Germany: How much will the one large OEM reduce his orders? Is there a risk they will lose him totally, or are there follow-on orders of other products from the data center? I think that's two questions here. Yeah. I'm not really interested, to be honest, in discussing our customer orders out in the public here like that. What I can say is that I don't expect any meaningful revenue from this customer this year. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that expecting a pretty flat year, it actually means that we've been able to replace quite a substantial amount of revenue, which is really good.
In terms of follow-on orders, I'm not really sure what the question means because we have gotten an OEM design win and of course there will be plenty of orders. I'm not sure. It's not a single order, so I'm not sure what that means.
Is it a relationship that is developing?
Well, we don't know at this point.
Very good. We go to France, I believe. In the -5% to -10% guidance, can you give us details on the underlying ASPs and volume components for the D&E division?
I cannot because we have 25 different OEMs who probably have 3-4 products each, meaning we have more than 100 different products. The ASP is simply all of them stacked on top of each other, divided by the number of products. That's not really anything I can say, but what I can say that could perhaps be helpful is that for some products in the really high-end, of course, the ASP will be a substantial reduction because the bling and the features and the LED will be a substantial part of the bill of material. Whereas, as if you move to the lower end of the product stack with not so many features, then the ASP will not go down so much. It's more or less impossible to say.
There are many components.
Yeah.
Complex in that game there. We go back to Germany. How long time will the transition of the business model in the gaming enthusiasts take? Will it be finalized here in 2020? How pronounced the margin effect of the change model be?
It's not necessarily smaller customers who will transition to the business model. It's not like there is a start and an end date, just like there are shifting programs that we are not changing. It's a mix, I will say. I actually expect the margin effect to be substantial. What is substantial? That's points we are measuring in here for sure. It's not behind the comma. The thing of course is what's going to happen with exchange rates, et cetera, going forward is impossible to predict. That's why we're also a little bit conservative. If we exclude factors like exchange rates and what's going around in the world, then I would say between three and five points on the margin. It's substantial for sure.
Indeed. We are in Copenhagen. On the question on the OEM reducing the purchases, have you removed this customer from the guidance?
We have obviously taken into account what's going on in our guidance.
There's a question here from U.K., I believe. What is the potential for a meaningful replacement cycle from gaming enthusiasts this year?
That's impossible to answer. I don't know. I think the potential for replacement is going on constantly. People are building PCs every day, and every time they build a PC, they're buying a cooler and a CPU and a motherboard, but I don't know how to quantify it.
Very good. There is a long question here that actually seems to start out by a statement. Bear with me, I'm reading. My conversation with data center operators and OEMs again and again point to some key barriers of adoption of liquid cooling around perceived risks to hardware, maintenance complexity, and risks of unplanned downtime. Since Asetek seems to be proving that these are misconceptions, have you considered providing risk-sharing or insurance protection for first-time customers to lower the adoption barriers, especially given your strong balance sheet, which could give credibility to such guarantees?
Well, first of all, it's not reflecting what I see from either OEMs or data center operators at all. As a matter of fact, I don't think it's related to finances or risk or hardware or anything like that. What we see out there is the data center operators, they do not see the value. To them, they can save power, and they can save much more power than it costs to implement liquid cooling. The math stacks up. What I see is that, for example, in the hyperscale data centers, they want to build the same hardware around the world. They want to build the same data centers around the world. They don't want a liquid cool data center in Denmark and then something else in Finland and then something else in Nevada or California.
What's going on in the hyperscale space right now is that people are competing really hard. Time to market, meaning how fast can you build a data center, et cetera, is really what's driving it. In my opinion, I don't think financial incentives will make any difference at all. I think we need to focus on the environmental angle of it as we are doing, and I think we need to realize, and the data center operators, they need to realize that they own a big responsibility in this and in the carbon emission reductions, and I personally believe that's the way forward. Further to that thought, I have personally been involved, like a couple of years ago, where we basically offered hardware for free to a data center, and they were not interested for the reasons I just mentioned.
I don't think starting to giving away money or discounts or credits or anything like that will change the picture.
Very good. From the same gentleman, but going back to gaming enthusiasts, the desktop OEM who reduced the purchasing, did they do that change in sourcing to circumvent you in China trade tariffs? If so, would Asetek consider that in its supply chain to mitigate the exposure?
I think the OEM reduced the purchase because it was cheap, and he wanted lower pricing. The other half of the question, we have been considering for a while, supply chain mitigation, and we are doing that effectively, in the sense that, for customers where this is a big deal, we are actually moving some of our manufacturing to Malaysia. It's not that easy because it's very easy on paper to say, now we move our manufacturing to Malaysia, so now we don't have tariffs. That's correct, but you have an extra layer of shipping because a lot of your sub-suppliers are already in Malaysia. It will change your entire shipping schedules, et cetera. It's not that easy, but for sure it's something we're doing.
Very good. Diving a little further down into the gaming segment here, has gaming demand for liquid cooling gone structurally from high growth to low growth? Do you see a long-term risk from online gaming streaming platforms like GeForce NOW, sorry for pronouncing that if that's not correct, and Google Stadia?
Not at all. In terms of gaming demand, I have no metrics to kind of be safe for that. I think if you're following our presentation, you'll know what's going on. In terms of streaming platforms, I don't see that as competition at all. It doesn't worry me at all. Number one, let's see if they can ever get it to work. Personally, I've never seen it work to date, but that's not what we're banking on when I say as I do. People have to understand our customers are hardware enthusiasts. They build their own PC. You cannot outsource to Google or to Nvidia to build your own PC online. Building your own PC is something that goes on in your own living room.
Whether you are then a gamer or you're not a gamer, that's a different discussion, but it has zero impact on our business, because people who like to buy their own PC and to build their own PC, it makes no difference what you can do online from any service. It's not even related. On the contrary, I think it's a great development for us because it means we will have a lot of high-performance data centers out there, which is a big opportunity for us. I welcome these services.
Very good. On the data center side, how do you foresee an environmental regulation on data centers would look like? How would this incentivize the data center to go for liquid cooling over the alternatives like sourcing green energy and other efficiency improvements? Google, for example, achieved a PUE, that's a Power Usage Effectiveness, as low as 1.14 on one of its data centers before it began to use liquid cooling.
Well, I think this is a great question because that displays very well the misconception that's going on. PUE has nothing to do with whether liquid cooling gives you an advantage or not. Even if you have a PUE of 1.0, which would be the perfect in this world, it still means if you don't reuse the waste heat, that you are wasting all of the power going into your data center. You can have a data center with a PUE of 1.5 and measure it up against Google's of 1.1, and the 1.5 will be the most energy efficient because they reuse waste heat energy, and thereby they don't need to have fossil fuels for heating.
The way I see that it would work is, and that's what we're working on, I think actually, was it two or three days ago, the E.U. came out with the new regulations for data centers, et cetera, and it's actually listed in there that they have to reuse waste heat. It will come no matter if they like it or not. I think that's the way forward, that we have to realize that data centers in general, and we all know the examples of streaming, that if you watch a movie, it will emit the same carbon as boiling 50 cups of coffee. What does it help if you're not flying, if you're then on the internet streaming movies? The way forward is not to change people's behavior. We need to keep flying, we need to keep streaming movies, of course.
We need to put in not incentives, in my view, because the incentives are already there. We have to put in regulations just like we do on the car industry. We have to put in regulations that say that, okay, if you use 100 MW of power, you need to be able to reuse at least 60% of that. I think it's pretty simple. It's just not an easy ship to turn.
Very good. A very specific question on the D&E. Do you plan positive volume growth in the D&E division in 2020?
That's an excellent question. I will have to get back to you. I don't remember it, to be honest, on top of my head.
Very good. Shifting gear again. I noticed Asetek is more active on social medias regarding data centers and carbon emission reduction, et cetera. Do you have a fixed strategy for influencing E.U. and the political environment? Have you received any political recognition on your efforts so far?
Well, I think as we have reported the last many quarters, that I don't know if the strategy is fixed or not. I personally spend a lot of time with politicians. I'm actually going to see the minister on Monday in Denmark, and I'm spending a lot of time in the E.U. as well, because I do believe it's the right and only way forward. In terms of recognition, if we take the ultimate recognition, meaning we can measure it on our bottom line, no. As I said, with the E.U. and the new Green Deal that's come up, I would not say I'm the guy behind it, but for sure, I would like to think so, that if we had not been doing what we are, I don't think it would have been on their agenda, to be honest.
On top of that, we just had here in Denmark, a lot of questions asked to the minister, and that was a direct result of me going to the Danish parliament. It is moving and people are starting to see that this is a big deal. I think it's just like we have to keep pushing, and we will.
It's a hot topic, that's for sure. Staying in the same line of questioning here, please talk about your efforts to expand the business to help buildings reduce their CO2 emissions by using the heat generated from data centers. No need to say this. Many ESG funds being created, you can become a part of the ESG wave.
Correct. What we also have to realize is that Asetek is a small company. We don't have the muscle. Even if we spend all our $ 20 million on our bank account, we don't have the muscle to do that. We have the muscle to support an OEM, and that's what we can do. We are not selling directly to data centers. We don't have the business model for them. I don't think we will ever go in that direction. What we can do is we can focus on the benefits, we can focus on the politicians to take this seriously, and we can build all the case stories we want, but if the data centers don't want to listen, it doesn't help.
What we have done recently, and as probably a lot of you have seen, that we have started, basically this year, early February, and probably as the first in the world, we have started to sell our waste heat to the district heating plant here locally. Not because we are saving anything environmentally by doing that with our small data center, but just to circumvent these discussions on whether it can be done and whether it makes sense or not. We are right now, 24 hours a day, selling the waste heat from our data center, and thereby we prove that it can be done. If people are in doubt, they can come and check it out.
One thing is what we do towards our customers and with our products we sell. On the internal side of ESG, we have started a project to hopefully score higher in the various ESG scoring tools that are out there, that we have in the past. We have not scored high, that's primarily because we haven't been focusing a lot on it, but that will certainly change. Totally changing gear here, how is the possibility for a share buyback developing?
Well, I think it's the same answer as last time, that as soon as there is any development, we will let you know. I don't think it's the right time to go into a discussion of why. For legal reasons and for tax reasons between the U.S. and Denmark, we are not able to do a dividend payout or share buyback. We have people working on it, and I can guarantee you that it's not on our side people are stalling. When we're talking about the IRS in the U.S. and the same in Denmark, things are just moving at a glacial pace, it seems.
Yes. We're waiting for those. Let me just refresh. Questions seem to have coming in, and they have stopped there. No more questions. Thank you for all the good questions. If you have questions after this, please post them or send them as email at investor.relations@asetek.com. Let me repeat that, investor.relations@asetek.com and we will reply to the best we can. With that, André, any further comments from you?
No.
No. We will cease this presentation. Thank you for your interest in Asetek.
Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.