Welcome to the Asetek A/S Q3 2021 financial report and earnings call. Throughout the call, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Afterward, there will be a and answer session. Today, I'm pleased to present André Sloth Eriksen, CEO, and Peter Dam Madsen, CFO. Please begin your meeting.
Thank you, moderator. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this Asetek A/S Q3 2021 call. My name is Peter Dam Madsen. I'm the CFO, and I have with me here in the room here, André Sloth Eriksen, who's the CEO and founder. Good morning, André.
Good morning.
The plan is to do the usual drill, if I may call it like that. We have a presentation that we go through. We have a Q&A session at the end where you may either call in, or you can type in your questions as you go on the app on which you're probably watching this presentation. We'll refresh and make sure that we get the answers, not just the questions online. With that, André, over to you.
Thank you. In short, year to date and the quarter, we've had a nine-month revenue of close to $62 million, which is 30% up compared to last year, and then a EBITDA of $6.5 million. The Q3 revenue was $13.5 million compared to $21.6 million same quarter last year, with a margin of 39% compared to a margin of 47% also last year. For the quarter, we have a negative EBITDA of $1.4 million compared to $5.4 million in Q3 2020. The results are pretty much as expected and as communicated of September 22, 2021.
We had a one-time charge of $1.7 million in our operating expenses for exiting the HPC data center niche. We have an opening, or we will open for orders in the SimSports products here in Q4 and had an R&D investment of $0.8 million in the quarter. We have gotten a design win with Razer that I will get back to a little bit later. We pretty much maintain our growth expectations for the year, although it seems as it's trending towards the lower end of the range. If we do a short status on the G&E market, then on the 22nd September, we updated our expectations simply because there were several things happened primarily to our supply chain at the same time.
Specific to us, we saw some COVID-19 shutdowns in Tonghua and Xiamen districts of China, where we happen to have factories and especially a lot of sub-suppliers. We could not get components in, and we could not get final goods out. Of course, that had an impact. More from an industry perspective, of course, we see the same challenges as everyone else, and specifically our customers are having a hard time on the shipping side. We see the increasing logistics cost and U.S. tariffs, of course. On top of that, we have the global semiconductor shortage situation. Fast-forward 5 weeks and say, okay, so where are we now?
Well, I would say fortunately, it seems as things are bouncing back a little bit for us at least. We are still expecting a growth of between 10% and 20%. As I just said, I believe it'll be closer to 10% than to 20%. I would say primarily because it's difficult for our customers to get containers and to get the goods out of our factory and into their own warehouses. We still believe we will have a profit or operating income of between $0 and $2. At least we do not expect to lose money. Let's put it like that. On the more company-specific side, business activities have resumed in Tonghua and in Xiamen. It's still not hunky dory because we are still.
I mean, I hardly got off the call with you last time until we got to know that we are seeing power supply restrictions. Of course, we also see that f or right now, I think we are able to manage around it. More on the industry side of things, the supply chain challenges are definitely still there. We see it every day. Our customers are seeing it. The industry is seeing it. Logistics costs are still crazy high. Chip shortages continue. What we see, at least what I believe, is that we see China reducing energy use and the CO2 ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics here in February. For those who are interested, you can go online and do a search.
They did exactly the same in 2008 ahead of the Summer Olympics. What that means is, at least I am optimistic that post the Olympics, production in China will run at more or less full steam again. Looking ahead a little bit further out than this quarter and this year, nothing has changed whatsoever to our long-term ambition of 15% annual growth. Of course, there are always uncertainties to when does the market normalize again. When I say the market, I should probably be more specific and say the supply chain, because I don't think the fundamental demand and I'm going to talk more about that, I don't think that's off at all.
What we are doing is that we are taking whatever mitigation actions we obviously can. We are continuously focusing on strengthening our supply chain and our capabilities. That being said, when you are facing a global situation, it's really difficult to do anything else than observe. We do adapt an active product pricing strategy, meaning that we can, of course, not continue forever absorbing the tariffs, et cetera. We are looking to what can we do on our side, what can our customers do on their side, to avoid the tariffs.
Just as a side note, because SimSports is new and we have, let's say, a high risk willingness, there's nothing to lose. In other words, we are actually adopting a model where we will be assembling, doing final assembly of, in this first round at least, our pedals, because the shipping prices are so high that if the pedal arms are standing up vertical, we can only have a third of the goods in the container as if it comes unassembled. It's actually with the salaries we have in Denmark even, it's actually cheaper to assemble them in Denmark than it is in China. On top of that, because we do most of the work in Denmark, we can claim it's made in Denmark, and thereby we will not have the U.S. tariffs.
That's a good model. It's a solid model. It's not without risks because it's new, but we start here at least and see where it leads us, but that's just an example of what we're doing to mitigate those risks. From my chair, what I see is a strong G&E market. The fundamentals are curbed right now because of short-term challenges. In the bigger picture, nothing has really changed. We see a growing gaming community investing in more immersive experiences, be it higher resolution screens, higher or better GPUs, and higher and more demanding gaming or games, more and more high-end PCs with liquid cooling. We are increasing our production capabilities. We are seeing many new products and a widening customer base.
Nothing indicates that things are not normal, other than the supply chain and the COVID-19 situation. You know, the access to microcontrollers, so in our systems, in every pump, we have microcontrollers, of course, we have it in our motors for the SimSports, and for those of you who are awake early, will know that the wheel and the wheelbase, it will not be available until a year from now. Just to give you an example, we are already buying the chips and the motor drive ICs for these products, although we will not be needing them for another 12 months. That just shows you a little bit of how early we are.
I think it's also important to notice that, yes, things are bad right now for a lot of different companies, but at least growing 10%, or that's what we expect to do, so on the back of a very high and very big record year. We are still alive, let's put it like that. We have seen a slow start to Q3. That's what I already communicated five weeks back. It is improving through the quarter, and I expect it to stabilize going into Q4. You can see the curves or the graphs here on the right, where you can, well, first of all, you can see the blue line from last year.
It's still up and down and up and down. You can see that the year pretty much started where last year ended off. Then we saw the big dip over summertime or spring and summer rather, and now it seems to be coming up again. There's not really much you can read into it other than what I'm telling you that it's very difficult to predict at the moment. Going further down, pretty much to the bottom line, which is really the interesting part at the end of the day. I think it's also important to take the, let's say, the longer glasses on and look at the bigger perspective here. If we look at the three lines we have made here, the orange line is pretty much SimSports.
When we started to enter the SimSports market, it's a year ago. We have the purple line, which is the HPC or the data center business, let's put it like that, combined. Since we have only been selling into HPC, it's really reflecting the HPC business. We have the white line, which is our gaming and enthusiast business. If you look at Q4, what we have done here is we've been conservative, so everything is in the low end of our revenue guidance. If you look at that, if you look at G&E on its own, it's actually not too far off where we would normally be. It's lower than last year for sure, but Forex and shipping alone covers that difference.
If you can just abstract from Forex and the increased shipping, then even with all the other challenges we are facing, the desktop business, as we used to call it, is pretty much where it should be. Then of course, the orange line shows that we are investing in SimSports. Nothing new in that's a deliberate choice. What you can also see is that the purple line is just not adding. It just continues to be a drag, and it's been like that for at least 10 years and for at least the 4 years that you are seeing at this slide.
S ometimes it's good to just look at a little bit more detailed picture than just at the big numbers, because there are some hidden details in here that at least I find important. We have gotten a lot of new investors over the last weeks, for sure. For those of you who do not know how we are organized, let me just summarize that. If we start out left, we have our Silicon Valley office, where we have sales, product management, total solutions, pretty much, field application engineering or customer engineering. We have branding and outbound marketing. We have finance, and we have local management. Then I have my COO in Texas, John Hamill, close to HP and close to Dell. He's located in Austin.
We have a sales office in the U.K., and here in Aalborg, Denmark, where we have product management, R&D, prototyping, sourcing, in-house manufacturing, quality, order management, also marketing, finance and obviously management. In China, in Xiamen, we also have product management. We have some level of engineering and R&D, obviously sourcing, outsourced manufacturing, quality, order management and finance. In Taipei, where our customers typically have their R&D centers, we have sales, product management, also FAE and R&D. Looking a little bit top-down, what we're doing is trying to grow our offerings for, let's say, the gaming market. We are, in short, a gaming company with a sustainability angle on the data center side.
That's pretty much who we are and the SimSports, no matter how we put it, is of course also gaming. If we start with the gaming and enthusiast market, the part of it where we are selling every day, we are seeing a very high level of new customers, or sorry, new products and also new customers. In Q3 alone, we started shipping 15 new products. It's continuing into Q4 with 19 new products. We keep investing in product development and branding to expand our reach, of course. I think that shows you that. Let's put it like this, there are at least other than me who believes the market fundamentals are solid because otherwise we would not keep having customers asking for new products.
What we are doing here is we are strengthening our base of G&E OEMs. We're currently shipping to more than 20. Top five was 85%, compared to 81% last year. Then you can ask, is that good or bad? Does that mean more or less customer concentration? I actually think it's good because, as you can see on the far right bar here, we actually have customers growing within the top five, s o there's actually less customer concentration this quarter right now than we have seen for a while. I'm not too worried about it, as I've said many times, because we have seen more than once that we have lost our biggest customer for various reasons.
Already next year, there's a new lead customer with the same amount of revenue and volume that the previous one had, which basically speaks volume about our brand and our products. One of the highlights of the quarter, we have not started shipping yet, just for the record, but one of the highlights of the quarter for sure is Razer that we have gotten a design win with them, and we are now behind their new Hanbo series of coolers. I think it's a strong validation of the performance, the quality and the reliability of our products.
Razer is a true leading global brand, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with a reported half-year revenue of $750 million. For sure, this is a top player, and I have solid expectations for them, for sure, and it's exciting. If we look at the development on this business, of course, the goal is to keep it very short, sell more, and maintain our position. How do we do that? We invest in R&D and product development. We grow our existing customers, but as I just showed you with Razer, we are also widening our customer base. We are of course spending time and money and effort on branding and marketing.
Going forward, we will keep our focus on the delivery of what we're good at. That's liquid coolers. We will ramp up development to keep bringing out new innovations to the market, so we have customers asking for new products. We will be best in class with our products that ensure the best performance, quality, reliability, noise level, and so forth. Yeah, that's it for this slide. Moving into the SimSports. It's of course difficult to absorb for you investors right now as it's only going money one way. It's interesting that we actually finally have some news to share. It's actually not fair to say finally, because if you think about it, what I just said was, it was a year ago we started this.
It was less than a year ago, three quarters ago, we finalized our M&A activities in the SimSports market. Already now we will take pre-orders. Basically a couple of weeks from now, we will open our pre-order program with delivery in Q1. Although it's an investment and it's been a turbulent year, I'm actually very proud of the team to be able to go from a PowerPoint to a solid product within 12 months. That's very fast. The part that excites me is that, unlike some of our other business segments, we are not really depending on anyone. We don't really need any OEMs to design it in. We don't really need any regulation to happen. As soon as we have the product, we can start selling.
I talked a little bit about the steering wheel and the wheel base earlier on in terms of purchasing ICs and motor drives. We actually do have now here with me running prototypes. We do have running prototypes and that's interesting because that is the result of the acquisition that we made. Whenever you buy a company, there's a, in my opinion at least, always big risks, cultural risks, execution risks. In this case it was a Finnish and a U.K.-based company. We have actually not been able to meet once because of COVID-19, so all meetings have been online. Despite that, we now have our own running prototypes. I think that's pretty good or it is pretty good.
If you then wonder why it will be a year until we can start selling them, that's because everything is now CNC made and handmade. We need to put it into production. Of course, we need to invest in tooling, set up manufacturing, et cetera. Of course, the products are not done, but we actually do have working prototypes. A little fun fact is, if we go back one slide, if you look at the screen, what you have there is actually a computer-rendered 3D model. But if you go to the next slide, these are the actual pedals. This is not a rendering. This is actually a product photo. It looks pretty good.
The next thing in the SimSports, of course, is the product will not sell itself. That's of course to start engaging with the channels and start to build up our own brand, our own web shop, et cetera. We are not just doing that now, we've been doing that for a while. Of course, we cannot sell something we don't have, but we are deeply engaged. Of course, we are engaging with the community and automotive partners, which leads me to the next slide. We have teamed up with Pagani, and for those of you who have just a small interest in cars will know who Pagani is.
It's founded by Horacio Pagani, pretty much same time as Asetek, and today is the world-leading hypercar brand, for sure. I will not talk too much about Pagani other than its. Their philosophy is they only produce between 40 and 50 cars a year. It's not like we are going to sell millions of systems because they sell one with every car. The reason they only sell a very few is because they are actually running it as an investment boutique. When you buy a Pagani, you simply cannot lose money because they are so exclusive, they're difficult to get. Of course, from Pagani's side, they are also looking at how can they monetize their brand? How can they get a further reach?
I went down there myself a few quarters back and I met Horacio Pagani last year in Copenhagen. When he saw our prototypes, he was really excited and said it was a piece of art. That's a big compliment coming from a person like him. We decided to do this together. What is going to happen is that we will build sim racing products based on their production car. For competitive reasons, I'm not going to go into details of what it will be and what we will start with, because we want to keep that a secret. It will be like you can buy sim stuff equipment from Asetek that is more or less identical to what's in the car.
Same look, same feel, based on real production drawings. Pagani will also sell the products in their channel, and they will also participate in the marketing of this. Just as an example, there is a, let's say, hypercar, supercar reviewer out there called Supercar Blondie. I believe she has 25 million subscribers on Facebook. For sure, if we come out with a Pagani product, and we should be fortunate enough that Pagani can entertain that she does a review of these products, it's a very powerful marketing machine. I'm proud about this partnership for sure. Yeah, I don't think I'll talk much more about the SimSports than I have done. We are ready in Q4 to take pre-orders, and then we'll just keep cranking. That's the message.
Going into the data center segment, let's start with just recapping why is it and why was it that we are going out of the HPC business. If we look at the money side of it, I think it's pretty obvious that when you compare to the same period last year and even the first quarter this year, it looked like we finally would get a breakthrough. That was not what happened. The bottom line just kept going south. Perhaps even more important is that what we also realized is that the HPC business does not really bring us closer to the overall theme of the data center market.
The overall goal and idea on the data center market is, of course, to grow a highly profitable and a large business and to get into mainstream data centers rather than just playing around in a supercomputer niche. That's the whole idea. Of course, we are not going to just leave our customers hanging, so we will keep supplying some of our OEM customers until I was almost going to say until further notice. What we're going to do is we're going to give them some opportunities to place orders, and they are very keen on doing that.
We'll be winding it down, and we will be focusing on reducing the cash burn and reducing the staff until a small group that keeps doing what we want to do, and that is to influence the influencers and work on the business development side and work on the politician side. That's really the main trigger here is the legislation. There's no doubt about it. That being said, we have seen an increased awareness about this whole you know reuse of waste heat and district heating. On the right here, I have an article that probably 250 eager investors sent to me. Thank you. It talks about a big Google data center in Norway that's planned.
Now people have actually started to realize that this one single data center in Norway could heat 350,000 apartments. It's not the case as it looks right now. As it looks right now, all that heat would be wasted. There's no doubt that there is still more focus on it, which is good. The EU, as some of you already know, is also starting to take it more and more seriously. That's of course our goal number one is to support this legislation and to support the people down there in Brussels to answer whatever questions they may have and help illustrating what technologies like ours can do.
From this summer, the energy directive proposal, also known as the Green Deal, it actually talks about that perhaps it's a good idea to require the reuse of waste heat from data centers. EU seeks to neutralize CO2 emissions and preserve, of course, and reuse precious resources. As we have talked about many times, it's a no-brainer to do it, but it just needs to happen, and that's what we keep focusing on. In that picture, the HPC is just a distraction. If we look at the helicopter perspective here, the goal here, of course, is, as I started out with, to create a sustainable and growing and profitable business. The way we're going to do that is we're going to work to influence the influencers.
We are both in EU but also on the data center side, of course. Let me just rule out a perhaps misunderstanding that occurred after the last conference call. We are not exiting the data center market. In fact, we are engaged with many different data centers, and we have been all the time. We'll always be until we will actually start selling. Of course, we will leverage our existing technology. That's the interesting thing that on the data center side, our technology has not really changed the last five, six, seven, eight years. Exiting the HPC space will not mean that we don't have a state-of-the-art technology to use in the data centers.
The development and the outlook is that, yeah, to put it black and white, if we get the legislation and the regulation that we hope for or if some of the bigger data centers finally wake up on their own, then I think the situation looks pretty good. We are of course all impatient. I'm not a person with a huge amount of patience, so I'm as impatient as you are. The good thing now is that after we have trimmed the data center business, we are not really in a hurry because we are a handful of people working on it now rather than 20 or 25 people working on it. From that perspective, I believe we have bought ourselves more time and more patience to see it out.
With those words, I will leave it to Peter to talk about the financials.
Yes, sir. Thank you. I will start from the top as usual. For the reasons André specified, our revenues in this quarter was $13 million, which is 37% down. That's the bad news. The good news is that year to date, we are 37% up at $62 million. A little comment here on the revenue line on the average sales prices. The average sales prices for the year as such is down. You can see that the number of units is up more than the dollars is up. However, it seems to have stabilized. The reason for this decline in average sales price is the change in the business model that we've been talking about many times.
It seems to have stabilized at this point as per plans. Actually the ASP, the average sales price for this quarter, Q3, is just a smidge higher than it was in Q2 of the same year here. I'll come back to the gross margins on a subsequent slide. I'll put my attention down to the operating expenses at $9.4 million versus $5.8 million last year. Obviously, that's a lot of money more this year than last year. However, if we take the $5.8 and then add some very quite specific items, like the
Sorry, like the $1.7 million special items, which is the HPC write-off, the income from the sale of some land, the $1.2 million that we've been spending on the SimSports investment project, and then some higher litigation expenses, then you actually arrive at exactly $9.4 million, which we spent this year. The math is different for the year to date because we are simply running a bigger operation now than we did last year due to the higher sales levels year to date. It's simpler. It's simply a bigger machine at this point.
Operating income for the quarter, -$4.1 million versus $4.3 million last year, and $1.3 million for the year as a whole versus $5.3 million last year. Income for the period after tax, -$3.0 million this year versus $1.5 million the year before. Going into a quick discussion on gross margins. We have a tough comparison this year because 2020 was a very successful year, gross margin-wise. One of the reasons being that the Forex was different the other way around supporting us last year, and we certainly cannot say that it's supporting us this year.
The Chinese renminbi is, I believe, 7% more expensive compared to the dollar this year than it was last year. That also reflects in the gross margin for the quarter as such being lower at 39% or 38.8 versus 46.5 the same quarter last year. That is impacted by the Forex. Of the 7% that the Forex has changed, around 3 or 4 ends up on the bottom line or on the gross margin in our books. If you add to that, the shipping costs around 4%. That is the reason. The shipping is the reason why the gross margin is dipping quite significantly in Q3. We spoke about shipping at our call on September 22nd. It has been a...
You all know that shipping has increased, skyrocketed in cost this year. What I hear or what we hear from our logistics people in China is that it seems to have peaked or plateaued or whatever the term is, at least for now, and that the same impact we saw in Q3 is probably percentage-wise gonna be impacting us in Q4. There's one little bit of information here also. You know that our revenues have been down because of different limiting factors that has impacted us in Q3. One of the customers who have actually been able to take products is a customer on whom we are obligated to pay the shipping. So yes, we have sold, but that sell has come with an increased shipping cost. Those things are being remedied.
André also alluded to a strategy there and a process that's going through. There's a time lag. That's one of the reasons why the gross margin is lower this quarter. Balance sheet. Actually, at this point, there's not so much news to report. We have $25 million in the bank, which is a little bit higher than it was a quarter ago. And that is actually also to be expected. The cash effect of either strong or weak quarter typically is shown on our bank and balance sheet items the quarter subsequent to the actual quarter in which it happens on the profit and loss.
We will see a cash balance reducing in Q4, which is the effect of the weaker Q3. Apart from that, we have still a very strong balance sheet. We are continuing, I should say, with our HQ construction plans, which is impacting us on the longer term on the balance sheet. We simply have to do that. We're sitting on top of each other in the facility here in Aalborg. Keep in mind, it's a two-year plan. It's out in the future. Just a quick note on revenue. The revenue outlook, we are maintaining our guidance of 10%-20% increase compared to 2020. However, it looks to be in the lower end of the range at this point. Our gross margins were extremely high in 2020 at 47%.
We expect those to normalize in the 40%-45% range here in this year. All these things result in a bottom line operating income level of $0-$2 million compared to $11 million last year. Even though, of course, we are approaching year-end, there are still COVID-19 issues to battle out there, and there still are supply chain logistics issues that we have to fight. That does create levels of uncertainty. I always have a financial strategy slide. Of course, the strategies that we have in the different segments also flow into the financials. Gaming & Enthusiast, André put it something to the effect of sell some more. It's about leadership.
In the SimSports, it's about growing that segment and learning that segment, you could say. Then we have changed the approach in the data center where we have exited the HPC segment in order to refocus and focus more on the general data center segment instead. The headline on the left, capture growth potential in the general data center market, is new. The rest of the stuff down there, cost base optimization, cash flow improvements, that's standard CFO chores. With that, André, back to you and the summary slide.
Yeah. Before that, let me just clarify a little bit on shipping, because per definition, we do not ship to our customers. They buy from us in either Hong Kong or Xiamen. We do have certain OEM PC customers where we supply to their hubs around the world, and then the shipping is on us. It 's kind of obvious that when you are working with global companies, pricing is not something you just adjust up and down real time.
Mm-hmm.
That's why we are impacted, because another dynamic is that in a world of component shortage, who do you believe is doing the best? Well, that's the big global OEM brands. They are selling, and that is confirming that there's still end user demands because they are selling and growing a lot. When we pay the shipping to these specific customers, we are obviously getting penalized for it as it looks right now. On our pricing strategy, we have, of course, tried to capture this. It's impossible to do this as an exact science because nobody could foresee that freight rates would go up three to four times, so it's not always a one-to-one. Hopefully, when our margins goes up to 45% or 47% even again, then keep in mind that's the other side of when we have adjusted prices.
They also just go down, not go down again two minutes after. There is always a lag in these things. Of course, we are taking into account for the customers where we pay the shipping, that shipping prices has gone up globally. We're not just sitting on our hands.
Mm-hmm.
It's not real time. That's also in, as I have said many times before, and I would like to repeat, is that at least Asetek is very hard to judge by the quarters because there's a certain lag and elasticity in things. It's much better to look at the years rather than look at the quarters. The quarters are rather a guidance or a milestone or what should we call it, rather than any exact science of where the business is heading. Summary and outlook.
Speaking about the bigger picture, I don't remember in percentage what our growth was last year, but with at least I hope 10% growth of this year, we are on track to and on target to hit our stated mission of reaching $150 million in revenue in 2025. Nothing has changed there. Yes, we have gotten SimSports to help us, but on the flip side, we have taken out somewhere between $4 million and $10 million on the data center side. In the bigger scheme of things, this is our goal until we realize it at least. We are still looking into a record year in terms of revenue despite the challenges as we have.
We believe there is a strong underlying demand for our products still. I think we prove that with the customers who got components are selling. We prove it by there's a high demand for new products, and we are also getting on board new customers. In fact, we landed perhaps one of the biggest potential customers in the world out there. We are developing and we are progressing to plan on the SimSports side. We are still at least mentally preparing for an increased data center demand over time driven by the EU legislation. I think that pretty much sums it up. We'll go into Q&A, I believe.
Yes, we will. Just a final comment on the data center. We did terminate between 15-20 employees recently due to all this. You will see or we will see the effect of that over the next 3-6 months as per the contracts, when they terminate people, they work until the end of their contracts. With that, moderator, if you will open up for phone calls.
Our first question is Yiwei Zhou from SEB.
Hi. Good morning, André and Peter. Thank you for taking my question. I have three here. What has changed over the last three months, if we just see the lower end of the guidance range is more likely now? I know you mentioned the customers are having the chip shortage, or is it like the supply chain issue continue to delay the sales to next year? Could you elaborate a bit here? I'll do one question at a time.
To be honest, I think I have tried to my best effort to explain what's going on out there. I don't really have anything further to add.
Okay. Fair enough. Regarding the OpEx investment for launching the SimSports product, you have ramped up the OpEx this year. Do you see the need to further increase for next year, when going to next year, considering you have more products will be launching to the market? Is it fair to assume this will be the run rate?
Let's say it's in the ballpark. We don't have any ambitions of just hiring people like crazy and crank up the burn rate. Of course, as Peter alluded to, we have unfortunately said goodbye to many good employees. Of course, it was tempting just to roll them over on the SimSports side, but we've not done that. It's interesting at the stage we're in right now because as we have so many new products to develop, of course, it's a one-to-one. The more people we hire right now, the more products we get out. Of course, also the bigger the burn rate and the higher expectations and the higher risk.
When we see, for example, really good people or get really good applicants or we have something extraordinary, then of course we act on it. I would say in ballpark, the R&D investments you see right now are pretty much where we wanna be. We should also keep in mind that for the first time, we are now building a branded business. Of course, we are going to invest in marketing. There's no point in investing in marketing when we don't have products. The overall level will be higher than what you see right now. Then again, to counter that, we should obviously also start to see revenue. That's the whole idea. On the revenue side, before any of you ask, let me just proactively address that. It's simply too early.
We need to get products out there to see how the reaction is. Personally, I believe we will see the biggest revenue pickup when we have what should we call it? A bare minimum of a setup. What's that? That's pedals, steering wheel, and wheelbase. We will have the wheel and the wheelbase roughly a year from now because then you can buy an ecosystem from us. That does not mean we cannot sell pedals in the meantime, and we obviously will. Just from a practical point of view, I have the highest ambitions from the date and from the day where we can start to sell, let's say, a minimum bare bone system.
Great. Very clear. Thank you. The last question, maybe to Peter. Peter, could you give us an indication on your CapEx spending relating to the HQ expansion? I understand its total is $50 million. For when will you initiate and for how many years do you expect to finish the expansion?
Yeah, I can drive away. Yes, the total investment as it stands right now is $50 million, thereabout. We have so far spent $4.something million through Q3 here, and then you'll see further investments when we actually start building in the beginning of next year. The way the cash flow looks is probably $20 million per year for the next couple of years. At this point, we have not discussed in detail with the board how to finance this, but as we have traditionally been cash flow positive quite significantly. That's not the case as it looks right now. Of course, we will need some kind of financing.
At least in my head, we still need a solid bank balance for many reasons. That means that we will not drive the bank balance to zero in order to finance this. We will find financing as needed as we go.
Great. Thank you. Very clear. I'll jump back to the queue.
As a reminder, please press zero one for questions. As a reminder, please press zero one for questions.
Yeah, moderator, I think we should conclude there are no further questions, which is quite normal. W e'll go back to the questions here online, and I think maybe it's a busy earnings day, earnings call day today or something because we only have one question. André, would you address that?
Yeah. There's actually two.
Oh, yeah.
Question one, what was the response from HP when you announced the exit? Of course, I cannot disclose any communication we have with our customers, but I can say on a more general level that some of the customers that we have pretty much gave us the same feedback that they were of course sorry to see us go and they would rather see us stay. They did not offer any solution to the big hole in our bank account though, so the conclusion remained the same.
We will of course support them to the best of our effort and the way we're going to do that is that let's say some of the products that we have in our catalog that are already developed and already there. We will give them a few opportunities to order, and I think they're going to do that. In terms of when we start shipping to Razer, the same, I cannot really disclose any detailed information about any customers. I can say as soon as possible, of course. We don't launch a customer just for the fun of it, so it'll be soon.
Perfect. I've been hitting the refresh button for a good number of times here and nothing more is coming up. I'll just remind you that if you have questions you can send them to us at the email address investor.relations@asetek.com and we'll do our best to answer those. With that, André, we should say thank you for the interest in Asetek and have a wonderful day.
Yep. Thank you.