Welcome to F-Secure's quarter three 2022 quarterly results session. Very warm welcome to everybody online and to our participants over here in the room. I have to say that I have to start off with a disclaimer. I should have calculated how many following growth quarters in revenue we have now achieved, but I dare state that we are now a growth company. It's for such a long time that we've been growing already, and this continues. We as an independent consumer cybersecurity company now are off to our first quarter by ourselves. Like it says on the slide here, we're off to a good start. Let's have a look at some of the main takeaways. First of all, both our revenue and our profitability developed favorably.
Our market environment naturally with an ongoing war in Europe, with rising inflation rates, with power prices going up, interest rates going up, is not the easiest market situation. As we've seen in the past, cybersecurity tends to be one of the more resilient industries for these types of times. Sometimes they even present some opportunities for growth. We would say that we have been very mildly affected by the negative consumer sentiment out there. We have a growth strategy which hinges on three things, higher average revenue per user through our all-in-one security suite, Total, our new products and their growth, so mostly ID Protection and Sense, and then thirdly, our new vertical partnerships that we're looking for outside of our traditional operator partners or CSPs.
Our growth strategy has moved forward nicely. We have signed up a good number of Total partners and upgraded existing partners. Our revenue from the new product initiatives has developed positively. We have new vertical partnerships that we can talk about here. Our outlook for 2022 is unchanged. Okay. In terms of numbers, our revenue increased by 5.3%. Small differences between our partner business and our direct business. Our revenue was EUR 27.9 million. Especially our demand for Total, Sense and ID Protection were contributing to this good development. Partner channel grew slightly more, 5.5% year-on-year, and direct channel about 4.7%.
Partner business got a little bit more boost from the USD, favorable USD/euro exchange rate, which direct business didn't see. Our gross margin was 92%, so we're naturally very happy about the development. It's slightly up from quarter two, so that was good. EUR 25.7 million. Our adjusted EBITA was 40.8% or EUR 11.4 million. Naturally, we are in the middle of a transition as a company after the demerger with WithSecure at the end of quarter two, beginning of quarter three. We have quite a bit of admin costs and tech costs, which are now something of a double bubble as we're building our independence.
This will continue more actively in the fourth quarter of this year. Very good result overall from our point of view and the kind of start that we were expecting for the company. A few words about our road to independence. First of July, we were listed separately on Nasdaq Helsinki after the demerger with WithSecure, who's now focusing on corporate security alone. In this second half of the year, we're now just a couple of weeks away from launching our own ERP system. That's one major milestone for us internally. Our HR, finance, and legal functions are within a couple of months practically totally independent already. We have a service center that we both use, WithSecure and F-Secure, for our invoice management.
In 2023, we're naturally making our major investments on the tech side, so both R&D resourcing, research, threat intelligence, we'll be making significant investments, as we see that at the end of the year, our transitional services agreements with WithSecure will terminate. We have 14 more months to work on full tech independence. Even after that moment in time, I would expect that you know, we would still have cooperation between the two companies, but not in the form of a TSA, but normal commercial agreements. Both create valuable threat intelligence for the other company.
What comes to our customer relationship management service and our own IT services, you know, around mid first half next year, we hope to be in the same position as at the end of the year now with finance, legal, and HR, that we will be, you know, around April timeframe already largely independent, by the end of first half, fully independent. From a double cost perspective, at the end of next year, that's planned to be the end of it. You know, one more thing that I can mention about the road to independence, it's going precisely as planned, which is good. Our growth initiatives, the progress that we've made, we've now added some new partners for Total, which naturally helps us increase our average revenue per user.
Out of our 170 partners, some 20 have already signed up for Total instead of just single products. Our renewal performance across the line, both in partner business and in direct business, has continued strong, which is good, very good, super valuable for us. With regards to developing our current offering and our future offering, both ID Protection and Sense have developed positively in terms of revenue, and they contribute to our numbers. Then we launched a new service we call Cyber Help, which is now available in 11 different languages, for our partners and their end customers. Our vision as a company is to provide the best security experience to people out there, and sometimes people just run out of, you know, ideas. For instance, should I do something more?
Am I now in trouble after I clicked on this link? For these kind of situations, it's good to have a chat service or even a telephone service available that people can connect to, and that will help them understand what is the best course of action in that situation. This is the kind of service that we brought to market now, which is delivering on the best consumer security experience promise. Finally, we've signed up a European insurance company onto Total. That will be launched in April. We signed a European bank, actually through an insurance partner, and the bank will be launching around December. You know, over time, that will be also seen in our revenue as they start ramping up their customer uptake.
Also, we had a utility company in Finland, which I can even name over here. It's Fortum, who started providing Total to their customers in quarter three. An insurance company from Denmark called Tryg, with one G, who launched our services in quarter three. We're definitely making progress, and the demand on that side seems to be good. It's looking very promising for us to expand our partner base from operator driven partnerships. That's all from me. I will hand over to our CFO, Sari Somerkallio.
Good afternoon, everybody. Maybe I start by reminding that everybody on the lines, you can already post questions during while we are speaking so that we then in the Q&A get going a little bit faster. Let's start by looking into the details of the revenue. Timo said most of the stuff that we already have on this slide. I'm not going to repeat everything. Higher growth on partner side and a little bit lower on in our direct channel, but both nicely within the 4%-6% guidance for this year. I would say that from our strategic initiatives, this Total upgrade and the new products are maybe a little bit more stronger present in the partner side during this quarter.
On the direct side, we have the challenges of the consumer sentiment, which is having an impact on our new sales. If you look at on the right-hand side, there's a deferred revenue where you see a lower growth percentage. That's where this consumer sentiment impact is visible. Still seeing higher revenue in the actual spot, but in the future a little bit lower, but it's still growing by more than 4%, that's quite okay in this situation. Renewals are working well, so no problems on that side. If we look at the geographies, very similar story compared to what we have said during the past quarters. The biggest growth in terms of percentages is outside Europe.
North America growing, well, but there we need to admit that the USD impact is big. The underlying growth is also growing in local currency, but it's more like lower single-digit growth that we are seeing there. Getting help from the dollar rates. In Asia, the growth continues to be good. Of course, the numbers are still big, but we expect to see nice growth there also in the future. In Europe, you've heard the story about Poland so many times that challenge continues still. Not disappearing yet, but of course, that impact will reduce over time.
Let's see when we get to the break even in that because we of course have new growing business there, but the impact on the regulation change is still having a negative influence on the underlying numbers. In the Nordics, growth continues to be quite nice. Then we come, I guess, in this call to the interesting part, our expenses where it's not comparable with the past and the numbers look very different. Here if I start with this comparability question, as you know that finance is not black and white, and you can do accounting in many ways.
How we are allocating overheads, and how shared functions were accounted for in the past, so it's just different methodology. That's why now admin is bigger and R&D and sales are lower. This doesn't mean at all that the activity within sales, marketing, and R&D would be lower than earlier. Maybe we can say that there is. You maybe noticed that in personnel we had a few people less at the end of September than end of June. There we have been recruiting all the time and ramping up the competencies that we need, but also there have been people who have left the company. Some were fixed term like summer trainees, so no like issues there.
Maybe we are a little bit behind the plan, but still, I would say everything going well. In October, we have many new people onboarded to the organization. Then on the admin side where you then see a big increase, so some of this the changes in reporting so have an impact there. But this is also, as Timo said, this is the area where we are first going to be independent, so also the ramp-up needs to be faster than in the other areas. We have the TSA cost, which corresponds to the old cost levels, and then we've been ramping up our own organization, so resulting in like double cost. Looking into the fourth quarter, you can expect to see similar structure as here.
We are going to get this new ERP, and I'm sure that there will still be some cost center changes and so on. I don't promise this is exactly the sort of structure that we'll see in the future, but it should be more like this and the carve-out numbers is not a good comparison point at this point. We tried to give as much information as possible on the TSA as we know that this is interesting. In cost of revenue, that's basically the hosting and royalties. There EUR 1 million of the quarterly numbers is TSA, so almost half of the cost. This is an area where TSAs will continue until the end of 2023, not maybe to the full extent, so it will reduce during 2023.
Yeah, let's see exactly at what pace. We have also the agreement WithSecure that there is a plan when certain services will be finished, but there is some flexibility as well. Mostly that will continue in 2023. In R&D, that's similar. There we have EUR 1 million, so a third of the cost is TSA, and that will also to a large extent continue until end of 2023. Again, not so that everything would be finished end of December, but there also is some gradual ramp down. Admin where you see EUR 2.6 million over half of our cost is TSA. That's the part that will reduce most dramatically. Finance, HR, or like general admin type of services will be finished by the end of this year.
There's only this finance shared service center that will continue, and then IT will gradually ramp down mainly during the first half of the year. In Q4, you can expect similar numbers as here. There are some true-up mechanism, but it's fairly fixed price and then next year. It's really based on the services and how we are buying from WithSecure. Hopefully this is helpful. Then, the gross margin was very good in this quarter. We saw a lower gross margin in Q2, but this was now very good. Some of this comes from the cost through the TSA, so we don't have full control or transparency into all the details. I would say this was good and Q2 was bad, so maybe expecting something in between is fair.
This is also a line where the USD has an impact. There are invoices coming in dollars in the hosting area, and some impact actually was included in this number as well. In terms of EBITDA margin was very good. Typically Q3 is a good quarter. There is a more beneficial cost structure when there are people on holiday, and so it is natural. We then. Well, you can count on the numbers. We are not changing our guidance, so see then what Q4 will be like. This was a good quarter for us. A little bit looking at the balance sheet, it has changed a bit again, as there were still some de-merger-related things here.
You see now we have cash EUR 14.6 million. Last time, some of that money was still on a WithSecure bank account, so now it's on our own bank account, which is nice. Trade receivables, they are a little bit bigger than they would normally be, so some of them are still coming through WithSecure. There is a delay because it goes basically through an extra step in the process. That should reduce. Then we have these structuring loans on both sides of the balance sheet. They are due within three years, but with possibility to prepayment.
You might ask that, "Why don't you just settle them immediately?" Well, I think we want to do it as soon as possible, but those are not between the parent companies, but they are in the local entities, and there are lots of details that need to be sorted out before we can do it. But it's work in progress. We are working on that. I guess that you can see that good cash flow continues, so cash is being generated and the result already has made the balance sheet bigger than it was. The year-to-date numbers, not much to add here. The quarter was better than the average so far, so here. We see here also the nice growth of 4.6%, so again, being within the range.
No changes to the outlook, so we still go with this 4%-6% growth for the full year and EBITDA margin around 40%, so no changes to this one. Similarly with our 2025 targets, seeing that we are now working on the ramp-up and building the competencies to create the growth for the future. Both growth and profitability should be on higher level than they are today as we now get everything sorted out. That was all, and now we invite you to ask questions.
Hello. Veikko Silvasti from Danske Bank. Few questions. Let's start with top line related ones. Start off, you said that 20 out of your 170 sales partners are signed up to Total. Does this mean they are already selling it, or do you still need time to implement, and then they only start to sell?
Not everybody is in production yet, so there is still work to be done to roll those out. Revenue will only be starting, you know, fully out of the ones that we've already signed up towards the end of quarter one, you know, to get all 20 firing up on all cylinders.
Clear. Will be a boost for 2023 then. How about the penetration of the Total package in the end user base at the moment? How low is it, and where do you think it could go in midterm, let's say 2025?
Okay. It's still relatively low. Many of our partners have started taking Total to market by providing Total as the product for their new customers. If they have had massive F-Secure customer bases, they potentially have only given them Total for endpoint protection, for instance, to replace SAFE, so that doesn't change the revenue yet. With the installed base, it takes time to upsell them to bigger packages. It's still very small and holds. I mean, I think it's a positive that it holds a lot of growth potential. With regards to the Total base, we've had most of our partners first out of the starting blocks in the Nordic region and, for instance, in Japan.
Which are relatively high average revenue per user areas. We've seen that the ARPU has grown much faster than we expected. It's looking good already now.
Okay, this is maybe behind the strong growth compared, like Nordics is growing way faster than Europe, for example, and this is behind it?
Japan and Nordics are both growing well. This is one of the contributing factors, for sure.
Okay. Then I've been thinking about this Total thing. It seems like such a low-hanging fruit. Why hasn't it been done earlier? Just roll out the Total package to the sales network.
It took us almost three years to build Total. I think it would've been great if it had come out quicker, but it just took quite a bit of time for us to develop it. One of the factors that was potentially holding it back was that we were highly profitable already in the past, but much of the investment in the company was directed towards corporate security business. You know, with the available resources, this was the fastest that R&D could bring it out to market, and that capability to invest into new growth products and new growth initiatives is now better as we all know.
Clear.
Sorry, maybe I could just add to that on our direct business side, we see that the ARPU is growing all the time. There they've been selling Total already for some years, but it's sort of the old Total where they sell it as a package, but it's a bundle of the individual products. There they will get the new real Total quarter one next year, so we there expect an additional boost from that on that side. Now this Total launch that we are talking about, so it's on the partner side.
Can you then give us an update on the sales partners of Kaspersky? Have you won new partners from them, and how long will it take if you win a new partner? What's the timeline until it starts to show in the numbers?
Okay. I won't comment on individual competitors, but I can say that, you know, whenever we sign up a new partner and we've signed up partners from competitive companies in the field in the last six months now, it will take anything between two to three months to as long as 12-18 months due to existing agreements with partners that they want to change. They may still have, for quite some time, an existing agreement with their previous partner, which, you know, stalls in a way our introduction. In average, we'd be talking about from signing anything between four to six months and we're live.
In direct business, we have continued to grow very nicely in Germany, and it's naturally impossible for us to say that from which services they are turning to us, but we can guess that Kaspersky might be one of them. You know, it's been our fastest growing region clearly this year in direct business.
Clear. Final question from me. I noticed that you are increasing your CapEx. What are the drivers behind this, and what's the sustainable level of CapEx then going forward?
Yeah. We have new initiatives within R&D which is not only about the products but also the platform that we are building, and similarly within IT we are building. Like we have mentioned here, ERP and CRM, they would be the biggest items. We expect to continue on this higher level for maybe a couple of years, but don't expect any, like, significant changes to what you are seeing, for example, in this quarter. We are not going to invest like EUR 10 million in CapEx a year suddenly, so not going in that sense to totally different ballpark.
The projects that we are turning into CapEx are clearly one-time investments into initiatives that will be bearing fruit only over a clearly longer period of time, and now we have to make those investments. They will be serving us for a long time.
Yeah. Yeah, on product side, similar pace as previously, but there are now these infrastructure type of things that are adding.
We'll see how much our new research will be, in a way, bringing up new product initiatives. That's still unknown. Remains to be seen. You know, more active research most likely at some point in time creates more R&D efforts, but what kind, if those are incremental projects or if they're completely new, remains to be seen.
Hi, it's Felix Henriksson from Nordea. Couple questions from me. I can go one by one. Firstly, starting on your direct sales channel, which grew pretty nicely despite the weaker consumer sentiment and what we've seen, for example, in global PC shipments. I'm just wondering that is it fair to say that you are gaining market share in that area, or is there some other factors that are allowing you to grow at such a good pace at the moment in that channel?
I think that one of the growth drivers for us in direct business has been that we've managed to improve our renewals. That's a crucial one, and it's a very good one. You could say that it's the low-hanging fruit. Nothing is ever easy, but that's where we managed to do a good job. Also, in direct business, we've managed to work with the products that we've already had in the market for, you know, on average between a year to five years, which is a phenomenal proof of their capability to execute, you know, in the digital channel. Now we're expecting to come up with a completely new product in February, so we're really looking forward positively to that change.
Just to follow up on that, when you talk about renewals, so is it basically that customers are renewing their contracts with sort of a higher share of wallet, i.e., they're buying more from you than they had in their previous deal?
It's two things. Higher percentage of people are renewing, and they're taking bigger packages.
Maybe also it is typical that when you buy first time, there is very often a campaign or quite strong discount. Then when you renew, then it's sort of closer to the list price.
Very good point.
Just to be clear, could you just remind us about the new product that you mentioned for February?
That's Total as one single application. Direct business has been selling Total by combining SAFE, FREEDOME, and ID Protection, and KEY as separate products, and they made it a commercial bundle. As a product, you've had to deploy several different products into your devices.
Even if the functionality is the same as on the partner side, so it is technically a bit different. That's why they were not launched at the same time.
Right. That is their variation in pricing on that one compared to the previous one?
That remains to be seen. There is naturally some inflation-related pressures, and our intention is that we're also, you know, whatever salary increases or production costs, like cloud, infrastructure costs are going up, we naturally need to also take that into account in our pricing. We see that the market can bear it, so we will definitely be moving some of that higher cost into prices. To what level remains to be seen. Sari mentioned already earlier that there was an effect of the currency exchange rate in our production costs, and that was a negative impact on us because, you know, the USD-based cloud costs were more expensive to us than they would've been otherwise. What we gained in revenue, we lost in a way on the margin side, and even though it was good.
Good. Yeah. I was actually gonna follow up on the gross margin next, 'cause there was quite a sequential uptick compared to the second quarter. Aside from the TSA and sort of fluctuations in exchange rate, was there anything sort of structural behind that? I remember that in quarter two-
Mm
You mentioned something about the higher hosting cost?
Mm
Although partly explained by.
Mm
The exchange rates and.
Mm
Perhaps some inefficiency in the beginning of your
Yeah. Yeah
independent journey.
I think there was also some like timing type of topics that just more costs occurred in, even though everything is not just a percentage of revenue, so there were some items like that. As said, this is also we are really looking forward to the time when the whole cost of revenue is in our own hands.
A final question. Could you perhaps disclose the exact USD tailwind on your revenue for the quarter?
We don't have that number here and it has not been disclosed. We are working on reporting, like even officially the currency impact, so I hope that we can do it after Q4 because I think it would be really beneficial for everybody.
We reserve the right to improve our reporting.
Hi, it's Matti Riikonen, Carnegie. Couple of questions. I would actually like to continue on the FX topic because that was my exact question, that what was the FX-adjusted growth in Q3? You talked about lower single-digit number, but I think it would be good to understand how much exactly it was.
I have to add that the lower single digit that Sari referred to was only with regards to North America. Out of our EUR 27 million revenue, a bit over EUR 4 million comes from the U.S. Whatever FX benefit is, that's where you see that.
Right. Do you have other FX exposures rather, outside U.S. that would have-
Yeah
an impact on the number?
The other biggest currency is yen and pound sterling and then Swedish krona, but they are much smaller, the impact, than the USD.
Yeah.
Yeah. The number two is clearly the pound.
Mm.
Swedish krona and
Mm-hmm
the yen.
In your previous comment about the exposures, you were saying that you are trying to get those numbers, I mean, the total.
The-
FX impact.
Yeah. So that we could actually report them. Of course, we have an idea of what they are, but we don't have a system so that we could say that now this is the number, and that's why we don't want to disclose that either. Of course, we know, have an idea of what they are, but.
Okay
working on that.
Fair enough. Another FX topic is the net impact on, let's say, EBIT-level profitability. I mean, you had some positives in top line, some negatives in gross margin. If we just look at any profitability line like EBIT, what is the kind of net impact there? Do you have a natural hedge?
Yeah
Do you get benefit from?
Yeah. Yeah
Let's say, USD
Yeah. Yeah
How does it go?
Of course, the outcome to that question follows from the previous, that we work on the reporting details. Yes, there is natural hedging because we have also costs in the same currencies. The impact on result is smaller, but it would still be positive, but less positive than the revenue impact.
The natural hedge is not 100%.
Yeah, exactly.
Something less.
Yeah.
Okay. Finally, when you say that the direct new sales was trending down in the quarter, how was it between the different months? I mean, we have seen that consumer sentiment has been kind of getting weaker and weaker as we speak. Was the trend very clearly pointing to that direction so that September would have been the weakest?
No.
No?
It was the opposite.
Mm.
Okay.
Go figure.
Yeah.
It was the opposite.
I think it was sort of around mid-summer we discussed that the weather had an impact because weather actually has an impact on how people do this kind of purchases that are not like groceries. But I think it has continued. Yeah, not like you said that it would have been September.
September was better than July and August.
Okay. Kind of illogical.
Yeah.
Consumer spending power point of perspective.
We were guessing that this would happen, what you just said, but we were happy to see that that was not the case. We had some impediments also in the summertime when we started, you know, driving our marketing efforts independently. There were certain marketing assets that we use in our campaigning that we couldn't use because we didn't yet have an account in certain marketing services that we needed to boost our services. For instance, something like five, six weeks in July, early August, we didn't have, like, production machines in the marketing side in use, which was silly, but that also held us back somewhat.
Mm.
What effect that-
We cannot say that would have been the whole thing.
No. You know, what kind of effect that was difficult to say, but let's say that we had some glitches.
Okay. Interesting. Thank you.
Hi. It's Atte Riikola from Inderes. There was already lots of good questions, so I have only few left. Maybe still a little bit more about economic uncertainty. If you look at the partners and channel sales, do you expect there to be some impact from that?
Forecasting the future, as we know, the most dangerous part. Let's put it this way. We haven't seen indications of that.
Mm.
We don't hear indications of that. That's all I can say at this point in time, unfortunately.
I think we have seen that our business is fairly resilient. This is not where people want to start saving money at the same time as they have maybe some challenges with their daily like economies, so they are also concerned about these things. If you are buying through your Like, when you are buying broadband and your mobile connection, so you don't start like taking off the cybersecurity part from there. That's why it's seen on this direct business side where it's a concrete when you go and buy a new laptop. That's a concrete like event where you could buy something new. That's why it's visible there. It's a different type of transacting.
Yeah. About the recruitment. The number of employees was a little bit down compared to Q2. Has the attrition level been higher than expected, or was there some other reasons behind that?
It was higher than what we expected, but not much. It was a bit higher. Like Sari says, in the times of transition, we've had to hire quite a number of consultants on short-term basis, and that is also visible in our attrition numbers. In a way, it was expected or summer helps.
It's been slightly higher. Also, I have to say that, you know, when a company demerges, somebody has joined a company of 1,700 people called F-Secure Corporation in the past, and then there is two different companies, F-Secure and WithSecure. For some people, you know, for whatever reason, this in a way is like a tennis break point and they feel that maybe I consider my options, you know, I've been with the company now for so long, and now it's a bit different. Maybe I'll do something else. I believe that some of that has been also hitting us, that actually F-Secure is not the same company it used to be. Neither is WithSecure, and that has a certain effect.
Yeah. Last question. Could you remind us when those problems in Poland begin? Just trying to figure out.
Probably 14 months ago.
14 months ago?
Yeah.
Okay.
August, September 2021.
All right. Thank you.
Any online, Iina?
Yes, we actually have a bunch of questions from Jaakko Tyrväinen at SEB. Let's take these one by one. Could you update us on the numbers of the Sense deals? In June that was two new deals since the 2021 Capital Markets Day.
No new deals to record at this time.
Okay, let's take the second one. Looking at the headcount of current R&D team, where are you now and how much the R&D team will grow from Q3 towards end of next year?
I don't have the precise numbers for R&D specifically on my mind. We're talking roughly 20% growth on the whole company level, what we're expecting by the end of next year. Roughly 20%-25%. Out of that, R&D is by far the biggest contributor, but not the only one.
The next one. Do you have any typical seasonality in sales looking at Q4?
It's typically better than, for instance, quarter three. I would say that the biggest swinger in quarter four on the partner business side is that our typical sales cycles are relatively long. They can be anything between six to 18 months and, you know, we naturally try to close as many of those in quarter four as possible. If we're successful, as I think we've been relatively successful in the past years, towards the end of the year, then we can see a little bit more uptick, and the same thing could happen now. At the same time, it's very digital, you know. Either it's pushed forward or you close it, and depending on that, you know, the result can be and can swing quite a bit with regards to new partner signings.
On the direct business side, it's a relatively busy cycle, quarter four, but naturally, as we're looking forward to launching the new Total business generation or the product generation in February, we think that we will also see now quite a good upswing in direct business in quarter one, not only quarter four.
The last question is, your deferred revenue declined quarter-on-quarter. What should we think of that?
We should think that new sales has not gone as well on direct business side as in the previous quarters. That's the only contributor. As we recognize our customer subscriptions, which are oftentimes anything between 12 to 18 to 24 months on the direct business side, we recognize that revenue month-on-month, and as there's been less new revenue, there's less deferred revenue.
Those were all the questions online.
Okay.
Hi, Matti Riikonen, Carnegie. Still one question related to inflation. You talked about your kind of increased costs and your willingness to hike your prices accordingly. Do you think that you are in a position to basically hike your prices as much as your costs increase or even more? Or do you think that you have to be settling for less for next year? What's your kind of idea at the moment of your pricing power?
First of all, I could say that, what comes to our partners, they're all increasing their prices. It's not like this is new for them. Naturally, we need to have that capability in the agreement that we have with them. If we don't have such a clause, we are working to add an annex that, you know, addresses that one. Our capability to increase prices towards partners has not been used actively in the past. There hasn't been an immediate need. It's more happened through products that have had higher prices. We still believe that we have a good chance, to transfer our cost increases. If it's going to be, you know, 1% increase in cost to 1% increase in price, I'm not in a position to say if that's possible. Sari can maybe comment on that.
I would say that our pricing power is still good because our partners are used to this kind of thinking and also the fact that we're coming up with a completely new type of product generation on direct business, that gives us the power now to set a new price. Naturally, everybody sells in the direct business side very heavily discount-driven for the first year or whatever is the first period, and then when people renew, they come to the real price. I would say that we do have a chance.
Maybe a comment about how the inflation will hit us. Salary inflation is the biggest item by far. The other question is the hosting cost. Hosting costs have typically gone down over time because there's just more productivity in that area. I've also seen discussions where the question is just that will they decrease less than they used to? Of course, now we have also the USD working in the other direction. Salary inflation is by far the biggest item. Of course, no one knows how it will actually go.
For instance, in production costs, our partners have not increased their prices. Due to more usage, there's been some increase, and also the USD effect has been negative for us. They haven't increased their prices. Like Sari says, they, like, for instance, AWS says that they will lower their prices every time it rains in Seattle, so that's how the market has been up until now. On the partner business side and overall, naturally our salaries are the biggest item.
Maybe further to the contracts that you have with your partners. Are you allowed or do the contracts actually say that you can raise prices or do you have to renegotiate those parts? I think that's the crucial one because if it doesn't say that in the contract, it will be a much more tricky road.
Mm.
Otherwise, it goes as granted.
There are both kinds. There are discussions we've already started. I would say that overall our partner relationships are very good and very strong. Our partner NPS is currently at 57. It's not like it's two enemies getting into a negotiation table when we talk about something like that, so it's a good discussion so far. Time will tell if we can get it all across the line. We do naturally also have capabilities to increase prices which are already in the agreements. There are both kinds.
Okay. Because isn't it so that if the partners raise their prices, they are basically just doing it so that they will have more?
Yeah.
Their share is increasing. You're not getting any bigger, anymore.
Nothing comes automatically.
Mm
Because our income is based on the number of subscribers, not the price they are getting.
Isn't there a unit price?
There is a unit price.
Yeah, yeah.
Our unit price stays the same unless we trigger an increase.
Exactly. It remains to be seen how these negotiations succeed from your side.
Yes. Some we can, you know.
Are a lot easier.
Some are easier, and we can already make changes. Some require negotiations, and we'll see over time.
Okay. Thanks for the comment. That increases quite a lot of the clarity.
Mm.
Veikko Silvasti, Danske Bank. One more question on the margins and the TSAs. Obviously the TSAs are burdening your margins this year.
Mm.
Now we will get some effect of it by the end of this year as the admin costs decrease and so forth, but then you start to probably invest more and more in R&D. Do you expect that the TSAs will burden your margins more in 2023 than they did in 2022?
Yeah, that's a complex question. TSA levels are expected to go down, but how much, that's, of course, a different topic. I think in R&D the ramp-up is more gradual, so you could maybe expect that R&D goes up at the same time as TSAs go down. I think now in admin it's this sort of double cost impact is heavier because it comes so much faster.
2023 less double costs.
Mm
than 2022.
Mm.
Okay, thank you.
Any other questions online?
No, we don't have any. No.
Okay. I believe this brings us to the close. Thanks for all the good questions. Thanks for attending online. Much appreciated. I wish everybody a great quarter four, including ourselves. Bye.
Thank you.