Good morning everybody here in Finland, Europe. Good evening, good morning, wherever you are joining us from. Welcome to the quarter one financial results session of F-Secure and the announcement of the acquisition of Lookout Life, the consumer security business unit of Lookout. We have a bit more news to talk about today than in our regular quarterly results sessions. My name is Timo Laaksonen. I'm the President and CEO of F-Secure. Let's have a look at the agenda. First of all, in normal fashion, we will go through our quarter 1 2023 interim report. Secondly, we will go through the news that we broke this morning at 7:00 A.M. Finnish on the acquisition of the mobile consumer security business unit of Lookout. Finally, we'll have a Q&A. That's what we're going through today.
Let's get to the quarter one results. We continued executing on our strategy that we have communicated earlier. That's the main theme for quarter one. This was a tough quarter for us, and we didn't meet the expectations we had set for ourselves. Our revenue grew by 1.6%, and especially the new business sales in direct business was hampering our development. I'll get to that a bit later. Right now, market uncertainty continued, and Windows laptop sales and Mac sales were down anything between 30%-40% according to market data. That gave us a very tough environment to be selling consumer security services to people who were selling less devices than in a long time now. That naturally caused a difficult market condition for us.
On February 15th, we did 3 things on the same date, February, you know, in terms of launches to the market. We launched our refreshed brand, kept the name, a good name. Why change? We also launched our new website and a new e-store. Finally, we launched our new generation, 1 single app service for consumer cybersecurity, Total. All of these were done on the same day, and that was done through our e-com channel on direct business, and also made available to our partners, who now had the capability to provide all of our services on all of the platforms. In April 2022, our partners were only able to provide our Total services on mobile platforms, Android and iOS. Now on all of them.
After the period, as a matter of fact, last night, we have signed an agreement to acquire Lookout Life. In terms of strategy execution, what did we do? In terms of accelerating our rollout of Total, which is our all-in-one consumer cybersecurity app, we made progress by signing up 3 completely new partners, and we signed up 8 of our existing partners to move on to Total. Out of our top 50 partners, we now have 23 signed up for Total. 27 to go to make the full 50. As I already mentioned, we naturally made a big product launch on Total, which allows us to grow the average revenue per user moving forward.
Secondly, very glad to say that we made good progress with Sense, embedded connected home security into the home Wi-Fi router that broadband providers are providing to their customers. We launched new services at two operators, Nuuday in Denmark and T-Mobile Netherlands, and you can guess in which country. Okay? They went out with the services which now brings two well-sized operators joining our Sense family. We also signed up our second embedded security partner. You may remember that we announced in our quarter four release that we have set up a new product business unit for embedded security services, and we said that we had signed up a major European operator group for that service. Now we have a payment broker over in Asia who is joining the same initiative.
We're making progress also on that front. Finally, we've expanded into new vertical partnerships as we have communicated as one of our crucial targets. We joined forces with Allianz Partners, the arm of Allianz, one of the biggest insurance companies in the world, who actually provides all the ancillary services to the insurance core products that Allianz provides through its own operations in different countries and through its partners, for instance, in banking. You may know that, you know, when you're doing your banking services, every once in a while your bra-bank says that there are these additional insurance services or other services that they provide. Allianz Partners is oftentimes behind many of those services that are provided to customers. Naturally we have a very active pipeline growing quickly on the new vertical partnership side.
As a matter of fact, we are going from, in a way, incubation stage in our own business operations of the new vertical partnerships into establishing it as a separate dedicated unit inside our business team. We're pushing the pedal to the metal there as it's progressing well. Short-term performance drivers. Some of these affected us in the first quarter, some positively, some negatively. Before I go into this, I will just say that, you know, the new sales difficulties we had in our direct business with were not only attributed to the consumer sentiment. We raise our hand that when we implemented our new web and we implemented our new way of talking about our services, not all of that clicked from the first moment.
We're now busy optimizing our performance in the direct business so that we get the performance up to the levels where it was before. Just as a, you know, as an example, search engine optimization, when you change the language that you use to promote yourself, you know it affects SEO, so organic traffic may take a hit. These are the kinds of things we've seen. So we are busy optimizing, and we believe that we will soon see good results from that. About the growth drivers, the weak consumer sentiment I already talked about. In terms of partner channel, it's solidly moving forward, right? We signed up, maybe you remember, we signed up 18 new partners, the new record in F-Secure last year, and many of those are going live now in quarter two.
It takes a bit of time to get those services out there. We're going to have roughly 20 new service launches, either completely new partners or upgrades to the new generation Total in the second quarter. We believe that we're on a good projection over there to continue growing. There is a strong underlying demand over there for consumer security services. That hasn't gone anywhere. You know, with the war raging, a lot of social engineering attempts out there, people being scammed, it's obvious that the need hasn't gone anywhere. Profitability drivers, we made big investments into growth and also continued investments into our independence in terms of technology following our demerger from WithSecure. That's something that naturally affects our profitability in the short term.
On the other hand, these Transition Service Agreement costs are bound to finish off at the end of this year. Naturally there are other environmental drivers like the currency exchange rates out there that we can't control. The cybersecurity demand continues to be good. In that sense, you know, we can say that, for instance, if we look at our retention rates, they haven't taken a dip in any way. That's the solid backbone of the business, which is always great. That's all from me for now. I would like to welcome my colleague, Sari Somerkallio, our CFO, to take the stage. Thank you.
Okay. Good morning, everybody. Let's look at the financials for the first quarter. Revenue growth 1.6%. Currency neutral 1.2%, so not the big FX impact in this quarter. Like Timo said, we are not happy with this number. We knew that Q1 was on the lower side of the quarters that we have planned for this year, but this is lower than expected, so we need to fight for this one. Looking at the geographies, Asia Pacific had some of this FX hit, so there we see that the underlying growth is actually very good. That's a market that we continue investing in and expect to see future growth as well.
In the U.S., we got some help from the FX. Europe continues to be a very mixed bag. We have good things happening, but also we have talked about Poland for many times. I hope that we get rid of the Poland comment soon. We are planning and seeing the turnaround in those numbers. Still remains negative in this quarter. Even if we have the new partners and Total conversions, also there are then some legacy products and customers which are declining. That's why the rest of Europe is so low.
Germany is not commented on this slide, but I think it worth mentioning that we've had the nice direct business growth in Germany for the past year, and now this quarter it was flat. In January and February, we saw the growth pattern continue like it's been. Last year, the growth started in March, so the comparison numbers were so big that now Germany direct business March numbers were negative. Overall, Germany remained flat for this quarter. We expect it to be a growth market in the future as well. Looking at the channels, so partner business +1.7% and direct +1.2%. I think in the partner business, as I said on the previous side, that's a mixed bag of positives and negatives.
Yeah, we hope that to be higher. Direct business was clearly the disappointment where the market sentiment and maybe we can say that Germany thing last year was so big that it also had an impact. Here, clearly higher expectations, and we are working on fixing the e-com. In deferred revenue, you still see quite clearly higher number than in the actual revenue, and that still reflects that the retail business is doing fine. People in this market situation, people are going for the long deals and are happy to make longer commitments as the price is so much lower. That's of course something for the future bag in terms of revenue.
Looking at the cost side, again, same boring story that when you compare with last year, it is not really comparable. During WithSecure time, the times, allocations into functions were different. This doesn't give the true picture. It's not so that we would have put so much effort into admin. It's just that we are not allocating to certain costs to other functions as before. The true story here is that we've increased costs, and it's really about the people cost.
We've added a big number of people during the last year. It's part of building the independence in the first place on like the admin side in ensuring that we are able to operate, but then really ongoing on the R&D side, a bit on sales side as well to deliver the future growth and build the foundation for that. In real life, it is R&D that is growing fastest of the cost. Also, you can see that the CapEx numbers were bigger, so especially within R&D, we are capitalizing certain initiatives which are about building the base and ensuring that we get rid of the R&D TSAs.
Talking about the TSAs, here first you see the total cost for the quarter and how much of that was TSA and compared to TSA for the six months last year. You see in cost of revenue, that's mainly the hosting and royalties. We continue with a similar rate. Here, this is assumed to continue the whole year, maybe a little bit reducing towards the end of the year, but currently it's still similar rate to how it was last year. In terms of R&D, also you see that there is proportionally a slight reduction. Certain things we have taken over, the R&D TSA is split into a lot of streams. When we are ready with the stream, then that invoicing stops.
Some of that we've been able to do. Then in admin, we told that most of the admin TSAs ran out at the end of last year. There you see a huge reduction. What we have remaining there is certain IT costs. I think all or at least almost all should be done by end of Q2. In finance, we are still continuing with the KL's shared services. In admin, it's really getting small, and we are quite confidently running on our own in that area. Looking at the profitability, Gross margin, a bit lower number than in December. There are fluctuations here and FX impacts, and a lot of this is still done through the TSA.
I think quite solid numbers still and no concerns here. In EBITDA %, last year Q1 was very high. That's a non-comparable number. I compare now more versus the Q4. We are a little bit higher, that is according to plan. I know that this was lower than the consensus forecast, this is in terms of our internal plans. This EBITDA % was as planned. It is the growth number that is the disappointment internally. This is going according to plan. Now we just want more growth, that's a main way to drive this upwards. That's definitely the plan we have.
Looking at the balance sheet, maybe just picking a few things from here, you see equity ratio now at 26.5. I think it was around 40 at year-end, that's because the dividend has been taken out from equity. This is a natural dip that we would have paying generous dividends. What we see at year-end, you see the dividend payable there separately and that's now been paid then since the end of Q1. Regarding outlook, despite the somewhat disappointing Q1, we keep the same guidance for the full year. We definitely believe in our own execution of the plan. We have, you know, we've signed a lot of new partners.
We've done Total conversions, and the impact of those will kick in during the rest of the year. We expect the growth to accelerate. Not changing the growth guidance and similarly not changing the EBITDA guidance. When we close the Lookout Life deal, then we need to look into this. They have very similar profitability to us, so, the main change will be, of course, growth path at what the revenue will be for this year. That, of course, depends also when we actually close. We'll come back to this when closing the deal. We decided in order to give you tools to look into the impact of the acquisition to update the midterm targets, now talking about year 2026, compared to earlier talking about year 2025.
We believe the revenue to be above EUR 200 million by 2026. Later on, when we today look at Lookout Life, you'll see a bit more from those numbers. Profitability, we keep the same, as it is similar profitability to us. We expect to continue with investing in the future, that's why we are not taking in any sort of scale benefits here compared to the previous guidance. Dividend policy will remain the same. Earlier, we said around or above 50%, where above was the case last year that when we had cash at bank and no planned investments, we could pay a higher dividend.
When we have now, as there is planned to be a quite a big loan, so then we keep at the 50% level. The same philosophy that we've been talking about during the past half year. We introduce a new target for the leverage. Now, we are going higher than 3 with the planned acquisition. Do we say that the normal satisfactory level would be below 2.5, but with our cash flow okay to go above 3 in the case of acquisition if that is the right thing to do at that moment. That's from the financials.
I think that, we go into the acquisition, not trying to brush the Q1 under the table or carpet, but I think this is still the key thing that we've been expecting and planning for a while. Now handing back to Timo.
All right. Thank you very much, Sari. We'll have the Q&A at the end for both quarter one results and the transaction news that we have. We have been communicating for the past year roughly that we are united behind the vision to become the number one consumer security experience company in the world, and this is what we are taking seriously and now through an acquisition in addition to organic growth. Let's look at the details, not the disclaimer. Sari and myself will be presenting once again, and let's talk about the strategic rationale a little bit. First of all, U.S. is the market in consumer cybersecurity. It is by far the biggest market, and we are going to be roughly tripling our business in the world's biggest market thanks to this acquisition.
We're strengthening our position as the leader serving the communications service provider market. I'll get to a bit more detail on that one later on. This in itself is already very important and massive for us. Secondly, Lookout Life has been from its inception, Lookout as a company, a very mobile security-centric operation. If you look at F-Secure, we've been more at home with the fixed broadband provider partner base, so serving users of Windows and laptops, naturally also iOS and Android. Lookout is optimized to serve the mobile customer base, mobile first, and this is what the world these days is. When you take the first device from your night desk, you know, beside your bed, it's most likely a mobile device, not your laptop, I would bet.
This is a mobile first world. We will be much better to serve it in the future. We've indicated earlier that we have about 16, 17 million consumers that we're serving. We're going to be hitting almost 30 million, a little bit short, thanks to this acquisition. You know, finally, or not finally, but, you know, next up, businesses like ours in tech and, you know, SaaS type of businesses, this is all about people. This is all about people. We can say anything we want about the technologies, services, go to market, and so forth, but this is about people. Our people from Lookout and our own team very much share the same type of culture.
You know, transparency, honesty, never letting go of our customer commitments, partner commitments, empowered people, and doing the right thing. This is what we share. It's been good as we've been working in the past months on this transaction, that it's been obvious that we are, you know, practically feeling and working the same way from the get-go. Now if you just heard what Sari said, our financial profiles are very strikingly similar in terms of the strength we have in our operation, very profitable. Now we'll have much more capability to invest and execute on our vision towards that best consumer cybersecurity experience. Instead of two slightly smaller companies doing it on their own, towards the same vision that we, by the way, share, now we're going to do it and pool our resources and be able to grow faster.
This transaction is all about growth. We're not here to optimize costs. We're here to boost growth. Finally, we believe that this transaction has significant value for our shareholders, and Sari will be going into a bit more detail about that, a couple of slides from here. Now, proud and excited to introduce to you Firas Azmeh, who is the President of Lookout Life and a future member of F-Secure's leadership team. We're in the process of agreeing with Firas his role in our upcoming leadership team, and we'll be giving you more information about that when we go for closing and talk more details then. Hey, Firas, welcome to the stage.
Thank you. Good morning and good evening, everybody. I wanna just introduce myself, Firas Azmeh. I have been at Lookout for about 12 years. As you can see, I joined the company back in 2011. The company was a very small company in consumer cybersecurity, focusing on solving the problem of security on mobile devices, iOS and Android very specifically. Early days, really it started out as a direct-to-consumer company. My role in joining the company back then was really to help scale the business, and we did that through partnerships. We brought on partnerships with T-Mobile, partnerships with Sprint, who was the third largest carrier in the U.S. at the time, AT&T and other partners as well.
Over the ensuing few years, we helped scale that business. Over the course of the following several years, I've held a variety of different roles in the company, always with partners across both consumer as well as enterprise as well. We also scaled our enterprise business through our carriers, and I was responsible for that as well. Over the past year or so, we went back to investing more in consumer security. There's a massive opportunity, and we felt like there is an opportunity for us to reimagine security.
When we say reimagining security, we're talking about providing a much more holistic experience, providing a solution, providing not features, but overall solution that protects the user and going away from just notifications more towards remediation. We've been embarking on reimagining that experience. This is something that we've been working on over the past little over the past while. In my current role, up until just now, I've been president of Lookout. We've split the company into Lookout Life and the Lookout Corp, if you will. Lookout Life has is the consumer part of Lookout. We have R&D, we have product management, sales, marketing, all under the Lookout Life umbrella.
Just give you a quick snapshot here of the company and of our capabilities. The company really started, it was founded in 2007, but it really took off following in 2009. If you, for context, 2007, we were still talking about Windows and BlackBerry devices. The iOS and Android hadn't yet launched. The company really started taking off in 2009. As I mentioned earlier, it was direct to consumer at the beginning. Today we are a EUR 36 million in revenue and EUR 14 million in EBITDA. We look at our capabilities in four separate categories, and they all sort of fit together.
Device security has the traditional AV set of features, but we also have a feature set of features around anti-theft and anti-loss, things like locating, screaming, wiping your device, but we also have a variety of theft alert types of features where we look for indicators that a device has been stolen, and we let the user know that they that device is maybe at risk or maybe stolen, and we let them know so that they can take action. The other category, if you will, is identity protection, that there's a whole set of features under identity protection.
In the U.S., we provide identity insurance, $1 million identity insurance, restoration, lost wallet, and various other services to help users with identity compromise. We also have identity monitoring as well as part of that capability. We mentioned a year ago, we acquired a company in Central Europe based out of Slovakia, a company called SaferPass. That's a password management product. The idea was not necessarily just to add password management as a module, but the idea, again, back to the concept of integrated security and providing a whole solution, it was...
The idea was to integrate password management feature set into the rest of the features so that we can get to that solution that we're talking about. Password management is another category. We have a set of features around privacy and online protection for users. That includes anti-phishing. It includes network monitoring and protection. It includes a set of privacy features. All of those capabilities are together what we are integrating now into the reimagined, redesigned product that we're launching later on in the year. That's a glimpse about the company. I'm happy to take questions later on.
Thank you, Firas. Let's move on. If we look at our split of revenue previously as F-Secure on the left, you can see that rest of Europe and Nordics have been roughly 40% each, while North America has been about 15%. Now in the middle, you can see a very different kind of a pie chart, with the USA being almost 90% of Lookout Life's revenue. As a result, we will now have on the right, you can see it, you know, after the transaction, we will have three very strong legs already to stand on, the Nordics, the U.S. or North America, and rest of Europe, and a relatively fast-growing region in rest of the world.
For instance, Japan is also getting a boost from this deal through a partnership like NTT Docomo that Firas referred to earlier. We will also be seeing good growth in the rest of the world. That's good. You know, the U.S. market is the biggest market in the world in terms of consumer cybersecurity. It grows at the fastest pace, roughly double the speed than Europe, Middle East, and Africa. That's good. It's good to be in a market that grows. We can grow with the market, go to the wave that grows fastest. Secondly, the U.S. market is actually the most targeted region in the world for cyberattacks. The new anomalies, the biggest threats, the new threats are most likely visible in the U.S. market first.
That has made consumers in the market very well aware that they need to stay protected. Actually, the willingness to pay for services is roughly 50% higher in the U.S. than it is in Europe. This also for us is good on our journey to increase the ARPU. This is a very good market to be in for us, which has been one of the primary rationales for us to go forward with this transaction. Now this one here is not about Pac-Man. This is about looking at the go-to-market strategies that we have for the companies, you may think that we got the numbers wrong because they're so similar. They're not. I assure you these are the correct numbers. Roughly 80% partner in both companies to begin with and 20% direct.
Our troops are already from the get-go very much aligned in terms of competencies, skills, you know, the understanding of the target market. We don't actually have to do a whole lot here in terms of adjusting our marketing, sales, business development, solution delivery kind of capabilities. They're right from the beginning. That's good. I think that that's a whole lot of synergy right there. I referred earlier that we're strengthening our position as the leader in serving more communication service providers with consumer security services than any other player in the market, any of our competitors, and that difference is now just getting bigger. We're going to be serving almost 50% of the CSPs out there, thanks to this added boost and injection that we're getting from Lookout Life.
We will be growing from roughly 130 CSP partners to 150, thanks to this. Not just any CSPs. AT&T, T-Mobile, NTT Docomo, they're names that people in tech, we all know them, very big ones. We've talked about our initiatives in establishing new vertical partnerships. Lookout Life is already serving a major insurance company over in the U.S., Allstate, which adds on to our strategic execution. NTT Docomo is an embedded technology, embedded security technology partner for Lookout Life. Also on that front, we will be getting stronger. From several, let's say, strategic execution points of view, not only financially, we believe that we are actually going to get a big boost into our strategy execution with this transaction.
If we look at the product portfolios, on the left side, we have certain things that F-Secure is bringing to the pot, which are unique for us. On the right, you can see some of the additional things that Lookout Life is bringing into the pot. When we combine all of this, we will have even a more holistic capability to serve all the relevant needs that consumers have. There are some overlapping features. There are things that have to do with endpoint protection, identity monitoring, password management. That's fine. We will be able to pool our resources and dedicate, you know, just dedicate a certain number of people to work on the overlapping features and then release some of that force to work on new feature development and accelerate our speed in terms of delivering on our vision.
Final slide from me. You know, the shared company culture, which is absolutely crucial. I said people first. We have strong competencies and experiences working with partners and products. Naturally, we're going to get a whole lot of people now adding, added into our team who are specialists at the mobile side of the business. We're jumping now to being a 500-person company. We can deliver more than we were able to deliver before. We are sharing an entrepreneurial spirit on both sides. I already referred to that. You know, transparency, agility, honesty, you know, delivering on promise and the hunger to get to be the number one. Now we have more money to invest into the talents and know-how of our people, which will drive innovation.
Finally, you know, we'll get best-in-class people in terms of mobile security capabilities. Puts us in a good position overall. That's all from me. I'm handing back to Sari to talk about the financials related to this transaction.
Thanks. Okay. I think this is really a moment that puts a big smile on the CFO's face. You've been asking us several times that what do we do with our all our funds and cash flow, and here you see what we can do with it. Testing, testing the limits actually what we can do when we heard first time of this thought that is it a little bit big for us? Yeah, we still were able to make it happen. If we start with the purchase price, paying 223 million, approximately 202 million EUR. Looking at the EV/EBITDA multiple 15.7, I guess you think that it might be a little bit high.
We are ourselves currently at 12.6 or something like that. Yes, it's maybe a little bit on the high side, but we feel we are also buying a very good company. It is profitable like we are, and the growth pace is actually faster than we have. We think this is justified. The big thing is, of course, that we expect to get a lot of synergies, especially its revenue synergies. It's, it is a little bit sort of counting apples and pears together when we look at this, how we are adding the 27 synergies into that multiple. It just sort of to give a picture that what we are going for in this and why we feel that there is a lot of added value for us.
I'll go through the financial impact part on the next slide. I jump over that. In financing, we are fully financing this with debt. We've agreed with OP and Danske. They are funding this together as a club. After this, our leverage will be around 3.22 times EBITDA, let's talk more about that also later on on the financing slide. About the integration, of course, now when we are closing the deal, we don't know exactly. When we are ready, we'll close within 5 days. That's the deal. Now the question is that when are we ready with everything?
It could be all ready within May, but Q2 is the official statement and target that it is during Q2, and we'll tell you when we are ready. Based on our understanding, we are not, there are no authorities, competition authorities or anything like that would need to approve this, but it's in our own hands, when we are ready with everything, between seller and buyer. Of course, there will be TSAs in this deal as well. We are sort of getting rid of the gradually of the WithSecure TSAs, but there will be a new set of them.
Here, we expect the admin side to be much lighter than in the WithSecure case because now we have our own infrastructure, and we are able to absorb this actually quite well. The admin TSAs will be measured in months, and on the R&D technology side, there will be longer TSAs. We'll then later on so talk more about them as sort of openly as possible. That's, that's a fact in this kind of carve-out deal where we are, the carve out on the other side is very similar to the demerger process that we did on our own side. Looking at the numbers, these are of course just illustrative and you'll get the official numbers after closing and when we really prepare the proper pro forma numbers.
Based on last year's numbers, the total is just below EUR 150 million. So we are basically adding a third of our current size. Profitability, very similar level in the release you saw that the previous year Lookout Life had much higher profitability. You also saw that they had added a big number of people, so they have taken profitability down in order to ensure the future growth. That's the story behind that trend. Similar level to ours and based on last year, so 39% or EUR 57 million is the starting point in the pro forma numbers, which we of course assume to be close to these but to be confirmed.
Then, about the synergies, what we are really trying to achieve here. Growth is really the big thing. As you've seen, there are lots of similar things and complementary things. Upselling and cross-selling is really the big, big, big item that we are going after. Also we talk ourselves about increasing ARPU, and that is valid also for this case. We believe that we can reach even more there. As we put together the competencies, and we are a bigger team with already today very similar ambitions and visions about the future. We believe we can accelerate the plans that we have in place on both sides. Then about the EBITDA impact of the synergies. That EUR 10 million is not the cost synergy number.
That's the EBITDA impact of all the synergies we expect to get. You can take basically the gross margin of the revenue synergies, and that leaves us around with the EUR 10 million number. There are some cost synergies because of the scale, and especially on R&D side. We have a lot of continuous recruitment pressure, and we believe that we can leverage some of the resources on Lookout side. Also in the cost of revenue, the royalties and hosting, there can be some synergies. We have some added cost in order to get that growth, so there are some areas where we need to add resources. Those cost synergies and added cost pretty much offset each other.
What you see is as a net is the gross margin impact of the growth synergies. If we look at earnings per share, we feel this is very accretive. Of course, this year there will be IAC cost. Current forecast is around EUR 7 million for the full year. If we leave that aside, already this year should be positive if we look at the cash part of the EPS and next year significantly and increasing. As normal, we will do the purchase price allocations. We have some ideas about that, but we need to finalize that, and that will of course have an impact on EPS. Current feeling is that probably 2024 EPS impact would be flat, and after that it would be positive.
Even if we think about our dividend policies or with the same policy, we will get short-term same and long-term possibility to pay higher than previously. Even in the reported EPS, it's positive but with some delay. We'll confirm those PPA and goodwill amounts when we are ready. Yeah, looking at the funding and leverage. As said, fully debt-funded this transaction, and assumed net debt or the leverage is 3.2 after the transaction. Strong positive cash flow will continue, so we expect the leverage to come down actually pretty fast.
Already during 2024, we would reach that 2.5, which we now set as the threshold for us sort of being a good cap in the normal situation. With our cash flow, the leverage will go down quite fast when we don't do things like this and then it can jump. I think during this process we have seen that we find funds for this kind of transactions when needed. I think this level is more for a temporary basis and not a sustainable level. We are happy in this place currently, and we really believe we can provide added value to our shareholders. Now we go into the Q&A.
All the three of us are available for both Q1 and Lookout questions.
Sami Sarkamies, Danske Bank. I have three questions for Firas. I'll take this one by one. Firstly, how concentrated is your revenue base? You mentioned large customers like T-Mobile, AT&T, and Docomo. How large are these as individual customers and do you expect them to stay on board also going forward?
We expect them to stay on board for sure. In terms of concentration, we're definitely very U.S.-centric and obviously skewed towards the larger partners. Generally speaking, all of our partners will be on board.
Okay.
Maybe you can share some of the initial comments that you have got from them.
Yeah, sure.
... in regards to this.
I'm happy to. Yes. In fact, we've spoken just to several of our partners, including some of the ones that you've mentioned just now. Specifically AT&T, T-Mobile and others. Certainly, there's a lot of interest from our partners in exploring with us the broader set of capabilities that we're now able to bring with this combination. Today, as we talked about the product that we offer to them, very focused on mobile. Now that we are able to bring to them home security, for security on the router as an example, or in some cases, desktop security, for example, for PC and Mac. These are capabilities that we did not have.
Definitely not only are they willing to stay on board, but they're actually very eager and open to have those conversations with us to have a broader set of capabilities coming from us in the combined company.
Okay. Secondly, can you please try to explain why Lookout is selling the consumer business now? It seems a bit hasty decision as there have been significant investments into growth during the past year.
Yes. Over the past several years, a lot of our focus as a company has really gone towards the enterprise. Enterprise mobile security first, and over the past couple of years in the cloud security, in the SASE space, in a cloud security space. Over the past couple of years, or past year, we've been making more investments in consumer. Certainly, it touches a little bit on the question you just asked a moment ago.
When we look at RFPs that are coming, when we look at some of our prospective partners that we're pursuing, even some of our partners that we are engaged with right now, increasingly what we're seeing are partners that are looking for a broader set of capabilities from one provider rather than take best of breed for, you know, individual point solutions. We've been talking to various partners about combining forces, but partners that also share our view, our vision, our strategy of providing that holistic security for consumers that I referenced a little earlier. Certainly, when I think about the combination of our of our co- companies together, it made sense for all the reasons that Timo outlined a little earlier.
Also, if you think of the journey that F-Secure went through, it's strikingly similar to the one that Lookout is going through.
Yeah.
Around 2014, 2015, both companies started investing more into corporate/enterprise security areas, and consumer security didn't always get the investment that it could have also gone for growth. Now, in the case of F-Secure, the company's demerged two listed companies. In the case of Lookout enterprise remains the company under the name, and they divested Lookout Life to give that same kind of focus as F-Secure. It is a very similar story.
Yeah.
I mean, just to confirm, is it maybe so that there was like a realization that you would still need to step up, you know, the investments materially in order to build a holistic offering required by the customer?
We are certainly more competitive with a broader set of capabilities. That's exactly what we're getting as part of this combination.
Okay. Finally, can you please elaborate on these growth investments? I mean, is it more about R&D or have you also been sort of building the sales channel outside?
Yeah
... U.S. during the past year?
Yeah. It's across the board. Over the past year, we've hired in product management, we've hired in R&D, we've hired in sales. In sales, I would say, both partner sales as well as direct. It's across the board. If I were to look at the in terms of number of employees, it skews towards R&D.
Okay. Thank you.
Sure.
Good morning. It's Matti Riikonen Carnegie. A couple of questions to, regarding Lookout Life. Have you made any acquisitions in the past? I think you mentioned at least one in your presentation.
Yeah.
What are the amortizations related to those deals, if any?
Sure. We have about a year ago when we started when we went back and we decided that we're gonna go back and refocus on the consumer business, we did make an acquisition of a company based out of Slovakia, a company called Saferpass. Saferpass is a password management company. Great tech, great team. And the idea was to accelerate our roadmap rather than go out and build the features ourselves. We acquired the technology, we acquired a strong team. We wanted also to have a position in Central Europe also for R&D, future R&D investments. We took that capability, and that feature set is what we're actually integrating into the mainline product.
Sari can comment on the financial implications of that.
Yeah. There is in this Slovakia company balance sheet, there is some goodwill because of that acquisition. I don't have the number in my head, but in this totality, it's a small number. The most of what we are paying will go to our goodwill and then it's customer base and the IP technology. That will be most of where we will allocate the value and it's really small that item even if it exists there. Not an impact on your models.
All right, thank you. Let's say during the five past years, what has been your organic growth rate in the consumer business?
Organic growth rate in the consumer business. The consumer business over the past 5 years I would say has been relatively flat. That's a function of the lack of investment that we had. We are projecting growth this year.
Also, there's been a, like, a mix of customer. There have been growing customers and then sort of declining or legacy type of customers. It's a mixed bag of different type of developments, but very similar to the F-Secure background.
Yeah.
The investments have only gone up in the past 14, 15 months or so.
Actually a little less than that. About a, yeah, about a year. Yes.
Yes.
Yes, exactly.
Okay. during 2020 and 2022, when there was a slight improvement in let's say, consumer spending on IT goods and therefore also security, did you notice any change in your top line during that time or has it basically been flat all the time?
More or less. It has been more or less flat for the reasons that Sari just mentioned just a moment ago.
Okay. Finally, what kind of margins have you made over the past, let's say, five years, not just last year, but has your profitability been pretty much the same or has it basically been better or weaker before and now compared to the numbers that you're showing today?
Do you wanna comment on that?
maybe I can comment.
Yeah.
You see in the numbers we provided that last year was clearly higher. Actually, there is no calculation for the previous years. This was not a business unit within Lookout before officially February this year. Everything is like manually calculated allocations and it didn't exist. Of course, you can do some math in Excel files, but it didn't exist as an independent and we have not asked to generate those numbers which we felt would not provide added value as the picture has through these investments changed so much anyways.
All right. Good. I think I'll give the floor to the next one.
Hi. Jaakko Tyrväinen from SEB. Could you give a bit more concrete examples how to realize the planned sales synergies? For example, in which solutions or areas, you see the lowest hanging fruits in terms of the cross-selling?
If I start, I would say that, from our point of view it's obvious that some of those partners that Firas was referring to earlier want more holistic solutions and that's one area. You know, providing our desktop protection products, our connected home security products are such that will be immediately naturally something that we can take on to the Lookout Life partners. Then, we will be exploring, you know, how to, for instance, use the good position that we will now have in the tier ones to go for more tier ones and there are cases like that ongoing. I believe that instead of going after those opportunities by ourselves, we're now in a better position to win completely new partners for us. I think that's a second area.
Going for the similar like category of partners as Lookout Life already has, there are others in the pipeline.
Maybe in terms of timing I could comment that of course this year will be and probably first parts of next year still a lot on the integration and ensuring that the plans are in place. Slower realization during 2023 and 2024 but then accelerating towards that EUR 12 million revenue in 2027.
As we came out with Total, in February, Lookout Life has a new generation service on the mobile security side which is due to be launched at the end of this year mobile optimized and that in itself is expected to also give a boost to the business.
Good. Sari already partially answered on my follow-up. How the integration looks from technological perspective, i.e., how long it will take you to kind of have a harmonized offering in terms of truly become a or truly a cross-sellable setup?
I would say that we're looking at roughly 2 years, roughly that order of magnitude. That plan will be more detailed once we go for closing and then in the following let's say 6-8 weeks plan in more detail how we're going to be carrying this out. Let's say from closing roughly 2 years is what we're looking at.
Maybe could comment that during the due diligence process, of course a big emphasis has been on the R&D and technology part to understand their platform and how it is integratable. So that's, I think, the area where we had most people involved in this project.
Yeah. From closing, it will not take even roughly a year that we will be running independently. How we consolidate all the backends and all the services will take most likely roughly another year.
Is that also the area where you are most concerned or will be, so to say, steering most closely the integration?
That is going to be a significant area, absolutely. One of the more significant ones. Naturally, another one is that even though Lookout Life is only 70 people, we're also introducing new sites now, R&D sites in Slovakia and India, for instance, and people in countries where we haven't necessarily had staff before.
Mm-hmm.
There's always the people element that we integrate successfully also on this front. Yes, technology integration will be a crucial part.
Good. Thanks.
I have to excuse myself. Excuse me.
It's okay.
Thank you. Excuse me. I have to excuse myself. I have.
Mm-hmm
I have to get on with the announcement for my own company. Thank you very much.
That's all right. Firas is going to be running a similar session now for the Lookout staff. Atte.
All right. Thank you. About those sales and marketing synergies, could you open a little bit about those? Are you planning to keep the Lookout brand also in the future or integrate it with, under the F-Secure?
Okay. In terms of sales and marketing synergies, if we talk about sales first, there is a direct business team at Lookout Life. We have a direct business team. In terms of geographies and the way to go to those geographical markets in terms of direct business, they are slightly different. The US market operates slightly differently. We start with two separate teams on that front. That's.
It is more like complementary.
That's complementary, absolutely. When we look at the partner business, we have, if not a massive, a very strong partner business team already. The team from Lookout Life will be joining that one, so we will get more, especially new business hunters, plus a team which is very accustomed to and very capable in managing large strategic accounts. On that front, that's what we're doing on sales. With regards to marketing and brand, we intend to be using, and we have the right to use, the Lookout brand for a certain period of time. How many months was that again?
I think it is January 25.
Yeah. We're looking at roughly one and a half years of being able to use the Lookout brand, and especially when it comes to the U.S. direct business market. It's very important for us to be able to continue to use the Lookout brand, I am absolutely certain that we will be adding some kind of a tagline like F-Secured or something of the sort in the meantime, and then merge towards one brand from beginning of 2025.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
You need to confirm the date that.
Yeah
don't remember-
Yeah
... it correctly. Anyway, there is a period which is sort of in that two years ballpark.
Yeah.
All right. Can you open up the cost of debt for the loans that you're taking now?
We feel we have gotten very good prices. They are depending on this leverage ratio. When the leverage ratio goes down, then the margins also come down.
Okay.
We had several banks in the process, and so we were able to... Of course, we got different types of offers, and we were able to choose the ones who gave a lower price.
Last question about the growth outlook for this year after the little bit soft start for the year. Now is it, like, the growth coming mainly from the partner channel, or do you expect also the direct channel to improve?
It's actually a yes and yes to both of your comments. In the direct business side, we absolutely expect it to improve as we have a task force making both short, medium, and longer term tuning so that our web performance and our e-commerce performance continues to be on the same high level as it was before. We expect that to improve. Maybe also the expectations that inflation rates will start easing off and the pressures on that front will start easing off, maybe that gets the consumer sentiment on a better projection. On the partner business side, as I mentioned earlier with all of the new service launches, we believe that it's on the right track.
We don't see any kind of slowing down in terms of signing up new partners. You know, you would always want your partners to convert to the newest generation service Total quicker. I think that it's also proceeding well. We have good aspirations and a reason to believe that we can hold the growth figures as Sari indicated earlier.
All right. Thank you.
Hi. Matti Riikonen from Carnegie. How many overlapping partners did you have?
No, sorry. One.
Just one?
One.
Okay.
almost amazing-
No.
being in the same business
... talk about complementarity. One common.
Was there any kind of fixed security in Lookout's portfolio?
No
Basically you just have that and they have.
Yes
... the mobile.
Yes.
Okay. You had some overlapping products. What's the revenue share of the overlapping products out of the total revenue?
It's relatively high of the overlapping products. What we will be embarking on right now is that we will continue to sell the products that both of these units have in their own right. We're not stopping anything. We continue with the new products, and we go as far as launching the new Lookout Life product, which will be becoming available at the very end of this year. We're not rushing into in a way consolidating everything because they are very different partner profiles that we're targeting for. We take the time then to design the next generation united offering. We feel that we're in no rush to do so right now.
Okay. If you at some point you will consolidate the product offering as well, that will be then done at the later stage. First you try to get the kind of revenue synergies as much as possible, then consolidate the kind of just that you provide only one product to all customers.
Yeah.
Is that-
That's correct. What we will do first in terms of integrating and consolidating are the backends so that our services will start using the same authorization and authentication, software distribution, security cloud, and so forth. We will do that first, and then on top of that, common platform, we will design and implement the new next-generation product.
very much depending on the R&D and technology integration.
All right. regarding the EBITA synergies that you mentioned, I think the number.
10
... EUR 10 million. You said that that's not pure cost reductions, but it's also the margin of the-
Yeah
... cross-selling
No. Yeah.
... revenues, right?
It's mainly the gross margin of that revenue. EUR 12 million was the revenue synergies, EUR 10 million is the EBITA synergies. If you take the revenue that we, synergies from that gross margin, 80-something%, you are very close to that EUR 10 million. There are actually some costs to deliver that EUR 12 million, some additional, and some cost benefits. Basically, it's roughly the gross margin of that revenue benefit. We have not given a number for cost benefits, cost synergies. It's a EBITA impact of all the synergies. That's the EUR 10 million.
Okay.
This is a growth transaction, not a cost optimization transaction primarily.
All right. All right. finally, a technical one related to the Q1 report of F-Secure. you continued to have some issues in Poland. what was the European area growth without Poland?
That's a good question. I don't have that number in our head, but it's clear that Poland is a significant market for us, and it is negative. Yeah, I don't have that number in my head, and we have not given the country-specific numbers.
Yeah.
It's not only Poland. There are also other countries where we have some legacy products declining. For example, VPN is FREEDOME is declining in some countries and there are some legacy customers that are declining. Poland is not the only one, but that's the one that is worth mentioning.
All right. Thank you. That's all from me.
You mentioned regarding F-Secure's Q1, you mentioned the impact of the steep decline in the sales of laptop and MS solutions. Have you analyzed that excluding that impact, how did you perform in the first quarter? Was it in line with your own plans?
It was not in line with our plans, and we haven't made such an analysis, but this was not in line with our plans.
Okay. Thanks.
I would say the renewals continue. We cannot say that they're strong, but a solid performance in the renewals. There we don't see this market sentiment impact or anything like that.
It's comparable.
It's new sales that is a challenge, and there we have impact of consumer sentiment and then certain things that we did not do well on our own. Of course, it's difficult to say how much the impact of each of the factors is, but it's clear that it's not only about market, and we can improve actively ourselves.
Understand. Thanks.
Okay. Thanks. Sami Sarkamies, Danske Bank. I still have a couple of questions. If we go back to product functionality, is there something that's better in the mobile product of Lookout Life relative to what you have in F-Secure Total?
The short answer is absolutely yes. If you look at the kind of ways how Lookout has managed to optimize a consumer security experience into an iOS device, for instance, they are on a different level than we are. They have truly taken that and turned it into a science and art how to provide that kind of capabilities in iOS environments, which has not always been easy for outside providers to build additional layers of security. Also, on Android, I would say that Android is the environment where you see more threats, and the mobile security threat landscape grip that Lookout has is very good. It's very, very good.
Our capability to provide security capabilities and protection in mobile environments is going to get seriously improved, thanks to the work that they have done.
Okay. Coming back to the revenue synergies, are these mostly based on cross-selling in the next few years when you will still have separate products, or is it more sort of based on the new product that will be available in a few years' time that you then will be able to cross-sell?
It is about cross-selling very much initially. It is about winning new partners because of a stronger portfolio overall, and later on, about the better product.
Okay. Finally, regarding Q1, you complained about teething problems related to your sort of new e-commerce site for Total. How can you be sure that it's really about teething problems and not about you trying to sell a sort of more expensive product in the current environment?
It's a combination of many things. We measure everything.
Yeah.
The great thing about digital marketing these days and sales is that you can measure every single step of the way. We see how people are coming onto our front door. We see how many people enter the building. We see how many fill up the shopping cart. We see how well people convert, and we can, you know, define the kinds of, in a way, factors that are affecting each one of these steps, and we're now systematically making improvements along the way. One aspect is price. How do you present the product? To which kind of bundle or product are you directing your customers to, at what price, and so forth? It's naturally one of the aspects that we are considering, and we are, in a way, you could say, not only A/B testing, we do something better.
We do A/B/C testing of every single change that we're implementing now, with a bit more time so that we get it right. We've actually been at this direct business for a long, long time, and our team knows what they are doing. This time around, we didn't necessarily give them sufficient time to test things to the level that we would typically do.
Okay, thanks.
Okay. Do we have questions on the lines?
Yes. Let's take 2 final questions from the chat. The first one is from Jyrki Orasmaa: "What is the minimum period Lookout's current management team is committed to stay on board?
The Lookout Life team is joining us as existing employees, and we will have certain type of retainer programs for key people in place, naturally. Those will extend roughly two years. I hope that answers your question.
Maybe we can also comment that as it is not an established business unit, but it was only, like, they started officially 1st of February, it is Firas who is the head of that business unit. There is no, like, well-functioning with long roots kind of management team, but it is certain key people.
Yes. There's an excellent team of senior people who are joining this team, they have only been, you know, functioning like this for a mere two, three months.
During that time, they knew already of the ongoing process.
Yes. They're, I believe, equally excited about the change as we are.
One final question from Felix Henrikson: How would you describe the brand recognition in the U.S.?
Lookout as a brand, I believe, has referred, and now this is coming from memory, this one. They have a brand recognition of roughly 45%-50%. It's a very high brand recognition that they have, which is good to have in such a big market.
Those were all the questions online, and I believe that was the Q&A session for today.
All right. Hey, thanks to everybody here in the room for the good questions and coming over here at our headquarters in Helsinki. Thanks, everybody online, for staying with us. Hopefully, an informative and interesting session for all of you. Hope to see you soon, in the coming months again. Have a great day.
Thank you. Bye-bye.