Good afternoon, and welcome to the Qt Group's Full Year 2021 Results Presentation. My name is Heli Jämsä, IR Manager, and with me today are CEO Juha Varelius and CFO Jouni Lintunen to go over the results. After the presentations, we will have Q&A on the conference call lines. Without further ado, Juha, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Juha Varelius, and as said, I'm gonna go through the Q4 and 2021. I'm gonna talk a bit about the business highlights 2021, then Jouni is gonna go through the financials. Then I'm gonna talk shortly about outlook for 2022, and specifically I'm gonna talk about our strategy and our targets in 2025, which are very exciting for us at the moment. If we go to business highlights, our net sales grew 52% last year.
What I'm really excited about is that last year our distribution license sales grew at a healthy level compared to the year before. In 2020 our distribution license sales growth was merely 5%, and last year we were seeing a very strong growth in distribution license sales, which is the sales type that mostly gets affected by COVID and supply chain problems and logistical problems because it's related to the end user products. Our EBIT was very healthy, EUR 29 million last year, and that is, we're not seeking to optimize our result, but of course we do wanna make profit. I think that our profit level was very nice compared with this nice net sales growth. Operating margin was 24%.
Our personnel 130 people last year, and that is greatly due, of course, that we were very successful in hiring people, but also we didn't have that many leavers. We had personnel growth at a good level. I'm gonna talk about that a bit in more detail later as well. If we look briefly at our growth strategy in 2021, it's actually pretty much the same strategy that it's been since our last planning season when we set our targets that we're gonna make EUR 100 million in 2021. Now we exceeded that greatly, and our core strategy is the same going forward also in 2025.
Like I said, our net sales grew at 52%, and I'm happy to say that this time the European EMEA region was on the top of the growth. We have three regions. We have APAC, Asia Pacific, and we have North America, United States, North America. They grow pretty evenly. I'm happy, you know. The pole position changes each year and this year it was the EMEA. I'm very happy that we were able to accomplish such a good growth in the European area. We also had a very great success in new customer acquisition.
That was the part of the business I was a bit concerned when the COVID started and we were all thrown out into our homes outside of the offices and face-to-face meetings diminished in 2020, and that's been pretty much in 2021 the same case. Of course, luckily, our customers had to adapt also working remotely and we've been able to acquire new customers in a very healthy phase. Top line growth is our number one priority, and top line growth will be our number one priority going forward. In our D&A, we're always looking for growth, but we're looking for profitable growth. I will talk about that more in the outlook session and in the strategy session.
Our focus is expanding our product portfolio and our focus is to expand our potential market, total addressable market. Good example of that was the acquisition of froglogic because it gave us a new product. Our core offering obviously is the cross-platform software development tool, Qt Framework and Qt tooling. But now we do have also quality assurance tools. When people are using Qt and developing software, what's your plan on testing the software you are about to develop? It fits well into our product offering.
On top of that, it expands our addressable market because you can use our quality assurance tools testing on software that's being developed, also other technologies apart from Qt. Strengthening our global sales network. I think that one key metric, one key thing for our success is our global sales network. We've been able to build presence globally that we have local offices throughout the markets where we operate in all these three regions I mentioned before. We have local salespeople. We do have pre-sales engineers and consultants and so on. We can serve and make sure locally that our customers are successful. Utilizing this sales network more efficiently, bringing more products in there, it makes all the sense, obviously, from our point of view.
Now that when our sales goes and sells the software development tool, at the same time, they can sell the quality assurance tools. We can utilize the sales network much more efficiently. I'm happy to say I'm very proud about our sales network. It is magnificently well operating organization. Organic product innovation projects we have ongoing. We have our ventures organization. I'm gonna talk a bit about that more later on. We are obviously doing R&D in our R&D product enhancements and but on top of that, we have the ventures organization, and they're always looking for new products and new business opportunities outside the core offering we have.
The continuous improvements we did last year, we did release the Qt 6.2, the long-term supported version, Qt for MCUs 2.0. We also had a Qt World Summit event virtually again. It's probably our biggest event during the year where we gather together the Qt community developers, networking, hearing what's the greatest and latest in the Qt environment. We also had great customer presentations from the Creative Assembly, Panasonic Avionics and BSH Home Appliances. These virtual events are very important to us, and I must say that I'm very happy how our marketing has been adapted to be able to be more digital in the marketing, which has again related to our great success in revenue and also in the new customer acquisition.
I wanted to highlight this slide because very often we talk about the same examples where Qt is being used, and we get kind of a false idea that the same examples that Qt is mainly used in these occasions. Qt strategy has always been that we are a cross-platform product, and we are a very horizontal product, and our offering is such that it's being used in 70 different industries throughout the world. None of these industries are dominant from our point of view, and we don't have any dominant customers in that sense. All the industries are very important to us.
Also that we do have a horizontal product, it means that when our customers are innovating, they're getting new ideas and they develop something, and on the next phase, they wanna develop something new and different, Qt won't be hindering their innovation. Instead, Qt can be enabling that innovation, and Qt can be used in very different use cases. Whereas if you're very focused on some use cases and some industries, it of course limits then the wider usage. So here we have the Vexcel Imaging, Vocalea, Hyundai, obviously a very known brand, and Spotify. But just to highlight some of these different companies that are using Qt in creative way, creating great products. So in short, I feel very strongly that we are in a great position.
The market is growing. We do have a product that fits very well into the customer needs. I think that we are in the early phases of this growth. We are in the right place at the right time, and in some simplicity, we could say that the only thing we need is a superb execution. What's always behind a superb execution is of course the personnel. Like I said before, we have a total headcount increase of 36%, mainly on sales and R&D. Our employee engagement increased, and our voluntary attrition rate was at very good level. The total number of the employees were increasing. We've put a lot of effort during this COVID time and when people are being forced to work from home, their free movement has been limited.
We've put a lot of effort into that no one's left behind and that not only the work gets done, but also the well-being of our employees. I must say that if I look at the past year, how in this difficult environment we've been able to execute and deliver great results, I'm very proud of the Qt personnel. We have an excellent team at Qt, which is, by the way, gonna grow again substantially during this year. Now we're gonna go to financials. Jouni is gonna walk you through the numbers, and after that, I'm gonna talk a bit about this year's outlook and the outlook further down the road. Thank you.
Thank you, Juha. Welcome from my behalf as well to the earnings call of Qt Group. My name is Jouni Lintunen, CFO, and walk you through the financial figures. As you have said, we did have an excellent year-end. Our net sales in fourth quarter grew by 55%, and that was driven by the license sales and consulting, and specifically developer licenses and quality assurance tools in that regards. We did get a little bit of positive impact from exchange rates. Our currency neutral growth would have been 51%. For the full year, we reported EUR 121 million net sales, and out of that, EUR 100 million was driven by license sales and consulting growth of 69%.
Whereas the sales growth of maintenance was very modest, and this shift is due to the change from perpetual and term licensing base to a subscription license model. Another important point here this year in 2021 was that our distribution licenses sales grew by 40% year-on-year after close to a flat year in 2020. At the same time, we still see that there are challenges in supply chains, logistical issues, and component shortages, which are causing some risk in distribution licenses sales. The same time we see that there will be significant fluctuations between the quarters due to timing of the large deals and uneven distribution of the distribution licenses' revenues. The same time again, the exchange rates will be impacting us since roughly 2/3 of our sales are in U.S. dollars.
We did continue the heavy investments on our long-term growth, and that shows in our expenses accordingly. Our headcount did grow by 130 employees, out of which roughly 100 organically and 30 as a result of the froglogic acquisition. At the same time, we are putting plenty of effort into R&D. R&D expenditure did go up by 41% year-over-year, and that represented some 16% of net sales last year. However, despite the great expenditure or investments, we are reporting EUR 28 million EBIT, and then EUR 22 million net profit for the year. Here's a short version of the balance sheet, and the major movements in these are driven by the acquisition of froglogic.
The non-current assets were increased by the intangibles and goodwill of the acquisition and trade receivables and the growth of that is in line with the year-end revenue growth. In receivables, due to our very horizontal business model, we do not see any major risk exposure based on customer groups. We are ending our year with pretty strong cash position of EUR 17.4 million in cash. Equity did go up due to the net profit for the period, share issue, share subscriptions, and then offset by the purchases of the own shares due to LTI program. Short-term liabilities, we are having some loan due to acquisition and then other short-term liabilities and the long-term liabilities, they are also driven, the growth is driven by the outcome of the acquisition.
This in short the financials, and now I hand the floor over back to Juha, who will go through the 2022 outlook and the strategy figures until 2025.
Okay. Thank you. Let's go for the 2020. Sweet and short, we're looking to increase our sales 34% year-over-year comparable exchange rates and I'm looking for a profit of 20%-30%. How are we gonna do that? I'm gonna talk in next slides and that's gonna be pretty much our strategy for the following years. Here it goes. Our mission is to increase the productivity of our customers' product development process and what we are offering as of today, we're offering developers a cross-platform product for developers to be more efficient, to create more code less, and use the code multiple times. In short, our core Qt offering is for developers to be more efficient to be able to create more with less time.
If we are looking at our mission, we're looking at the whole development process, and we're thinking going forward in 2025 that how can we help the developers even further make the developing fun and easy and making fun and easy developing something through software? It's not only the development part, but we're also looking at how to enhance the whole process, so to speak. I'll be more specific in a bit. Doing this, our core business is on embedded devices as well as desktop and mobile. Our vision is to have a multiproduct strategy. We're looking, like I was saying earlier, that the developers are first developing something, then they need to test it.
There are also, of course, other parts in the development process like development and security. I'm not gonna go into that. Our strategy going forward is that not only are we gonna be offering the development tools, but also other products for that development process. Our strategy is that in where we don't have the competencies to do this, then we are going to acquire it. A good example of this is the quality assurance tools. Of course, over time, we'll probably would have been able to create and develop quality assurance tools for ourselves, test automation. But it, you know, it would have taken a long time. Instead, we acquired froglogic.
We got a great people and a great product, and we were off the ground very quickly and to be able to put it into our sales portfolio and in our sales network. That in a nutshell is what we're looking to do also in our future. We do have what I think strategically is a great position because we do have our license sales. We do have subscriptions of Qt Framework, QA tools, and Design Studio. We're selling developer licenses as a subscription model, which means that there is a continuous revenue stream from the developer licenses, and we are growing that base.
Distribution license sales is very important for us, and I think I'm sure it will generate a bigger portion of our total revenue, whereas we do get paid by the device being produced into the market. We are looking in a ventures organization for transactional businesses like digital advertising. Obviously, the clue from the monetary perspective is that then we would be getting money through the life cycle of the product. Very interesting. Before we get too excited, we do have projects in that area, we do have pilots and we're looking ways to get into there.
If I look into 2025 and our plans and this guidance, we have very little money from these transactional businesses inherited over there. We're looking to see that until 2025, we're gonna be growing 30%-40% annually. Each year with an EBIT margin of 20%-30%, very rapid growth. I think that the company that can put on the table such figures in these uncertain times, it's, I think, these are very impressive figures and very impressive outlook. How are we so confident that we are putting these figures down?
Well, first of all, in our sales process is such that we meet a new customer and we start negotiating. It takes many months to close the deal. Then we sell the developer licenses and people start developing something. Then later on, we get the distribution licenses. The lead time in slow-moving industries can be two-three years. To get into this business, it's a slow start and then the processes continue fairly long. We do see quarterly fluctuations, and we do see that the life doesn't go like on a straight line.
We do have confidence and we do, on a longer term, have a vision of where the market is going. We are looking at this growth both on organic and inorganic, so we're looking for acquisitions. When are these acquisitions going to happen? We'll see. They'll probably going to be not too many during this period until 2025, and they're gonna be the size like froglogic. We're looking for acquisitions, fairly small acquisitions that are adding specifically to our strategic product portfolio, increasing our product portfolio and increasing our total addressable market, and then we're gonna put them into our sales network.
We're not looking into very big acquisitions that would change the whole structure of the company. Why are we investing already and why are we talking about these new things? We do see that our core product offering, the Qt core software development tool offering, it's in its early phases in the product life cycle. It's still in the early phase of rapid growth, and it will continue to be there for many years to come. Instead of waiting that someday that growth will slow down, we are already looking for new growth initiatives. We are looking that we can generate growth well beyond 2025 as well.
In a nutshell, if I'm gonna put here that what are these tools to new markets as of today, they are quality assurance and Qt Design Studio, and we're looking for more there to come. If we're thinking about these products that what is the total addressable market, it's kind of a threefold in a sense that. Today we have our, for example, our quality assurance tools. We do have the Qt commercial customers we can offer to Qt quality assurance tools. We can also offer quality assurance tools to our open source user community. We do have a big open source community, which we think it's great for the Qt product. Of course, what's being created through open source needs to be tested as well.
We see that there is a market outside of this ecosystem that our software being developed using other technologies than Qt, and we can expand into those markets as well. That is the how we see that we're gonna be adding new products into our portfolio going forward, and at the same time, of course, invest further into sales and R&D and the core business we have. Doing that, I think that the we are in a great strategic position.
We do have great assets, we do have a great platform to build upon, and I'm very confident that we're gonna have a eventful and full of surprises strategic period until up to 2025, but we're also gonna be having a very nice growth path and story and our journey is gonna be probably very interesting going forward. Looking forward to that journey. At this point, I'd like to thank you for listening to our presentation. That was my last slide. We are a Qt developer accelerator, as you can see over there. I hope that picture doesn't mean that it's all downhill, even though the guy is coming down there, but we're ready for questions now.
Thank you, sir. If you'd like to ask a question at this time, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. Please make sure that your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Once again, that is star one, if you'd like to ask a question. A voice prompt on the phone line will indicate when your line is open. We will take our first question. Caller, please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi, it's Felix Henriksson from Nordea. I have a few questions. I'll go one by one. Starting off with, you know, the success in new customer acquisition. A year ago, you stated that the number of customers you had was around 3,500. Could you share with us that number today?
Thanks, Felix, for the question. I don't have exact figure, and of course, we do have customers with different license types. Some customers are shorter periods and some longer, and then there is churn. Like I said, I don't have exact number to give you, but it's well into double digits.
Got it. That's helpful. Thanks. Then, looking into 2025, sort of envisioning the three revenue streams that you mentioned, subscriptions, distributions, and transactional, if it all goes well, what do you envision as your ideal sort of sales mix, as sort of percentage of revenue between these three sources?
Well, yeah. It's of course 2025 is a long way down the road. Let's put that this is more like a guesstimate now and it may vary. We do see that the distribution license business will grow significantly where it is as of today, and that's based on the number of devices out there. At the same time, I think that from the last strategy presentations or the last strategy time that we had when we last time presented our long-term plan that what we're gonna make in 2021, we just moved from the perpetual licenses into term licenses, and now we are in the subscription licenses.
The license base that we have in our customer base as they are transitioning into subscription licensing, that's gonna increase the developer license revenue going forward, and it's gonna be substantially bigger source of revenue than it would've been in a perpetual license. At the same time, we are acquiring new customers. The license revenue in that sense will grow. Developer license revenue will be bigger. On top of that, we did a froglogic investment, and in froglogic, we don't have any distribution licenses. It's a developer license-driven business, also moving into subscription as we speak. The developer license business will be a bigger portion.
If I look at the proportion, not giving you an exact number, I think that the Distribution license revenue, and this is now disclosure, this is my guesstimate, but I think that the Distribution license revenue is probably gonna be 30%-40%, and the developer license revenue might be even a bit bigger chunk. The rest remains to be seen how we do. Of course, we have consultancy business as well. It's not our primary business, but we do see it as needed to support the developer license sales so that we do have consultants and expertise to help our customers in their development projects as they go forward.
We do have this transactional revenue. In this transactional and digital advertising is very new to us and on this strategic period, we haven't put a lot of numbers in it because it's in such an early phase.
I answered, I'll say this as well, even though Felix, you didn't quite exactly ask it, but we see the digital advertising that when we do have our design tools and people are designing user interfaces for their embedded products, it's it will be. I think that it will be a common issue that people will start thinking that here is my user interface I'm designing with our design tools, and then they think that it would be nice to have a spot for advertising or maybe product information or a banner somewhere on that user interface. By enabling that people can now design these spots while they're using Design Studio makes all the sense in the world.
At the same time, if they wanna have advertising, we can provide that advertising to them on a revenue share basis. I think that we haven't seen so much advertising yet on the embedded world as we see on the web world. I think it's a growing area, and definitely we need to have design tools that help design how to put that advertising in there. We haven't forecasted a lot of that revenue yet into our long-term vision, just to be cautious.
Okay, thanks. That's helpful in any case. Then, just thinking of the software development process overall and the parts of it that you currently address, you know, being developing, designing, deploying, and now also quality assurance, are there any other central parts of the process that you're currently not addressing and sort of these white spots in your offering that I'm trying to capture? What could you add to developers that would bring significant amount of value? I think in our previous conversations, we've touched on sort of integrated cybersecurity or no coding, no-code type of element. Could you mention any examples of what you could add to the developers toolkit?
Well, I don't wanna get too much into that, but I think that we can still strengthen our quality assurance offering quite a bit. I think that the automation in quality assurance is a big thing going in the future. To have more automated quality assurance testing, that's one avenue. Kind of a low-code or no-code type of a thing that we're a bit addressing with our design tools that there is less coding needed. That's one avenue. Security definitely is an interesting area. Rather than highlighting the, we're looking into all of those and in our ventures organization, we're looking into different avenues.
We're looking at a lot of different areas, a lot of different companies, and we're discussing with a lot of different companies. Like I said, I believe there will be further acquisitions and then we're gonna announce them when we're gonna announce them. I'm sorry, I don't wanna get too far into detail at this point in time. Those are the areas we're looking. On the other hand, we're looking to be in a software development space. We're not looking to.
I know.
To expand a much further out there.
I know. Okay, got it. I got one final one.
Okay.
Your guidance on operating profits, just a technical question, does that refer to EBIT or EBITA, that being EBIT excluding PPA amortizations?
It is referring to EBIT.
Okay, that's clear. Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, we'll go to our next question. Caller, please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hey, it's Antti Luiro from Inderes. Question on your guidance for the year. I mean, in previous years, you have been given quite conservative guidances. If you think of forecasting, how you look at that and giving guidances, has anything changed this year compared to previous years?
No. If you're asking me that is this a conservative guidance, I must say to you that it's our guidance. I think that if I elaborate that a bit, obviously, you know, we're living in a situation where there is a component shortages, all kinds of component shortages, not only chips. I think that that's gonna continue probably this year, maybe even next year. Probably in 2024, we're gonna have a surplus of all kinds of electrical components in the world, and the prices will go down. Corona is probably going away.
Last time I said that the COVID is probably going away, we got Omicron and then we ended up, we were working on a hybrid model, and we ended up being in a home office again, where we are currently. Last time I said that I think the COVID is going away, I didn't envision at all that we are on the brink of the war in Europe. I wonder what's next. In that sense, do we have that conservativeness in our 2022 guidance? Well, of course, we've been looking into these different scenarios and situations. Having said that, at the same time, we've already been in this situation in 2020 and 2021.
Obviously we do have a lot more confidence and vision that although there are uncertainties that how things are working in these uncertain times. What we don't see, and it's hard to have a vision on that when things are actually gonna start getting better and back to normal and when we are gonna be seeing a kind of a normal situation. Obviously that is a bit hard to estimate. We've given this guidance, and we believe that this is the guidance where we're gonna end. We don't call it conservative or the As a matter of fact, if we look at the different analyst reports, some analysts have a, you know, higher end expectations, and some analysts have actually been more on a lower end. There is a variation also on the expectations in that respect.
Thanks. That's helpful on the context of that. The question on the digital advertising opening you did or announced earlier this year, can you comment on the kind of early traction for that in your customer base right now? Also if you have any view on how you think your customer base will be interested to utilize this solution. Is it more for certain smaller customer groups or is it broader customer base that you see could be interested in this?
Well, I do see a lot of advertising on the web world and so far we don't see a whole lot of advertising on embedded world. Obviously not all, you know, some of the embedded devices will be product information only or related directly to the product. We do have lots of embedded products. I don't envision that you're gonna have a lot of advertising onto infotainment into in a car, for example, for the simple security issues and whatnot. While the car is standing, I don't think that it's not worthwhile showing a lot of advertising. I don't envision that.
I do envision that there, you know, there are quite a lot of machines like vending machines or, you know, the, or the, what's the. When you play a game, you put the coins and you twist whatever that machine is called now, I don't know. You do have a lot of machines that you spend time in front of, and there is a screen, and obviously that could be used for advertising. First of all, offering a solution with our design tools and with our offerings that you can design a user interface where that is, where it's possible to place these ads, that's gonna be needed for sure.
How much advertising there is gonna be, well, if I look at the amount of advertising elsewhere in the world, I think that the advertising will find its way on these embedded devices as well. Where we at today, we do have pilot customers that we're piloting, and we do have a quite a number of leads from customers that have expressed interest. Definitely there is an interest, and it's in on some customers, it's in piloting phase, but very early stage obviously to make estimations on what would be the revenue stream. Yes, I think that one way or the other embedded devices will see advertising on them.
All right. Thanks. That's really helpful. One question on your plans to expand your current product. I know you're not gonna give more details on what exactly you're going to do. If we think broadly about kind of the current use cases for Qt technology, versus kind of moving to new use cases overall, you mentioned that you might want to expand beyond your current ecosystem right now. Do you see more opportunities in kind of going deeper into the current development processes for Qt is being used? Or do you see new application areas altogether as more interesting? Or any kind of balance or idea of the balance between those two would be helpful.
Well, you know, the core of Qt is the fact that we do have the Qt technology, so the cross-platform software development tool, and it's being used in open source, and it's being used commercially, and that's our core, that's our heart. Why do I say that this dual licensing and open source is very important? In the open source, it's a great support for the developers. Sometimes developers can get help through that community and in those discussion forums, they don't have to call our support, they can support each other. The product quality is a lot better when the open source community, large community is using and reporting the bugs, and there are a lot of benefits in that.
We see that is the core of our business, and we see that in that business there is rapid growth for years to come. When we look for our, for example, froglogic and the quality assurance testing in that sense, the first thing we see is that, well, it's very well integrated into Qt. So if you're using Qt technology and you're developing something using froglogic tools, fits in very well. On top of that, the next step we see that we have these open source users and it's great that they are there. They're using the open source product on those license terms that they are, and we are happy with that.
We see that well, of course, what you develop with open source, you need to test as well. We have this payable product for that community that they can be more productive and get more benefit out of using Qt. That's our core really. In these new products, that's the first offering expansion I can see. Of course, we do have a trade connection with these open source users. It doesn't stop there because on, like, on froglogic products, you can utilize that testing. Testing in that sense is universal, that you can use that on testing also other products, and that further expands our total addressable market. That's all fine, and we see that that's how we do.
We do see that each of these products need to be good to stand alone, but the, of course, we're looking that we can offer them together to our existing customers and have more touchpoints in our customers and in some sort of a more, closer relationship with existing customers more they use our product. I would say that that's kind of the sequence how we're thinking expanding further.
All right. Thanks. That's helpful. The final question, and I guess the one that most Qt investors are always interested in, so your figures are looking great, the market is looking great, everything so far going good. But how are you sleeping these days? Do you have any worries that are keeping you up at night?
Yeah, I know. That's an interesting question. First of all, thank you very much for all the investors. Thank you very much for all the forums that you've been discussing about the Qt. I do follow the discussion and I find it very interesting. To your question, I sleep very well. I mean, like I said in my presentation, from a CEO point of view, obviously we started, you know, we started in 2012. I was still at Digia. Digia acquired Qt, and then we separated the company in 2015, and we've been building this foundation. First, we raised money from the investors, owners then to build our sales network.
We were successful. We do have a great sales network in place. We built the foundation. We further invested on our R&D, and we made the product better. We invested on design tools. We added the design tools into our core offering. We added the MCU in our core offering. Now we added the quality assurance tools, and now we're in a position that we can offer a great set of tools to our Qt users, commercial customers, and our open source users, and we can expand further from there. I think that we have a great platform in place to add more products, more services, expand the customer base. Strategically, I'm very happy. I'm happy that we are where we are in a good position.
Now it's the question that we need to execute fiercely, and we need to execute fiercely globally. This position and situation is a lot easier than what it was in 2015, because in 2015, we had very little money and a lot less people. Now, we do have quite a lot of people on the ground. We have nice cash flow coming in. We can invest part of that cash flow, and we're in a good financial position. A pretty long answer, but I sleep extremely well. Thank you.
Fantastic. Yeah. That's really appreciated. That's all for me. Thank you, Juha Varelius. Over to you.
Thanks.
All right. Once again, everyone, that is star one, if you'd like to ask a question. We'll go to our next caller. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes, good afternoon. Gentlemen, Jaakko here from SEB. A couple of questions from me, and as well, I'll take them one by one. Firstly, just to clarify, regarding the digital advertising solution, will it be so, and the commercial logic for the solution, will it be so that it will be based on the advertising volumes or what is the logic that you are considering there?
Well, it's the same logic done on web advertising, basically, that you have cost per click, or then if it's not interactive, then you have a calculation on that, the how many predicted eyeballs they're gonna be viewing that ad. Then that basically, the revenue shares seem to be going in a, in the same fashion that on web advertising. You know, we get a share of that, and then of course the party, the broker that delivers the ads are gonna get a share of the revenue. Then obviously the owner of the product or where it's being displayed, they get a share of revenue.
The revenue shares are very similar, at least at this point seems to be very similar revenue shares and splits you have on a web world and the metrics and means. We basically, to answer your question, we would be getting a part of that revenue stream, making it available to end-users on those devices. Yes, it's based on the volume of the ads, and it's based on the potential eyeballs and their actions in front of those devices.
Right, thanks. Very helpful. I follow up on that one. In your vision, when that revenue stream starts to be material for you, is it 2025 or do we have to look until the end of the decade?
Well, I'm an impatient person, so definitely, you know, before 2025, otherwise I'll, you know, I'll shut it down. Yeah. It's hard to explain, you know, it's like I said, early phase. We are enabling that. We've enabled that you can, you know, on our design tools, you can actually design and you can plan that where the ads are gonna be. We do have the, you know, we can, you can design that where you're gonna put the ads on your device and on your screen. We can deliver those ads and we do have pilot customers.
Technically it works, and now we need to see that how big the market, where is the, where are the early adopters, how are we gonna get the early adopters, and at what market segments are gonna be the first ones to attack. It's gonna take a little while, but the substantial revenue streams, well, it's kind of our what is substantial. Yeah, definitely, you know, well before 2025 we're gonna see that the if it's gonna fly or not. Couple years.
Okay.
Yeah. If it's this year building and next year expanding something like that, I would say that the latter part of next year we need to see a rapid revenue growth otherwise we need to, you know. The way we do this is that we kind of have sort of quarterly development gates that the so when we started this that, you know, is this technically possible. Then each quarter we're viewing that how it's progressing, and you need to kind of go through the hoops in order to be able to get further financing and further investment.
They do have this kind of a quarterly get done kind of a list, and then we're giving them financing. I'm actually very much involved personally in those. Basically, you know, if they start lagging behind or we start seeing that the project is not progressing as expected, then we need to change the direction or we need to do something. You know, I'm not gonna finance a project forever. Let's put it that way.
Okay. Still continuing on that topic. The digital advertising market is huge, hundreds of billions dollars. What is your vision, how large share of that market will be in the embedded device world?
Well, it's too early for me to say, but you know, long time ago I used to work for Yahoo, and that was then it was the web advertising world emerging. I can tell it was a very lucrative business and still is. If I look at all the kind of devices where you have screens, if I looked at how much time people spend in front of those screens, I'm sure advertising is gonna find its way onto those screens.
I'm also sure that in a way, on a way to those screens, you need to use development tools. You need to design that here is the ad, here is gonna be a video, it's gonna be five seconds long or whatever, and here is a banner you can click and so on and so forth. You need to have those tools. Now we have those tools in place. Is the advertising gonna find its way into embedded devices? Definitely. Can we find a way that we are in that business on some angle? It remains to be seen. I'm pretty sure we're gonna find a way.
Okay, thanks. Still on the kind of your addressable market, but more into the embedded device side. I recall that you have had in your previous slide that you've had a slide showing that the number of devices in the sweet spot market that you have is about to be 1.5 billion devices by 2025. Is that number still intact or do you see that number larger nowadays?
Well, it probably is a bit larger nowadays. Do we have an updated number? No. That's one part of if you look at our product development and our R&D. Our R&D obviously is looking always to better serve our current customers. We discuss with our current customers what kind of challenges they have as of today and what kind of needs they have for tomorrow, and then we develop our core product based on that feedback. Of course, we do have some own ideas as well. On top of that, we're looking at how we can increase that addressable market. How could we expand the capabilities of Qt to be used in more use cases? MCU, Qt for microcontrollers is a great example of that.
We introduced MCU that enables Qt to be used on a lower hardware and a lower memory environment. We're continuously looking at that kind of development as we speak so that the addressable market can be bigger. It's not only, we see, of course, it's good to have a bigger addressable market, but we do see that as also in a way that we are very horizontal product, and that's our core strategy, and that's what we wanna be, and we wanna be cross-platform. We see that if you're building, well, now the automotive is a good example. If you're building a digital cockpit in a car, you're gonna have lots of different screens.
On some screens, you have more memory, and you have more processing capability, like on the infotainment in the middle. You have less on a screen, and you usually do have some microcontroller screens in a car. Making it possible to use Qt on different use cases actually makes it easier for our customer. They can take Qt, and they can build everything they need. They don't need to have multiple tools for that. That's one thing. I think that the number has grown. We haven't updated that. On the other hand, even the 1.5 billion is big enough.
Basically, we're saying that the market size is not limiting our growth now and not in the foreseeable future either, even though there is competition, of course.
Okay, thank you. Finally, from my side, looking at your numbers and growth, it seems that there's no rivalry out there. Have you seen any major changes in the competitive environment? Could you please remind us what is the reason for customers choosing Qt, although there might be cheaper options available?
Yeah, we do see competition. When we started this business, there were, you know, some competitors, we were about the equal size. If we look now at where they are, I think that they are far behind. Obviously they've grown, but they are a lot smaller. I think that there are few differences in that on strategic level they've done. Many of them have not invested in direct sales as we have. We put a lot of effort into building local offices and local people and executing locally with our customers, whereas our competition did not. They relied more on resellers and whatnot. That's one big difference.
The other big difference I've seen in our competition that they've concentrated very focused on some industry or some use case, where we're focused on a very horizontal. I think those are strategic differences. If we go and compare our product, which our customers very often do, the efficiency that we can provide and the efficiency when they are comparing our product to our competitor's product, we are very competitive. Our product is very, very good. On top of that, we've invested quite a lot on growing our personnel, and we've invested lots for this growth and concentrated on this growth. We do have a great product, and those strategic differences I mentioned.
We've been growing very fast. Going forward, do I see that there's gonna be more competition? Yeah, probably. Although I haven't seen anything similar than we are. We do see competition on different segments. We do see competition fairly fragmented. We don't see competition like we have. I think that's basically where we're at as of today.
Okay, thank you very much. That's all for my time.
Thank you. I think that we are running out of time. Thank you very much for watching us. Thank you very much for the questions. Just for kind of a sum up, I think that we had a great year. We are looking for long-term growth up to our strategic period up till 2025. I think we're gonna be growing very nicely even after that. I think that we do have a great strategy in place. We do have a great product in place. I think that we are in a great position. I'm very proud of our personnel, and I think that we're in a great position to execute very well on our plan that we've laid out today.
Wish you all the best for the year, and see you in three months. Thank you.
Thank you.
That is the conclusion of the conference.