Good afternoon, and welcome to the Qt Company's Q1 Results Presentation. My name is Heli Jämsä, IR Manager, and with me today are CEO Juha Varelius and CFO Jouni Lintunen to present the results. After the presentations, we will have Q&A on the conference call lines. Without further ado, please, Juha, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our Q1 results release. We're gonna have pretty much the same agenda as before. I'm gonna first briefly talk about Q1, then Jouni is gonna talk about the Q1 numbers in more depth, and then at the end I'm gonna have a view to the outlook as to how the rest of the year is looking, and then we're gonna have a Q&A session. If we look at our Q1 highlights, our net sales grew 35% and it was a very good start for the year. I'm actually very happy with the start. We pretty much bang on our internal plan, how we were planning to execute this year. Revenue generation was pretty much the same as it has before.
We had a very strong developer license sales. We had a bit of headwind on our distribution license sales. Distribution licenses are growing, but obviously, the supply chain challenges and some other challenges in the market environment are affecting the growth rate. Developer licenses was very good. On Q4, we had a EMEA region. Europe was the strongest performer. All our regions are about equal, but on Q1, specifically North America was performing extremely well. On Q1, North America was our best performing region. However, as said, they do perform pretty evenly, and the number one pole position does change quarter- on- quarter, but this time it was United States.
Our EBIT was EUR 4.7 million, and we did have quite a lot of growth investments in R&D on our sales and on our ventures. I talk about all these a bit more detail on the following slide. As you know, we never capitalize our growth investments or R&D investments. Instead, we record them all as costs. We did add 59 people in Q1, and I believe, on year-on-year comparison, we had something like 160 people more than a year ago, which is quite a big increase to our size. What I'm happy about is that we've been able to attract and retain people, so we've been very successful in our hiring.
Like I said, if we look at Q1, I'm very happy about our performance in Q1. The headwind we had is obviously the war in Ukraine. It did not have that big of an impact. It started at the end of February. I think it will have a bigger impact into European economy as we go forward later in this year. What does have an effect on supply chain logistics is very strict restrictions in China. I do expect that we're gonna see a lot of logistical problems globally because of the fact that the harbors are closed over there and whatnot. I'm not talking about only supply chain challenges here.
We're seeing our customers are facing challenges on all kinds of component shortages, and I expect that to remain the same throughout this year. When I say this, it does affect our distribution license growth rate, but obviously you know, our distribution license sales is still growing nicely. If we look at the ventures business, we have a new business unit, ventures business unit, and they're actively looking for acquisition targets for us. What we're looking for is to strengthen our core business, but we're also looking kind of a developer's normal day and the software developer's whole process and what we're looking into there is that how can we add more product into that portfolio?
As said before, the acquisition of froglogic last year was a very logical increment to our product portfolio when we added the quality assurance tools into our portfolio. That continues. We're not giving any timelines that when do we expect to have the next acquisition because it's very hard to predict, but I'm pretty confident that we're gonna see acquisitions this year. We do have also multiple product development projects in various, one being the digital advertising that we launched during the first quarter, and there are also other product development projects, and we're planning to launch those products later on this year and then we announce them when the time is right. We did also a major new version 7.0 release of our automation Squish tool.
Which is now the subscription model version only. One of the Q1 offering highlights were the Squish 7.0, where now you can have a video to see how the test went. We launched the Qt Creator 7.0, Qt Design Studio 3.0, MCU 2.0, and we also had our ultra digital cockpit demo that demonstrates specifically our real-time 3D capabilities for our automotive customers.
These are just few examples to demonstrate that we continued our R&D investments also on product side, and we had a very, very exciting new enhancements on our product. On top of that, as said before, we did invest quite a bit on personnel, and that personnel mainly went into our sales operations, so to strengthen our sales throughout the world. With this, Q1 highlights, I'm gonna hand over to Jouni, and he's gonna talk about financials a bit more detail.
Hello, all, and welcome from my behalf as well to the Qt earnings call. I'm gonna talk about the financials, talk about revenues, income statement, and then a couple of words about the balance sheet movement in Q1. As Juha said, we saw net sales growth of 35% in the first quarter. This was driven by the developer licenses, specifically out of the region, the Americas. The license sales and consulting, they grew by 44% to EUR 27 million. However, the maintenance that we report as a separate revenue line, it remained flat, and that line will start slightly going down going forward in coming quarters because of our ongoing exercise to change over to subscription license mode.
We did get some tailwind from exchange rate changes specifically from USD, and the impact of that was EUR 1.1 million. In comparable currencies, the growth were at 29%. We see that the strong quarterly fluctuation will continue, and we see that the exchange rate impact will remain going forward as well. Exchange rate impact because of the fact that roughly two-thirds of our revenues are in USD and our reporting currency is euro. The other side of that is that the timing of large deals and the timing of the distribution license deals fluctuate from quarter to quarter. Here is a short version of our Q1 income statement, and as said, 35% revenue growth driven by America and developer licenses.
Materials and services, which we use for third party consulting expenses, so that grew by 28%, I'm sorry. Our headcount grew by 40% year-on-year. We are now 160 more than what we used to be a year ago, and alone in Q1, headcount increase was 60. That impact shows directly in the personnel expenses, which grew by 41.7% to EUR 17 million. Other operating expenses grew by EUR 2.2 million, driven by the business development and ventures projects. Then also travel expenses, marketing are going up as well after two long years of COVID. This all leads us to EBITA margin of 17.7%, slightly down from last year, in euros EUR 5.5 million.
Amortization line, it's EUR 0.9 million per quarter, and that increase is driven by the froglogic acquisition that we executed last year in April. This gives us EBIT margin of 15% or EUR 4.7 million. We did get some gain from financial items, EUR 0.3 million, specifically from the exchange rate gains. Income tax accruals were EUR 1.1 million, meaning that the effective tax rate is roughly 22%. All this leads us to 12.2% net profit or EUR 3.8 million. Here in the balance sheet side, I'm gonna concentrate on the movement in Q1, and we see some increase on the non-current assets and also in the non-current long-term liabilities. The impact of that is driven by the lease contracts that we have now in our balance sheet.
Current assets are up by EUR 18 million, driven by the cash position. Let's talk about that a little bit later. There's no major change in the receivables part, and that due to our diverse mode of business, multiple regions, multiple segments, we don't see any specific risk exposure on those accounts. Cash is up by EUR 18 million, driven by the fact that 120,000 shares were sold in Q1 that had been initially purchased to hedge the 2019 LTI program. Equity is down by EUR 6 million. Components shortly are net profit for EUR 3.8 million, and then offset in the LTI program impact on equity.
Short-term liabilities as well are up by EUR 22 million, and that's driven by the impact of the long-term incentive program tails of that that are gonna be executed now in Q2. This impact is gonna be fading out in second quarter. With these words, I will hand over to Juha to talk through the market outlook and the guidance for 2022.
Thank you. Thank you. Now we get into the interesting part that the how is the world looking going forward. Our long-term growth prospects are pretty much unchanged in that sense that the increasing number of devices needing great graphical user interfaces, having great user experiences, and the need for cross-platform tools is not gone anywhere. Instead, it's growing, and it will be growing in the future. There is a very clear customer need for our product and how software defines the value of a product, it's still there. We do see more and more products that are being built with graphical user interfaces and applications on them. There is no change in that.
I also see a very strong demand on developer licenses going forward because more and more this type of software needs to be developed. If I look at how we've been able to attract new customers and how I see that our current customers are expanding the usage of Qt when they find how good a product it is and how much it can enhance their productivity, I'm very certain that we have a very bright future going forward in that sense. Also, we are adding more products like the quality assurance tools, as we can offer now to our customers not only the capabilities of developing world-class software, we can offer them tools to test those software when they do changes and so forth.
I see that we can utilize in the future a lot better and a lot more the capabilities we have because we have our own sales channel, we have our own sales people throughout the world. On top of that, we do have a great product. If I look on a shorter term in this year, on the second quarter, and this year particularly, I do see that well, obviously the Russian attack to Ukraine will affect some of our customers because some components have been done in Ukraine. We do see also impacts in the European economy. Inflation is rising and so on. Obviously the economy is gonna cool down.
I already mentioned that the COVID restrictions in China will be affecting the supply chain logistics throughout the world. It's not only gonna be in China. On short term, obviously, very tight restriction in China may affect a bit our ability to close deals in China, but those are kind of a minor effect on our top line growth. This high inflation, well, evidently the economy is gonna be cooling down all around the world. However, having said this, there is not much new in that sense that this is pretty much the same situation we had last year and a year before with COVID. How we see this affecting is that our developer license sales is performing very well.
Many of our or all our customers, when they see and when they look the future, they will have to think beyond these difficult times. They need to think what kind of products, what kind of user interfaces we're gonna be launching this year, next year, and the year after. Therefore, that development is actually not slowing down. The only place where we actually see this affecting is that some of our clients are having difficulties on supplying products in volumes they were anticipating in the first place. However, our strategy has always been that we operate in three continents. We operate in multiple countries. We have our country exposure risk is not limited into one particular country. Instead, it's that we're very spread out.
Our product is very horizontal, so our product is used on over 70 different industries, so we're not affected on any particular industry per se. We do have industries that are not actually facing supply chain, component shortages. I wanna highlight here, by the way, that when I talk about component shortages, I'm not talking only about chip shortages. There are, you know, logistical problems on all kinds of different products. There are some headwinds ahead of us. Despite that, I'm very confident that if I look our pipeline on the second quarter, if I look our business outlook, we are reiterating, we're not changing our estimate that we're looking for 30%-40% revenue growth, and we're looking for 20%-30% EBIT margin for this year.
I have no doubt in my mind, at least at this point in time, that we would not be able to meet these targets. On the contrary, the business looks very healthy at this point in time. I think that these headwind themes, unfortunately, they're gonna be themes for the whole year. I don't expect the supply chain logistics problems to go away. Obviously, well, hopefully the war will end very soon, but the effects on the economy will be affecting Europe and rest of the world for the remainder of the year. Despite that, we see that we're gonna continue very well, and we are keeping our targets, as mentioned before. With these words, I wanna thank you all. Now we have time to go on our conference lines and start our Q&A.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question at this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please ensure that the mute function on your telephone is switched off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. A voice prompt on your phone line will indicate when your line is open. Please state your name and company before posing your question. Thank you. We will take our first question.
Hi, Juha. It's Felix Henriksson from Nordea. I have three questions. I'll go one by one. Firstly, you delivered 29% growth in comparable currencies for the quarter, which is below your guidance of 30%-40% on an annual basis. I'm just curious on what gives you confidence that the growth rates will improve in the coming quarters, especially as you're facing tough comps for the second quarter. Is it the likely M&A that you mentioned, or do you also see improvement in the organic growth rates?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I do see growth on organic growth. When I'm giving this guidance, like I said, we do have, obviously w e've been looking on an M&A side. We've been looking into companies, but I'm not counting any M&A to help us on that guidance. If I look at our business historically, it's very clear that, first of all, it does grow on top of business in a way that it keeps building up, i.e. we do hire more people, we do investments, we expand our business, and that's where the growth comes.
I do see also that there are fluctuations on quarters. Quarters are not the same. It's a very good point that you pointed out that last year the second quarter was very good quarter with very high growth. Obviously this year, the growth rate, comparable growth rate will be lower on the second quarter. However, having said that, if I look for the overall, and if I looked at how our organic growth is, how I see it developing, how I see pipelines developing, yes, I do have confidence that towards the end of the year, the growth will accelerate and we're gonna meet our targets at the 30%-40% targets.
If I'm now looking into our targets and the obviously we are very far from the year-end. As you know, our fourth quarter is usually a very busy quarter and for some reason the fourth quarter usually is. All our quarters are that towards end of the quarter the sales accelerates. Towards the end of the year and the fourth quarter, I do anticipate that our growth will accelerate as it has always done.
If I look the pipeline building and if I look the outlook for the whole year, I'm not seeing at this point of time that we would even be on the low side of our guidance. In that sense, I'm pretty happy. Like I said, our first quarter, we pretty much bang on our internal plan. In that sense, the year started as we anticipated. That gives me also confidence that where we're gonna be heading.
Yeah, thanks for the answer. Very helpful. Maybe to follow up on the quarter fluctuation themes. Even though you did say that you did deliver bang in line with your own expectations, so I'm wondering if you saw any sort of like deal slippage from the end of Q1 to Q2 that we should be aware of.
Can you repeat that question? The voice quality over here is not the perfect one, so could you please repeat it?
I was touching on the quarterly fluctuations and asking that even though you did deliver bang in line with your internal expectations, was there any sort of deal slippage from end of Q1 to Q2 that we should be aware of?
Okay. Well, yeah, okay. Yeah, I see where you're heading. Well, there always is. If I look at the first quarter, what did we get? Then were there some deals that actually went into second quarter? Yes, there were. There always is. We always get a spillover to next quarter, and then the deals close because, for whatever reason, our clients want to sign the deal on particular quarter. Yeah, there was a spillover. I would say that was normal. There were. The amount of spillover to the second quarter was normal.
Do I anticipate that the second quarter, therefore, the quarterly fluctuations. We have to keep in mind that the second quarter last year was very, very good. The comparable growth on the second quarter this year is gonna be less than we have normally. If I look at the pipeline building, how the business is growing, we're pretty confident on the overall guidance for the whole year. We didn't close any big deals, obviously, on the first quarter. Or major deals to that extent.
Got it. Thanks. Then my final question is related to the distribution license growth. Obviously, it's clear that the developer license growth is a, you know, spearhead for growth at the moment, whereas you mentioned that the distribution licenses are facing some headwinds. I'm just curious if you could help us out at all with the sort of pace of the distribution license growth for Q1. You mentioned that it was growing, but are we sort of talking about single-digit levels or double-digit levels? Any sort of help like that would be much appreciated.
Well, on the first quarter, the distribution license revenue fluctuates depending on the, as you know, that our customers buy those in chunks, and they may report in chunks later that this much they used. I would say that if I look now that the distribution license revenue, that what is the growth rate and how does it look like going forward? We don't disclose this, that number, but it's. How would I describe it? It's it's it is a bit slower than I would have hoped for. I do see the reasons why there's been some slowness on some of our clients to get their products out.
Although I think that they are products that will get delivered. The delays are more like months, not like years or not like that they would not get out of the door at all. In that sense, I do anticipate that the distribution license sales will pick up later. The only major risk in that is that if the very strict COVID restrictions in China will continue, and if this logistical supply chain problems will get worse than they are today, then I would say that there are things to worry about. If things remain as they are, then I'm sure that the overall distribution license revenue this year will be okay.
Like I said, our business does fluctuate. Quarter-over-quarter comparisons, I would say that the half-year comparisons are better, full-year comparisons are even better. We do anticipate the full-year growth to be on a 30%, 40% on comparable currencies.
We got it. That's very helpful. Thanks. That's all for me.
Thank you.
Thank you. We are taking our next question. Please state your name and company. Thank you.
Hi, it's Matti Riikonen, Carnegie. If I would continue with the internal expectations versus the outcome, would you kind of explain a bit how much kind of developer license sales you expected? Or was it kind of more than you kind of expected if you say that the distribution license was a bit of a disappointment in Q1? I'm just trying to find the balance between those and your internal expectations before coming to the.
Yeah, of course, when looking just one quarter, the fluctuations in euro amounts are very small. But yes, I would say that if I look on the internal outcome, so if I look the overall revenue, it was pretty much where we anticipated it to be. If I look the that where is the fluctuations, yes, the developer license sales has. It was already last year, and it has continued very strong.
Developer license revenue is, say, a bit stronger and the distribution license sales a bit lower, if we compare on kind of our internal quarter- on- quarter expectations. When I look the business, I actually look the business in a half a year sequence. Internally, I look at the pipeline build-up. I have kind of a rule of thumb for how much we're gonna close, how much it's gonna go forward. There I estimate, and we do much more sophisticated estimates on that. I have my own rules of thumb looking at that on a half a year.
If I'm looking now at the first half of the year where we're gonna probably end up with this pipeline on overall revenue, I think we're gonna be very close to our internal targets for the first half of the year. If I look at the pipeline build up, we also look at our distribution license estimate that what do we estimate that the distribution licenses are gonna be on a half a year scheme.
There was a bit of softness, but I wouldn't say that it's alarming software softness in any regard. If I look at the customers where it's coming from, it was very obvious that they did have some component shortages. They weren't able to distribute and have the production they were planning to. It's on a quarterly basis, you know, the changes are very subtle, I would say. To answer your question more on developer license, less on the distribution.
Right. If I continue with, was there any kind of unexpected variation between the customer segments, like how the large customer volumes developed versus the smaller ones? Is there any deviation from your internal expectation?
No, no. Our customer relationships are very, they're very long, they're very steady. If I look on a larger customer base, it takes to get a new customer for the first time it takes some time. They usually take us for their new product development project that they have. They usually find out that the Qt is a very good product, and then they start expanding that usage. And as they expand that usage more and more their products are being developed using Qt and more they see benefits out of it. And this relationship building where the expansion of Qt happens over a longer period of time, it's, you know, it continues a longer period of time.
We don't see much of a fluctuation over there. The basis for such satisfaction obviously is that our product is very good. Now if I look that we added the quality assurance tools into our portfolio, we see that some of our bigger clients are now investigating and seeing how well those tools are integrated into Qt, and they're looking into starting using the quality assurance tools in part of their product development efforts. We obviously have startup customers. We have small companies in various sizes and there the deal is, they contact us. We usually get a lead through the website. They contact us, we sell a couple licenses and whatnot.
It's the development cycles are long, these relationships are long, and they are developing, so there are no short-term fluctuations per se. What we obviously see is that when the war in Ukraine started, it does affect on various components that were manufactured in Ukraine. Some of the raw materials that are from Ukraine and so on and so forth. That will have a short-term implications. The bigger picture that due to COVID, we still are seeing chip shortages and shortages on a global scale on some of the components.
Right. Then my last question would be that you already mentioned that the growth range for top line is pretty wide for this year, 30%, 40%. You also said that you have not changed your internal expectations in which part of the bracket you would be. I think you said that you're not looking to be at the low end of the growth range just to meet the guidance. Could you kind of confirm that where is the kind of confidence coming from that you think that you are in the same spot after Q1 than you were before Q1 or coming to the year?
Well, if I look at the pipeline build up, if I look at how the internal projects in our customers are proceeding, the bigger cases, how they're going forward. If I look at the pipeline build up and I see how the pipeline is being closed, that gives me the confidence that where we're heading at this time of the year. Obviously, it's, you know, the first half of the year, very early, and the end of the year is far out. You know, like I said, when we're meeting a new customer and doing the deal, it takes some time, right?
We have a pretty good idea of how much pipeline we need, how it's gonna be closing. We do have an idea of how much distribution revenue we're gonna be getting this year and so on and so forth. Obviously, there is a lot of deviation. If I look at the numbers and our plans, we are pretty much where we were thinking of. When we gave this guidance to 30%-40% year-on-year growth, obviously we weren't thinking. Our internal plan was not to make a 30% growth, which is pretty obvious, right? Nothing has changed there. That's why at this time of the year, yes, it looks that I am confident we are exactly where we were planning to be, and the things are progressing well.
All right. Thank you. That's all from me.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. We take our next question.
Good afternoon. It's Jaakko Tyrväinen from SEB. Can you hear me?
Yes. There is just a slight echo.
Okay. Great.
That's why I need to concentrate very carefully.
Okay. Well, let's try it too. I have a couple of questions. Thanks for having them, and I'll take them one by one. Following the escalation in Ukraine, have you seen any changes in the customer behavior, and especially when it comes to the decision-making of acquiring development or developer licenses? Are there any geographical differences in the behavior?
Well, the customer decision-making, I think that, mostly our customers are, they're developing great products with great user interfaces and great applications on those products, and obviously they're planning to have a longer life cycle for those products, and they need to be manufactured and what. Our customers are looking at their products and product portfolios for many years. Having kind of short-term challenges don't usually affect those plans because at the end of the day, those companies also, they need to have those products into the market. In that sense, I don't see. When the COVID started, we were a bit concerned that, what's gonna happen, when the factories were closed in February 2020.
What we saw then very quickly was that the factories were closed, and there were logistical problems, and there were less products manufactured because of all these restrictions. We actually saw that all our customers didn't change their long-term plans. Their developers were sent home from the offices, but they continued working from there. We haven't seen any hesitation in that sense, and we do see a healthy development in developer license sales. What we do see, well, if you want to look at differences based on one quarter, it's very difficult to say because our quarters do fluctuate and whatnot.
Obviously the Q1 was very strong in North America, so you could argue that there was less effect, but I don't see that was a really decision-making per se. It was that COVID is maybe a bit, you know, more, it has less of an effect in the United States now than maybe on some European countries. There are less restrictions. People are going faster forward and whatnot. Europe is coming up. On the other hand, Europe was very strong on a fourth quarter. Maybe the biggest impact I do see in customer behavior is the fact that in China, it's very, very difficult to have customer meetings. It's very, very difficult to negotiate the deals and close the deals and so on and so forth.
The restrictions on China are really affecting the sales effectiveness, so to speak. I don't see, even in China, I don't see that our customers would be thinking that they put projects on hold. That's basically what I do see. This is my own interpretation that I do see growing inflation rate and growing interest rates, which probably will affect the economy and what probably will affect the consumer spending on some point of time. Given all these logistical problems we have, I think that's actually gonna be healthy, and it's gonna be partly helping out on this supply-demand problem we're having at this point of time.
Okay. Great. Thanks. Then my second question on the competitive environment and a brief update on that one. For example, have you seen any certain rival in the market field more often compared to the previous times? Do you think that the Qt holds all the competitive edges that you've had in the past as well?
I do. If I look in 2015, 2016, when we started ramping up this business, we decided to have our own sales channel, our own local offices, and hired sales guys, pre-sales engineers, and consultants locally. We have a direct relationship with our customers in their local language, I see. Now we can add into that same sales channel, we can add more products. As we've grown, we can put more, even more, effort into R&D projects. We can invest more on products, and we can broaden our product portfolio. We can broaden our market addressable market.
For example, in quality assurance tools, we can offer them to our commercial customers, we can offer them to our open source customers, we can offer them also to technologies, where our customer has developed something using some other technology than Qt, so it opens up a bigger addressable market for us. I see all this playing for us and more size and muscle we have, more we can put effort into that. I see our growth opportunities actually growing going forward, based on the strategic decisions we've done before. In that sense, if I look now at the growth challenges we're having as of today compared what growth challenges we had few years back when we had very few people in this company.
Obviously the growth needs to be bigger, but we have more people to execute upon them. In that sense, I think that we are in a very good position. Do I see any new competitors or rivals? No, I don't. Obviously we do have the names we've mentioned before. Some of the smaller ones that we saw in the early days when we started this, I see some of them are kind of flattening out or declining, and obviously there are the usual big names there. Does a Qt Framework per se has its competitive edge? Yes, it does.
On embedded where you need the performance, you need to think about the performance of the processors and whatnot. Qt is an excellent choice, and we are a very good cross-platform tool. We keep on making it better. We do get feedback from developers using Qt and that's not getting any worse. Qt is, it's getting better. The more we can put effort into the product. We do have a great product, and people are very happy about it. No worries on that sense. You know, there is a COVID, there is a war, there are all kinds of hassles in the world.
The fact that software defines the value of a product, the fact that people want even better user interfaces, and they want even better usabilities and user experience when they purchase different products for their use, it's not going anywhere. It's the demands are getting higher. If you're building products, if you're building cars, if you're building refrigerators, you need to be even better on your digital experience than you were two years ago. I don't see that the market is there. The market is still in infancy. It's growing.
If I look, you know, up until 2025, I don't see, you know, I'm not worried at all that the market would like be penetrating in any particular way, or I don't at this point of time, this is always gotta be careful. At this point of time, the competition rivals I see, I think it's good that there is competition. It tells you that there is a market when there is competition. It's also a good run-up for us that there is competition, but there is more than enough room for all the competition. The market is still growing very fast for many years to come.
All right. Excellent. Thanks. My final one, just briefly, an update or first takes on the piloting of the digital advertising solution. How has that gone and do you expect the product to have some kind of impact on the 2020 number, 2022 numbers? And then if not, when should we think that that solution could have more meaningful impact going forward?
Well, let's put it this way that it's a very new offering to answer first to your question. We're having pilot customers in there. There are pilot customers in there. There is a pipeline of customers that we are implementing as we speak, and we're seeing how it works and how it should be built in a way that our customers will be able to make revenue out of it. The revenue model is that we do get a revenue share out of the advertising revenue.
What we do offer is that when you do use our design tools and you design the user interface, you can design where you have an ad, you can design where you have a video maybe or a banner ad. You can decide maybe that is only your internal advertising, maybe that is only your product advertising or product instructions. You have this capability on your design tool, and I think it's very important to have that because there are customers that will wanna have that feature. As you do that, and as you know, on embedded devices, there is no advertising market as of yet. For customers not only to be able to develop a design where they want their ads, we can provide those ads, right?
We do have the platform and capability that you can define that on this particular spot, I wanna have ads, and we deliver those ads, and then we share the revenue. Then we do have pilot customers in there. I think it's a needed feature to sell our design tooling and our design tools because that is a capability some of our customers will definitely want, not all, but many do. Keeping in mind that we do serve over 70 different industries, so there is a whole range of products that are being built using Qt. On a bigger vision, if I think of how this business has evolved, first, we were selling perpetual developer licenses way back when, and it was a one-time license. Then we started getting revenue.
We changed a bit our strategy and business models and our product and whatnot. We went into business that we're selling developer licenses and a runtime revenue. We do get paid when something is being developed and designed, and then we do get paid a small amount when a product leaves the factory. That's really great. I mean, that's a great business model. Now what we are testing and we're looking for different opportunities that wouldn't it be great if we would get a small fraction of revenue during the lifetime of a product? That's kind of the strategic thinking and vision behind there, that how could we be able to get into in a such position.
Obviously, that needs some kind of different product offering we have of today, and digital advertising is one example of this. Will it succeed? Time will tell. Will it have a revenue impact this year? No, not a meaningful one. Will it have a revenue impact, let's say 18 months from now? Yeah, definitely, I do hope so. We do have lots of different product initiatives and some of them will fly, some of them won't fly. Definitely the ones that won't fly, we do have a kind of internal development gates and business development gates you have to go through.
If you stop meeting those criteria and if you stop, if we see that, well, this is not really working, then we're gonna, you know, definitely we're gonna close and kill it. Let's say that in the next 18 months, digital advertising will start generating revenue or I'll stop talking about it. I won't stop, I won't stop our efforts trying to find a way that we would be getting revenue through products out of through their lifetime if you follow what I'm trying to say.
Yes. Thank you very much. That's all from my side.
Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, please press star one to ask a question. We will take our next question.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes.
Hi, this is James from Investico. I just wanted to ask on your guidance, 'cause from the last time we met, sort of hinted that you may be looking to up guidance. It's a bit surprising that you left it as is. Is this you being overly cautious or is this of a new paradigm we live in where you think there's gonna be reduced room for growth?
Can you elaborate a bit? Because I think our guidance is now 30%-40% year-on-year and that we did revise that not that long ago. Our guidance before was kind of a long time ago that we would grow 15% or more. Obviously, looking at the numbers as of today and looking at the numbers last year, that was a bit on the low side. Now our guidance is 30%-40% year-on-year growth and that we did launch not that long ago. I can't remember now off the top of my head when that was announced. I don't think that's you know 30%-40% year-on-year growth and 20%-30% EBIT, it's not particularly modest. Can you elaborate a bit your question, please?
Yeah, of course. Just looking at the history of the company, the growth has been growing at quite an extraordinary pace. I guess the market was expecting a continuation of that rate of growth. Just wondering, is this you telling us that market was too ahead of itself?
Now I understand you, sir. Yeah, okay. You're thinking that we had 50% growth and the expectation was that would continue, that 50% growth. If we look, we didn't definitely guide for 50% growth and I don't, we've never implied that we would be able to keep up a 50% growth year-on-year. I think that in that sense, the expectation has been too high. We haven't been guiding on that kind of expectation at all. I would not, you know, 30%-40% year-on-year growth, I would take on that.
As of now, like I said, it doesn't seem that we're gonna be on a low end, but I would, you know, the 30%-40% year-on-year growth, I would stick to that. What comes to a 50% growth last year, obviously the great impact on that was the fact that we had a big deal on our second quarter, and that affected the whole year. Last year, the second quarter year-on-year growth was exceptionally good with a very large deal. That, of course, contributed to our whole year growth being so strong. We did have a very strong fourth quarter, which is very typical.
We do have usually the first quarter is slower, second quarter is faster, third quarter is slower, and fourth quarter is always our busiest quarter of the year. Why does it go that way? I really don't know, but that's the way it is. I think that if you take away the effect of the bigger deal, then obviously the whole year growth would have been a bit less. Our quarters also fluctuate. An idea that we would be having kind of a straight line growth, certain percentage, it's not gonna be like that. It's gonna go up and down. Overall, if I look on this year, we've.
Well, I've said this many times, we still think that we're certain that we strongly believe that we're gonna make that 30%-40% growth this year. Are we gonna have such a mega deal that would affect the whole year and change a particular quarter? Of course, in the future, there will be those big deals. I mean, sometimes we do get these major deals. Do I anticipate something like that to happen on the second quarter? No. Do I anticipate something to happen in the future? Yes. When do they come? It's very hard to predict. However, am I kind of basing my this year assumptions based on that I'm gonna somewhere find a big deal? No. I hope I answered your question.
Yes. Just one last question from me. In terms of winning new customers, have you noticed yourself winning customers from competitors, or have you been winning customers moving off their own internal legacy system to your system?
Yeah, very good question, sir. Both. We do see that when a customer is in a situation that they start thinking about that, hey, we have this new product, whether it's a refrigerator, washing machine, or they think a new product line, and they think that they are getting ready, designing, planning and what it's gonna be like, they usually start looking at what kind of hardware, what kind of software, how they're gonna be developing that. That's the moment we get in. If it's a new customer, usually there is. We do proof of concepts and we might do demos. The customers are comparing that using Qt, what is the performance, what's the outlook, what kind of hardware I need to get the experience I want.
Qt really shines because building with Qt, you can use less hardware, you can save costs, you can be quicker. They compare other technologies usually, then we win or lose, and many times we win. The other that we see a lot that before in some industries, companies been having their internal tools. They've developed some internal tools and they've been using those. The question then is that, do I release my engineers from developing and upkeeping my own tool and put them into development and instead take Qt and then rely on the fact that Qt is a great product and we will also invest for Qt in the future?
Actually they're gonna get a better software development tool and framework using Qt instead of trying to build their own using maybe 10 or 20 engineers. It's usually an easy sell. It's better to put your scarce resources on developing something new, pay a bit of money for us and get a lot better product because that's our business, and we have hundreds of people working on or 150 people on R&D, subcontracting and so on, and we've been doing it for years. We do see both. We do see customers moving away from their internal tools, and we do see a competition.
Competition is, like I said, on a new customer, it is usually the proof of concept doing demos, and the customers can really see that what kind of usability and performance they can have using Qt on particular hardware compared to our competitors. We, on embedded devices, really shine on that. We're good. On customers that have been using Qt, obviously they already know this. The question is, then the negotiation is usually more like that, "Hey, we're gonna add these new products, we're gonna add more developers," and so on and so forth. It's a negotiation with their sourcing department that since we're becoming now bigger customer, what are the terms and whatnot. We get into volume discussions and price negotiations.
Usually, we do get in discussions of framework agreement. Our customers are usually big companies. When they see that they're gonna be using Qt on a wider spectrum in their business on various different business units and products, they wanna have a framework agreement, and then our sales negotiates a framework agreement that different business units can download and use Qt on particular terms. Not each business unit has to make a deal by themselves. That's a typical cycle. A very typical cycle is that when customers first start using Qt, we usually see happy customers and smiling faces, and we usually see that usage will expand later on. That's a cornerstone.
We need to keep our people executing, we need to get our new people executing very fast, but at the same time, we need to make sure that our product stays very competitive going forward. I have no doubt, I mean, our R&D is, you know, it's best in the world for building Qt. Now, I think we've used our time. Thank you very much for very good questions. Thank you very much for participating and listening. Looking forward talking to you after second quarter. Please keep in mind that the comparable quarter last year was very good, so the comparable growth rates will be lower. Looking forward, we're looking forward to a very good year for Qt. Thank you very much.