Good afternoon, and welcome to the Qt Group's third quarter 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 first have Q&A in the room, and then via conference call lines. Without further ado, please, Juha, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Very warm welcome to our third quarter results presentation. I'll go through briefly some of the business highlights, and then Jouni will talk about the financials, and then we have the outlook and guidance for 2022. The business highlights, our net sales grew 31% year-on-year, and it was a very good growth quarter. Our developer licenses grew, they grew especially strong on the QA tools, the quality assurance testing tools. On this quarter, we had a bit softness on the distribution licenses.
However, already at this point, I wanna stress out that there is always a quarterly fluctuations on the distribution license sales, so we still do see and expect that the overall distribution license sales will be very healthy this year. Our EBITDA margin was 22% of net sales, and EBIT impact on our Axivion acquisition impact for our EBIT was a - EUR 1 million negative. Jouni will talk more about the Axivion acquisition impact to our numbers. Our personnel increased 66 people in third quarter. Mainly the growth comes from sales and R&D, and it's good to realize on this number that the 41 people was actually the Axivion headcount impact.
It was roughly 20 people, a bit over 20 people that we hired quarter-over-quarter. If we looked at what was the economic situation in the third quarter, it remained pretty much the same as it was on the second quarter, i.e., we do see a bit of differences. In APAC we see a bit of softness, and there we see COVID impact specifically in China. There are a lot of restrictions in China that are slowing down the business. What we see in Europe is a bit of softness from well, all. We all know what's happening over here, including the war and inflation and so on. There is a bit of softness.
In U.S. we see, as a matter of fact, at this point of time, economy is still pretty healthy and going well. If we look at our numbers, we pretty much hit our targets on Europe and in U.S. and had a little softness in APAC. That's pretty much the same picture we had on our second quarter. If we look at our recruiting, we see that we're still recruiting as per our plans. If we look at some of our customers, we can see that they are slowing down on their recruiting. We're also seeing some cautiousness in our customers, and there we can see that we're selling more one-year licenses than three-year licenses.
Again, that was pretty much the same situation on the second quarter, so we haven't seen much of a change over there. At the same time, we do see that the projects that our customers are doing, they are going forward. We don't see project cancellations or we don't see in that sense slowness in the market as it is. Couple words about the Axivion acquisition. What Axivion does, it's a kind of in a very short, it adds value, it kind of fits into our quality assurance tools in a way that with Axivion, developers can, they can test the architecture and they can test the software while they are developing the software.
Whereas Froglogic is more like for the, it's testing the user interfaces. These two complement each other. What does it complement for Qt as a whole? We're selling the software development tools and we're selling also now testing tools to test what our users been developing. While it's good to mention over here is that both Axivion and former Froglogic tools, they are standalone products, so they can be used to test software that's been developed other software development tools, not only Qt, so it expands our total addressable market. Axivion in 2021 was EUR 5 million revenue and EUR 1.5 million EBIT, and the personnel was 41 people as of September 30th, 2022.
Before our acquisition, Axivion was concentrating mainly in the German market. What we're gonna do with Axivion is that we're gonna introduce it to more to a global market. It will expand our offering to C++ developers and beyond, and it will strengthen our ability to engage customers in multi-product one-stop shop called Qt. The addressable market is, say, EUR 1 billion. We see just this quality assurance tools business testing market, very attractive market just as a standalone market, and we have very high expectations for it in the coming years. Some of the Q3 offering highlights, we did introduce 6.4 where there were major improvements on our WebAssembly support. There were also other introductions on 3D and so on. We did 6.0 on Coco.
Coco is the quality assurance tool, name for the product. We did introduce 3.7 on Design Studio, on Android, new version on Android Automotive. In short, we're doing quite a lot of product development as part of buying new products and making sure that our existing products stay very competitive, which they are. All the time we're getting feedback from the developers that the Qt product and our quality assurance tools products are very high quality, and we are exceeding the expectations from our users, which is very important. If we look what we did in Q3 on a product, we continued enhancing our existing products. We bought Axivion to our product portfolio, and we keep on developing our product further and we continue those investments.
We also continued our investments on sales and sales operations, which is basically sales and pre-sales engineers, and we intend to continue on that path and keep on hiring. We don't have any plans to slow down on our growth plans or growth projections. Without further ado, Jouni will go through the financials.
Thank you, Juha, and welcome from my behalf as well to the Qt Q3 earnings call. I will talk through the financials, some notes about the net sales income statement, and then a couple words about the balance sheet. As already mentioned, our net sales grew by 31% in third quarter. The growth came from the licenses and consulting part, specifically in which the testing tools and the consulting did show good growth numbers, and some softness then on the other hand in distribution licenses part. Maintenance is down year on year as expected, and that's as a result of our change into subscription licensing mode. That maintenance part will keep on going down in coming quarters.
Exchange rates, again this quarter gave us a piece of tailwind, and the impact of the exchange rates now was EUR 2.5 million, meaning that our net sales growth in comparable currencies were 20% year-on-year in Q3. For the first three quarters, our net sales grew by 23%, and that's as well for most parts coming from licenses and a consulting part. We have been gaining from the exchange rate impact for pretty much all quarters so far, impact of which is EUR 6.2 million. In comparable currencies, our net sales growth were 15%. We will keep on seeing the strong quarter fluctuations from timing of the large deals, also timing of the distribution license bookings, and then also the.
We want to note that the exchange rates will keep on having the impact on our revenues going forward as well. Roughly 2/3 of Qt revenues are in USD and the rest in Euros. Here is the income statement from the third quarter. As said, the net sales grew to EUR 35 million. In expense lines, the materials and services were pretty flat. That's the account we use for the third party consulting services to be provided for our external consulting sales projects. Personnel expenses up by EUR 4 million. Our headcount is up by roughly 180 employees year-on-year.
Roughly 40% of this increase is coming from the sales operations, 41% as an outcome from Axivion, and then next biggest one is the R&D, which are aligned with our growth initiatives. Other operating expenses is the growth is again to support the our growth projects in ventures business development. Also we do see increase in R&D outsourcing, marketing and also now in travels after two slow years with COVID. The EBITDA, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization is EUR 8.9 million or 22.3% in the third quarter. This is on the same level as it was in the first half year.
Juha said that there's negative EBIT impact of EUR 1 million because of the Axivion acquisition, and that's coming from the amortization, roughly EUR 0.7 million, and then one-time due diligence cost of EUR 0.3 million. EBIT then for the third quarter is EUR 6.3 million or 18%. We are seeing good gains in items below EBIT this year, primarily, specifically in the financial items. That's because of the exchange rate impact in the balance sheet items when it comes to intercompany balances. Our effective tax rate will be low this year, and that's because of the kind of reporting of the impact of the long-term incentive program that was executed in first half year.
All in all, net profit for the third quarter is up from EUR 4.4 million to EUR 6.9 million or 19.7% of the net sales. Here, the same story for the first three quarters this time. We reached EUR 104 million. Earnings before interest, taxes and amortization is EUR 23 million, so 4% up from last year's. EBITDA margin is 22.5%. No change pretty much from first half year. Amortization is up. We are now having the full kind of period of Froglogic amortization and now also Axivion as a newcomer. So amortization is up from EUR 1.8 million to EUR 3.4 million, bringing the EBIT margin to 19.3% or EUR 20 million.
We do get the positive impact from the financial items and taxes in total, and net profit for the first three quarters is EUR 21 million or 20.2%, which brings our earnings per share to EUR 0.84. Balance sheet. The most movement is coming from the Axivion acquisition. Non-current assets up because of the intangibles bookings and goodwill. Current assets are up because of the customer receivables from Axivion acquisition and then also tax receivables. Equity is up from since end of last year by EUR 19 million. Obviously net profit, EUR 20 million. Then negative impact of the LTI impact early this year and now the share issue because of the Axivion acquisition of EUR 8 million.
Long-term liability is up again by EUR 44 million, and that's the loan we took for the acquisition and then also the tax liabilities and earn-out liabilities relating to that. Now I will hand this back over to Juha to talk through the market outlook and guidance for the full year.
Thank you. Thank you. Well, if we look at our long-term market outlook and prospects, we do actually see it pretty much unchanged. There is the underlying need for developing better products and underlying need for those better products to have better user interfaces, graphical user interfaces and user interfaces overall. We see new product cycles, new product families coming, being launched all the time. We don't see any change on that long-term prospect in that respect. We also see that Qt is very well positioned. We do see competition.
Some of the early competition we had in 2015, we see that competition going away and getting smaller, and we see that our product lineup is very good. Our products are very good. Now that we are increasing our product lineup, like we've said before, that we are looking for the software development process as a whole, and we are looking to enhance the developers. We wanna make the developers' life software development fun and easy, and we're looking to ways to offer to our customers to be more efficient in that software development because the bottom line is that there is not enough developers for all this software to be developed in this world in the coming years. We are very well positioned in that.
I think that the these product acquisitions we've done, they add perfectly into our strategy. I'm very happy that the Froglogic acquisition we did a year ago, how we've been able to integrate that and how it's performing. I'm certain that Axivion will be on a similar path. There is a very clear need for our offering. We see that the market will be growing and on a longer term, and we see that growth for years to come. In that sense, we're very confident on that and we don't have any reason to believe that that would change somehow. On a shorter term, I'm sure that you've heard this pretty much on every presentation so far that you've heard, that there are uncertainties.
I would say that they are a bit different. We are operating in a global market. We see in Asia the very strict COVID restrictions. They affect the business, how business is being done in China and we see some softness over there also in the economy. Japan, obviously the Japanese currency has weakened quite a bit and so there are some challenges in the Japan economy in that sense. We see some softness coming through in United States, although we still see that the economy over there is going very strong. I think that Europe is in biggest trouble at the end of the day, with the inflation, with the energy prices and whatnot.
My expectation is that the European economy will be in pretty much in deep trouble in the coming winter and a few coming months. How long that's gonna last? Well, there are different estimations that this slow downturn will be relatively short, and some people are saying it's relatively long. The truth of the matter is that nobody knows, but there'll be a slowdown, that's for sure. COVID is also. Well, it's rising up again, so we'll see that will have some effects. We do see some countries issuing, apart from China, also more restrictions, but we haven't seen travel restrictions so far a whole lot. If we...
Like I said, our quarters are very different and a quarterly comparison in our business is very difficult to do because there are sometimes bigger deals, customers are buying more developer licenses. Also the runtime revenue does fluctuate from quarter to quarter. All this slowness, if I look the first three quarters up until now, the developer license sales been doing fine. I mean, if we see that, are people starting new projects, are they continuing with the existing one? Are they pushing new products to the market? Yes, they are. I think that that's gonna be overall, if we look on a yearly basis, that business seems to be going forward.
We don't have any reason to believe that would change a whole lot. If there is gonna be an economic downturn, then I would say that the effect is gonna be on the runtime revenues. Obviously, the runtime revenues are growing share of our total revenue all the time, so that will have an impact then. We do expect a healthy runtime revenue development in fourth quarter, and we do see, we know that there are quite a lot of projects that the products are hitting the market next year. We do expect our runtime revenue to grow also next year pretty healthy.
We'll see how much this economic slowdown will have an effect on that. At this point in time, we're still looking at it and still feeling that it'll slow down from an ideal world, but they're still growing pretty healthy. That's what we see. Guidance for 2022 is unchanged. We're saying that the full year 2022 will increase 20%-30%, and the EBIT margin will be 20%-30%. As we know, usually the second and fourth quarters are the strongest quarters, fourth quarter being very strong, and the first and third quarters are kind of the slower quarters for us.
That's why it goes well, obviously. There is a summer vacation in the third quarter, and then there is a year change in the first quarter. A bit of a slow start for the year, but that's how it works. If you look at our previous fourth quarters, they've been always substantially higher than what we have in the other quarters. It looks like, again, this fourth quarter that we have quite a lot of deals lined up for the fourth quarter that we're expecting to close. Also, we do know that there are quite a lot of existing business that is closing as we speak. For the fourth quarter, I would say that the.
I'm sure there are gonna be questions as to where we see the risk. I actually don't see on our bigger deals, if we look at the bigger deals that we have, we usually don't have a whole lot of risk involved in them, that they're gonna go away or we're gonna lose them because at that point when we're negotiating with our customer about a bigger deal, that means that the customer has already decided that they're gonna develop. They're gonna design, develop, and manufacture a product that's gonna go into the markets. Obviously, there are quite a lot of decisions already being made and we're in that discussion. Those projects very seldom go away. But the timing, of course, is an issue that the.
We'll be able to close these deals on the fourth quarter or will some of the deals being pushed on a first quarter. Because sometimes our customers rather have the invoice on a first quarter rather than on a fourth quarter. That's mainly the timing issue we see there could be a potential risk. With these words, thank you. Do you have a question?
Yes. Thank you. Veikko Silvasti, Danske Bank. Let's maybe start with the guidance for this year. Could you just once again describe the reasoning behind reaching the 20%-30% constant FX growth? That obviously requires now constant FX growth of over 30% for Q4. Are you expecting customers to maybe move back to three-year licenses, or is the sales pipeline just so heavy now that you expect to get those closing, or is there some other changes or expectations in the market?
Very simple question, dear. Very simple answer to your question is that the pipeline is just so heavy. Obviously at this point of time, we've gone through the pipeline very carefully. We've gone through all the bigger deals very carefully and we looked at where we think we're gonna be ending up and the. That's why we think that we're gonna be within the range. I think it's fair to say that we're gonna be most likely towards the lower end of the guidance rather than the higher end.
I understand. The classic question about potential deal slippage, from Q3 to Q4. Have you seen some large deals you maybe expected to get in Q3 moving on?
Yeah. There were a couple. Yeah.
Clear. I understood from Jouni's presentation that especially strong growth in testing tools and also in consulting, but then distribution license revenue missed. How about the developer license of Qt, the core product of your developer license, has this grown as you've planned or?
I think Jouni was referring to line developer licenses and consulting. Developer license has been growing very nicely. Yes. If we saw some softness, it was on the distribution license sales. Over there, I wouldn't make too big conclusions because, you know, some of the distribution licenses we do get that people report that, "Well, you know, this is how much we shipped, and here is your license. Check." Then we have customers that they buy, for example, half a million, and once they've shipped those half a million, then they buy more. There is a quarterly fluctuation on that.
If I looked at the distribution pipeline, that's what we expect for the whole year, that number, at least as of now, looks very healthy for the whole year. If we just look at the third quarter, yeah, then the distribution licenses were a bit softer.
Yes. Can you just briefly describe how you kind of combine this kind of distribution license pipeline that you expect? Because as far as I'm concerned, looking at your past reports, I think distribution license revenue has been the line that's been essentially missing the expectations, I mean. How do you construct this kind of pipeline, and how do you make sure that it's, you know, aligned with the reality that will then come through?
Yeah. It's a very good question. If I look at the distribution licenses as a whole. Well, by the way, I need to get these terms right because I talk about runtime, so I talk about distribution licenses, and the same thing. It's the same license, so I use kind of two terms for the same thing, and I have to wean away from the runtime. Runtime word. The distribution licenses, if we look in 2020 when COVID hit, and there were a lot of closures and whatnot, our distribution license sales was very small. It was like, you know, very single digit.
In 2021, it started to get better, and in 2022, like I said, if everything goes like it looks now, the whole year growth for distribution licenses will be a healthy growth. How do we estimate? Obviously, when we do make deals with our customers, we do. The negotiation goes like that, you know, what is their expected volumes and when are they planning to be shipping and whatnot. We have a rough idea of how much to expect. On automotive market, that is actually fairly accurate.
That's easy to make estimations that how many cars are gonna be manufactured and delivered because they kind of make those decisions beforehand and they order quite a lot of different parts for the cars, and so they kind of plan. That's fairly accurate. We know that when they're gonna be launching, how much they're gonna be shipping, so that's no problem at all. When you go to cheaper priced products like rice cookers or such, then it kind of gets complicated. If you look at the amount of sources where we get runtime customers, we have a huge number of runtime customers as of today because we serve 70 different industries and very low-end.
From a very low-end products to very high-end products. We do have customers that are actually manufacturing very low-end products and whatnot. Some of those customers are buying some of the runtimes also beforehand. There is some uncertainty on those estimations, that's fair to say. Of course, we do have a list that where it's coming, we're constantly following it, and we are fine-tuning the estimation. In this kind of situation, when we do have large number of customers, we have three continents, and there is an economic slowdown hitting, it is fair to say that, of course, we don't have, you know, accurate at what's going on just right now, that how much they are and what kind of decisions they are making.
There is a, you know, it's an estimation. It's I don't have exact information, but this is what's gonna happen. On a deal slippage, yes, that's always a possibility. I mean, you know, we do have like, I think a year ago or a couple years ago, we had a deal, a bigger deal that everything was negotiated, everything was ready, and then the customer signed it on second January. They didn't sign it into fourth quarter. They signed it on second January for whatever their budgetary reasons. That can always happen. Yeah.
Okay. Thank you. I think I need to speed up in order to, for other analysts also to get to ask but a few questions still. It seems like this kind of customer behavior from buying three-year licenses towards one-year licenses has continued from Q2.
Yeah.
Should this kind of change be permanent? How does this affect your, let's say, first of all, 2023 outlook, and then on 2025 outlook, so your longer term growth prospects? Does this, by the way, affect distribution license revenue?
No, it doesn't. In a way, it helps next year because the most of the... Well, I can't see any development project that it's done in a year, so which means that they're gonna continue, and the year licenses will be sold again after a year. On distribution licenses, that does not affect. I think that's the. In these uncertain times, we do see some of our customers, as a matter of fact, they're slowing down their hiring. Some of our customers are even laying off people, as we know. Even some big tech companies are laying off people, as we know. Companies are clearly getting ready for tougher times. They're looking at their cash flows, and they try to secure their cash flow. There's a lot of uncertainty.
A lot of our customers say that they rather buy a one-year license, even though it's more expensive than a three-year license. Yeah, we do expect to see that sales too happen again next year. In the short term, it does not affect on the runtimes. Runtimes are based on the fact that how much product goes out, and then they're gonna be buying those licenses again. If I look at the number of licenses and how the number of licenses is growing, that's, you know, on a very solid trend in that sense.
Okay. Selling one-year licenses doesn't affect your 2025 targets?
No.
Yeah. Cool. Then final one. You said that some old competitors are fading away, probably this industry specific offering and so forth. How about new competitors? Are there some new technologies rising? To name a few, Flutter and Unity. How do you see this?
Yes. The ones that we see that when we started in 2015, there were, you know, offerings like EB GUIDE and Kanzi was there quite a bit. We were about the similar size. If we now compare the sizes, I think EB GUIDE is pretty much gone. Altia was one of the companies. I think they kind of remained the same. We made quite a lot of investments, and we've been growing quite a lot. I see them specializing on some things or some specific things, but clearly we're gaining more momentum as they are. On Flutter is actually not a very new thing. I don't know when Flutter was introduced.
It's a language and started from mobile and it's been on. We've seen it in mobile. We've seen it a bit on desktop. We haven't seen it on embedded. Unity, we've seen that, Unity is a game engine, and they have a very good 3D offerings and whatnot. On the other hand, we see that with our products, building, for example, the digital cockpit in a car with Qt, you can do that. With Unity, you can't. We do see some of these game engines, mainly in some high-end automotive cars. If you wanna build really cool 3D effects where you don't have any hardware constraints or electricity or memory constraints, great products for that, for sure.
Exactly. Unity will be one more tool in Mercedes-Benz toolbox, and you will be there as well in the future.
Yeah. By the way, when you see automotive, we do have few customers where you can say that Qt is dominant, so that pretty much everything is built in Qt. I think that in a normal situation what you see is a hybrid. Still, the automotive manufacturer is using many different tools to build the digital cockpit. We have few customers that are using Qt extensively. We also see that the customers using Qt extensively, they actually do gain quite a lot of benefits. Using many tools, having many development teams and whatnot, in the long run I don't kind of foresee that to continue.
It is much more efficient to try to combine and use only one set of tools. At this time, I think that there are a lot of experiments, people experimenting doing different things and whatnot. It's a very common thing that if you see a car, there is software being made with many various ways and with many various tools, so it's not all unified as of now. I do expect you to see Qt sometime. If I look at our position in the automotive market, I think it's very strong. We do have a very good offering. Of course, there are some fluctuations all the time, so you may win or you may lose something.
Overall our position is very strong. And again, I wanna stress out that even as of today, our runtime revenues are coming from very multiple sources. We have a very large number of customers in that specific area, and I don't expect the automotive overall, you know, if you look 2025, if everything goes like a dream, then the automotive revenue will probably be 20%-25% of the total, but not more than that. Majority of the revenue is coming outside of the automotive market, even as of today.
Yeah. Thank you so much all from me.
Yep. Thanks.
Thank you. Any more questions in the room?
Peter Friis, Private Investor. I would continue on your product offering and how competitive it is. Are you considered being in various industries the market leader or an average product offering company?
Well, we actually consider that our product is very world-class, and it's extremely good. It depends, say, a bit on how you define. If we looked at it, we serve over 70 industries throughout the world on those different use cases from a very low-end hardware memory footprint into a very high-end. We're probably the only game in town that can serve customers on such a large scale, which means that you can build your lower-end products and your higher-end products and everything in between using Qt. We're very good on that. We're very proud to be so widely cross-platform tool.
Our framework is, we do see that it's one of the best in the world, and that's what we do get feedback on. If you take a very specific comparisons, like you take only 3D, and then you forget that, you forget everything else, then yeah, it's fair to say that if you take game engines, and you wanna build really cool 3D effects, and you have limitless amount of hardware and the processing power, then obviously the game engines are better. The game engines are made to make games, and they've been doing that for a long time, so obviously, you know, that's their stronghold. We've been always looking that we wanna be a horizontal product.
We wanna have a very wide variety of the use cases and therefore we do have these 70 industries. If you look at that strategy, we're pretty much the only game in town. Yeah, we do surveys on our developers, and the feedback is that it's extremely good. You know, one cornerstone for our success obviously is that the product is excellent. If I look at our acquisitions, the quality assurance tools, Froglogic, and then we have the Coco and Squish product names, the feedback on those is also excellent. The Axivion in its own sense, I think, you know, if you wanna make a comparison to Axivion, I would say that it's like a Formula One car.
Okay. I maybe would like to continue to the CEO regarding the profitability. I looked at the nine-month figures and revenues, even if maybe slightly lower than expected among investors. When we look at the EBIT level, and especially if you look at the currency exchange rate adjusted, there is hardly any increase in EBIT this year compared with previous year in nine months. Is this a concern which the company is addressing or do you see this as a temporary situation whereby the scaling impact will gradually get more pace?
Well, we've guided that our EBIT will be between 20% and 30% year-on-year going forward, and we do see that we're gonna be well in that guidance. We're not looking, obviously, on a short-term would we be able to make even better EBIT. Yes, we would. I think that at this point of time, it makes all the sense in the world to invest in this growth and make sure that we're gonna be on this growth path for the years to come, which we are going to be. That's. I have no doubt about that. Therefore, we do have R&D investments. We do have our own product development investments we're gonna continue. We do have research projects going on where we're testing different things.
Maybe some of them will be announced later, and some of them will probably be killed, as it is. We are also hiring more people on sales and R&D as we speak. We intend to continue those growth investments. On EBIT side, we're very confident that we'll be able to be on that 20%-30% range. We have no doubt about that and on a yearly level. I'm not concerned on that. If we look at where our one measure we actually look is that on a yearly level that what is our growth rate in percentage and what's the EBIT percentage.
If we see that the revenue growth percentage plus the EBIT percentage, if that's over 40%, we're actually very happy because having such a number that is over 40% on a year-on-year basis, it's kind of a tough measure to meet, and that's not official guidance we're giving, but that's our internal measure, you know, that we wanna be on those two numbers summed up together. We wanna be on over 40%. We're looking for profitable growth in that sense. Like I said, the revenue fluctuates a bit, and in our business it has a direct impact on EBIT. On the EBIT guidance, 20%-30% EBIT this year, we're very confident on that part.
I'm not concerned. On the other hand, to your question, are we going to be slowing down on our recruiting or are we gonna be slowing down on our investments for the growth? No.
Okay. I have two specific questions for the CFO. There was a quite heavy increase in other operating expenses. Did I understand that there was some one-time expenses related to this latest acquisition or can you open a-
Sorry. The other operating expenses primarily are driven by the growth initiatives, and the Axivion acquisition is only like EUR 0.3 million. It's EUR 300,000 of that what comes to due diligence and these transaction-related costs. That's a limited part of that.
Yeah. Okay. The other part, depreciations and amortizations, are heavily up.
Yeah
how big is all in all the amortization amount related to these two acquisitions? In how long period are you gonna depreciate those?
The Axivion calculations are still preliminary, but all in all, these two acquisitions, Froglogic and Axivion, add up to roughly EUR 7 million on annual level starting next year.
Okay. Thank you for the great answers.
Any further questions in the room?
Let's take them online.
Let's move on to the questions online.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Matti Riikonen from Carnegie Investment Bank, Finland branch. Please go ahead.
Hi, it's Matti Riikonen, Carnegie. Couple of questions. Firstly, within the license sales and consulting reporting line, was it so that the developer license sales or the growth was the strongest, followed by consulting, and then distribution license would be clearly weaker growth than these two?
Yes.
What is the kind of momentum there?
That's the momentum. First of all, on a consultancy business, just a reminder, we do consultancy business for our key accounts when they wanna have specifically help from us. If it's a consultancy business where our customers just need more headcount to be able to do the consultancy work, they usually go to our network of partners. We do have partners globally, consultancy partners globally, and we direct our customers to those partners, so we don't intend to do that business on our own.
Our consultancy business growth now and also in the future, it'll be relatively modest compared to the overall growth on a yearly level on overall growth to our in overall numbers because that's the and that's how we wanna keep it. For example, for next year, we don't envision to grow our consultancy business, but we do need to have it to support our consultancy business. This quarter, the developer license sales was going very well, and yes, your conclusion that the softness was more on the distribution license itself. It does vary quarter-on-quarter, so I wouldn't make too long conclusions on that. It's a quarterly fluctuations more.
Okay, thanks. I was just curious about can the distribution license revenue growth go beyond or lower than consulting? That was really the essence of the question. Was it that weak, or was it better than consulting growth?
Well, we do see that the distribution license sales is growing, going forward it's becoming bigger and bigger part of our revenue mix, and it's clearly outnumbering the consultancy revenue.
That was also the case in Q3?
Well, as you know, we don't report them separately.
Yeah. That is actually my second question. Have you considered that you would actually report the distribution license separately on a quarterly basis?
Uh-
Because we will be asking about that in any quarter, in any case, so you might just.
Yeah, I know.
Save us the trouble.
Yeah. I know. Thank you.
Okay
We need to think about also the quality assurance business. As it grows and becomes more substantial, should we be reporting that separately as well? Yeah.
Right. The second question is related to headcount. Now, the organic headcount growth has been roughly 26%. Do you think that is the rate that you could think of pushing forward into next year and also coming years? Do you see that you need that amount of people to basically take care of the future business?
Well, that's a good question. I think that if I look now on a shorter term, yeah, the current hiring, there seems to be a bit of fluctuation, so like in the first quarter, we got a lot of people coming in. Second quarter was a bit slower. If I look overall at how the personnel is growing, for example, to next year, yeah, probably something like similar like this year. A bit harder to predict for 2025, but there's gonna be, yeah, we're gonna be hiring.
I would assume that in the, you know, in the coming years, later years, the percentage at least will come down because the base number is getting bigger, but I haven't really looked into and we haven't really looked into that deep into 2024, 2025 personnel numbers in that respect. Clearly, as a percentage, it'll slow down. Yeah, we'll be hiring. We will be hiring in the coming years, for sure.
Right. I think we already discussed a bit the revenue split between one, three, and five-year contracts. Could you give some kind of idea where we are standing at the moment? I mean, the kind of revenue shares of these terms, one, three, and five-year contracts. Because since that has obviously changed, it is creating quite a lot of kind of estimate changes, or at least many investors tend to think that it has a big impact on your revenue recognition short term, and therefore it kind of makes or creates fluctuation in the top line growth. Could you state what, where you are standing at the moment in the revenue shares between one, three, and five-year contracts?
I think we discussed this three months ago, and we were promised that there would be some more clarity, but that has not yet happened.
Well, I can give you one easy answer. We don't sell five-year deals. I mean, you know, if we do, it's one or two or something like that. But I mean, in general, five-year deals are exception.
Okay
It's one- or three-year deals. There we definitely. I think that we, you know, it's been fluctuating a bit, so it's, you know, it's not a constant measure. If I look at the overall number from the beginning of the year where we are as of now, I would say that we've been selling more one-year licenses this year than we've been selling three-year licenses. We've been seeing customers being more cautious. Customers are more cautious on their cash flow and cash positions, and they're looking different ways to manage that than we've been seeing that customers prefer now more one-year licenses. Then, on shares, I'm sure we did not give any figures out.
Is there something that you could give more clarity on that, Jouni?
Right. We haven't specifically given the shares and, well, as Matti stated, it does have rather significant impact though when it comes to revenue recognition. Now, instead of booking the revenue every three years, now you if you sell one-year licenses more, you do it once a year, every year. The impact is rather significant. However, the mix as well has changed somewhat in that, with this regard as well that we now didn't have Froglogic, for example, last year for the full year. Now we have that. The magnitude of that is probably somewhere high single-digit millions year to date so far.
Okay. High single millions for the whole nine months so far. If I understood correctly.
Yes, Matti, you did understand correctly. It's kind of a estimate now.
Okay. It would be quite helpful if you would be able to put that in more transparent terms because then it would basically remove the need to think about has there been any changes in the accounting or the way you sell licenses, and then we would just compare apples to apples. Now, we are not quite sure what we are kind of measuring, so that's the challenge at our end. Of course, you probably know the numbers and you might think that it is not relevant, but I think we can disagree on that.
Well, we don't have to.
Okay if you-
Yeah, yeah. We don't have to, I mean, you know, we do have the numbers and, it's still making quarterly estimates on our business, it's a very tough job. I don't envy that. I mean, you know, In our business, there are so many things that actually fluctuate on a quarterly basis. It's very difficult to make those estimates just on a quarterly basis. It's relatively a lot easier to make on a yearly estimates. But the quarterly fluctuations, there are so many moving things that it's a very tough job. Yeah. I do understand that with this, with this information it's even tougher, but yeah.
All right. Thank you. That was all my questions this time.
The next question comes from Jaakko Tyrväinen from SEB. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon. It's Jaakko from SEB. Couple of questions on my side. I'll take them one by one if I may. First one, I'm continuing on the guidance, which implies very strong Q4 and the delta from Q3 is kind of massive. Is your sales pipeline just so strong that you are able to deliver the very strong Q4? Are you, for example, seeing some larger deals that could take you closer to the or that could take you to the guidance range?
Yes, we do.
All right. Fair enough. In Q3, did you see some customers that postponed their decision making in the first half? Did those customers came back and acquired the licenses during the third quarter?
That's what we. Our customers are, you know, they have a project whether it's manufacturing the rice cooker or maybe a oven or refrigerator or whatnot. They've decided that this is what we're gonna be manufacturing and bringing to the market. They start designing that the how, you know, they do market research and whatnot, and they make estimations that how much we're gonna be producing this kind of a product and all that. They start designing the product. They start getting these tools, making hardware, software decisions, et cetera. You know, it's highly unlikely that a customer being doing all this, they would cancel the whole thing, so they don't.
We start negotiations and there, you know, there are legal discussions, there are terms discussions and whatnot. It's very highly. Usually when we're in that situation, in that stage, they've already done the proof of concepts and demos and whatnot, so it's highly unlikely that they would change to some other technology. It's very easy for them at that point to decide that instead of pushing the button and starting the investment, they postpone it like a quarter. That's easily done. When things are in production, it's very difficult to postpone anything like a quarter. You are in production, and you need to keep on going.
Before you start the production, you can always delay it months ahead if something, you know, if something drastic happens. As we know this year, drastic things have been happening. There are, you know, a lot of drastic things. We usually don't see, you know. We do see things postponed. We don't see things canceled, or we don't see a whole lot that something just goes away. Having said that, it does happen but, you know, it's like, you know, single hand times. It may happen, but it's very seldom. Things being postponed from a start date and from one quarter to another, that's something that we do see. Yeah. Yeah.
The things that were postponed. You know, we see in each quarter a certain amount of things moving forward. We kind of have a. When I see a pipeline, I kind of have a rule of thumb that, you know, about this much we're gonna win, about this much is gonna go to the next quarter, and that's actually pretty constant number in, you know.
Mm-hmm
In a whole volume. That's what we see, and so it goes. A very good thing is that when we do get a new customer, the first deal is usually relatively small. They start doing a one project. What we do see, and that's really very reassuring, is the fact that our customers, they tend to increase the usage of Qt. The first impressions using Qt, the first products they do, they see the benefits, and then they expand the usage. We do have quite a lot of sales going into our existing customers, expanding the usage of Qt. That's a great proof for our product being very excellent.
Thanks
... 4:05. Thank you very much for participating in our quarterly results and see you again in the future.