Welcome to SSH Communications Security's Investor Call for Q1 of 2025. I'm Aino Virolainen. I am a member of the SSH Finance team, and I also handle our investor relations. The results will be presented by our CEO, Rami Raulas, and our CFO, Michael Kommonen. After their presentation, we will have time for questions. If you have any questions during the call, you can ask by posting in the chat. The call is hosted with our own solution, SalaX Secure Messaging. The call will be recorded, and the recording, as well as the presentation material, will be available in our investor pages. Now it is time to start. I will give the floor to our CFO, Michael, who will start with the financials. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Aino. Good morning and welcome also on my behalf to our first quarter investor call. Let's start by looking at the financials of the first quarter. The net sales grew 7.9% in the first quarter, and EBITDA remained stable at EUR 0.2 million, the same profitability we had on EBITDA level a year ago in the first quarter. The sales reached EUR 5.4 million. Underlying or underpinning the sales growth was a subscription ARR growth of 12.9%, and PrivX subscription sales grew 15% in the first quarter. On the profitability side, a couple of things impacted our profitability. On the spend side, we had increased spend in regulatory certifications in North America partially, and also the expansion of our North American organization increased our cost somewhat in the first quarter.
Looking further down the income statement on our EBIT, our EBIT was negatively impacted by a write-down as a result of us refocusing R&D efforts in the secure messaging, secure communication business unit. That write-down was EUR 0.4 million. Again, that is visible in our EBIT for the first quarter. On the market and portfolio side, we closed several PrivX deals globally in all three regions in the first quarter. We also saw several deals in Tectia, especially in Europe and APAC. These deals materialized in the first quarter. Rami will elaborate a bit more on those going forward. If we look at some other key metrics, key figures of the first quarter, overall subscription sales grew 11.4%. Our deferred revenues were down mostly because of seasonality, declined somewhat to EUR 11.8 million. EBITDA is mentioned EUR 0.2 million.
On the EBIT, we can see the negative impact from the write-down. EBIT EUR 1.1 million negative. Cash flow from operations was broadly in line with the previous year quarter, slightly lower at EUR 0.7 million. The liquidity position, however, improved in the first quarter. We ended sequentially compared to the end of 2024. We ended the quarter with EUR 3.5 million of total liquidity. With that, I'm happy to hand over to our CEO, Rami Raulas. Rami, welcome.
Thank you, Michael. I wanted to take you through a little bit about what we achieved in Q1 and how we are now moving forward in Q2 and toward the rest of the year. Focus has been on two things in the past year and moving forward. On one hand side, has been on improving and making our solution offering more competitive and more compelling. Secondly, about getting our marketing and sales activities onto a higher level to increase demand and the amount of business opportunities we can create for ourselves.
Now we are celebrating, as said already earlier in the previous calls, the 30-year anniversary, and we're going to use that to our advantage to talk about the presence that we've been able to have in helping to make the internet safe for the past 30 years and now proving it safe for the next 30 years with quantum-safe encryption and protection technologies. SSH protocol itself and Tectia as a commercial product is still going strong. You can see some examples there, windmill parks, subway stations, connected cars, still using that. Indeed, what I wanted to show here is a couple of cases of actually new Tectia deals with the bank and finance industries in Asia, telecoms operator in the U.S., space operator in Europe, Nordic financial, major finance and insurance organization for mainframe. Security, they are still working around. Some other financial customers and another authority.
Apart from people using open source, there's certainly a good growth pace still for commercial solution for government industries and for better security. Next, let's have a quick look about our performance globally. In Q1, we were able to grow in Asia, continue strong, actually up to 50%, and on the average growth rate in Europe. In the U.S., we still did not grow in Q1, and we have made some initiatives there, which relate to building a new team, enhancing and reconstructing and putting effort in our partner network and getting an approval for encryption validation that is approved by the U.S. government. With the new team, Sean McAllister was appointed, the young talented leader last year.
We have been building a team for marketing with Barbara and Chris, for sales with Wumi and Ben, and for partner management with Megan, and then technical capabilities with Saget and Rafal. This is not the whole team, but these are the new additions to our team and new roles in the team. I feel pretty confident that we have now a new gear in the US. We aim to grow with our partners. We continue to develop our partner business and grow our partner business. We were in many events. This is a picture from an Australian event. We were at the cybersecurity summit in Singapore, at Security Days in Tokyo, a couple of OT operational technology events together with our partners. We signed a few new partner agreements here in Finland with Loihde, mainly focusing on OT markets.
Actually, today we are announcing a signing of a partnership with Cinia. This is me and Jaakko from Cinia shaking hands. That will come out today. We signed a partner agreement to enhance our product and offering portfolio with Honeywell. A bit more on that later on. We had partner days in Europe, in Prague, very successful partner days. We are going to have another partner event, partner days for about 50 partner representatives in Asia in Bangkok in two weeks' time. Really a lot of activities with partners moving forward. Coming back to the other element of the game here, compelling and competitive solution portfolio, and then on the second hand, marketing and sales, we've been able to simplify our product offerings.
Nowadays we talk about three core businesses, the biggest one being PrivX Zero Trust Suite, complemented with network security, and then human Secure Collaboration. We added also a few things into that last year, which are now coming into play, new versions and functionalities for the secure messaging, OT insights, PrivX OT Insights for complementing our OT offering, and then file encryption solution as well. With that in mind, I wanted to take an example of one industry, which is the defense and defense-related providers, actually using all of our solutions. There is no reason why other markets and other customers could not deploy our solutions more widely. I guess you could say, but this is about post-quantum communications. It's about secure file transfer and encryption. It's about Secure Messaging, Secure Mail and Secure Messaging. It's about secure networks and access management.
We're not even talking about Privileged Access Management when we talk about defense, because everything is privileged in that space. I guess you could call our solutions military-grade in a sense. This is work we've been doing in the past three to four years, and now we're achieving some success with that. There's one area which we did not focus on yet, which is kind of secret level encryption device or solution. Single country market is too small for that. We are looking for ways to expand our presence in the defense market through strategic partnerships with defense operators globally, both in Europe and in Asia especially. Let's have a look at one of our key products, the main product, main growth product, which is PrivX, Privileged Access Management.
I'll maybe just a word on here as well, is that there's in many countries nationally a request or requirement to do encryption family solutions, and we certainly have that encryption family solution, our main supplier for that now. On PrivX, the annual recurring revenue in Q1 grew 19%, and we had some new customer wins in that area. Not a single big deal, smaller, medium-sized deals with some service providers, retail and wholesale company, cloud service, managed service provider, manufacturing industry, and again, more for the defense sector. With PrivX we introduced also new versions, actually two new versions in Q1, and added new functionalities into PrivX. High Availability. I mean, these are critical systems. All the critical connections to critical data go through the solution like PrivX. It has to stay up 99.999% of the time.
We've added all the latest protocols for quantum-safe encryption for the connections that go through from users or systems to target environments, whether they're databases or servers or network devices or applications. We've enhanced our presence to automatically work with cloud operators. We've already been compatible with Azure, AWS, Google. Now we added Oracle Cloud and quite a few service providers also using OpenShift, which we are compatible for, finding automatic resources in the cloud environments, onboarding them automatically, scaling up and down automatically, and connecting to the targets for users and applications as well. We added a few more OT-related, operational technology-related security components into PrivX. The whole method of accepting access to manufacturing sites or critical infrastructure has to happen from the side. Somebody on the side has to allow access. The whole workflow and approval process tools were developed.
We now introduced to the market the integration of network security and Privileged Access Management, so PrivX and NQX integration. A little bit more on that in a while. Moving forward, we are now bringing in the next PrivX release, we are bringing FIPS, which is the U.S. federal approved cryptography for the U.S. government business. We have partners in the U.S., and we have a federal ink company in the U.S. as well. This is something that will enhance our opportunities to engage more with the U.S. government business as well.
Indeed, moving forward on the simplification and focus on the solution architecture, solution branding, if you wish, we are going to bring to market PrivX Key Manager in a matter of a couple of weeks, which is an enhancement and next generation of what used to be called Universal Key Manager, automatically removing the need of having to rotate passwords, let alone passwords, but also security keys and making it fully automatic for customers to create connections without having to change or renew keys at all. PrivX Desktop will be released a little bit later in Q2. That is the next generation of future development of what used to be called Tectia Client. Enabling secure connectivity from workstations and remote engineering workstations without the need of having to use VPN, complicated and expensive VPN solutions.
We will also in Q2 be releasing PrivX IT Insights, which is a further development from what earlier was called Risk Assessment, where we are adding capabilities to scan and discover assets, accounts, targets, resources in the IT landscape, whether it's computers, servers, databases, applications, or network devices, and the state of their health. We will be adding generative AI development to that. That is a big investment we're making at the moment to further automate that process. On the OT side, actually pretty comparably, we have now a partnership with Honeywell, which gives us PrivX OT Insights, i.e., being able to find assets, onboard them automatically, and monitor the connections and vulnerabilities and threats in the OT landscape. We've already had under the PrivX branding, we've already had a PrivX Authorizer, a mobile app, and PrivX Device Trust Authorizer with the partnership with Beyond Identity.
All of that is going to happen in Q2 to further simplify the PrivX branding or product naming and to have more functionality so people can start from the kind of asset discovery or environment discovery and analysis, or they can start from the endpoint security. Multiple opportunities there. Indeed, as Michael mentioned, we have some new cases there. The integration between PrivX and NQX is a unique offering that we have, which no other PAM vendor or access management vendor and no other network solution vendor can offer, where we simply combine the access management capabilities of PrivX, authenticating the user, authorizing the user, and then add to that capability of just establishing a just-in-time tunnel as well. We even make the network connection ephemeral. It's only valid for the time of the session. It's created automatically.
PrivX commands NQX to open a quantum-safe tunnel. When the job is done, everything is destroyed and set up next time around. There is nothing permanent. Nothing is left behind. There are no open doors. In the OT environment, everything has to happen from the right-hand side. Ports and gates are not open until they are told to be opened. With that, let's have a quick look again on what's happening in the OT space. We've been talking about OT as the big growth market, and certainly we are now seeing the next steps happening in that market. This integration of ephemeral tunneling and secure tunneling between sites and from engineering workstations to sites is certainly a great addition to our offering.
We talk about IT and OT convergence, meaning that there are nowadays necessity to connect to operational technology sites, manufacturing plants, windmill parks, oil rigs. Earlier, they used to be kind of air-gapped, like in oil and gas, for instance. You could not allow changes or connections to those remotely. This has all now changed and changing, and all those companies are looking for now solution for secure access and the integration between the IT platform and the OT platform. That is why we are expanding and moving forward. What we have seen now, we've been recently in a couple of Gartner analyst big events, called Identity & Access Management Summits in the U.S. and in London, talked about 450 people face-to-face in those events. They are mainly IT people. What we've seen there is that nearly half of the discussions are around OT.
People are keen to find out how they can improve their security for OT. Conversely, we've been to OT security events, CS4CA and ManuSec, two events in the U.S. and Europe. Typically, they have been only representatives from OT security from companies, from the manufacturing part of the organization. Now in those two events this year, we've seen nearly half of the people are from IT security, CSOs, CIOs, or cybersecurity specialists from the IT side. Certainly, at least on the people level, this is already converging. What we are now offering is a converged solution between IT Access Management and OT Access Management, and then enhancing our OT Access Management with the partnership with Honeywell. You may have seen the press release on that.
Indeed, what that does and helps us, it helps us find the assets, onboard the assets, monitor if there are any unnecessary or illegit network accesses to the target devices, control devices in manufacturing sites, and then see vulnerabilities, block vulnerabilities from happening, and then producing compliance reporting as well. We are integrating these solutions together. The other key element is the architecture of PrivX itself. In the IT side, you have certain requirements for a Privileged Access Management solution, typically about identities, identity management, entitlements, authorizations of users, auditing, recording, just-in-time, zero-standing privilege access methods. On the OT side, these requirements are a little bit different. It is more about approvals and workflow processes. It is about the norms and standards like NIS2 or IEC 62443, which are totally different from the IT side of requirements.
You have some certain protocols or connection methods which by default were not encrypted or protected at all initially, like OPC UA or Modbus or S7 or PROV.NET or those kinds of things, which have to be protected and encapsulated into secure connections as well. What is unique in our solution, which I do not think anybody else can do, is that customers can use one platform for that and reduce the cost of ownership and have a simpler way of managing systems just on one platform, whether it is divided into installations or two services or run as one service. Indeed, we have been active with OT, with a lot of activities. We have been, as I mentioned, in OT events. These are some pictures from those OT events.
We are quite nicely represented in one of the latest, which just came out a few weeks ago, actually, at the end of Q1, an industrial cybersecurity bias guide, where you do not see, apart from one, typical IT Access Management solution vendors. You see specialists from the OT side. That kind of further, again, highlights the uniqueness of our offering between IT and OT that we can make with PrivX. We are working on customer cases. I am actually happy to kind of announce that together with our new partnership, there is a new customer win just right now about a global automation company specializing in logistics solutions and robotics and automated material handling systems. You will see more about that a bit later on in the coming weeks.
Still, coming back to that network security, and I mentioned NQX and how we are deploying that also now for the OT side. Let's have a look at what's happening in the network security, NQX part of the business. That also grew 23% year- on- year. We're moving forward there. Initially, the whole development was aimed at the defense market. We have then moved forward with the defense contractors and suppliers, supply chain security as well. A new entrance area for us, which we've been working on and now got success in Q1, is data center operators, data center to data center or rack to rack within the data center, secure connectivity with really high-level performance, low lag times. There's a really special requirement for performance, but then connected with security.
Typically, security is an overhead that takes down performance. In our solution that is not happening. There is only 4% degradation when you run full-blown quantum-safe encryption on network devices. We are focusing on European cloud providers as well. A few more words on that in a second as well. We are also finding and developing new market opportunities next to the OT opportunity with the European telecom sector and Asian telecom operators and government use cases, especially in Asia and Europe as well. As I mentioned, one of the new grounds is Data Center Operator. This was a press release that we announced together with Verne Global at the end of Q1, where really the security combined with performance was the unique selling point, which they could not find from anywhere else on the market.
I want to share a little bit about what is the family of network encryption with NQX aimed at. There is a family of different solutions. The blue box is there to talk about throughput. On a 10-Gb line, you can get a throughput of closer to 10 Gb, and on a 100-Gb line, you get throughput closer to 100 Gb. That is what they are scaling from small boxes or small deployments that can be in the field, in a moving machine, a tank or a ship or a vessel, or a remote site like an embassy as an example, all the way up to massive data center connections where you need high bandwidth, high performance. Typically, those solutions cost hundreds of thousands.
We have a very affordable solution because we're using standard hardware and standard infrastructure technology in our solutions, not bespoke, expensive technology, but gain a high performance because of a few features that I wanted to share with you here as well. If you can make all right. There are some interesting key features. Secure Boot, these are really easy to take into use. Anybody could take them into use, and they will only kick off and start if the security of the device and the software is interlinked on the site. Crypto Agility, we will be implementing one of the first vendors' new algorithms when they come through the standardization processes. Crypto Module means that customers can deploy their own cryptography. That would be hush-hush projects, but technically that's possible.
We have built some clever network connectivities and the high-end performance coming from the architecture of the devices. Our software, especially software, means that we can scale in an unprecedented way. Not so much about features. It is more about what are the kind of benefits of that. It is about the automation and ease of use, ease of taking the solution into use. Of course, it is important to have the accreditations, National Cyber Security Agency accreditations. We are in the final stages of NATO and European Union approvals for restricted level, which will open us new market opportunities in those spaces. We already mentioned PrivX, Privileged Access Management, and NQX integration, which I think is pretty unique. We can just encapsulate all OT, unprotected old OT environments into a secure environment, and the performance against hardware-based solutions is up to six times faster.
Toward the end here now, just a few to complete the enhancements and development on our portfolio. Just a few words on SalaX Secure Collaboration and Secure Messaging. We already have a strong base in Secure Messaging with the Secure Mail, with the acquisition many years ago and further development of that. What we see happening on the market is that the Mail and Secure Mail itself is not growing. We have grown a little bit in that. There are some new customers there as well. The market is really rapidly moving into pick-up or Secure Messaging, secure fast messaging type of solutions. That is why we decided to enter that market.
A few years ago, we decided to base our solution on so-called Matrix Open Platform technology, which is a European development platform up to about 160 million users, many interesting instances on that technology stack with French government, German healthcare, German defense, many Swedish public sector customers, and so on and so forth. There is kind of a bit of a compelling reason for that as well. First of all, for many government organizations who are running these services for themselves, many still are based on Skype or Skype for Business. That is coming to an end of life, so there is a replacement requirement there. Of course, because of the policies, compliance, and really adhering to company standards, people need to understand what can be communicated where. Typically, you would not invite people to your communication platform when you deal with secrets or confidential data, right?
You don't use Signal for that purpose as an open platform, as we all have seen recently as well. What we have now added to that is a secure offering. We are offering SalaX Secure Messaging from Secure Cloud, European Cloud Service Operation as a SaaS offering. This is new, just came to market. We will also be promoting our solution with the free trial onto the market, being released this week or next week. I see a great opportunity there, especially given that we have a strong base already in the Secure Messaging part from the Secure Mail side of things from the past. With that in mind, I'll just summarize here how our portfolio has been now completed overall and invite Michael to join here for an outlook and Q&A session.
Okay, the outlook for 2025 remains unchanged from what we communicated in February. We expect net sales to grow during 2025 compared to 2024. We estimate EBITDA and cash flow from operating activities to be positive for 2025. As a reminder, at the end of 2024, our ARR was EUR 20.5 million. In 2024, our net sales grew by 9% to EUR 22.2 million, and EBITDA was EUR 3.4 million in 2024.
I guess I know we could facilitate some questions if there are any.
Yes, thank you. I will shortly check the chat for any possible questions. As usual, the first questions will come from Redeye's analyst, Fredrik Reuterhäll. Fredrik, please go ahead.
Good morning. Rami and Michael, thank you for the presentation. I have a few questions.
First, regarding the recruitment in the U.S., can you give us your trajectory for the rest of the year? I mean, are you satisfied with the number of new recruitments, or are you going to add on to that? Will there be any more, you think, additional costs related to the U.S. expansion now?
Yeah, certainly with the recruitments have taken on a bit more cost, as you can imagine. I think the main part of the investment now goes for the solution of focus on the market, the partner network development, and sales and marketing resources are now in place. I do not foresee any major further investments in that for this year. Now we need to see the results of that investment, obviously.
Yeah, that was actually my next question. How do you—I mean, APAC grew pretty nicely in the quarter.
How do you balance the sales effort now between the APAC and the U.S. going forward?
Yeah, I mean, the U.S. is the biggest market. I mean, five years ago, the U.S. used to be half of our business. Okay, we have grown elsewhere, certainly. We maybe did not have the right strategy and right resourcing in place in the U.S. Now we are working on that, starting from the second quarter of last year and now kind of fulfilling that. I have high expectations that we are able to turn the U.S. around this world.
I think when I look at now about the amount of dialogues that we've been having in the events, the amount of new deals or opportunities, you might say, that we've been able to establish, and also the work that we've been doing now with our existing customers, because we have massive customers, but only buy one or two products from us at the moment. The kind of key account management and landing and expanding and enhancing their experience of our further solutions is key. I see the right steps being taken there. It's a little bit difficult to estimate how quickly that will show in the numbers, but we'll have to take it step by step.
Yeah, makes sense. Regarding PrivX, you grew 19% in the quarter.
If I look at the growth, I mean, the growth rate for last year is a bit lower. Do you think you would manage to have like 20% growth for the rest of the year, or what do you see there?
Yeah, we certainly target that and even higher. I mean, that is the biggest part of our business. It is the highest growth market. I mean, the Privileged Access Management market will grow. There are two parts of it. There is new market. There are new customers, new players who yet do not have a proper solution in place, especially in the OT space, which I hope will take and expect to take off more now in the coming couple of years. There is a replacement market. Some people have 20-year-old solutions in the market and other market leaders. They are maybe not happy with those.
They are complicated, expensive, and they're looking for a more nimble, more cloud and hybrid era solution. Let's even call it a third-generation PAM, which PrivX stands for. Certainly, our aspirations are pretty high. We don't give specific projections, but I foresee an opportunity to grow more in that space.
Okay. It was interesting to see the product development in PrivX there. I'm just curious, how much of the product development is from in-house compared to requests from customers? Can you say something?
Yeah, that's a good question. I used to say in my earlier career that there's always a combination of customer requirements and technology innovations, and they kind of meet. We are a really customer and market-driven organization. We talk about closer to customer as a theme here, as part of our values as well.
The majority of the development is happening in dialogue with our key customers and partners. We are market-driven. Of course, there are new technology innovations like AI. Generative AI is a good example. I mean, customers are not saying, "I want you to deploy generative AI that way." That is a technological innovation that we need to put in place to see how that can enhance our solutions. The majority of a large part of the development comes from dialogues and discussions and real requirements for our roadmap from customers, customers and new projects.
Yeah, okay. Thank you very much. That was all for me.
Thank you, Fredrik.
All right. Thank you. I do not see any questions in the chat, so we will close the call. Thank you very much, Rami and Michael, and thank you to everyone who has been following us online.
Our next investor call will be on July 17th when we publish our results for Q2. Thank you again, and we hope to see you in July.