Good day, and welcome to the Quickbit Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2022 Earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question via audio, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Hammad. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Rocco, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to Quickbit Earnings Call Q4 2021/2022. On today's call, we have our CFO, Susanne Andersson, and me, Hammad Abuiseifan, CEO of Quickbit. Before getting into the presentation, I would like to hand over the word to Susanne to shortly introduce herself as she's new to Quickbit. Susanne, please go ahead.
Thank you, Hammad. First of all, before I introduce myself, I'd like to say that I'm glad that you could all make it here today, since just as Hammad and Simon mentioned in our Q3 conference call that we accelerated the closing process due to the shift of the CFO in the midst of a year-end close. We managed. Thus, I like to send big thanks to Simon, our former CFO, and the entire finance team. It's really a great job that has been accomplished. We will, however, continue to overlook our processes, but for now, the dates in our calendar are the plan dates of our future Q Reports. A short introduction of me. I have my long background or 17 years within Ericsson in various financial positions and also investor relations.
Over the past 10 years, I've been working as a CFO and IR within a number of smaller stock exchange companies in various industries. These companies have been noted at Nasdaq, both First North and the Main List. This is, however, the first time in fintech industry, and I'll try to speed up my industry knowledge as quick as possible. I think that's pretty much everything on me, so I hand back over to you, Hammad.
Thank you, Susanne, and very warm welcome to Quickbit. So early today, we published our fourth quarter interim report, April to June 2022. In today's call, we will walk you through the key highlights of the quarter, our products, as well as our financials. We will wrap up by looking ahead and touch our focus in the coming months and conclude with a Q&A session. Before getting into the presentation, I would like to share some comments and reflections over the past couple of months, where we've seen an increased level of geopolitical instability and the highest inflation in potentially 30 years. We're also experiencing high volatility on the crypto market and seeing companies operating under severe pressure to manage the situation, and in some occasions, also seeing companies defaulting.
As a company, Quickbit is debt-free and have a strong cash position. During the past 12 months, we have reestablished a strong foundation consisting of solid platforms and to a great extent, unique product offerings. As we have evolved our business and our development processes, our organization has a higher level of accuracy and a strong innovation funnel, and I do believe that we are well equipped to take on the future. With those introductory words, I'd like to start. Operator, next slide, please. We are now looking at the Q4 highlights. The revenue in Q4 amounted to EUR 69.3 million, which is lower than we expected and a decrease from EUR 83 million year-on-year. The decline in the fourth quarter is primarily due to a lower conversion rate in our affiliate platform, which has led to accelerating some system improvements.
We have noticed the conversion rate increasing in the end of the quarter and expect a gradual enhancement of our conversion rate. We also noticed, in addition to this, reduced activities from some of our merchants compared to last year, and we do feel confidence in that this is a temporary decline and that we are actively now engaging with all our customers to increase the activities and see positive signs in the later part of the quarter. Looking at our margin, our gross margin came in at 4.3%, which is an increase from 3.6% year-on-year. The margin increase is primarily driven by our product mix, as well as a result of our focus to lower our dependencies of external partners, as well as renegotiation of existing and new contracts.
During the quarter, we also received the final payment of the rolling reserve, hence concluding the old business model. This payment further strengthens our financial position with an addition of EUR 3.9 million in capital injection. As a company, we continue to keep a good pace with high productivity and focus on releases and geographical expansions. In the fourth quarter, we launched a Quickbit Card in Sweden and Norway successfully. We finalized the development of our own wallet and several partnership contracts have been signed. During the quarter, we also received our approved registration and license in the Netherlands, meaning that we are now preparing for further geographical expansion.
If we look in, we're concluding and wrapping up a turbulent year with a temporary weak quarter, and it's been a year where we have experienced lockdown in society due to the pandemic, geopolitical instability, macroeconomic challenges, and crypto volatility. Despite this, and despite the temporary weak quarter, we have increased our revenues by 38% for the full year and improved our profitability each quarter. Our cost structure allows us to scale up our business in an efficient way, and we see good potential to further increase our revenues and improve our cash flow. Next slide, please. We are now looking at Quickbit Affiliate. In the fourth quarter, our average daily volume came in at EUR 0.8 million, which is a result of our merchants activity and our capacity to convert and facilitate incoming customer requests to transactions.
We are not happy with these results, and as I mentioned on the previous slide, I am confident that this is a temporary downturn and we have thus been upgrading the underlying system which will gradually increase our conversion rate as we progress. As we have finalized upgrading the systems, we now have a more robust and flexible affiliate product that can handle larger volumes, which is a necessity for us to grow in line with our ambitions. During the quarter, we also added eight new merchants and reached a total of 82 merchants on our platform. We are now actively working and engaging with all these merchants to increase their activity to come up in volume again. Overall, we see a positive trend, and I'm looking forward to keep growing and expanding our affiliate business.
Looking at our profitability, our focus on improving our gross margin is continuing to pay off, and we have steadily been improving our gross margin during the last year. Related to the affiliate, this is partly a result of less dependency of external partners and a favorable business mix. I believe we are well equipped to continue strengthening our gross margin as we progress. Next slide, please. We are now at the Quickbit App. During the quarter, we finalized the development of our Earn Wallet and signed new partnership agreements. With the introduction of the Earn Wallet, we will enable both our consumers and later on our business customers to use their crypto as collateral and receiving a yield.
At the first stage, we have chosen to introduce this capability to our consumers using Bitcoin, but are looking into introducing additional coins as well as introducing this to our business customers. We see the Earn Wallet as a great opportunity for our customers to tap into DeFi services and at the same time attracting customers to our platform and of course, generating non-transaction-based revenues to Quickbit. During the quarter, we also finalized and received our licenses to expand into new markets and are working on introducing the Quickbit App, the Quickbit Card, and the Earn Wallet in Finland and later on also the Netherlands. Looking ahead and at future opportunities, we are continuing to add new features and capabilities, one of them being the ability to purchase euro directly with a debit or credit card, as well as adding new Alternative Payment Methods or APMs.
This makes it easier for our customers to add funds and get started. We're working with continuous design improvements in which we are focusing on customer experience and looking at adding price graphs and other financial instruments into the Quickbit App platform. Next slide, please. We are now at the Quickbit Card. A part of our vision is to make crypto useful, so it's important for us to provide solutions that work across the borders of crypto and fiat. Quickbit Card contributes to the crypto infrastructure with tools that we use in our everyday life. Quickbit Card is a great way to quickly convert a long-term cryptocurrency position into an instant payment for goods and services. Our card is an important strategic platform as we are looking to expand our offering in this space by bridging the gap between cryptocurrencies and regular spending.
During the quarter, we successfully released the Quickbit Card in Sweden and Norway, and will introduce a Quickbit Card in each country that we enter with a Quickbit App. We are seeing good, solid interest with traction and uptake on the card. If we look ahead and at future opportunities, the Quickbit Card strengthen our customer offering together with the app, and we are now looking at connecting the card directly to the crypto wallet in the app. We also see opportunities to introduce crypto cashback to our customers as we continue to evolve our products and partnerships. Furthermore, we're working on extending our partners and partnerships to fully digitalize the Quickbit Card. Next slide, please. We are now looking at Quickbit ecosystem. This slide is a slide that I've shown before and that displays our product portfolio and how we consider it to make up an ecosystem.
It's a fundamental part of our business and vision and how we see our products align to accommodate a need and space in the economy. Let me just give a quick recap. To the left, we have the Quickbit Affiliate that offers a card to crypto solution to e-merchants so they can offer their consumers to buy and pay in crypto at checkout. This is a proven solid platform that has facilitated over EUR 1 billion in revenue so far in what we consider an unsaturated market. In the center, we have the Quickbit App, Quickbit Card, and Earn Wallet, which essentially manifests our ambitions in the consumer segment. On the right-hand side, we have our Quickbit Merchant platform, which is completing our ecosystem. The Quickbit Merchant platform enables a one-tap payment between consumers and merchants, providing a customer-centric platform with future-proof technology.
With the merchant platform, Quickbit consumers will be able to access their account and issue payments towards the merchants using various channels such as web widget, the Quickbit wallet or any external wallet. Merchants will be able to receive, reconcile, and accept crypto with the ability to instant settle in either various cryptocurrencies or fiat. Further to this, we're looking at offering our merchants holding crypto the Earn Wallet. At the first stage, we're looking at introducing one of our merchant platform products to some of our existing customers during Q1. Our development is progressing well, and we are targeting to release a series of products on this platform during the second half of this year. As this ecosystem evolves, we will see emerging opportunities to claim a larger share of our users' finances.
We also predict our revenues and margins to grow as these products are net reported on revenue. With that, I would like to hand it over to Susanne to walk you through some financials.
Thank you, Hammad. Next slide, please. We're on slide seven, revenue and margins. Now only two weeks into Quickbit, I'll do my best to try to present and comment some of our Q4 results. If we start on the left side of the slide, the revenue in Q4 amounted to EUR 69.3 million. As Hammad has mentioned, we are not satisfied with the sales in this quarter and the 17% decline year-on-year. However, as previously explained, we see the decline as temporary, and the reason primarily due to lower conversion rate in our affiliate platform, which has led to accelerating some system improvements. We notice the conversion rate increasing in the end of the quarter and expect a gradual enhancement of our conversion rate before the more busier winter season.
Also in addition, we notice the reduced activities from our merchants compared to last year. If we move to the middle graph, our gross margin came in at 4.3%, which is an increase from 3.6% year-on-year. The increase is primarily driven by our product mix and cost efficiencies from our renegotiated supplier agreements. Again, we will continue our focus on profitability and cost efficiency. If we just move to the right side of the slide and looking at the full year, we saw a 38% sales growth despite the temporarily lower sales volume in Q4. This is all positive and proves there is a market need for Quickbit solutions and good opportunities for future. Next slide, please. We're now on slide 8, costs.
Again, if we start at the left side, our total operating expenses amounted to EUR 2.7 million in the quarter, of which volume-based are broken out of the EUR 0.7 million, the top blue part. Of the remaining EUR 2 million, personnel costs are roughly half of that at EUR 1.2 million. This has increased over the year due to the growth in the company but also transition from consultants to employees. However, despite increase in headcounts, the total OpEx has come down as a result of cost efficiency program. Maybe I should also say that the company has mentioned before, the volume-based reduction year-on-year is a result of previous work of establishing stronger and more sound relationships, both with acquiring banks and commercial banks.
If we then look to the graph at the right, our total Adjusted OpEx is EUR 2.3, and it's adjusted for non-recurring costs, mainly related to staff or personnel of EUR 0.4, and the rest is FX. Again, we will continue to drive cost efficiency and cost awareness within the company. However, we still need to invest for future growth, for example, to expand geographically, and new products and features. Next slide, please. We're now on slide nine, profitability and cash. Again, if we start at the chart to the left, our Adjusted EBITDA was positive of EUR 0.7 million despite a quarter with lower sales, plus the ongoing work with improving margins and keeping cost consciousness in OpEx has really paid off. Again, we will continue to work on the same track.
In the middle, we can see that we have a cash position of roughly EUR 10 million and also be reminded that there is no debt within the company, thus we have a very strong balance sheet for future opportunities. Finally, on the graph to the right, we can see that the final part of the rolling reserve of EUR 3.9 million was paid back in June, which completes the old business model, so to say. This is all good that it's now completed. Just some closing remarks from me. I think Quickbit is on a good track and coming in as a new CFO, I think the measures that have been taken are all good, and I will do my utmost to continue the good job started by Simon and colleagues.
I'll be looking forward to keep the communication up with you in future. Now I'll hand over to Hammad for some final remarks before we head into a Q&A. Next slide, please.
Thank you, Susanne, and once again warm welcome to Quickbit. Before we go into our Q&A, we normally close the quarterly presentation with providing a sense and a flavor of what's ahead of us. I'll take a minute to do so. In the aspect of rollout of features in the app, we're constantly working on new features that will enhance the customer experience and enable additional revenue streams for Quickbit. We envision to create the best customer experience possible in all our products and are working on enhancing the overall customer experience and including additional APMs in various markets. APMs meaning Alternative Payment Methods such as what we have in Sweden, for instance, Swish and iDEAL. We're also introducing some additional financial instruments for the crypto wallet and are working on connecting the Quickbit Card directly to the crypto wallet.
Regarding new launches, we recently launched the Earn Wallet with Bitcoin and are looking at adding additional coins into that offering. For Quickbit Merchant, we have ongoing dialogues with e-merchants, both existing ones to extend from affiliating to Quickbit Merchant and completely new e-merchants from different sectors and in different sizes. The genuine interest we're seeing looks very promising and makes us excited for the launch. As I previously mentioned, the development is progressing well and according to plan. Looking at new markets, we have received approval for our license in Finland and the Netherlands, and we're now preparing for a launch. If we look beyond today and into the coming year and what's ahead of us, we believe that crypto adoption will continue and accelerate. We believe that crypto and blockchain is an excellent complement to the existing financial systems of today.
We have a great strength in our profitable business, our business model, and our future-proof platform, and we'll continue investing in evolving and growing our business with ambitions of sustainable and profitable business growth. With that, I will open up for some questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, we ask that you please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Today's first question comes from Hjalmar Jernström with Erik Penser Bank. Please go ahead.
Hello, Hammad and Susanne. Thanks for taking my question. First, okay on the strong gross margin, maybe you could elaborate a bit on whether this comes from mainly from the product mix or these re-negotiated agreement that you mentioned, and maybe if you could remind us again then how it fits dynamic between the product mix and the gross margin, please.
Yeah, I'll take that. Thank you, Hjalmar. I've had some difficulties understanding. I think the quality wasn't perfect, but I think you're referring to your question to what's driving the growth of the gross margin, if it's a product mix primarily or other. I mean, we've mentioned that we have a good product mix which will continuously increase our profitability and gross margin, and we're starting to see effects of that. We also in the previous quarters put the foundation for increasing our profitability by taking on bigger part of the business as well as renegotiating and adding new partners into the overall ecosystem. Looking ahead, we do predict to continue growing our products.
As we've shown before, our ambition is to continue growing our profitability and gross margin. I'm not sure if you wanna add to that, Susanne.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Hjalmar Jernström.
All right. Thank you. The next one, the merchant release, you spoke on that, but I was thinking maybe you can go into more detail. Do you still see conversion of current customers as the main driver of growth? Can you maybe provide us with some flavor on perhaps your long-term target in terms of conversions of your current customers or something in that matter, please?
Right. I think it's a good question. First of all, the merchant is more or less a platform in which we will add various products as vertical products addressing the B2B segment. We see some parts of the merchant product to be adding value in the sense that our affiliate customers will extend into merchants, and some will completely transform and go into that product. We do see our affiliate business continuing growing, and we see the merchant product to take on both organic growth in terms of new customers, as I mentioned, as well as transforming some of the existing contracts, either by extending or completely migrating into the merchant platform.
That essentially will also catalyze and drive additional growth in our consumer platform, the app, and the capabilities around the consumer offering we're seeing and having. Obviously the merchant platform has wider capabilities, so that extend to greater part of the e-merchant segments.
All right. Thank you. One final question then on the headcount or the personnel expense. In addition then to converting consultants to employees, will you in the upcoming maybe two quarters add any new employees? What can we expect in terms of recruitment?
Yeah. I mean, we previously said that we have a very scalable business model. Some additional geographical expansion requires us to hire people locally. So that obviously, as we continue growing and expanding, we see that we have to extend our teams. We do, however, feel that we have enough people as a critical mass to continue scaling, and we're scaling very well with the organization we have today.
All right. Thank you. That was all.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have no further audio questions at this time. I'll hand it back over to Hammad for any web questions.
Thank you, Rocco. We have a couple of questions on the web. Let me just try to take a few of them. One of them coming from Bill: Why did you miss the previous standalone launching of merchant during Q4? Once dealing with platforms like this and essentially people's money and transactions, it's very crucial that we do the proper end-to-end testing and also extend into wider integrations and test with our customers and merchants. It's not easy to predict on the day how long this will take, obviously. What we're seeing now with our new development processes and how we actually address our development, we have a higher level of accuracy.
A part of predicting this also goes into counterparts and customers and how they evolve into that platform when we do, for instance, testing directly with certain merchants. I do feel that we have a much better development process and that we are much more accurate with targeting dates. I think this is something all tech companies have as a challenge. If we continue, are we only adding affiliate merchants or do we sometimes lose some? From Kalle. So when we report the total number of merchants, that means the total number of merchants, and we're looking at adding, that's the net add we're having on merchants. So far we're not losing merchants.
As I mentioned in the call, we are actively engaging now with a wider number of merchants and seeing traction on that. Let's continue. When do you estimate the app, card, Earn Wallet to generate a favorable revenue and profit? I think it was last quarter when we showed how we will transform into higher gross margin. Obviously, that is mainly driven by the uptake and adoption of our app, card, Earn Wallet and the merchant platform which is our net revenue. I mean, we are seeing good traction in all of our new products, and we will continue driving the evolution of them and accelerate and extend our marketing and the customer acquisitions as we go. Let's continue. We have a question here. The app has been released for quite some time now.
How are you planning to drive traffic to it? The offering is superior compared to our Swedish competitors, so why are you not focusing on taking a larger part of the Swedish market? Adding Swish or Trustly is an easy way to make the offering even better and would surely increase the amount of customers. Is it anything you're looking at? I think I mentioned in the slide that we're looking at what we call APMs, Alternative Payment Methods, which are then introduced into the platform and enabling different ways to top up and transfer funds into our platforms. That's something we're actively working on, and we will add new APMs as we continue. The Swedish market is very interesting for us, and I think we will continue trying to drive growth in the Swedish market.
There's a great potential in the customer acquisition that will be generated from the affiliate flow, as we previously described. When the merchant product and the platform is ready, there's a natural gateway to migrate affiliate consumers into being app customers and entering the complete ecosystem. We have a question here regarding the heatwave in Europe and the discussions on crypto and its high energy use, what is Quickbit's take on this, and do you take any steps in a greener direction? I think it's a great question and we are doing so in several aspects. I think one thing to remember is that a part of our technology is a custodian technology, which means we essentially don't invoke the blockchain at each and every transaction.
That means it's a completely green transaction from that perspective. As we are seeing new, more efficient transactional coins, we would obviously introduce them to a greater extent. A major part of our transactions today are not on high energy-consuming coins. We see evolution going on the technology side from, for instance, Ethereum, which is launching Ethereum 2.0, which enhance their environmental footprint. There's a lot of work going on here, partly by choosing the right currency for a coin for transaction, as well as our custodian solution, which really limits the CO2 footprint. Here we have. Why does it take so long from acquired license in other countries before launch?
As an example, Finland license acquired already last quarter and still no launch there. When it comes to the licenses and actually expanding into new markets, a part of this is obviously getting the license. As we previously said, it's not a homogeneous way to acquire a license in different countries, so there's different processes. Some countries require additional reporting capabilities and additional technical integration between us and the authorities. A part of, you know, not being able to have full visibility into that, we don't really see the process on the other side until we get the license.
What we essentially do when we prepare ourselves for getting a license is make sure that we are as technically compatible as possible, so we enable a fast go-to market. There's other things such as timing comes into play and making sure we have the right APMs for the local market. Now we feel that we are very well prepared for Finland, and we are getting the same level of preparation made for instance, Holland, where they have a different way than Sweden and Finland regarding both electronic IDs as well as APMs. We obviously work on enhancing this process, and we will continue getting faster and better at this. We have a question. I'll try to translate this.
When you've stress-tested the reporting, what was the purpose with this, and what's the next step? What about the discussions, ongoing discussions with bigger companies or businesses? Could you tell us more about that? I mean, first of all, I think Simon and now also Susanne has established a very good platform for us to be able to close our books in time and our financial process, and I will let Susanne shed some additional light to that. Obviously, that's. I think a baseline and a necessity for us to be able to evolve as a company, both from a process perspective and accuracy. I think that is just something we have in our roadmap to continue evolving our processes.
In regards to new customers and especially in regards to the merchant platform, I wouldn't be able to comment on that other than that we're having good, solid dialogues and there's a good interest out there on the market. I'm not sure, Susanne, if you wanna add some additional to the reporting process.
No, I can add that I think Quickbit has done a fantastic job to actually step-by-step improving the processes, and that is also closing a quarter shouldn't take too long time. I think the team has done a fantastic job and we will continue with continuous improvement, et cetera. Actually, maybe, Hammad, we can link that because we also have a question asking about Nasdaq and their readiness. I think this is actually one thing that goes hand in hand that we are continuously working on the internal routines and the compliance and these bits. I think all this work is going in the right direction.
Here I need to hand back to you because I don't know if exactly what we have stated for the Nasdaq, but I think we are in a good shape. Also what I can say from my previous experience is that it's not done in one hand turn. It's not done quickly. There are certain processes for that, and that also includes orders by the Nasdaq auditors, et cetera. I think so far so good. We're in good shape.
Thank you, Susanne. I think you covered it very well. I think we have a last question. When will new board members be appointed? I can only say there's ongoing recruitment as we communicated, and we will come back to you with the progress, and I cannot really further comment on that. I think with that, we've covered all the questions. Now we're coming to some additional questions. Do you see any advantages with the European Union MiCA regulations for Quickbit, compared to other crypto competitors? I think, I mean, in the presentation I mentioned that, the Quickbit Merchant platform is future-proof ready. The technology is future-proof. I think we've been working with what we predict being the MiCA regulations for quite a while.
We have a very, very strong compliance organization, which is also part of our product development process, feeding requirements into that. I think we're very well prepared for that. I can't really comment on other companies other than we see ourselves being well geared up for that. When will you start marketing your products on a higher scale? You worked with Noah for a year now. I mean, as we are progressing with our platforms and, to one of the questions, seeing that our product is very well perceived and strong with strong offerings, I think it's a better foundation and baseline to continue doing and driving customer acquisitions. A part of that will be acquiring customers organically through marketing, obviously.
A part of that is also finding the good potential bridges between our affiliate consumers into our platforms. Both of them have different opportunity values, one of them being more natural than and more cost efficient than the other. We will continue accelerating and growing our marketing spending as we feel we have the opportunity in certain markets. I think with that I think we covered most of the questions. If you feel that you have questions that haven't been answered, you're welcome to email us, and we'll make sure to answer your questions. I would like to thank everybody for listening in. Thank you, Susanne. With that, I would like to conclude the fourth quarter earnings call. Thank you.
Thank you.