Welcome to the Quickbit Q2 conference call. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen only mode. During the questions and answer session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing star five on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers. Please go ahead.
Good day everyone. Welcome to Quickbit's earnings call second quarter for the financial year 2022-2023. On today's call, we have Martin Samuelsson, Head of Product, and Sneha Patel, Head of Finance, and me, Anders Jonson, Interim CEO. Martin, would you like to start by introducing yourself?
Absolutely. Thank you, Anders, and thanks to everyone for listening in. My name is Martin Samuelsson. I'm the Head of Product here at Quickbit. I have a background in marketing and design and UX and product design. I've been with Quickbit for three years, so right from 2019, right around the pivot towards the consumer market. I've been working as the design lead and the head of design. Now I've taken the overarching responsibility for the product portfolio. With that, I hand over to you, Sneha.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Sneha Patel. I've been working at Quickbit since last summer. I have close to 15 years of experience in various roles within finance, working in a variety of businesses from scale-ups to government-owned companies. I'm excited to be here today with Anders, Martin, and the rest of the management team. In a few moments, I will share with you the financial details. Before we start, a kind reminder for those of you that have a question, please send your questions in English. Next slide, please, where Anders will walk us through some business highlights.
Thank you, Sneha. We are now looking at the second quarter highlights. With an average daily volume of EUR 0.9 million, the revenue in the second quarter amounted to almost EUR 82 million. We're pleased to see the 20% growth in sales compared to the quarter, driven by an increased activity among merchants during the quarter. Our gross margin was stable at 4.2%. During the quarter, we launched our consumer offering in Netherlands. This is an important step in our geographical expansion. We welcome the forthcoming EU regulation Markets in Crypto-Assets, MiCA, and believe it will bring opportunities for further geographical expansion. I have had the honor of appointing the following new members to the Quickbit management team, Martin Samuelsson, Head of Product, Sneha Patel, Head of Finance, Thomas Engdahl, Head of Tech, and Jesper Sundström, Head of Growth.
We have also launched Quickbit Checkout during the quarter, this was an important milestone for us, enabling us to be competitive with our business to business products. Martin will now deep dive into our product portfolio. Next slide. All right.
Okay. Thank you, Anders. Here in front of us we have an image of the Quickbit product catalog as it stands. With the background of this year's strategy, which is focused on deploying those our products, consolidating our position in crypto payments and optimizing the product score performance. I'm going to start with talking about Quickbit Checkout. It was finished around the end of the second quarter. Essentially it's a payments flow that accepts the major coins. It's an opportunity for merchants to accept crypto and still get settled in fiat.
In its current form, it works with any wallet, but the kind of the current work stream with it is to sell it obviously, and to optimize it for Quickbit App. To kind of make it perform better with Quickbit App. Then moving on to Quickbit Pay. It's a homegrown B2B gateway to our ecosystem that we're very proud of. We had one iteration finished this autumn, so in mid Q2. We decided that there's a lot of positives for us to actually add the functionality to be able to receive from external wallets to Quickbit Pay. The previous design was a closed loop.
Adding the ability to accept crypto from any user is kind of a, like I said, a lot of upside in that. That's why that's what we're doing with it right now. That kind of creates a little bit of overlap between those two products. Want to highlight the important difference in the use case for the merchant. Where Quickbit Checkout offers the ability to receive crypto but to get settled in fiat, Quickbit Pay is a product for those who have a little bit more engagement with crypto. Or, yeah.
The front end of those, so the consumer facing end is, we're working to unify that experience so that the face of Quickbit, business to business product is the same to any user. This kind of constitutes a bit of a complex roadmap.
I'm not going to give you a date for the release of Quickbit Pay, but we're working on it with full priority. Going back to Quickbit App, in Q2, we launched in the Netherlands. We refreshed the transaction flow, so improved the UX there quite a bit, and settled some technical debt that we think will make us faster in the future. We continue to work with Quickbit App as a service in the kind of crypto segment, but also as an integral part of the pay product. With that, I will hand over to Sneha.
Thank you, Martin. We're now moving to slide number four, revenue and profitability. If we start looking at the graph on the left-hand side, the revenue in Q2 amounted to EUR 81.6 million, with an average daily volume of EUR 0.9 million. This is a 20% increase compared to Q1, mainly related to increased activity amongst merchants. Comparing year-over-year, net sales decreased with EUR 6.6 million. Our position to influence revenue levels have changed over the past year. We are exploring alternative revenue stream in addition to our promising merchant products. Moving to the middle graph, we can see that our quarterly gross profit amounted to EUR 3.4 million, which is the same gross profit as Q2 last year.
As I mentioned, our net sales was EUR 6.6 million lower year-on-year, we still maintained the same gross profit. This has proved that renegotiating contracts and strategically routing our traffic has had a fruitful effect on our costs. Our gross margin came in at 4.2% during the quarter, an increase of 0.4 percentage points year-on-year and stable compared to Q1. Looking at our underlying profitability, the graph to the right shows our EBITDA adjusted for items affecting comparability. Adjusted EBITDA during the quarter amounted to EUR 0.8 million, which is significantly better than the EUR 0.2 million during the same period last year. Compared to Q1, the underlying profitability has decreased. I will deep dive into the costs generating the lower EBITDA in the next slide.
Adjusted operating expenses shown on the graph to the left amounted to EUR 2.6 million in Q2, a reduction of EUR 0.6 million compared to Q2 last year. We are working hard on cost control and cost efficiencies. We've had some material cost items during the quarter, which has resulted in higher OpEx compared to Q1. The purple part of the graph, the volume-based costs, mainly consists of transaction fees and bank fees. These have increased compared to Q1 as a result of higher sales, but also due to implementing a KYC module. The black part of the graph, the non-volume based costs, mainly consists of costs for staff, consultants, and advisory. The increase compared to Q1 is mainly due to advisory costs, recruitment fees, board insurance fees.
Our cash position shown on the graph to the right was EUR 2.4 million on December 31, 2022, compared to EUR 9.4 million on December 31, 2021. The largest cash flow item during the past year was the acquisition of two technical platforms amounting to EUR 4.5 million during Q1. The further drop in cash position compared to Q1 is a result of large payments at the end of December relating to board insurance and warrants. Large daily in and outgoing payments affect our working capital, and due to cut-off dates during the holiday season, we had a temporary increase in our accrued revenue in the balance sheet. We monitor our working capital closely and are confident that we will restore a strong cash position in the quarters to come.
Thank you, Sneha and Martin, for reporting on Quickbit financials and products. If we widen our perspective and look ahead of what is in store for Quickbit, I would like us to again take a look at our ecosystem. The Quickbit ecosystem and our view of how all our products align is a fundamental part of our business and vision, and how we see the need for our products and services come together. The Quickbit Merchant suite is designed to serve users regardless of their crypto maturity. I am happy to announce that we have signed the first customer for Quickbit Checkout, marking that as an important milestone in the Quickbit ecosystem. We expect the pace to be accelerated further ahead. We are also looking into growing our affiliate business with the help of our acquired product in August 2022.
With our new, newly appointed Head of Growth, Jesper Sundström, we will focus on diversifying our revenue streams and on sales activities, which we expect to generate growth even further. Our strategic target for the coming period is to consolidate our position as payment service and build our user base, and we will work tactically with the product interfaces you see here to optimize the conversion rate and to engage users looking for better and more convenient ways to pay.
With that, we open up for some questions. Again, please write your questions in English. It will make the Q&A session easier. Operator, please go ahead.
The questions section has been limited to one question per participant. 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 Hjalmar Jernström from Erik Penser Bank. Please go ahead.
Thank you. My question. On the gross margin, I assume that in the long run that this will of course be affected by the product mix and also the launch of the B2C offering. I was wondering, could you elaborate a bit on the short run gross margin? Do you feel that you have stabilized on the current levels? And do you feel that this level will be maintained in the short run, granted the current product mix? Thanks.
Thank you, HJalmar. Yes, we believe that we will keep a steady 4% in our gross margin across all our products, even going forward.
Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad. There are no more phone questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions.
All right, we will continue to the written questions, and there's a new and shiny interface for us here, we're trying to find our way through this. I saw one of the questions was why we don't disclose the new Quickbit Checkout customer. We hope we can in a short time, but it's a collaboration, of course, between that part and us. Hopefully we will disclose the first one soon, as soon as we can. I have that as an answer to that first question. Do we have another?
Fyodor asks if the additional functionality that we're building in Pay, if that is based on checkout. To some extent, we are creating a similarity there. Like I said, the products are targeting different types of merchants with different types of crypto maturity.
We're browsing through the questions here. Here's a long one.
I can take a question here. I'm concerned about how your cash flow keeps dropping during October to December. No money came in from RR. Instead, you had to write off EUR 1.5 million. That's a long question. How do you think about this? Basically a question about our cash flow and our thoughts about that. We are of course monitoring our cash balance closely, and we are taking measures to have a positive cash flow going forward. We are continuously renegotiating contracts, both in terms of bringing down costs and also changing the payment terms on our invoices to have a more even cash flow throughout the year. We are very much looking into our cash flow and monitoring it closely. We have here a very long question.
We are trying to see if we can shorten it or read parts of it because there are many questions in one. Just bear with us here. A lot of product related questions. I think we have answered. They are similar questions, we have answered them. I can just remind you all to send if you feel that your question hasn't been answered, you're always welcome to email ir@quickbit.com, and we will follow up there because there are a lot of repetitive questions here at the moment.
Here is a question from Fyodor, regarding Quickbit Pay, and maybe you want to answer again, Martin, but I know you mentioned that we are working on it, of course, as hard as we can, but promising a date is always difficult with tech. What do you say, Martin?
Absolutely, it's a little bit counterproductive for us to do that right now. I will limit myself to saying that we are working on it as hard as we can, and we'll bring it to you as fast as we can.
Fyodor has again a very good question regarding something about airline as a merchant, et cetera. We are of course looking for this type of merchants when it comes to Quickbit Checkout and we cannot disclose exactly which one we are aiming for or how discussions are going, but that looks very interesting of course. Rest assured we are working very hard now for acquiring lots of different new customers for the Quickbit Checkout product of course.
Question here from Adnan. "Going forward, do you have a plan for share price care?" Well, our plan is, as always, to show positive numbers and to be consistent on how we communicate externally. We will continue to launch products and streamline costs continuously and increase all our revenue streams. That is our plan to on our share price.
Here's a question from HJalmar from Erik Penser Bank, again, on operating expenses. Would you like to give us some comments on the level of non-volume based costs? Basically, we are always looking for optimizing our sort of cost costume at any given point, of course. That's part of running a company and regarding inflation pressure, what you say, Sneha. Yeah, basically, we are quite cost aware at this point, of course. There are a few questions regarding raising more capital and how do you say in English? The emission of new stocks, et cetera. No.
I mean, as we see our result this quarter, we have a steady income flow. We are confident that we, well, of course, are able to run Quickbit at the current pace. We see no need for that right now. Regarding the number of merchants, Sneha, we have actually mentioned this KPI before.
Yes. Can you read the question, please? Where is it?
We usually always receive information how many new merchants are added per quarter. Why is there nothing about this in this report?
Yes. We no longer consider that the number of merchants is a fair KPI, so going forward, we will communicate other types of KPIs instead that the company's board and management consider to be more relevant.
The reason for this is quite simple. One merchant might be, have a lot of, contributing to the revenue, while other merchants are small, and therefore, the actual number is not a really useful KPI at this point.
Correct. There are some repetitive questions here.
Yeah, Martin, maybe you want to answer this question.
Okay. Sure. The question is, if we will move all the affiliate merchants to Checkout and Pay in the future. I think we serve quite well, different use cases. I think Checkout and Pay are good augmentations to the product offering, and it depends very much on the appetite of the respective merchants. Mostly, I think we're looking to approach a segment that we internally call digital native companies, and but, I'm going to have to come back to that more in the future when it's in better proximity.
There's a question here from Adam: "How is the outlook going into the next quarter? Is the ADV the same as Q2?" In general, we cannot comment on numbers that we have not released as yet. Unfortunately, we cannot comment further on that one at this point.
ne mentioned here it's, can we keep this in Swedish? Sorry, you have to be satisfied with our Swenglish. Also, I can see that, okay, one, I think, final question maybe. Next countries Quickbit is looking at launching. Again, Martin, you have the possibility to shine here today with your expertise knowledge. Any comments on countries, et cetera?
Right. We, like all other European crypto actors, are looking forward to the MiCA regulation. That is essentially a passportable license across Europe. That's what we're, that's our most concrete large expansion that I will mention right now.
Excellent. There are a lot of repetitive questions, and I hope we have answered most of these questions you have. As Sneha said before, if you have more questions, please email us at ir@quickbit.com, and we will be happy to answer those questions to the best of our abilities. With that said, I think we are ready to basically conclude this meeting.
Thank you all for listening.
Thank you, Sneha and Martin. I think this is it.
Wish you all a g-