Hi, welcome to Elliptic Labs' Q4 and full year 2022 presentation. My name is Laila Danielsen, and I'm the CEO of Elliptic Labs, and with me is our CFO, Lars Holmøy. For today's presentation, there are three main takeaways. First, in Q4, despite the economic and market headwinds, we continue to make good progress to expand our solid platform, position us well for long-term growth. In Q4, we signed with two more laptop customers, strengthening our position in our biggest growth area to become the golden standard for human presence detection in the PC market. It is important to note that it took us six years to add two of the top five smartphone customers, but it only took us 18 months to add on three of the top five PC customer. This is really good news.
Secondly, as we stated in Q3, we expected lumpiness in the smartphone and PC markets in Q4, and this is what occurred. The revenue in Q4 was down from previous year. This was due to our biggest smartphone customer. In the past years, this customer has signed a 12-month upfront minimum contract that has been signed and recognized in Q4. However, due to the market conditions clouded visibility for 2023, they moved instead towards a smaller minimum commitment contracts covering shorter periods. We expect that the next few quarters, the market will continue to be lumpy. We have previously said we aim for revenue of NOK 500 million with more than 50% EBITDA over the end of 2023. Given the current market situation, the target will be delayed to 2024, 2025.
This is due to that we are structuring the all of the contracts slightly different because of market condition, leaning more towards a pay-as-you-go model with higher per unit pricing. Lars will elaborate more about this in the financial section. It's important to note we are a 100% software company that does not have any inventory costs. We are currently not burning a significant amount of cash. In addition, we have a strong balance sheet and do not anticipate that we need to raise any additional funds to achieve our goals. This positions us well for success in both bullish and volatile markets, that leads me into the third takeaway. Thanks to our achievements in the laptop market, our company is currently in the strongest position ever.
We so clearly see that more so than ever, that the PC market is serious in using our software platform broadly. Three of the top five PC companies are now our customers, and they are planning to expand with us broadly, not just into more laptop models with more virtual smart sensor, but also across their broader product portfolio. Sensor touch every aspect of life and drive digital transformation. Our vision is to build the leading software platform for all sensor, making every single device smarter, more human, and environmentally friendly. In 2002, we made significant progress towards this vision. We expanded our platform with more AI Virtual Smart Sensor in new verticals.
Those of you that are new to Elliptic, note that we deliver 100% software-based sensors that use existing single-purpose hardware and devices for wide range of new functionalities that can be added to smartphone, laptops, IoT, and automotives. In 2016, we launched our first AI Virtual Proximity Sensor on a Xiaomi smartphone. In this market, we are competing at the fairly low price points and have launched a total of 75 smartphone models and on about 500 million devices to date. Currently, we only have a small concentrated fraction of this market with high exposure to Asia. In the beginning of 2022, we launched on Lenovo's top seller ThinkPad T14, and we've rapidly expanded with three of the five largest PC manufacturers in the world.
Currently, the PC market has slowed down. We are in a position to potentially take a large portion of this market. IoT, smart TVs, and automotive represent a large and growing opportunities. In total, Obviously, this market we're going after is large, and we expect this opportunity to be in the area of $5.5 billion. To be clear, short-term fluctuation in this market will absolutely not impact our precision, ambition, and ability to create long-term value for our stakeholders. We are expanding with customers in the smartphone market, and during 2022, we launched on 33 new models. We signed contracts with two new customers in the past six months. Obviously, one is yet to be announced, so it's undisclosed.
The end market in the smartphone market is currently weak, We expect this revenue stream to be up and running again as soon as the market regains its footing. In 2022, we made solid traction in the PC market, It's a strong validation of the broad opportunity we have in the PC market as we closed out Q4 by signing two additional PC OEMs as our customers. We now have three of the top five PC manufacturer as our customer, This is phenomenal. On top of that, we have successfully launched with Lenovo on their best-selling product, As planned, they have been adding more and more models to use our products. As I've said before, we are confident in our products and people, and we will not let short-term commercial gains come in way for our long-term value creation potential.
General supply chain issues and end-user demand may delay our projected revenue from the vertical, as this is recognized per shipped unit in combination with milestone achievements. For 2023, we will keep expanding with our PC customers, and we are on track to add even more customers in this vertical. Our precision and opportunity to take the lead in this 300 million unit market has never been better. In addition to our expanded customer base, we're also launching new AI Virtual Smart Sensor that will help our OEM customer increase user-friendliness on their devices while reducing cost, waste, and emission. This represent the launch of our third laptop product, and we will continue to add more functionalities and value towards OEMs in the future. To remind you, more AI Virtual Smart Sensor is only one out of four growth levers.
We're also growing through two more models and three more customers across more verticals. The laptop market is set to be our main growth driver for our $500 million target and beyond. Our competition in these markets are single-purpose hardware sensor that must be produced, shipped, installed, used, and in the end, thrown away or recycled. Elliptic's 100% software-based sensor needs none of the above. Consequently, we are able to give competing single-purpose hardware sensor fierce competition. In our three current revenue generating verticals highlighted in green, there's a large difference in price of the hardware sensor we're competing against. As you can see, there's large potential upside on pricing alone just from the laptop vertical. Now I will give the floor to our CFO, Lars Holmøy, that will take us through the finances. Thank you.
Thank you, Laila. As Laila mentioned, we have an adverse market environment that impacted our revenue in the last quarter of 2022. OEMs have had a clouded visibility into 2023. At the same time, having increased their inventory level. As a consequence of the added uncertainty, we did not receive upfront revenue commitment from our largest smartphone customer for the expected complete year of 2023 shipments as we have done the last years. The PC market has the same issues. We also expect delays in our laptop revenue. This means that we get revenue recognized per shipped unit in combination with milestone achievements. Basically, more a pay-as-you-go model with a higher price per unit as the customers is not signing high upfront commitment contracts due to their cloudy short-term forecastability.
This leads to higher average sales price per unit, which is of course positive for us, but it will take longer time to reach our revenue targets. Revenue from the PC vertical in 2022 consists of license revenue from only one model launch combined with milestone achievements. License revenue will increase as more model is being shipped. I'm going to repeat what Laila said. As our customer base is more diversified, Elliptic Labs has never been in a better position as a company. We continue to add customers in the smartphone vertical, and we have added three of the top five PC OEMs in the last 18 months. We have diversified our revenue and opportunities across two major verticals, and our customer base is geographically spread out.
We have expanded our product portfolio by launching even more products. We are currently managing our organization to capture a large opportunity in front of us. In 2022, that meant adding 13 full-time employees to our staff, which resulted in an employee benefit expense of NOK 63 million in 2022. This number will increase as the cost, as we have the full year effect of those hired in 2022, while also adding on more talent in 2023. For 2023, we plan to continue to carefully add talents to our team, calibrating our hiring plan to real needs, focusing only on the specific key roles related to current and new customer projects, meaning we continue to carefully managing our costs.
The increasing other operating expenses is related to the full year cost of significantly higher activity level. The effect costs are related to our new hires. We even have expansion of our office facilities in Taiwan to support the increased activity in the PC market. In summary, we have expanded market opportunities while running the company efficiently. We do have a strong cash position to support our business plan. We burned an average of NOK 3 million per month in 2022. We ended the year with a solid cash position in our balance sheet of NOK 178 million . We want to turn the cash flow from operation positive as soon as possible, expanding into our large target markets.
We continue to invest in our technology to defend our position as a market leader, and spend NOK 4 million repaying short-term borrowings to Innovasjon Norge. To sum it up, we are well-funded for continued expansion, and we currently see no need to raise, additional capital to execute on our strategy to reach our goals. I will leave the stage to Laila, who will take you through the outlook and concluding remarks. Thank you.
Thank you, Lars. We are financially strong to continue our expansive growth plan. If we take a moment to zoom out, while we expect short-term volatility, we are in a stronger position as a company, as our revenue are spread over more customers with more products in two verticals. We are early phase of penetrating these markets. As smartphones and laptops will remain an integral part of our society, we are confident in the long-term sustainable end user demand across these markets. We will continue to capitalize on our strong market momentum, and we're making sturdy progress toward becoming the preferred 100% software-based sensor for smartphones, PC, and the IoT markets.
In particular, we see strong customer engagement in the PC market, and we anticipate that our planned product rollout across more PC models and manufacturer will be the main medium-term growth driver in 2023. We will continue to work with current and add new customers in the smartphone, but expect lumpiness. While our long-term outlook is intact, given the current end user markets, we will delay our NOK 500 million to 2024, 2025. For this year, for 2023, we will continue to expand and enter into well-planned agreements with more customers and partners. We will manage our organization efficiently to support our future growth and carefully manage cash. In conclusion, we have never been in a stronger position as we're building upon a large customer base across multiple verticals.
We will remain focused and disciplined in how we execute our top priorities to strengthen and expand long-term revenue opportunity in 2023 and beyond. Thank you. Now we will take a short break so we can review the questions, and then both of us will return to address them. Thanks. Thank you for waiting, and welcome back. First just wanna start off thanking for the gentleman that has put in a lot of questions from the retail market and submit it. Once again, really appreciate that, so.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. It's a two-faced question because it's a combination of more.
Okay.
first, do you still expect, Ellab's tech to become the standard in all PCs, and for the other manufacturers to continue knocking on the door? it's a little bit more-
Okay
We will ask, elaborate a little bit on the feedback from the PC OEMs customers.
Okay.
What do they foresee, like, broad deployment and so forth?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yes, for sure. We still see that we have a very clear path to become the de facto standard, the golden standard in the PC market. There are also more manufacturers that we are working with beyond the three ones that we have announced, or at least announced the contracts with. The reason for the broad deployment, 'cause we start out, you know, because a lot of questions about PC in general and that market...
Yeah
...which makes sense because it's our greatest growth market here in the future. What we're seeing is that in general, that we see in the high-end laptops, it's a time-of-flight sensor, hardware sensor. Over time, we see that the customer are looking to replace those in those laptops. That's mostly high-end, smaller volume. What we are really focusing in is the, they want to do the broad deployment in the mid-end market. The reason for that...
Mm
...is that we meet a very attractive price point that they can justify quicker to do broad deployment. On top of that, you know, when we work with these customers, of course, we have multiple capabilities...
Mm
to really deliver through innovation.
Mm
... frictionless user experience, across, not just the laptop, but broad set of their product portfolio. That's sort of like the long game. They start with the human presence detection, broadly.
Mm
...the mid. As they are designing out the time-of-flight sensor, we expect to move up on the high-end. Once again, the high-end laptops are small volume, so we really are focusing on the mid-end volume.
Yep.
I guess I answered, like, four questions in one.
Yeah.
A question for you, Lars. What is the CapEx guiding for the next years?
Oh, okay. Yeah, we don't, in general, do any cost guidance, at least not yet. Yeah, I can say this, but for the CapEx, we can say very broadly that we have a very conservative approach to capitalize R&D. As a software company, CapEx is basically investment in R&D and future products. But to capitalize it is, we do have a very conservative approach, and basically, we do it in accordance with governmental grant, which it's, in per definition, future R&D. We do not expect this to change the coming years. Yeah, fairly, yeah.
Mm-hmm. I think,
Yeah. Then it's regarding the spring 2022 announcements about extension with Lenovo up to 18 models, does this mean that Lenovo can release up to 18 new models with Elliptic Labs' tech without you being able to advertise this?
Yes.
Mm.
Unfortunately, that is a possibility. Of course.
Mm
...we work with the customer, and.
We hope not.
We hope that's not gonna happen. You know, of course, we work with the customer.
Yep
...and trying to do, if not joint press releases, at least press releases that we can.
Yep
...the launches. We hope that. It is a possibility-.
Mm
that may.
Yep
...unfortunately.
Yeah. A little bit of vertical that we're not yet in. What is the biggest challenge for Elliptic in the automotive industry?
Okay.
Yeah.
That's I don't think this comes as a shock to people, but it's very long sales cycles in the automotive industry.
Yep.
It requires a lot of rigid testing.
Yep.
It's a market that we are looking at through partnerships.
Yep
... and not going direct. I mean, right now, we have so much business going on in the also the PC market...
Mm
Well as that we are expanding.
Mm
...smartphone market that, we have to have our core team-
Mm-hmm
...core professionals, core people, really focusing on, you know, penetrating, expanding that.
Mm
...the, in that market.
I think that one Yeah. Yeah. Of course, smartphone vertical. How many new smartphone customers is Ellab's in dialogue with for first-time integration of software-only presence detection?
Well, it's proximity detection.
Yeah
...which is a shorter distance.
Yep
...and a different product. We don't comment specifically on the number of customers that we're working with in the...
Mm
in the smartphone market.
Mm.
We are working with more than we have announced thus far. We expect to add more smartphone customer as well.
Yeah.
I think this one, number five, if you go.
Yeah. Yeah. What is your expectation for the partnerships with the two other laptop OEMs compared to the partnership with Lenovo?
Yeah. They probably wanna know if... Yeah, sorry. If it was, if we have broad deployment-
Yeah
number of
Yeah.
Yeah. The, the plan is, the way, every single laptop manufacturer, is approaching us is the.
Yeah
...same principle as Lenovo. you know, they look at future products, more products, but they want to start with, human presence detection.
Mm
... and then from there spread broadly into the mid commercial markets, the consumer markets, the mid-end, the low-end, and the high-end, and then broadly. What we're seeing thus far.
Yeah
The feedback thus far is that they also would move in the same direction as Lenovo.
Yep.
This is incredible good news.
A little bit more on how we attack your verticals. How is development going in the IoT vertical?
Yeah, we're still navigating and exploring.
Yeah
... the IoT market. It's very fragmented, so it's very different in comparison to smartphone and laptop where you have few players but high volume. In the IoT verticals you have lots of players with smaller volume. What we do in this space in particular, we are signing up resellers, we've been doing that in Europe and the US as well as in Asia.
Mm-hmm
... and sort of work through those channels. We also work with integration partners that we put together, a set of demo boards.
Mm
so they go out and promote to their customer base. The reason for they.
Mm
... our software to promote is that because they sell hardware components
Mm
They need to have feature to demonstrate.
Yep. Yeah. Of course, are you in talks with the other top 5 laptop manufacturers who have not entered into ... I think we addressed this the last quarter as well, but yeah.
Yeah, we talked to many PC OEMs, so more than five.
Yeah
... let me
Yeah
be clear about that.
Yeah, and yeah, I think you covered... Can you also indicate if AI technology mainly comes in high, mid, or low-end models?
Yeah. I think.
Covered that.
... said that many times but, you know, when we're working with a customer, we are planning for broad deployment. They are planning for broad deployment.
Mm.
We start as we did with Lenovo and T14, which is their highest selling product.
Yeah. High volume.
High volume, product. Ooh.
Mm.
We are following the same approach.
Mm.
We see mid-end, and then, most of the high-end has a time-of-flight sensor.
Mm
... that over time they, the OEMs are also they're signing out.
Yep.
That's excellent news. I don't know if you have some more here that's fitting in.
Yeah. I have a few more, and it's a very finance related question.
Okay.
What is the finance expense relate to? We have most of our businesses in US dollars of course, so receivables is also in US dollars, so it's basically, exchange rates, the differences. We also have IFRS leases cost and also, yeah, interest on our debt. You elaborate a little bit about the Infineon partnership that we just released.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
This is a R&D project with Infineon and a few other players.
Yeah.
It's funded by EU, so this is for future products-
Yeah
... that we're working on and that we will expect to announce in the future.
Yeah. Of course it's very related revenue for Q3, but will the revenue boost it as the smartphone revenue normally is recognized in Q4 smoothed over future quarters?
Well, okay.
Mm
really address.
Yeah.
you know, in Q3 we talked about this lumpiness that we potentially thought would occur, in or we expected to occur in Q4.
Mm.
That happened. This is our biggest smartphone customer. Clearly if they knew how much they would sell for, the volume in 2023, they would have signed that same similar contract in Q4, end of discussion.
Mm.
They're still our customer. How they will spread over the next quarters, that we don't know because they do not know. We are of course continue working closely.
Mm
... with this.
Yep
Expect to sign more contracts in 2023 with this customer.
I think.
Okay?
that summarize pretty much all the questions.
Okay. Very good.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank-
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.