Good morning. I'm pleased to welcome you all to Napatech's fourth quarter and full year 2021 interim management report presentation webcast. I'm Ray Smets, CEO of Napatech. I'm joined by Heine Thorsgaard, our Chief Financial Officer. Today's fourth quarter and full year 2021 IMS was released earlier this morning on the OSE and is available on the investor relations page of our website at napatech.com. For your information, a recording of this webcast will be made available on the Napatech website as soon as possible later today. As always, we will answer your questions at the end of this presentation via text, which you could submit on the webcast page using the button below the presentation. We can take your questions on the phone if you prefer. If you'd like to ask a question, follow the instructions on this slide.
Please note that this presentation contains forward-looking statements that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ from those discussed in forward-looking statements. We are looking forward to presenting a summary of how we finished 2021 in the fourth quarter and full year 2021. After a brief financial highlight overview, I will share some exciting developments about our progress in the market, key evolutionary steps the SmartNIC market is going through, and where we are navigating Napatech to seize a key role in the evolving market and catch the growing and compelling opportunities that are ahead of us. Heine will cover our Q4 financial results, and I'll review our guidance for 2022.
Reflecting on 2021 in general, this was a year where Napatech worked harder than ever to develop momentum for the long term while leveraging the investments we have made in the past to deliver a solid foundation to grow from. In total, we made significant progress. These results tell part of the story, and I'll explain the backdrop to these financials as we get through today's presentation as to why the progress we made in 2021 was paramount to building long-term value. We promised our investors that we would build a leverageable business model. In 2021, we proved this to be the case. We had improved year-over-year earnings and EBITDA compared to all prior years of our business. That is what I mean by leverage.
Despite the shifting sands of inflationary impacts on component costs, we were able to increase our gross margins, and we feel that we're set up to maintain them in 2022. More on that later. The revenue presented a different story, where we feel we came up short of our aspirations. As we communicated in our announcement on January 3rd, our booking data shows that the total demand was actually quite strong in Q4 2021. The order intake in Q4 was $12.9 million, up 42% compared to Q4 2020. The order backlog at the end of Q4 2021 was at record levels of $7.9 million, up from $2.4 million at the end of Q4 2020. However, the supply chain impacts and the customer request to defer these deliveries into 2022 limited Napatech's ability to ship these orders for revenue.
The backlog we ship in 2022 over the next three quarters has been factored into our new revenue guidance for the year, and I'll describe on that a little bit later. We also expected a few initial orders from our strategic partnerships, like Lenovo in 2021. We didn't get them. However, the engagements we've been working on to win business with Lenovo customers in Asia continue to move forward in positive ways, and our story around our partnerships is getting stronger and even more exciting. More on that shortly too. Overall, in 2021, the data shows that we have an unbroken record of year-over-year revenue growth for the 13th quarter in a row and delivered a combination of year-over-year revenue growth and profit for the 7th quarter in a row.
We have been making important steps in building the foundation for future revenue growth, and we remain committed and are optimistic about the market potential as we think about full year 2020 and 2022 and beyond. As we've been communicating through 2021, we believe Napatech has never been in a more compelling position to take advantage of this growth opportunity, and we are navigating our way to achieve that growth. Starting on the upper left side of this picture is a view of the market that we're in. As I'll update you later in this presentation, top industry analysts that track our market space expect the total overall NIC market to double, growing to $5.6 billion by 2025.
The SmartNIC segment of this market where Napatech is focused is expected to grow to $3.6 billion and accounts for the fastest growing segment of the overall NIC market. This growth is being driven by deployments by hyperscalers, tier two cloud operators, telecom service providers, enterprises, and others, driving the need for SmartNICs. Moving to the upper right of the slide, in the data center and server domains, SmartNICs are hot, and they're getting hotter. The purpose of the programmable SmartNIC used to offload CPU-intensive workloads is intensifying, and adoption by industry players to leverage even more powerful designs is driving the evolution of the SmartNIC to what is now being called an IPU or DPU to offload the entire virtual network stack.
The technology curve that we are on at Napatech is getting more important in our target market, and we are already participating in this SmartNIC evolution, expanding into new areas of the market that we focus to address, which we expect to grow much faster than our existing business today. We are navigating Napatech to be a key player in this evolution, leveraging what we do best, accelerating applications and virtual network functions on FPGA-based SmartNICs. We are building deeper partnerships to get access to the new and growing IPU/DPU market opportunity by bringing our best-in-class high-performance software to the IPU.
I'm gonna update you on key partnerships that we put in place in 2021 in just a bit, but what we've communicated about Lenovo as their OVS acceleration solution and porting our software to Silicom's Intel-based IPU while building long-standing partnerships with Xilinx, Intel, and our newest partner in the FPGA space, Achronix, and engaging Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise , Napatech's in a better position than ever to grow within these larger ecosystems. One of the ways we'll grow is by getting access to the market with these important partnerships, so we consider them an important step to grow. The value that Napatech brings to these partnerships is the rich software solution and expertise that we've created for the SmartNIC to break into several new verticals.
Although we do not have authorization to publicize this important win from Q4, Napatech did sign a new important deal with one of these partners, and we are fast approaching a new paid partnership we plan to reveal in the coming quarter with yet another strategic partner. If we are successful, these partnerships will expand our potential to win new design wins, which is the cornerstone for revenue growth to Napatech. With this, we could potentially transform our business and increase our revenue multiple times within a very short time horizon. Yes, we absolutely see this as a compelling time for Napatech. Let's dig deeper into this to underscore why we remain optimistic. One of the key strategies for growth is by engaging key relevant strategic partnerships that give us access to growing parts of the market that we are serving.
On the left side of this slide are the three most important FPGA makers globally, and we have a solid and growing relationship with all three of them: Intel, Xilinx, recently acquired by AMD, and Achronix. What Napatech brings uniquely to these engagements is our product-grade, high-quality, high-performance, feature-rich software that runs on programmable SmartNICs that functions in combinations with the FPGAs that these partners build. A SmartNIC without software is nothing more than a brick. Our SmartNIC and software solution together accelerates applications on servers in the data center to solve problems on a growing number of use cases across cloud, telco, and enterprise. All of these engagements will align our technology software roadmap to support FPGA architectures with Intel, Xilinx, and Achronix FPGAs, including their versions of the IPU and DPU.
This is quite unique to any vendor we compete with and gives us access to potentially a much broader market opportunity. Napatech's partnership with Achronix continues to evolve nicely. We are focused on bringing new powerful FPGAs to our customers while aligning our software solution with Achronix target customer market. Achronix is a leader in FPGAs and embedded FPGA IP. In this partnership, it gives each company access to each of our own best-in-class solutions. We intend to combine the Achronix Speedster7t FPGA with Napatech SmartNIC software, giving both companies a win-win in an effort to provide a feature-rich, high-performing solution to a growing set of cloud data center operators, mobile telecom, and service providers, data centers in the enterprise space, and government agencies. Another key partnership that we'd like to highlight with Silicom is also continuing in 2022.
Napatech software will power the Silicom SmartNIC, which is based on the Intel FPGA SmartNIC IPU reference design. This is a paid partnership to bring Napatech Link-Virtualization software combined with Silicom's leading FPGA SmartNIC to the market. We expect this relationship will add new revenues in the near future. Moving beyond the FPGA makers, we are also engaging partners in the server domain, creating partnerships that expand our market reach to an increasing set of customers, markets, and geographies. These server makers have a need for embedding SmartNIC solutions into their server offerings, solving important performance challenges in the data centers for telcos and cloud operators. What we bring to these top partnerships is commercial-grade, high-quality, high-performance, feature-rich software that runs on programmable SmartNIC hardware that we build or they build.
The partnership we announced in 2021 with Lenovo is an important engagement that we have enriched throughout 2021. Lenovo is a tier one server maker with long and deep relationships with the kinds of customers we wanna get access to. In this partnership, we bring our latest hardware and software solution focused on virtual networking to their market, running our newest Link-Virtualization SmartNIC software designed to accelerate apps and services meeting the most demanding virtual requirements of 5G mobile telecom operators and service cloud providers. Napatech has estimated the revenue potential of this design win to exceed $10 million over the life of the product, and if we achieve even higher aspirations for this partnership, we could increase our annual SmartNIC production by around five times our 2021 production in future years.
Although we expect to see initial orders on several important end user engagements with Lenovo in 2021, we have not lost any deals in the pipeline of activity with Lenovo, and the activity continues to be quite attractive. These potential orders via Lenovo are quite interesting to us. They can potentially multiply fast due to the scale of the server deployments, which will dramatically increase Napatech's annual production volume. Just as we developed with Lenovo, we are making progress with others like Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise to expand our access to different parts of the server market that they are focused on. Similarly to the Lenovo engagement, we will bring our hardware and software SmartNIC solution focused on virtual networking, running our Link-Virtualization SmartNIC software designed to accelerate apps and services focused on the virtual requirements of 5G mobile telecom and service, cloud service providers.
As a proof point to our progress with these strategic partners, I'd like to highlight what we have delivered. We have signed three key paid partnership deals in 2021 in excess of $1 million. We signed a new seven-figure deal in Q4 with one of these partners, which we are not allowed to name, and we are in progress of developing another multi-million dollar program, which we do intend to announce sometime in the first half of 2022. To be sure we have the bandwidth to fulfill these partnership objectives, we have already announced in Q3 of last year that we are increasing our R&D investments to fulfill these commitments. Napatech is in a better position than ever to grow within these large ecosystems.
One of the ways we will grow is by getting access to market through these important partnerships, so we consider them important steps for growth for Napatech. The value that Napatech brings to these partnerships is the rich software solution and expertise that we've created. To make this point clear, why is Napatech relevant to these strategic partners, and why are they investing in Napatech's product roadmap? There is a clear win-win that comes from these partnerships, and it all starts with the strategic value of our software. Firstly, our Napatech software and hardware design aligns with their FPGA customer requirements. We have what they need to win. Also, our SmartNIC software brings an expanding set of production-grade, high performance features that match the needs of the target customer markets in the telco, cloud, enterprise and edge domains.
Napatech is unmatched in our features, functions and performance within these growing market domains. We are building software that leverages and integrates advanced virtual networking features to support an expanding set of capabilities. The software provides the features that make our customer software solutions work better, smarter, and more securely. When it is married to our hardware, we add benefits of the FPGA hardware performance to accelerate these applications even further. Napatech is investing in the software and the hardware features that make our SmartNICs more applicable in terms of value and benefit to a broader set of large volume and high growth applications. The key strategic advantage, to underscore this once again, to our success in Napatech, is that the software that runs on these SmartNICs that delivers the real value to our customers.
We are adding features and functions to our NICs to allow them to bring value to an expanding set of apps, services and customers and the networks that need those kinds of benefits. Napatech also benefits from these paid partnerships. We gain access to leading edge FPGA technologies from these leading global FPGA tech leaders, and we enter into their ecosystems to reach new customers that we cannot on our own, helping us to better access new high growth parts of the market. Our partners have been driving the next evolution of the SmartNIC to meet the unstoppable rise of digital business needs. The world has become even more dependent on data applications in the cloud.
Add to this the architectural evolution of mobile networks to roll out 5G and the explosion of artificial intelligence and the catalyst of IoT, the need for performance in the data center has become even more intense. In highly virtualized environments where our market is evolving fast, server computing resources are being stretched to their technical limits to process more complex applications, along with hypervisors, container engines, network and storage functions, security and greater amounts of network traffic. Server technology just can't keep up, so the more infrastructure tasks that need to be offloaded from the server needs to be offloaded to, you guessed it, the SmartNIC. The SmartNIC needs more compute horsepower as in our design, the FPGA carries a generous load of compute.
The industry giants like Intel, Xilinx and Nvidia have designed a new class of processors called DPUs or IPUs, infrastructure processing units, that include general purpose computing cores. The difference between the IPU and the current SmartNIC is that the SmartNIC can effectively accelerate infrastructure apps, which is what we at Napatech do every day. The IPU is designed to go further and offload and run the entire network stack, which will give service providers a new option to deploy network and security functions more economically. How does Napatech participate in this evolution? Well, we already are. We will expand our software on our SmartNIC and hardware solution to include IPUs, and we have already created partnerships, including the one with Silicom and Intel and others to be named later. It is our ambition to win new business in 2022 and beyond in this expanding space.
I would like to underscore that this evolution we're participating in is solidly based on the software foundation we currently have in place. For Napatech, this is adding new software features that leverage our existing core solutions that we've been designing for years. Another validation I would like to show you is that the SmartNIC in today's market are needed more than ever to solve performance challenges for an ever-expanding set of applications and use cases. We announced in Q3 of 2021 a new solution called our Link-Programmable SmartNIC solution to improve up to 90x performance for compute-intensive time-critical workloads. This family of SmartNIC cards enables customers to develop and deploy their own custom FPGA computational solutions in industry-standard servers. Since we announced this solution, we have won two new design wins in Q4, and we have a pipeline of more than 10 additional opportunities with similar needs.
We were able to announce one of these new design wins with The Packet Company to use within their new next-generation Packet Recorder product, serving the demanding needs of their customers requiring full line rate network traffic recording without any loss of performance, improving network visibility and security. This case shows the power and flexibility of Napatech's programmable SmartNICs and how they can serve a rapidly expanding set of customers, networks and apps and services that have an immediate requirement for application acceleration. In the latest Omdia Q3 2021 report about the overall NIC market, the 2021 total market is expected to be about $2.5 billion this year, growing to about $5.5 billion by 2025. That's a CAGR of about 20%. However, the programmable NIC market, which is the segment that we're focused on, is growing much faster.
In this new report, newly revealed forecasting for 2025 shows our segment growing from just under $1 billion in 2021 to over $3.3 billion by 2025, which is a CAGR of about 33%, and is forecasted to be the most lucrative part of the overall NIC market in 2022. We are focused on where the action is. The programmable NIC segment shown in pink on the graph, often called the SmartNIC segment, is where the highest performance solutions reside, delivering ultra-high speed networking functionality with the ability to be programmed, reprogrammed and enhanced with new software to meet the ever-changing requirements for higher performing mission-critical apps. Napatech is keenly focused on addressing this programmable NIC market segment. The key points that I want to make with the backdrop of the latest market report is the following.
In the overall NIC market, we remain one of the top 10 largest NIC makers. More importantly, the SmartNIC market is the fastest growing part of the overall NIC market, and we are listed as a top vendor in this part of the market too. The growth of the SmartNIC market is being driven by the need for speed and the requirement for apps to perform better in highly virtualized environments such as cloud, hyperscale, and 5G mobile. As this market for vendors gains momentum, we are investing in building partnerships to gain access to those growing faster parts of the market, and we're gonna capitalize on that potential growth. We are investing in new inline virtual use cases to augment our already strong position in packet capture to get more growth in this market, and we believe our strategy is already beginning to pay off.
With the new investments we're making just last year, our market is ripening up and our investments are lining up with the emerging parts of the SmartNIC market. Here is a sampling of logos of customers from all over the world from different market domains who put their trust in the Napatech hardware and software solutions in Q4 alone. Mixed in with these brands are key new design wins. We are pleased to see a steady stream of new designs won from both new customers and within existing customers as well. We have a high retention rate. We haven't lost any customers from 2020. We continue to see strong demand in our largest deployed application areas of cybersecurity, fintech, network monitoring, and mobile infrastructure.
We have seen a new wave of new demand around enterprise and cloud networks supporting autonomous vehicles, telco 5G infrastructure for virtual user plane function acceleration, just to name a few. Some notable, well-recognized brands that are showing up recently with new orders are the following. The Packet Company is using our Link-Programmable solution. I just mentioned that a few moments ago. Starbucks is running accelerated apps in their data centers with our SmartNICs. Herrick Technology Laboratories' software-defined radio solutions for defense use cases is also using our SmartNICs. Baraja, building deep technology that has reinvented lidar for self-driving vehicles, is using our products. EXFO, working within large Middle Eastern telcos, is positioning our solution for greater deployments there. GreyCortex network security monitoring and response has leveraged our products for the first time.
Yoroi, a light wallet for Cardano, a public blockchain company in the crypto security domain, is using our solution. A few new financial customers like Grinnell Mutual, Databento, and Beeks Financial Cloud have also put their trust into Napatech. A new important evaluation is underway at Fujitsu, so watch this space. We're excited about that one too. We are pleased with the overall customer wins in Q4, and, you know, we're building progress here as we move into 2022. Many of our investors are curious how we are navigating the complex supply chain environment. We cannot say that we have hit all of the curveballs that we have been thrown, but we have worked diligently with our contract manufacturer to optimize our situation and assure we have a sufficient supply to meet our annual revenue goals in 2022 and in 2023.
We have been proactively sourcing SmartNIC components to keep our supply chain healthy. As shown on the chart on the left provided to us by our close trusted contract manufacturer, lead times for almost all of our components have been lengthened dramatically. We're expecting our margins to be well-managed despite the increases in component times and component costs because we've instituted a price increase in 2022 for affected products. As we continue to see this global situation evolve, other areas we are closely monitoring are industry server availability, where we have reports of tighter supply for servers for data centers. Another area that we have heard reports of is around shortages of customer personnel to deploy projects, which has caused some project delays, increasing the time when customers need our products.
We are definitely not out of the woods on this topic quite yet, but we will keep a close eye on this global situation and be as proactive as we can be and react accordingly if we see any new challenges emerge. Finally, let's get into the financial details. I'd like to turn the call over to Heine Thorsgaard to review more details about our Q4 and full year 2021 results. Heine.
Thank you. Revenue in Q4 in USD was up 2% compared to Q4 of 2020. Due to a bit of currency tailwind, revenue in DKK was up 5% and amounted to DKK 55 million. For the full year of 2021, revenue in USD was up 5% compared to 2020 and amounted to $31.1 million. In DKK, revenue in 2021 amounted to DKK 195.5 million. Gross margins in Q4 ended at 72.2%, up 0.3 basis point compared to Q4 in 2020. Gross margins for the full year of 2021 were 71.8%, up 0.3 basis points compared to 2020. Our staff costs and other external costs in Q4 amounted to DKK 23.1 million, compared to DKK 30.8 million in Q4 of 2020.
Staff costs in Q4 were significantly impacted by lower variable pay in 2021 than in 2020. For the full year, staff costs and other external costs in 2021 amounted to DKK 111.7 million, compared to DKK 117.1 million in 2020. EBITDAC in Q4 amounted to DKK 17.2 million, compared to DKK 7 million in Q4 of 2020. EBITDAC for the full year of 2021 amounted to DKK 29.3 million, compared to DKK 21.9 million in 2020. Staff costs transferred to capitalized development costs in Q4 amounted to DKK 5.9 million, compared to DKK 4.8 million in Q4 of 2020. Transferred costs for the full year of 2021 amounted to DKK 23.6 million, compared to DKK 13.5 million in 2020.
EBITDA amounted to DKK 23.1 million in Q4 and to DKK 52.9 million for the full year of 2021, compared to DKK 11.7 million in Q4 and DKK 35.4 million for the full year of 2020. The result for the period in Q4 amounted to DKK 21.7 million, up DKK 15.5 million compared to 2020. For the full year of 2021, the results for the period amounted to DKK 40.2 million, compared to DKK 9.6 million in 2020. The financial results in 2021 were by far the strongest Napatech has delivered in the history of the company, and it clearly demonstrates the scalability of our business model. Net cash flows from operating activities in Q4 amounted to DKK 15.2 million, compared to DKK 14.8 million in Q4 of 2020.
Net cash used in investing activities in Q4 amounted to DKK 12.2 million, compared to DKK 4.9 million in Q4 of 2020. For the full year of 2021, net cash used in investing activities amounted to DKK 31 million, compared to DKK 14 million in 2020. This increase in investments is reflecting the acceleration of our new product development. Free cash flow in Q4 amounted to DKK 3 million, and reported free cash flow for the full year of 2021 amounted to -DKK 16 million. If adjusted for the increases in working capital, free cash flow for 2021 would have been positive DKK 22.6 million. Cash and cash equivalents end of Q4 amounted to DKK 39.4 million, compared to DKK 62.7 million at the end of Q4 2020. Now back to you, Ray.
Now let's turn our attention to 2022. We have been successfully building a solid base of revenue and profits in our core product line. We are also keenly focused on executing to build new product capabilities and solutions with our new inline and link virtualization product offers to unlock faster areas for growth for Napatech. We have been putting strategic partnerships in place to get access to the larger market opportunity we see ahead of us. This multi-pronged approach by strategy and our product and partnering strategy assures that we are building core revenues on a solid foundation while enthusiastically building new revenues in areas where we believe we can win. As we look at 2022, we say full steam ahead.
We see a large opportunity in front of us in the fast-growing market with use cases in cloud, telecom, enterprise, and edge data center deployments. Our SmartNICs solve an immediate problem to solve and offload servers and accelerate apps, and the problem is only getting bigger. Our SmartNIC software, which is our competitive strategic weapon, will continue to improve performance for critical apps and use cases, and our software truly is our strategic advantage going forward. As we mentioned in our Q3 report, Napatech has increased investments in software development to accelerate feature velocity within the evolving market, and that hiring process has gone really well and is on track as predicted, hiring of about 30 new full-time R&D and subcontractors by Q2 of this year.
We are confident that this focus and these investments will get us access to new 2022 design wins and revenue expansion for years to come. We believe focusing our business and making these investments now is the best thing to do for our customers and for our investors. The timing of this investment is strategic, and now is the time to accelerate this effort. Onwards to 2022. Given all of the potential we have discussed in today's presentation, combined with our belief about our ability to build a larger pipeline of opportunities and build a faster-growing business, we are confirming the revenue expectations that we indicated at the beginning of January in the range of $37 million-$41 million, a growth rate of 19% on the low end and 32% on the high end.
Even though the USD and the DKK exchange rate is very volatile and we are expecting some currency tailwind in 2022 compared to 2021, the revenue guidance in DKK for 2022 is consequently DKK 235 million-DKK 260 million. We have taken the right steps to protect our gross margins within a challenging supply chain environment, and we believe we'll achieve gross margins in the range of 69%-71%. Staff expenses and other external costs are well managed. Even with the increase in engineering investment, we expect to be in the range of DKK 155 million-DKK 165 million in 2022, along with staff costs transferred to development costs in the range of DKK 28 million-DKK 33 million.
We expect depreciation and amortization to be in the range of DKK 23 million-DKK 28 million. With performance in the middle of the guided ranges, EBITDA would be positive DKK 13.3 million, and EBIT would be positive DKK 18.3 million. In conclusion, we are a stable and growing business chasing a very lucrative opportunity for growth within a very important market for data center expansion. Our core business is sound, which is an important foundation that we are building on as we navigate our way into bigger and very compelling market opportunities for accelerating apps, offloading functions and virtual networks, and catching the wave with IPUs through partnerships and new ways to get to the market.
Overall, we remain optimistic about the potential for growth, and we are striving every day to unlock the growth potential with innovative technology, SmartNIC solutions and features that deliver market-leading performance for our customers, and great customer service. We are in the most compelling era right now for Napatech. There is so much potential. We know what we can do. We have a plan to get access to the growing opportunities in the market, and we have our eye on the prize, and we are full steam ahead in 2022. Now we just need to get the job done. Now I'd like to invite Heine Thorsgaard to join me to take your questions.
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Seems like we have a bit of a technical issue there. Just wanted to get confirmation on whether or not you can hear me now.
We can hear you on the conference call.
Thank you. We'll jump to one of the text questions. We have an issue with the line getting through on Ray. I'll start with one of the questions from the web. The question is: Can you explain the lower operating cost in Q4, and what OpEx levels should we expect in first half of 2022? As mentioned earlier, we did see some significant impacts in Q4 on lower variable pay. We accrue for variable pay throughout the year and, as we show in Q4, if we don't meet the targets, we'll reverse some of the accruals and that impacted the staff cost significantly in Q4.
If you wanna get a sense of what to expect in first half, it probably be best to look at reported costs in first half of 2021, and then take into account some of the increased hirings that we've been communicating that we would start seeing impacts from in Q1 and Q2 compared to last year. If you look compared to Q3 is usually impacted by our holiday allowance regulations, so the staff costs are a bit lower there.
We've had Q3 being lower due to holiday allowance regulations, Q4 being impacted by low variable pay, and then expect first half of 2022 to get back on the levels and increasing compared to 2021. We have a second question in there as well. I'll continue and we'll see if we can fix the technical issues with Ray's line. The question being: Can you give an update on when you expect to see the virtualization order? As mentioned, we were hoping to see the first order in Q4, but we didn't. Testing on the customer side has been progressing quite good.
We have some excellent test results. Our product is performing very well. Due to some internal customer reasons, the finalization of the testing wasn't completed in 2021 and was postponed into 2022. We are definitely still progressing and moving forward and are still hoping to see progress here going forward in maybe first half of 2022. This is something that we've been working on for some time and hopefully we'll be able to continue here in 2021.
I just wanted to check in with if we have any callers online with questions, or I should proceed with the next webcast question.
We have no callers on the line, so you can proceed with the webcast.
Thank you. I have one other question popping in here asking if we are planning any buybacks of shares or any other things regarding to the stock price. We don't have any plans on initiating share buyback programs. The cash we have, we'd like to spend on product development. We believe that this is by far the best utilization of the cash. We don't have any plans to initiate share buyback programs. There is a lot of volatility in the marketplace right now, especially with the things going on in Ukraine and what we've seen in the share market globally up until now.
We are as a company not immune to that. A small company with a lower volatility on the shares is usually impacted harder in times of uncertainty and I believe that is what we see with the share price now. We do believe that progressing with the investments and initiating new product development that could access the market opportunities is the way forward for us, and that would also, I believe, be showing in the share price going forward once some of the uncertainties in the marketplace will wear off.
I have one final question there relating to some of the communication from the Capital Markets Day last year. The question being: Are you on track with expecting yearly growth of above 30% from 2022 and beyond? As communicated in the outlook for 2022, if you look at the upper end of the guided range, we are on track with-
Can you hear me now?
Yes. We do hear you now, Ray.
I'm sorry.
Uh.
You're doing fine, Heine. Please continue.
Yeah, just finalizing the comment. You can maybe chip in there afterwards. We are on track with the guided range with revenue potentials of above 30% a year. Of course, the majority of new high growth is related to our success in the virtualization domain and we fully believe that we do have the potential there. Maybe you can chip in on that question there, Ray.
Yeah, sure. I'm sorry there was a technical problem with my audio. I was speaking and nobody was hearing me. I apologize for that. Heine did a very good job responding to the questions, though, so I hope you got it. I would say regarding the revenue guidance, we. You know, as we mentioned in the webcast, we see a very interesting and large opportunity ahead of us in the marketplace. We have a solid foundation that we've created with our existing product line and business that we've been enhancing over the last couple of years.
As we said, we've been able to deliver a very nice track record of growth, 13 quarters in a row, year-over-year growth and combined with profit, it's about seven quarters in a row, and we're very happy about that. We absolutely aspire for a much higher revenue stream and revenue growth rate and we did not achieve that in 2021 as we talked about. We feel very confident given the opportunities ahead of us, looking at what we're looking to achieve in terms of product deployment, partnership development, and pipeline activity. Our guided range, we feel very confident about, that it's in a good spot for us to achieve this year.
We'll reiterate the guidance range that we published at the beginning of January, and we still feel very confident about achieving that. Heine, while we were trying to fix the technical problems, I noticed we had a question regarding the virtualization order, and I just, have we fully answered that question?
I think it'll be good if you chip in. I was addressing it a bit with the progress with our Chinese customer and testing being the finalization of the testing being postponed into 2022.
Yeah. It's
Please feel free to.
Sure. I don't wanna repeat everything that Heine said, but obviously there's a lot of interest in how the activity is going with our new virtualization product line. Obviously, we've been putting a lot of effort into this as a very significant part of our growth story. What I'd like to say, first of all, is we did announce the Lenovo relationship in early 2021. We announced it with Lenovo selecting Napatech to be the Lenovo-branded solution for OVS acceleration, which is a switching acceleration solution that they would like to ship with their server solutions. We've made great progress throughout the year working with multiple customers on their side to get the ultimate initial order. We have publicized this as an expectation in 2021.
We hoped to see the initial order win in Q4 of last year. We didn't get it. I'm sure Heine mentioned that we had one of the specific customers that we did have expectations on receiving an order from deferred their testing plans into 2022, but we have not lost this customer. The activity continues. The testing continues. The results have been very good. The performance is quite good. Our delivery as an engineering organization to that particular set of requirements for that customer has been on track and on schedule. The team is doing a great job. Due to customer reasons, the completion of that testing was postponed into 2022, and it was intentionally postponed until after the Chinese New Year celebration.
We don't have a specific date on when we will expect that order, but we do see progress in 2022, and we would hope and expect to see an order in 2022. When we know more about the timing of this, of course, and/or if we succeed, we will absolutely alert our investors. Okay, operator, do we have any additional questions on the call on the lines?
We don't have any callers. No.
Okay. Well, I think that brings all of our questions and answers to conclusion. We don't have any more being texted in. I'd like to first of all say thank you very much for your attention. We as a company and as part of the European theater, of course, being a company based in Denmark, are watching the activities over in Eastern Europe very, very carefully. We're very saddened to see some of the activity that has unfolded through the night. We'll hope for the best. From a business perspective, we're very optimistic about Napatech. We've navigated this company towards what we believe is a very bright future. You know where we came from, you know where we've been, and we feel very confident about where we're going.
We'll continue to strive for greater growths. We're gonna continue to execute faster to get those partnerships and customer revenue streams in place. We believe we have the right strategy, and I hope you're also optimistic about the kind of success that we can achieve. Thank you today for your attention. I'd like to thank all of our employees at Napatech for the great efforts through 2021, driving our business even faster. I hope you all have a great day.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.