Good morning, and Welcome to Our Presentation of Q1 2022. My name is Svenn-Tore Larsen, and with me, as always, I have my CFO, Pål Elstad. I will start by summing up some highlights for the quarter. We delivered 28% revenue growth in the quarter even though delivery capacity continues to be severely impacted by wafer constraints. Gross margin was high at 60%. Pål will discuss this when in his part of the presentation. It's actually generated a 52% increase in our gross profit, and we ended at $109 million. With this operational leverage we have, this led to more than doubling of EBITDA, and we ended at $55 million, an EBIT margin of 30% for the quarter. We expect continued solid performance in the second quarter despite the continued supply challenges.
This is based upon our capacity support plan from our vendors. We expect a revenue guidance for $190 million-$210 million, and a gross margin will be above 54%. I will reiterate that our long-term outlook stands firm. The situation now is that the demand is significantly higher than supply. Given the persistent supply chain constraints, we are actively working with our end customers and distributors to adjust order volumes to better match the delivery capacity. The current order backlog is much higher than our delivery capabilities, and reduction of the order backlog during the first quarters reflects Nordic's initiatives and not demand. We needed to take some of the larger customers, and we were allocating them, and not everyone got 100%. Also some customers didn't get more than maybe 40%, 50%.
We had laser focus to keep customer running their production. Until the wafer supply situation is resolved, you should expect that we have to continue at the moment, and it's very correct to do. I mean, if you look at the situation backwards a bit, we used to have around 2 quarters of backlog when supply were unconstrained. In that situation, the order backlog act as a kind of leading indicator for the revenue the following 6 months, 2 quarters. However, the backlog started to increase towards the end of 2020, and when the wafer shortage started to take effect early in 2021, the combination of extreme demand and constrained supply really extended our backlog significantly.
We have been working with our suppliers to increase our supply, and now we are in a situation where we more or less know what we're going to get for second half. We have stated, or will state later in the presentation, that second half supply are above first half of 2022. The ratio of order backlog to current revenue went from 2 times to 10 times if you look at the slide here. Now we had to take these active measures to start bringing the order backlog more in line with the capacity. Our revenue is currently decided by supply and not demand, and I see also from other semiconductor companies that have been given results, it's the same message.
As the order backlog is not a good indicator of revenue demand, as I have talked about, we still keep the backlog as an alternative performance measure for consistency. It's nothing to basically look and analyze to determine what would be the revenue for next quarter. That's basically supply only, and we've been guiding $190-210 for next quarter. We also have been getting some questions from investors and analysts about pipeline filling and inventories lately. Likely this is because more uncertain economic outlook and fears of reduced consumer spending. All we can say is that there is no signs of any inventory build up for Nordic, not in our own product line, not at the distribution level, and certainly not at our end customers.
We spend almost every night and mornings to discuss with customers how to allocate to keep our customers' production afloat. If you see here, there is some inventory, but that's basically parts that were not able to be shipped out, and from this day, end of the quarter, and works in progress from Nordic. Wafers are on the way to go from raw wafers to packaged ICs. If you look into our markets, it's the first time we report four end-user markets. It's consumer, industrial, healthcare, and others. Consumer still accounts for two-thirds of the last twelve months revenue. Given the supply chain side constraints, this reflects our production allocation, not the demand to the different markets. That's an important thing. We need to allocate to customers that are loyal and have a long activity on the products, and also are in the right verticals.
If you look at the growth and analyze the industrial, it actually has the strongest growth the past three years. When I come to the slide with the design wins, we show that last quarter there was 50-50 design wins among consumer and non-consumer products. We have been highlighting medical vertical for a long time, and we see high upsides for the professional healthcare markets in disease monitoring and drug delivery. In Pål's presentation, we will go deeper into these numbers by segments. As said, we have a steady and high certification market share. The important thing is that at Nordic, we see significantly higher value per design. Again, we do have a new product launch here.
If you look at the announced products in the first quarter, we continue to see new products in both Bluetooth and in cellular IoT, as well as product combining the two technologies, which is very exciting. I think also that's part of why we're driving more designs on Bluetooth on non-consumer. Because we see PCBs containing both Bluetooth technology and LTE technology. As usual, it's a big span of applications, from smart door locks to smart watches, to asset trackers and theft protection, to utility meters, which is LTE. We also see quite a few customers developing new modules with Nordic LTE chips on. Basically, cellular IoT, we need partners to accelerate our products or our customers' products to the market. We had a difficult quarter when it comes to cellular.
There was a shortage of a filter, a 4-cent filter, which basically prohibit us to produce as much as we could. We expect this to be fixed for end of June, which means that second half of the year, we're going to see increased revenue in cellular. To make cellular easy, we further fuel demand with partners. I mean, in the first quarter, we added AVSystem and Ignion, which is a virtual antenna technology, and also Memfault's platform is available with Nordic LTE. We also work with Nokia over the last year and a half, and during the quarter, we made license agreement with Nokia. It really means that all customer making application based on cellular technology need access to standard essential patents. This way, we are making license available to our customer at the end device.
This joint effort with Nokia is an industry first, adding transparency, predictability early in the design process for new cellular IoT products. It's an important milestone. We also have attended both Mobile World Congress and the CES. I just want to show you before I leave the numbers to Pål, that audio was really well-perceived in those two shows. We showed the nRF5340 sound technology with codecs from Cirrus Logic. I can also say that we are extremely happy to see that our BLE audio technology has been chosen by world-leading Sennheiser for a new broadcasting product. Now audio is starting to appear in revenue. With this, I would like to hand over to Pål to go through the financials in more detail.
Thank you, Svenn-Tore. I'll jump to Q1 financials. Nordic continues the strong product growth as achieved in the previous quarters. Although we are still heavily capped by supplies, demand is higher than what we actually are able to deliver. We came in at $183 million, as I said, which is in the top end or a little bit above the middle of the guided range of $170 million-$190 million, showing that we continue to deliver on our guided ranges. The increase from last year was 28% in Q1. In 2021, we had $143 million. In comparison to last quarter, we had the growth of 7%.
This growth is mainly driven by the full quarter effect of the price increases that we had in Q4 on all products in our portfolio. We see a very strong Bluetooth growth of 26%. We're really continuing to deliver on the long-term aspirations for this product line. We also see continued good proprietary numbers, where the proprietary was driven by very good sales in our PC accessory business. For cellular IoT, we are seeing strong design activity, and several projects are now beginning to gain commercial traction. However, we, as Svenn-Tore mentioned, do have shortages of our products, mainly some components to the module. Actual delivery is significantly less than what we see as demand.
As a result, cellular revenue was $7 million in the quarter, slightly up from last quarter, but a 400% increase compared to last year. I'll now go to revenue per market. As Svenn-Tore mentioned, in Q1, we have changed how we report or which markets we put our verticals in. The main reason we do this is that we want to align our reporting to how we focus our sales and efforts out in the market. We now differentiate more between who's the end purchaser of the products. Is it a consumer, or is it a business-to-business market? Another change is that we actually now have included cellular IoT also in the numbers.
We're not currently gonna split out cellular IoT in more detail, but on occasions, we will of course shed light on where we see traction in cellular IoT. We'll also include an explanation in more detail on our webpage, so that analysts and investors can make a bridge between the old and the new reporting structure. When you look at the various markets, it's important to emphasize that growth patterns reflect product allocations more than the underlying demand. Several of our large proprietary customers are actually in the consumer market, therefore we see a very strong growth in this area. Just as for our overall revenue, individual markets show a strong growth compared to last year and relatively flat compared to last quarter.
Consumer electronics is by far our largest market, with 67% of the total, representing a 28% growth compared to last year. Consumer market is now larger than under the previous method of splitting our revenue. The main reason for that is there's some consumer related tracking solutions. There's a lot of wearables products now in consumer, and also smart home solutions purchased by consumers is also included in consumer. Many of these were earlier in the building and retail segment. Healthcare had a growth of 54% compared to last year and 40% compared to last quarter. We see continued strong traction in this area.
The cellular IoT products are mainly sold into the industrial, and we also have a fair chunk in the others, which is the module business. This slide shows the breakdown of the different markets we now have split our verticals into. As you can see, there's some significant changes mainly to the consumer business. I'm not gonna go into detail, but you'll find this on our webpage. Gross profits increased by 50% to $109 million in Q1, up from $72 million in Q1 2021, with a gross margin of very close to 60%. This is compared to 50% in the first quarter last year. Last quarter, we had 58.9%.
For Q1, 2022, we guided for 53%-54%. The significantly higher gross margin comes as a result of a higher than anticipated effect of the depletion of materials purchased prior to the supplier price increase we had in late 2021. This is an effect that's going to be more or less reduced in Q2. Adjusted for this inventory effects, the gross margin is still higher than the indicated 52%-54%. The main reason for this is that we see product allocations under constrained supply and more positive effects of changes in product and customer mix. With the current visibility, we see this continue also during the rest of the year.
Yes, we do have a higher than anticipated gross margin in Q1, but also the underlying number is better than we have seen previously. Now we turn to the operating model. The numbers on this slide reflect the reported numbers. First of all, the strong reported revenue in the quarter has resulted in improved performance all over the line. Although the underlying absolute spending, of course, has, as we have talked about before, increased. We're investing in line with what was communicated during the Capital Markets Day. Although volume growth currently is being capped, we see significant margin expansion in the model. Total operating reported R&D spending was just above 20%, down from 22.6%. We have some lower spending in some areas.
I'll come back to that in the cash OpEx later. We also capitalized $1.7 million in this quarter, more or less the same as last year, slightly up from last quarter. We have some more products now coming into the commercialization phase, some of our adjacent technologies, like Wi-Fi, for example. In absolute numbers, R&D investments increased from $32 million to $37 million. We do continue to invest to capture the growth opportunities we see ahead of us. I think on the SG&A cost, it's below 10%. It was a little bit higher earlier quarters. In Q4, we had a very strong catch-up from earlier in 2021 due to the COVID lockdown.
It was a little bit lower in Q1, but we see activity picking up going forward. Overall, EBITDA of $54.7 million or very close to $30 million or 30%. Of course, historically, we've been also showing the short range EBITDA, adjusting for cellular and the Wi-Fi business. This will now, of course, because of the strong gross margin in this quarter, be close to 40%. Total cash operating expenses amounted to $54.7 million in the quarter. This is when we're adding back capitalized development expenses and deducting depreciation and equity-based compensation.
This compares to $47.7 million in the same period last year, representing an increase of 15%, which then is of course well below the revenue growth of 28%, improving the operational leverage. As I just mentioned, costs in Q1 were normally high, and then we do see increased activity going forward. Used 40 million of cash operating expenses related to payroll, compared to $30 million last year, representing a growth of 11%. At the same time, number of employees have increased by 22% to 1,257 employees at the end of the quarter.
The reason the salary increase is less than employees is that we had some, what you can say, reduced expenses related to taxes on equity compensation and also related to bonus adjustments from last year. Other costs, cash operating expenses were $50 million in the quarter compared to $12 million last year. CapEx was in Q1, $4 million, down from $6 million last quarter. We are continuing to invest in additional test capacity to be ready when we get more wafers available. However, due to higher lead times for equipment, CapEx in this quarter was a little bit lower than planned. We do see that CapEx intensity for the year as a total will be around the 4% that we had last year. Finally, cash flow.
We continue the positive cash generating ability as we've seen in the previous quarter. During Q1, we added $25 million to our cash balance, which ended at $204 million. Operating cash flow was $32 million, and is of course a result of a strong EBITDA, but we also see a slight increase in working capital during the quarter, mainly driven by higher accounts receivables. However, net working capital continues to stay below the 20% target, although it's a small increase from last quarter. Svenn-Tore, I'll hand over to you for the guidance and outlook.
Thank you. Pål. As I said earlier, we expect a solid Q2 despite the supply challenges. We see revenue in the range of NOK 190-NOK 210 million for next quarter, which will correspond to around 30%-40% growth from the second quarter last year, and 4%-15% above Q1 2022. This forecast or this guidance is based on the wafer allocation we see for the second quarter. We have stated earlier that we expect higher wafer supply in the second half of the year. Cellular IoT is expected to be affected by component shortages also in Q2, although this matter is expected to be resolved and it's going to be full production for second half of the year. Gross margin is expected to remain at high levels.
This is due to favorable product mix and also the fact that there is this demand-supply imbalance. We are looking forward to sort of do the allocations, help our customers to keep them afloat even through Q2 of this year. There is multiple ways of easing the situation. I mean, one of them is that our competitor's customer get weaker demand. It doesn't look so, but if so, we could get more wafers. Important thing is what can Nordic do ourselves, and we are actively working to expand capacity through multi-sourcing. Obviously, we do more. We also design in the features that IoT requires in the future to be the customer's choice of Bluetooth chip when they do the design wins.
What we're going to see is that the first short-range product should ramp up end of next year, and this new product line will be the key enabler for our growth beyond 2023. We are optimistic about all the new products we are putting to the market. As we said, we've been expecting to ship Wi-Fi over the end of this year, and LTE situation with production will be fixed second half. We have good reasons to believe in our growth for 2024 and onwards towards 2026. That's why our outlook stands firm. We are on track to reach our $1 billion target next year. We aim to more than double the revenue from 2023 to 2026.
As I said, the accelerated traction in cellular IoT, the early traction in Wi-Fi, and also combined with our adjacent components, is going to take us towards this goal. I'm thanking for listening to me and opening for questions.
Perfect. This is Ståle. I'm the head of IR. We have got some questions. I've split them up in different topics, so we start with the revenue. This is from Christoffer Bjørnsen, DNB. The last quarter, the last couple of quarters, you have guided for $20 million sequential improvement in revenue every quarter, despite limited improvements in wafer allocations. Now you are indicating better wafer allocation in second half. Should we interpret this as an indication of sequential revenue improvement to be higher than $20 million per quarter from Q2 and onwards?
Unfortunately or fortunate, we only guide quarter by quarter, and we know the capacity support plan for the rest of 2022, but we are working every day for upsides. This is possible to change depending on how much we will get from our suppliers, but we are not able to talk more or indicate more than for next quarter.
Thank you. We have a question regarding demand. It's also from Christoffer Bjørnsen, DNB. Svenn-Tore, we have already seen some of your customer coming out with profit warnings, with revenues coming down post the 2021 boom, and now your backlog is declining sequentially. Can you give us some color on where your confidence in demand is coming from?
It's coming from the design wins we have had in new verticals. We have every week requests from our customers to put multiple dollars on the order backlog. We are not able to confirm a delivery at the dates our customer wants, and we have to reduce and actively reduce these orders to meet what we have in supply. For me, the challenge is more to allocate to keep customers flowing than seeing any, I will say, cancellation from customers. I mean, the backlog is impacted, as we have discussed with customers, and instead of giving them a confirmation of 100% of the need, we may take it down to 60%-70%. The important thing is that as many as possible of our customers keep flowing through this difficult time.
Thank you. We have a question regarding supply capacity, and this is from Rob Sanders, Deutsche Bank. In terms of foundry wafer capacity availability, has it become harder to access nodes between 40-65 nano, given auto OEMs have escalated their supply issues to a governmental level?
It's been difficult throughout, I think, two years now, and we don't see any immediate sort of inflection point where this eases up. We do have a very good communication with our suppliers, and we know what kind of capacity Nordic has secured, and we hope that there is other verticals than automotive that could ease up, and we could achieve higher deliveries than what we have already. I want to state that existing capacity support plan is taking us towards the $1 billion goal in 2023.
Thank you. That was clear. Øystein Elton Lodgaard, ABG. Do you think wafer supply could be an obstacle to ramping up PMIC?
All product line is affected by the shortage, so it's correct.
Thank you. We go over to backlog. Henriette Trondsen, Arctic, has two questions. Is the lead time similar to last quarter, and how much of the backlog is beyond 12 months?
As we've been actively working to reduce the volume at customers to match or at least align more to the supply, we are not very keen on receiving orders below or after 52 weeks. That backlog that stretches more than 52 weeks is more or less unchanged point.
Yeah. The lead time is similar?
We don't talk about lead time because basically here is a matter of allocation, and it's a matter of vertical that is the customers in. Do we believe in the verticals? We also have a social responsibility. Is the product something that we think is good for the globe? We support it. Is the customer having a product that is a longevity, is a long-lived product? There's a lot of factors that decides how big portion of the orders we are confirming and shipping.
Thank you. We have Johannes Rees. He has a question regarding price effect on the backlog. Is it higher prices only for new orders or upward adjustments for the whole backlog?
Basically the cost is for the whole backlog, so the price is impacted on the whole backlog.
No, the adjustment of price was done in Q4.
Yeah.
There's no price adjustment.
So there is-
on the backlog this quarter.
I mean, it was done end of December.
Yeah.
Thank you. We have a question regarding cellular from Rob Sanders, Deutsche Bank. Are you still confident to get cellular IoT sales above $1 million by 2024?
Are we at-
100, sorry.
Yes. Answer is yes.
Wi-Fi. Can you give an update on Wi-Fi progress in second half 2022?
We have secured allocation for wafers for end of this year, where the Wi-Fi projects runs, so we will get some start of Wi-Fi revenue end of 2022.
Thank you. We have a question for you, Pål, on OpEx from Henriette Trondsen, Arctic Securities. Payroll expenses somewhat lower than expected. Is the current level a good proxy for the forward figures?
No, I think it's, as I mentioned, it's a little bit lower in Q1 for various reasons. The adjustments to the share price impacted social security taxes and also bonus, of course. I think we have to look at the growth in employees, which was 20%. Use that more as an indicator of how it's going.
Thank you. We go over to gross margin. Øystein Lodgaard, ABG. How long do you expect the positive effect, mix effect to continue to have a positive impact on your gross margin?
I mentioned at least in 2022, commented, or Svenn-Tore commented, I will say above 54% for the full year. Definitely the rest of this year. We're reverting back to what we said during the Capital Markets Day. Also the cellular IoT will have an impact on gross margins. We mainly just stating for the rest of this year at this point.
We have a question from Christoffer Wang Bjørnsen, DNB. Gross margin guidance for Q2 is 54%. Is this just a temporary blip, or should we expect this level to continue in second half due to structural shift?
I think we just.
It's the same, isn't it? Yeah.
Yeah. I think Pål, answered it, but it's not guided 54. It's guided above 54%.
Thank you. We have a question from Adam, from Bank of America. Is cellular gross margin still expected at 30%-40% over ramp period, given that the short range is now 60%? Is cellular also increasing?
Well, we are in a different sales phase with cellular, and we are not going to increase margin very much on cellular.
Thank you. We have a question regarding PMIC from Øystein at ABG. When do you think we can begin to see meaningful revenue from the PMIC?
We already see revenue, and I think we're going to see more in 2023. It's a matter of how we allocate our wafers. Currently, there is a surging demand for our Bluetooth chips, and we have prioritized to put our products on the wafers on Bluetooth.
Okay. Thank you. Design wins, Adam at Bank of America is asking, new design wins today, what is the outlook for pricing in these contracts over the next one to two years? How flexible is pricing on the upside or downside?
We discuss with individual customers, and the most important thing now is to get supply, not to get cost down. We are willing to pay excess on our cost to ensure that our customers get products out in the market. Demand is really high, and that's the challenge. I mean, it's not that is one or two customers that have increased the demand. Most of the new tier one customer we've been discussing over the last year, Pål Elstad.
Mm.
are growing dramatically compared to 2021.
Mm.
For us, it's a matter of supplying, and that's what we're working on. Price and cost is not the main issue at the moment.
Thank you. I think that was the last question.
Yeah.
For this time.
Okay. Thanks for calling in and listening to us, and looking forward to see you again in summer when we have the Q2 presentation. Thanks.
Okay. Thank you.