Welcome to Pexip's first quarter presentation. My name is Trond Johannessen, and I am the CEO. It's great to be here and host my first quarterly presentation after joining Pexip in the middle of April. I've gotten off to a good start, and I'll share some of my observations a bit later today. I'm here with our CFO, Øystein Dahl Hem . Our Chief Revenue Officer, Åsmund Fodstad, is joining from a remote location, and Mirza Koristovic from Investor Relations is here as well.
Together, we will take you through the quarterly presentation. Before diving into the Q1 highlights and the presentation, I would like to do a quick recap on what Pexip is about, what makes us unique, and what our strategy is. Pexip is a global technology company with more than 500 employees spread out across the world.
Our R&D and software development teams are located in Europe across three main hubs, while our sales and marketing team is global, as the rest of our business is. We are proud to serve more than 4,000 large organizations across enterprise and public sector in all our key markets. We have a clear focus on large organizations and solving the most complex needs in our industry.
We serve our customers together with our partners, and they enable us to scale better than we could do on our own and ensures that our product integrates well with the rest of the customer's IT systems. Since 2011, we have built a subscription base of $106 million in annual recurring revenues, and we have established Pexip as a leading player within attractive parts of the video communication market. Our competitive edge comes from unique patented technology.
Pexip has the best transcoding architecture in the world, and it is from this technology that we get our unique interoperability capabilities. This is why Microsoft and Google and others have partnered with Pexip to deliver interoperability to their customers. Also, since most of the computing happens centrally in the network, Pexip's technology is perfect for use with devices that run on batteries or have limited processing capabilities, so-called thin clients.
Tests indicate that Pexip's technology gives almost 10x more battery life to such a remote device than traditional video systems. We also have the ability to run on any computing platform. We can deliver an easy and scalable cloud service, and we also have the ability to deliver completely on-premise air-gapped data centers. This is why our capabilities in data privacy, control, and security are truly unique. The technology is built as a platform.
This means that it's ideal for embedded video solutions in customized systems. We have many examples of working with specialized solutions within judicial, healthcare, finance, and retail to build bespoke systems that integrate with the client's other systems. Pexip has taken a very focused and differentiated approach to the video communications market. We are not competing with the major video conferencing players for generic meeting solutions.
We are rather cooperating with them to enable customized solutions that they are otherwise not able or not willing to deliver. As an example, we often work closely with Microsoft to deliver tailored solutions. We are approaching a part of the total $20 billion market where our technology can really make a difference and where we have a unique and differentiated position. In most cases, we do things that the big players don't do.
The market niches we are operating in make up an annual revenue pool of around $5 billion, and we target to take number one positions in several areas of this market. I will explain a bit more about the strategy and focus we have on the next page. Pexip's focus strategy centers around three main solution areas. Within Secure Spaces, we provide solutions for organizations concerned with complete privacy and control over data.
Here, we are proud to be working with government entities, defense organizations, public sector players, and large enterprises across the globe that trust us to handle their most critical communication needs. Within Video Innovation, it's for those that require an embedded or highly customizable video solution. We are working closely with actors within the judicial, healthcare, finance, and retail sectors to provide custom-made solutions to cater for their exact needs.
For judicial specifically, we have recently launched a dedicated product that can be utilized to take courts through the digitalization process with huge resulting savings for them. In Connected Spaces, we solve the needs of organizations that operate with several video communication systems within the same organization, and they want them to work seamlessly together.
Pexip's unique technology makes it possible to build these bridges between the different protocols of the various video systems and enable a smooth user experience. As mentioned earlier, we work in close partnership with Microsoft and others in this area. Now, with that as a background, let us move over to the quarter one highlights.
Year- over- year, we delivered 21% growth in annual recurring revenues in the first quarter with a resulting $106 million annual recurring revenues out of Q1. Total revenues were NOK 223 million in the quarter, which was 24% up from the first quarter last year. In Q1, we experienced a $0.8 million reduction in annual recurring revenues compared to the end of Q4.
This is including a one-time negative effect of NOK 2 million. Adjusted for this, we had an underlying annual recurring revenue increase of NOK 1.2 million. The EBITDA ended at -NOK 52 million , a - 23% margin, and we had an extraordinary high cash outflow due to share buyback and portfolio purchases. Even so, we are comfortable with the current cash position on our path back to profitability.
On the sales side, we experienced strong momentum within Secure Spaces, and we continue to win projects globally in the public sector. Working closely with Microsoft, we also closed our first sales through the Azure Marketplace during Q1. As we stated in April, we are aiming for a relatively quick return to profitability, and we target a positive EBITDA in Q4 and for the full year of 2023. As a part of executing on the focus strategy launched late last year and to ensure profitability, we have started the process of adjusting and rightsizing the organization to reduce the overall cost level. Now let me hand it over to Åsmund for an update from sales.
Thank you, Trond. It's a pleasure to actually be here at ISE in Barcelona. It's the biggest event in Europe for our industry, and Pexip is of course here to meet with new customer opportunities as well as existing customers and partners. We have had over the last three days an enormous interest at our booth, so I'm happy to share that, and especially around the judicial product that we launched this week. My apologies if there are some noise behind me because I'm here in the middle of the trade show. Well, look at Q1. Pexip delivers 21% year-over-year increase in annual recurring revenue.
In terms of Q1 standalone, this is an overall flat quarter with an underlying growth of NOK 1.2 million and a recognized growth of -$0.8 million due to a change in pricing model with one of our major partners, leading to a $2 million one-off. Sorry. We are, of course, disappointed about the growth in Q1, which comes down to development in new sales and in particular on upsell to existing customers. This is due to mainly three core reasons. One is lack of hardware endpoints deliveries to customers due to supply chain issues, reducing the trigger for upsell to these existing customers. Remember, it's the infrastructure part that Pexip is selling.
The second is lower net upsell due to the strong growth in capacity over the last two years, which we see is making it difficult to continue to upsell to some of these customers. The third is related to our refocus on our new strategy, which we believe greatly in our three core business areas. We see strong customer interest in these areas, but our execution and our pipeline is still at an early stage for these three areas.
A positive out of Q1 is certainly that we continue to see positive development on churn as we continue to grow in segments where structurally lower churn and the customers stay loyal to Pexip. New customers represents the main driver for the ARR growth. This page shows the split of growth from new and existing customers.
Overall, growth from new customers is at $23 million, which is in line with the previous full month. What is different is the decline in net upsell, which is driving, of course, a net reduction in net retention. As I stated initially, this is driven by excess capacity from the last two years, as well as a lower-than-planned use of video rooms for many customers, as return to office is not fully in place at different geos around the world. As an example, U.S. federal just came back to office at the end of April. This is also hit by the $2 million one-off. Again, on the brighter side, this churn continues to decline, and it's now at 9.2% per year, down 0.5% from Q4.
Let's share some of the customer wins that we had in Q1 2023 to explain better where and why Pexip win. Let me start with a new customer in one of Pexip's sweet spot segments, Secure Spaces. For this Ministry of Justice, security and privacy is of the highest importance. Pexip win this customer with our uniqueness of being able to install the solutions on premises in the Ministry of Justice own data centers.
With the change in the political climate these days, secure and private solutions are mandatory for customers like Ministry of Justice. Pexip offers a unique technology for these kind of customers. The customer will utilize our virtual meeting rooms, our One-Touch Join solution, and the endpoint management solution to the full.
They are utilizing most of the Pexip portfolio. Going forward, we are already working with them for a tailored Virtual Courts solution, which I just said that we released earlier this week, which again is a unique add-on to the Pexip Infinity platform and of course represents a potential upsell for Pexip to this exact customer. We win this customer in fierce competition with Cisco.
We basically out-compete them with better on-premises solution, branding capabilities, and management systems for their entire video conferencing estate. Pexip has the best technology available in this space, in fact, second to none. Moving on to Video Innovation, a market where Pexip have had success since the beginning. Some of you might have heard about the Department of Veterans Affairs before. They are the largest healthcare provider in the world, and they've been a Pexip customer since 2016.
I like to say that they made a world record in the video conferencing market in 2021. They served more than 2.3 million veterans, and they had more than 9.5 million video telehealth calls on the Pexip solution in 2021. They used to run it on-premises in their own data center and have now transitioned into a self-hosted solution with Amazon, which we have helped them do.
They do that because security and privacy is of course still of high importance for the Department of Veterans Affairs. This customer is also utilizing our virtual meeting room solution for all their meetings. The win for us or the upsell, like we like to call it in Q1, is a substantial add-on because their usage just keeps on growing. The customer has in fact increased every year since they became a Pexip customer, and it's a good example when we hit the sweet spot in the market, we become sticky and the customers grows with us.
For Department of Veterans Affairs, it's important that it integrates with their existing workflows, like medical files, that it can be branded, that it works with any web browser, any kind of hardware platform out there, as well as have some social aspects to it, like members getting access to doctors, psychiatrists and so forth immediately versus hours and hours of drive every time they have a need for a consultancy. In fact, the VA claims that they save lives with the Pexip technology. Again, it's unique to Pexip for these kind of customer who wants integrations, branding, and secure solutions.
Moving on, Connected Spaces keeps on being our largest segment, and we win a major logo in this segment. Solving the need for high quality interoperability between Microsoft Teams and their video endpoints and a seamless join experience like One-Touch Join, lobby bypassing, and endpoint branding, DLA Piper wants their meetings to be of high quality and everything should just simply work, and Pexip solved that issue.
Again, we've been competing with Cisco and Zoom on this one, but we are taking all the technology requirements from this demanding customer who has a variety of technical solutions and want integrations. I want to point out that this was successfully sold both together with Microsoft and NTT, which is one of the larger system integrators in the world.
Of course, utilizing their long-term partnership, but also underlying that working through these kind of partnerships makes success for Pexip. With Connected Spaces as an entry point, which is very often the case for Pexip, with DLA Piper, we are already looking at a Secure Spaces solution for them. We're looking to displace another competitor to enable DLA Piper to have privacy meetings around M&A, legal briefings, and of course high-net-worth clients.
Security, privacy, where does my data go is in meetings like those are of the highest importance for this customer. As we saw with DLA Piper, Pexip does not necessarily just fit in one of these segments. With the win of Västra Götaland region, which is very specific to the Nordics, Pexip now have nine out of the 21 regions in Sweden.
We win it from Cisco, and it's actually in fact known as a prestige customer for Sweden, so that makes the sales team at Pexip extra proud. It also gives a lot of kudos to both the Pexip technology and the Pexip team that we have a good technology and a good approval from such a prestige customer. Again, the customer integrates with Cerner, which is one of the biggest or the largest medical systems in the world for patient meetings as a video innovation solution.
In addition, it's a direct replacement of Skype for Business for secure meetings, and thirdly, an interoperable solution for the different technologies and large variety of video endpoints. We deliver on all three solution areas. Going forward, Västra Götaland are also looking to deploy an in-field ambulance solutions with wearables, again based on the same Pexip unique technology.
Again, it will represent a potential upsell for us to this customer. To finish it off, we just launched the Pexip Engage, which you hopefully have seen. It's a complete scheduling and business intelligence system for what happens before, under, and after a video meeting with your client. Tightly integrated with the largest CRM providers in the world, like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com. We have already gained a good traction on this with our customers, and it also builds further on established Skedify customers like Tryg and TUI. Pexip Engage will give us a broader and better solution in the video innovation area. With that, I think I'm gonna hand it back to you, Øystein.
Thank you so much, Åsmund, and good luck with the rest of the sales event in Barcelona. For the section on our financial results, let me start off by giving a quick summary of the P&L before we dive into the underlying drivers. Starting with the top line, our revenue grew to NOK 222 million in Q1 of this year, up 24% year-on-year. Our cost of goods sold is at 12% of revenue, in line with Q2 and Q3 of last year, and is increasing due to both a higher share of service revenues in addition to strengthening the robustness of our platform.
Salary and personnel expenses and other operating expenses grew 7% and 42% respectively, taking our EBITDA to -NOK 52 million, in line with Q1 of last year, and with a 7 percentage point increase in EBITDA margin. Still, there is a long way to go into black numbers, and we recognize that growth alone will not take us there, so addressing this is a key focus for us going forward. In terms of recognized revenue, our revenues grew to NOK 222 million, and the growth of 24% is a result of a growth of 20% for self-hosted software and 29% for Pexip as- a- Service. Both of these areas are growing in line with the underlying ARR development. In terms of operating expenses, the biggest cost item for Pexip is salary and personnel expenses.
If you exclude share option related costs, salary and personnel expenses grew 27% year-on-year. This is in line with the growth in headcount of 32%, which is the main driver for the increase in salary and personnel expenses. At the end of Q1, we have 551 employees, of which 310 in sales and marketing. Looking at other operating expenses, that grew to NOK 60 million , a result of both a higher activity level overall, as well as an increase in external services, due to legal costs related to M&A, audit costs, and R&D development. We also see that we have higher travel and event costs in Q1 of this year compared to Q1 of last year, as activity has started picking up and we continue to have more customer meetings and more customer events.
To the resulting EBITDA development. Our revenues grew NOK 43 million, and our gross margin grew to then an additional NOK 32 million in the quarter. However, this is balanced out by the growth in operating expenses, so that we have an EBITDA in absolute kroner of roughly the same level as we had in Q1 of last year. Going forward, addressing this and taking us back to positive EBITDA in Q4 of this year and in 2023 full year is a key priority for us. Looking at cash flow, operational cash flow for this quarter was -NOK 31 million. This is driven by a negative EBITDA, and a positive impact from the development of net working capital.
This is the expected seasonality as Pexip invoices a larger share of our customers in Q4, and hence we collect that cash in Q1. However, in terms of cash flow, the key event this quarter was the extraordinary and non-recurring cash outflow, partly related to the share buyback of minus NOK 88 million, in addition to higher CapEx due to portfolio repurchases.
We announced that in Q4, and together with the settlement for the Videonor portfolio acquisition of 2020, the combined cash outflow for both of these was NOK 59 million. With the share buyback that we did in March, we have covered our expected exposure for share-based incentives for the next two years, at least, without further dilution.
With the accelerated path back to profitability, we do consider that our current cash reserves are sufficient, both to drive continued growth and to take us back into profitability and a cash positive operation. With that, I give the floor back to you, Trond.
Thank you, Øystein. Let me share some of my early observations as CEO and also talk a little bit about our targets and outlook. Pexip has grown steadily over the last 10 years, driven by unique video technology that solves the complex communication challenges for many of the world's largest companies. We are a trusted provider for the Fortune 500, large public sector organizations, and other organizations that need customizable video solutions.
The video industry has changed dramatically through the pandemic. This has created opportunities and also certain challenges for Pexip. New and very attractive opportunities where Pexip's unique technology makes a real difference have emerged. Realizing these opportunities requires Pexip to innovate on technology and go-to-market model. Therefore, we will, going forward, adapt the organization to be able to better execute on the defined strategy, capitalize on the identified growth opportunities, and reduce the overall cost level.
Building on the unique talent, technology, and customer base we have, we aim to return to growing profitably while maintaining the required speed of innovation. This is nothing new for Pexip. This is the formula that has been followed very successfully in the past. Over the next few months, we will execute on a new organizational design and go-to-market approach.
The objective is to increase focus and efforts within the high-growth opportunities and at the same time reduce costs in other areas. At the end of it, we seek to increase our growth, as well as having secured our return to profitability. I will share more details with you when we present the second quarter in August.
In summary, we believe that Pexip has a significant growth potential over the coming years through executing on its focused strategy to be a leader in core solution areas and market segments, all within the $5 billion revenue pool that we have identified as being our core markets. We have started the process to reduce the overall cost level and get back to profitable growth. In Q2, we expect to be back to ARR growth at a level in line with Q1 underlying growth. We target positive EBITDA in Q4 and for the full year 2023. Last point before we go to Q&A, we will present our Q2 and first half results on August 11th.
Going forward, we will not publish a separate ARR notice at the beginning of the quarter as we shift our focus from mainly growth to a more balanced approach on growth and profitability. As such, we believe it is better to present the full picture and the full results in a combined presentation than in two separate events. That concludes the presentation for today, and I hand it over to Mirza to handle the Q&A.
Thank you, Trond, Øystein, and Åsmund for your presentations. My name is Mirza Koristovic, and I'm the Director of Investor Relations at Pexip. We will now go into the Q&A session, and I will take you through it. We are pleased to welcome Øystein Lodgaard from ABG Sundal Collier, one of the analysts covering Pexip. We will have a Q&A session with Øystein before we take the questions from the audience received on ir@pexip.com. Øystein, the floor or the screen is yours.
Thank you very much, Mirza, and thank you for the presentation today. I'd like to start with one question on the product strategy. With the launch of Pexip Engage and the Pexip Virtual Courts, it seems that you're moving in a direction with more creating more tailor-made off-the-shelf products specific for different sectors. Is that more of a general trend in how you'll work with the products going forward?
I think both of them are good examples of us seeing a very concrete user need and then delivering a solution which is quicker to adopt for those accounts. I think at the core of what we do is the Infinity platform, and we will continue to have a sort of platform play where we enable capabilities that will very often find its way into the hands of other solution providers to build the end-to-end solution.
However, for justice and for the meeting customers on video, that is very sort of specific use cases where we see that we can accelerate that by providing a full end-to-end solution. We will continue to be flexible in that approach. Where we see solution areas that we can solve directly, we will do so. The core of our strategy is built on our platform and making those capabilities available both to our own products and to the products of other technology service providers.
Interesting. Also we're right now in a more, say, an uncertain environment with more uncertainty. There's a war going on in Europe. Are you seeing that impacting the demand for your Secure Spaces products?
Åsmund, would you like to?
Sorry, I was on mute. I was trying to answer Øystein. It's both. As an example, we were about to close a couple of customers when that broke out, then very typically on the critical infrastructure, everything freezes. You're not allowed to touch stuff. Even though they want more capacity, more better solutions. We've seen both sides of it. We do see that with the government institutions and so on, of course, this arises need to make sure that we have secure platforms and basically where do my data go. It's both.
You also state here that ARR in Q2 will be aligned with the underlying growth you had in Q1. Could you maybe specify then? Are you then referring to the Q1 ARR growth, the data in Q1, or more the year-over-year growth in ARR that we saw in Q1?
When we put it like that, we mean the underlying ARR growth of Q1, which was just in excess of $1 million. What we're seeing right now is an expected growth in Q2 in that sort of on the same line, although there continues to remain uncertainty in terms of how many deals we are able to close.
Right. That's good. That's very specific. Moving over to next subject. You talked about right-sizing your organization and adapting your organization. To me, that sounds like you will begin to reduce the number of employees. Is that how we should interpret it? That you will likely exit the year with a lower number of employees than what you have now?
We are in the process of planning the exact execution of the details of the program. I think it's clear that we will in some places probably, you know, invest more and increase the number of people, in other areas reduce. The net of it is likely to be a reduced number of employees out of the year.
Yeah. Could you say something about which areas you would like to invest more in and where you might want to reduce?
Yes. Particularly within, you know, within the Secure Spaces, within the public sector markets where we have real traction, certain parts of the Video Innovation market. You know, we mentioned these four verticals within judicial, health, finance and retail, where we see real traction today. We need to make sure that we have enough resources and the capacity to really capitalize, because this is where our technology is unique, and we have a unique differentiated position.
The timing is kind of now to take that market and take the number one positions there. When it comes to Connected Spaces, in certain cases, the competitors' products have become good enough so that the number of use cases where Pexip finds really attractive opportunities has been reduced, particularly in the enterprise segment. We are probably going to have a more efficient approach to that market going forward.
Makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. You previously talked about that you will launch some new product features which will improve your competitive position within that segment. Have you gotten some initial feedback from these new features that you've launched, or what is your thoughts on that now?
Åsmund, anything to share from ISE in Barcelona?
Yeah. To also your previous question, Øystein, of course, number one, it's important to understand that the Pexip Infinity platform is the fundamental of everything that we deliver. That has always had open API SDKs, which gives us flexibility when we do see that, as an example, the judicial side of it, where you can tailor-make different court flows, etc , which again, is unique to us because we have the transcoding and so forth, and our competitors have a hard time actually doing that.
That is easy for us to pick up and easy to adjust. It's not really tailor-making, it's kind of off the shelf. That has a lot of traction. Of course, we're pushing that as well because we know we're unique there. That combined with then also what we predict as the new almost video economy, which is inserting video in any kind of workflow like we see with IKEA, which we have seen with the medical and now on the judicial side, that's where we can play a central role, and that's also where we wanna double down on the efforts and the investments that we asked Trond about.
Mm. Mm.
Yes, we do see good traction on that.
Lastly, you also mentioned a new go-to-market approach. Is that something you would like to give some more flavor on today, or should we wait for more on that in Q2?
We will definitely give more flavor to that in Q2, but we are talking about being more focused and bringing together the best of our technical expertise, the best of our commercial expertise, and going after certain of these opportunities in a very targeted way. Our experience is that when we bring our best people together and we bring them out to the client, and we sit down and we solve the client's complex communication problems, we are very often successful. That's a formula we're gonna try to do more of.
That sounds like a good idea. Thank you very much for taking my questions.
Thank you, Øystein.
Thanks, Øystein, for joining us today and for your good questions. We will now move on to the questions received at ir@pexip.com. First question: Do you have control over the development in the company in light of previously being stuck on your ARR target of $300 million in 2024, then suddenly downgrading this goal? And does the management feel humble towards its shareholders, seeing the consequences this entails for the company and its shareholders?
I guess I can take that since that was before your time, Trond. I think we set out with an ambitious target of reaching NOK 300 million that we had good confidence in reaching. I think both the market changed and sort of also then changed our confidence in that. As your confidence in reaching a target changes, there is no other way than to take it down, because to maintain a target over time but not believing in your own execution of it is not a possible solution.
While I recognize that that is abrupt, I think it's the only way to do it. That's of course something that we are humble in the recognizing that we did not reach our that target. It's a retraction of our target is painful. Although we still strongly believe in the capabilities of our technology, our people and our future growth opportunity. It's also something that we take with us now that we plan, making sure that we develop a plan that we will execute on and where we will find success.
Thank you. The next question: Are you returning to profitability in an accelerated speed because you see that your cash position will not be sufficient if you don't?
I'm happy to take it.
Yeah.
I think we're accelerating our return to profitability because it's the right thing to do. We've invested heavily for growth over close to two years. While we found good growth and we've doubled the company in the same period, we have not been able to find the same growth as we expected. The only sensible thing to do is to scale those investments back and to accelerate the return to profitability and balance going forward, growth and positive cash flow.
Thank you.
Having said that.
Yeah
We also stated and we strongly believe that the cash reserves we have at the moment are sufficient to both secure the return to profitability and be able to invest in profitable growth.
All right. I'm pretty sure the last question that I see here is to the new CEO. Trond, what are your top three priorities in the next six months?
I think I can make it simpler. I think I can make top two priorities. It's to making sure we execute on this focused strategy where we double down, capitalize on the really unique opportunities we have ahead of us in certain of the market segments and solution areas where we operate. Secondly, to ensure that we do deliver on the target of returning to profitability in Q4 and for the full year next year.
Thank you. I see no more questions, so that concludes our Q&A session. Thank you, very much for your attention, and have a nice day.
Thank you.