Good morning and welcome to Hotel Continental in Oslo. Also, welcome to you who are joining us on the webcast. We are here to report Smartoptics Q1 2025 financial results. Four years into our journey on the Euronext Stock Exchange today, or soon rather. There are four topics that we intend to cover today. There will be an introduction, as usual, by me. A little bit new topics into the introduction is, of course, the tariff situation that we and all other companies are facing in the U.S., to get some clarity on that, a natural thing.
Topic number two, I will cover our revenue, where it's coming from, what's good, and so on and so forth. Stefan, my CFO, will also go through the financial details as usual. The fourth topic is a first glance at the strategic efforts that are currently going on in the company.
We always revise our strategy in the first half of the year and present that to the board of the company in June. We want to share with you in which direction we are going. That is going to be the fourth topic of today. Jumping into quarter one, growth of 13.5%. This is actually a very good quarter from some perspectives, from many important perspectives, I have to say. It is a record quarter for the company, and we are doing a record quarter, having gone through one of the most noisy periods, certainly in my career, possibly with the exception of the first month of COVID and the 2001 telecom bubble burst.
It has been a very, very noisy period also in Q1, which may be unknown to people. I will come back to that. What is really good this quarter?
It is the performance in Americas, which may be surprising given what I just said. It's not so surprising when you look at the numbers because it has to do with Optical solutions, software, and services that, as most of you know, have been the areas where we have over the past eight years invested nearly all our resources and efforts. From that standpoint, the strategic elements of the company's past is really paying off in the quarter, which is very nice.
It's a strong cash quarter, and we think that we are delivering an acceptable EBITDA, certainly below our long-term ambitions, which has to do with revenue for the most part, in my view at least. Also, we are continuing to invest in the company. It is a continuation of investments in R&D, in our R&D capability, and in sales, and so on and so forth.
We're also building a new backbone for the company. An example of that is we have, during quarter one, in January, to be precise, first of January, implemented a completely new ERP system in the company. And those of you who have been in such a journey know that it's not a trivial task. We performed this with really moderate impact on our business. Of course, the first couple of weeks of January, we were effectively closed to do the implementation, but after that, the project went well.
That's a relief to us. Summary again, all in all, very, very good given what was going on during Q1 on the macro, more specifically the Trump tariffs. Let's move into that area.
Also, breaking away from our normal habit of not guiding too much on the individual quarters, it's impossible to have this conversation without talking about the early parts of April too. What most people don't know is that quarter one was also heavily impacted by tariffs, specifically on the business area Optical devices. Effectively, we had a 7.5% tariff during January, which was the same tariffs that we've had since Trump won. That was increased on the 4th of February to 17.5%, and it was increased again on the 4th of March to 27.5%. This is a number that, using normal mechanisms such as Google search or an AI engine, you will probably not be able to find that number. That is illustrating how difficult this period has been for us, and I assume for everyone running a company importing goods into the U.S.
It is not a case where the administration provided a help desk, a hotline that you could call and ask, what is the situation right now? It was a situation where many people in the company had to work many nights to figure this out and to understand what to do. The 4th of March was an important date for us because that was the trigger to move production outside of China for the Optical devices. That is when we initiated that, and that is what our team has been doing pretty much from the 4th of March through to the first half of April. I would like to thank my team, the PLM team for Optical devices, the procurement for their monstrous efforts in getting this done. It is not one or two devices we are talking about. It is 2,600 parts.
You may wonder, how can they move production out of China in one month? The whole issue with Chinese manufacturing is not new. Over the past couple of years, production has been moving out of the country, predominantly into Thailand and Malaysia and a few other places. That has been driven by people like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, the hyperscalers, refusing to take Chinese manufactured goods into their data centers. For us, it was very much about tagging along with a setup that was existing. It is still not a trivial task because all of a sudden you get 2,700 new parts into your newly introduced ERP system, and we have 178 partners that need new price lists and new codes, et cetera, et cetera. Certainly a very, very noisy period. If I now, so that was Q1.
If I now forward a little bit to April and Liberation Day, which took place on the 2nd of April, where, of course, the tariffs on the Chinese manufactured goods, the optical devices, went up to 152.5%. At the same time, the tariffs on our solutions products made in Sweden and partly made in Thailand and Malaysia, some optical transceivers that we're using in our solutions offering, those tariffs went up to 20%. Of course, the first couple of weeks in April, again, a very noisy period, largely demonstrating that what we did on the 4th of March, start moving production outside, was indeed the right decision. Another important date is the 11th of March. When I woke up on my birthday, the 12th, sorry, 11th of April, when I woke up on my birthday, the 12th of April, the tariffs were gone.
That is the Executive Order 14257, which you may have read about being the relief for Apple, as an example, to be able to import Apple products into the U.S. We are exporting our products under the same HS codes, and we have always exported our products under those HS codes. That is not a change from our side. Good. If you had asked me, let's take a random day last week, Thursday, what is the tariff on your solution products, I would probably have given you a different answer because it has been remarkably difficult to find out what is the current state, what do we need to do, and what will happen when we ship products. We have, as an example, used sample shipments to figure out what invoice do we get back. Can we track that to a particular number? Noisy, very, very noisy.
Last thing that happened last week was that we got confirmation on what you see on this slide, that tariffs are gone for solution software and services. It is 0%. That is very, very positive. What remains is 27.5% on the parts of business area optical devices that are still manufactured in China. I am saying here that that is 6% of our revenue, and what we have done here is taken the Q1 revenue, looked at the product mix, and then we say, what if we deliver this in Q2? What will it look like then? 6% of the company's revenue is still manufactured in China in Q2. That is a declining number. Why do we keep 6%? There are, of course, instances where made in China plus tariffs is more cost-effective than made outside China without tariffs.
I believe that we are still going to drive those 6% down to a number very, very close to zero. That is for other geopolitical reasons, namely, it is a more attractive product on the U.S. market if it's not made in China. Hence, we will adapt to that. To summarize, the situation on tariffs going forward is actually quite positive for the company at the moment, which is very, very nice having come out of that noisy period. All in all, good. Q1 deep dive. Let's look at the revenue and where it's coming from. You will find here that if we start by looking at the geography, we can see a pretty remarkable U.S. in the quarter and even more remarkable growth in APAC.
I want to say what I always say when I present this slide, that the important thing here is probably not whether one particular region grows in one particular quarter. The important thing is that we have two very solid markets, be U.S. and Europe, and that we have an APAC region that now seems to deliver meaningful revenues to the company after three or four quarters with very, very good growth. Of course, 74%, as in this case, is a remarkably good growth, but it seems to be there to stay, which is very, very positive. America's very, very good. EMEA, not so good. I do not have a particular reason why EMEA is flattish down 3% other than the fact that Q4 was a remarkably good quarter in EMEA.
Of course, we exhausted a number of projects during Q4, and there is a little bit of a backlash in Q1. That's all natural and all following the normal seasonality in a sense. This is a slightly bigger drop than you would normally see, but it's no worries. On the topic of EMEA, when I now review the big opportunity for the company going forward, if we go back about a year, I would have said that it's nearly all the U.S. That is not the case anymore. EMEA has made a comeback in our pipeline. That is quite remarkable. We can see that going forward with the big opportunities and good projects that we have ahead of us, EMEA and Americas seem to be on par with each other, which is very, very positive for me.
Great growth in the U.S. and remarkably good growth from low numbers in APAC, but very promising for the future. Looking at the products, you can see that together our solutions, software, and service business areas, which are, may I remind you, closely coupled to each other. We do sell the software and service when we sell the solutions and vice versa. Together, they grow by about 24%. Certainly very, very similar to what you have seen Smartoptics delivering over a long time with very good growth, which is way faster than the market, meaning we are winning market share in that segment. The problem child, minus 10%, is business area optical devices. I think I have talked enough about it, and it is pretty obvious what has been going on here.
What I can say going forward is that those of you who have listened to us over a longer period know that this is an investment area for us. It's an area that has been more or less, I wouldn't say neglected, but from when we talk about larger strategic investments, certainly a little bit neglected over the years. We started to communicate about more investments and more strategic efforts in that area middle of last year. We have come a long way down that route, and we are now in the situation where we have this many ideas on initiatives, and that needs to be shrunk down to this many ideas and initiatives that's going to be implemented. Right. We are having some noise in the room. They are apparently rebuilding.
I'm going to stop there and hand over to Stefan to take you through the financial details, and then I will come back to talk about the strategy.
Thank you, Magnus. Talking about drilling and the building, I will drill down to the financials. We have, as Magnus mentioned, increased revenue of 13.5% up to 14.4% compared to 12.6% last year, and it's partly driven by strong Americas of 7.8% compared to 6.4%. We have stable gross margin on 47.3%, but it's slightly down from 48.6% last year, and to some extent driven by impacted by the U.S. tariffs on China products. We had old pricing on outstanding orders giving a short-term impact on the margins of around 1 percentage point. The EBITDA was 1.2% compared to 1.1% last year.
The increase of 0.1% is split up to an increase of 0.6% that is related to the revenue increase and a slight margin drop. Then we have a minus 0.5% that's related to OpEx increase to 5.6% from 5.1%. That is driven by organizational growth. The average number of employees grew by 9% from 118 to 129. That's mainly in R&D. Cost per employee is stable, quarter over quarter, with a slight increase from the annual salary review. We have an exchange rate exposure in the OpEx since more than half of the OpEx is based in SEK, and revenue and COGS is predominantly based in U.S. dollars. As a result, we see the EBITDA margin of 8.4%, the same as last year, and that is impacted, as I said, from tariffs of around 1 percentage point.
The operating cash flow is positive, 2.6% compared to 2.5% last year. We see net collections of trade receivables in Q1 give us a positive of 1.5%. Inventory increased and cost 2.3% in cash. Trade payables consequently increased by 1.8% and gave us a positive impact. We have a strong balance sheet with an equity ratio of about 58% compared to 64% last year. Non-current assets is 8.6% and consists of capitalized development costs, tangible assets, and deferred tax assets. Current assets is 34.4%, up from around 30%, and it's mainly inventory of 14.9% and trade receivables of 18.4%. The cash situation is good. We have 9.9% compared to 11.5% last year, but it's up 1.9% compared to the last quarter.
Cash from operating activities generated 2.6%, and that was, as I said, driven by a reduction in trade receivables, increase in accounts payables, and partly offset by increase in inventory. We still have the credit facility available on $7.1 million, equivalent to NOK 75 million. Non-current liabilities is 0.6%, of which lease liabilities is 0.4% and borrowings 0.2%. Current liabilities is 11.6%, and that's mainly trade receivables, tax liabilities, and personnel related liabilities, up from 9.5%. Deferred revenue is up to 10.2% compared to 6.3% last year, and the increase is related to larger revenue share from business area, software, and services, and the growing revenues. Working capital amounts to 13.6% compared to 14.9% last year, which is good. Inventory increased to 14.9% from 13.5% and was up from 12.6% last quarter and are back to pretty normal levels.
Trade receivables increased to 18.4% from 15.5% last year, but has decreased from 19.9% end of last year due to collections in Q1. Trade payables are up to 6.9% and related to high purchases in the quarter and the timing of due dates within the quarter. Net other short-term liabilities increased to 12.8% from 9.9% and is mainly related to increase in deferred revenue that is up to 10.2%. As we announced before, the board proposed a dividend of NOK 0.6, and that is pending AGM approval and is following our new dividend policy that we have already published. Thank you, and back to Magnus.
Thank you very much, Stefan. First glance at the 2025 strategy, the way this works is we gather the teams around about March timeframe and start brainstorming around the topics that we have identified.
We are now working through, there are about seven or eight teams now working on different initiatives related to what I'm going to talk about, and come end of May, beginning of June, we will be able to display a little bit more details. I think this is remarkable times for us. The ever-growing demand for bandwidth has a new body going forward. It's called AI. We are seeing that left, right, and center, how that is affecting the world. May I remind you that AI, predominantly in the early phases and probably still heavily dominated by very, very large data centers and an inter-data center communications market, more and more initiatives of distributing the AI architecture resulting in intra-data, sorry, I mixed it up, inter-data center communications. The regular business of Smartoptics can certainly, and our product offering can certainly help out with that.
We are, of course, anticipating a phase three where AI no longer is text strings going back and forth between a supercomputer and a user, but rather movies and such in 4K quality being transported by 10 billion people around the planet. That will have a massive impact on the ever-growing demand for bandwidth. When I meet my colleagues, people who work for the hyperscalers and internet exchanges and people who actually know exactly what's going on with bandwidth, there is also no doubt that there is no relief on what used to be driving bandwidth growth. It is still growing at the same pace. I'm talking about the cloud services, I'm talking about streaming media, and I'm talking about things like more content to your handheld devices as an example. There is no relief.
It's continuing to grow, and we're adding another beautiful thing on top of that. I'm expecting the ever-growing demand for bandwidth to continue to grow, certainly during my lifetime, and probably grow a little bit faster. Very, very positive. It's what's underpinning our strategy and actually the whole business of Smartoptics. The three areas that you see on this slide, starting from the left with expanding our addressable market, middle, filling the gap in the market caused by consolidation, and to the right, open and disaggregated networking. This is the foundation of Smartoptics strategy. We have had this on page one of our strategy documents since 2017. It is super robust, and it's very, very stable. In fact, it is even more accentuated today than it was when we initially wrote these arguments back in the days.
This company is, in my opinion, leaning on a very, very stable foundation of a strategy. What we're doing every year is we add a number of areas that we are going to focus on. You saw what I talked about earlier today, building a new backbone for the company, new ERP system. That was part of an initiative from last year's strategy, which we called Clean Up and Shape Up. Having grown the company for six, seven years by about 20%, there are many things that you decide to deal with later in such a period. We have dealt with them now. There have been large initiatives in the company, a completely new IT strategy, a completely new IT department, a new organization for the company, et cetera, et cetera. We are doing the things that we say we want to do.
In 2025, it's not a big surprise to anyone that it will be the year where we not only gain underlying demand from what's going on with AI in the world. We will also start utilizing AI as an instrumental part of our product offering and also as an instrumental part in how we continue the Clean Up Shape Up program, how we become a partner where our partners can effectively conduct their trading in a frictionless manner. That is the ambition. At the core of any AI strategy, there needs to be an ambition to increase the amount of data that you have available and the quality of the data you have available.
Because an AI tool, as an example, whatever that is supposed to do, if there is no data in the background to learn from, to analyze, and to draw conclusions from, it's likely going to be pretty useless. What we are working on now is a concept that we call a new data-driven Smartoptics. That is, of course, scrubbing and increasing the quality of our internal data in the company. More importantly, it is how do we learn from live networks around the planet in order to do the things that you have on the left, network automation, predictive surveillance, and for our customers, getting better support, better maintenance, better networking analysis, better troubleshooting, and so on and so forth. That conversation has started about a month ago.
We have a number of customers who are signed up to this initiative now, who will work with us to constantly feed data from the network into our data lakes in order to start training our models in order to build better agentic AI applications and services for the customers. It is clearly a win-win for us and our customers to do that. We are also introducing in our product range with the first release now in December, a completely new way of streaming telemetry data. For those of you who are in the industry, it is referred to as GNMI streaming. We expect that by the end of this year, the complete Smartoptics product portfolio will be GNMI enabled. That means in real time, we will have access to everything that is going on in our networks.
For the avoidance of doubts, it's thousands of things happening all the time and measurement points and data that is coming from the network. I don't think I've ever been this enthusiastic about the strategy work, maybe with the exception of when we formulated the initial strategy in 2017. It is clearly something that's going to help us to gain market share going forward and ultimately to start generating new revenue streams for the company. I don't think we will be there to talk about that already this summer, but certainly as time progresses a little bit more, we will have identified new ways of generating revenue into the company. I'm super excited about this. This is certainly going to help us as we move beyond our near-term $100 million target.
Ending this presentation, just looking at the long-term ambitions, and this is a slide that has been with us for four years now. There is no reason to change this slide at this point, in my opinion, and I'm going to reiterate what I always say about our long-term ambitions. Number one, they are not very long-term anymore, as you can see, 2025 and 2026. Still, I would claim that is this possible to achieve in 2025? The opportunity is certainly there, but we have to be successful at nearly everything, and we probably also have to be very lucky to hit this number in 2025. Of course, if the opportunity is there, 2026 looks considerably easier. What I did introduce as a discussion point in the last quarterly result is, what is 100 million and when does 2026 happen?
If we do 92 as an example or 108 in 2026, is that good or bad? To me, what's important is the continued momentum in the company to generate revenues way beyond these types of numbers and to continue to build the growth in the company by continuing to increase our addressable market through the strategic investments we are doing in our regular products and now adding on top of that a completely new set of AI-driven applications. Building that momentum, whenever this happens, having the backbone and the muscles to continue the growth journey is what matters to me. With that, I would like to say thank you, and let's start with questions in the room.
Thank you. Marcus Heiberg, SEB, a couple of questions from me. Going back a bit to the tariff impacts, you talked about the direct effects.
Maybe you can elaborate a bit on the customer discussions that you're having, especially in solutions, and if projects could be delayed, awaiting, for instance, an industry-specific tariff that could come. We don't know. Any signs that projects are being delayed is the first one?
Certainly, you know, the weeks before the so-called liberation day, I mean, you don't take a huge infrastructure investment decision when you know that in seven days from now, that could be 20 or 30 or whatever number really more expensive. Obviously, stability is what matters. The sooner we can get past whatever date we have in front of us, there is one example of the end of July where the 90-day pause is over, the sooner we can get past that, the better.
I do not think, given of course that the tariffs do not become a trade barrier, I mean, like 150%, I would consider that impossible to do business. Assuming that there is a tariff that's reasonable, I don't think that's going to have a dramatic effect on our industry. People need to build networks. People need to take investments. 400 gig, 800 gig is still happening. The networks are old and not up to par with the requirements. The investment needs to be done. If there is a 12% or 7% or 8% or whatever the number is, I don't think that's going to matter, to be perfectly honest. What matters is to know exactly what it is. Right now, we know that it's zero on the solutions. That is going to be very good for the coming short-term period.
It is not hindering business today, but it was in the last weeks of March and first weeks of April, for sure. That is of course reassuring. Looking a bit, of course, into Q2 and where we are in Q1, if you look to the seasonality, sort of Q4 to Q1, it is down a bit more than usual, but you explain that with Europe, it seems like. Of course, going into Q2, you see actually now that demand could actually come faster because of this uncertainty in the short term. Do you see evidence of that, or do you expect sort of normal seasonal development into Q2? I think it is a bit too early to say anything, but I expect kind of a normal seasonality.
When we look at the quarter, and you know, we do not have a habit of guiding the details of a particular quarter. As I said, between the 2nd of April and 11th of April, as you can imagine, the order booking in the U.S. was not very good. That has caught up remarkably well now in the past couple of weeks. Hopefully, a very short-term delay rather than it's not lost business, it's a delay we are talking about. Right here, right now, you know, yeah, it looks absolutely okay. No reason to expect anything but a normal seasonality, I would say.
Okay, and thank you. Then final for me is you mentioned that in Europe, you're actually now seeing a similar pipeline as in Americas, which is quite surprising to me given that you have these large accounts signed in Americas.
Can you elaborate on the specific opportunities? Is it tied to the new strategy here? Or maybe how could you have a similar pipeline given the strength that you've seen in Americas on the large accounts side?
Yeah, very good question. I honestly, I wish I knew the details of the answer here. I mean, there is an element, of course, here in the fact that Europe has been was late to the game in a sense. Through the four quarters that we had between Q4 2023 and Q3 2024, Europe was performing worse. Some sort of dammed up demand is probably one answer to this. I think another answer to this is in Smartoptics, the products that we have released through this period makes us much more attractive in certain areas of the network, to be precise, regional network, longer distances, bigger networks.
That has certainly brought us into very interesting conversations. We are building networks for enterprises, as you know, communication service providers and cloud players. Within the enterprise segment, if you look at the segment that has to do with public safety, defense, and such more strategic government-style networks, that is a third reason where we are now having numerous conversations that is related to building a stronger communication infrastructure for the future of Europe. Right. Of course, the continued industry consolidation that was in effect during Q1, but that has been known for quite some time. I'm talking about the Nokia Infinera acquisition, effectively making the gap bigger and wider, which is an opportunity for us. There are a number of reasons that are very tangible.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Oystein Lodgaard , ABG.
First question to you. You have talked about all these large new accounts that you are working to sign, also you have signed some. Can you say something about the progress in Q1 in terms of how much of revenue came from customers that were customers of Smartoptics 12 months ago and how much has come from new customers?
Okay. We have not made that, and that's a long-term analysis looking at Q1 over Q1. I would say that it's always like that with Smartoptics, that a very large part of the revenue, and I think we had that in our Q4 reporting, that, I do not remember what the number was, but it's a large part of the revenue coming from accounts that we have had for a very long time. It is not going to be very different.
We know that the big accounts that we announced in quarter three last year have now, I wouldn't say that they're up to full speed in terms of deploying networks, but certainly very, very good order booking from companies like Win Technologies that we talked about in Q3 last year through the quarter in Q4 and in Q1. Progressing very nicely. In Q1 now compared to Q4, was there more contribution from new customers, new projects, or is that more of the same level just to see kind of whether there's an acceleration here or how that is progressing quarter over quarter? We will have to come back with a deeper analysis on that.
Okay.
All these customer dialogues that you have with new potential customers, can you say have you lost any opportunities or are most progressing and you are still one of those players that are evaluated for winning those projects? Can you say something about those dialogues that you have been in for a while now?
I would say the majority of them are continuing. I think several of them have progressed one step further. We have actually lost one. I remember talking about sometime in Q3, we said that we are going to start dipping our toes into the Tier one marketplace just to test that out and see where we are. I remember also talking about what that looks like for us with, as an example, 500 pages of requirements related to the login procedure into our software platform.
We did that knowing that this is a bit of a long shot. We were not selected. It is a Tier 1 in Europe, a very large one. It is building up credibility, learning as we go along and being present, being visible. That is why we did it. I would say overall, the situation is stable. Of course, which markets are hot at any given moment, which conversations are strong at any given moment, that goes up and down. As I said, right now, Europe looks very, very nice, in particular the Nordics and the DACH region where we are working with many, many nice projects at the moment.
As you said earlier, there has been some consolidation with the Nokia Infinera merger.
Have you seen any impact of that when you are evaluating for projects, that there are fewer, one less competitor bidding for those same projects, or would they have been bidding on completely different projects? There is no impact from that on each specific project.
We have seen all of it. We have seen situations and scenarios where a particular customer has a dual vendor strategy, one vendor being Nokia, the other one being Infinera that is not a dual vendor anymore. We have been invited to conversations. We have won business as a result of similar things. Of course, looking at what does it look like in any particular competitive situation, I do not think we have seen that much related to the different platforms, et cetera, yet.
If ever we will see that, I have no clue, to be honest, but we will see. Certainly, yes, we've seen it.
That was all for me. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much. Are there any other questions in the room? If not, we will pass the microphone to Mr. Burman for questions on the portal.
We have Christoffer Wang Bjorsen from DNB on Teams. Can you ask your questions, Christoffer?
Hey, can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Can you hear me?
Yes. Yes.
Thanks for taking my questions. Yeah. You know, I'm not asking for guidance on Q2 in any way, but you mentioned that you kind of at this point, you know, having a reason to not kind of indicate normal seasonality in Q2. Could you just help us understand how you view that?
You know, historically, there's been a lot of like big contracts distorting that picture. Is normal seasonality like 20% plus growth sequentially or, you know, any thoughts given that you gave that statement would be helpful?
Over Q1, you mean?
Yeah, Q2 versus Q1 from a historical seasonal perspective.
Yes. Yeah, to give you a broad answer, Christoffer, I would say that Q2 is 15%-30% higher than Q1 if we analyze this over a longer period. Something in that range, I would assume.
That's helpful. Thank you. You know, just, you know, trying to be a bit difficult with the year, but, you know, you're still hanging on to that $100 million for 2025 or 2026, kind of seemingly indicating that 2025 is a no-go.
In 2026, you're like, well, even if it's only $92 million, would that be good or not? Given where the estimates are for 2026 these days, I would kind of love to hear if there's, you know, why you're kind of constraining that range down to $92 million. You know, do you have any aces up your sleeves which make you confident that you will get to at least that $90 plus million level in 2026? You're far off that growth rate as of today. You know, just trying to understand what you see, which makes you confident that, you know, at least $92 million, something like that.
Yeah, it's a very, very good question, Christoffer. Thank you for that. The $92 million was a number that I pulled out of the air. It could have been $93 million or $98 million or whatever.
That would also be good. That would also be great, right?
My purpose was to set an example rather than forecasting 2026. I am, to repeat, I'm confident that the opportunity is there to meet $100 million in 2026. Naturally, we have to perform. Naturally, we have to win. Naturally, we have to be able to deliver and so on and so forth. Naturally, we have to be able to run our company very efficiently to do this. Of course, our ambition is to do that. Yeah, that's the answer.
Yeah, but
I have no data underpinning that $92 million is more important than any other number.
Sure. It's just, you know, you recently just like on this call said that you lost out on a tier one opportunity with a big telco teams in Europe.
But then again, you're kind of still talking about, you know, it being pretty plausible that you could do something, you know, in and around $100 million in 2026. I'm just curious if you have any, or is this built on those sorts of opportunities, which could be a long shot, or you kind of have decent visibility on the number in 2026 being somewhere in the vicinity of the 90s or something like that, right?
We can easily get to $100 million without winning a tier one player in the market.
All right. That's great. Finally, from us, I think, you know, any comments on your headcount ambitions for the rest of the year, given where the uncertainty is, you know, it seems like, you know, you're a bit more cautious on the top line now than you were like a quarter ago.
What's your plan in terms of adding people and talent for the rest of the year?
Right. I would like to please ask me that question in Q2 again. Right now, we've kind of put the lid on this, awaiting whatever's going to happen here in July with the tariff pause, et cetera, et cetera. Since a few weeks back, we're kind of a little bit more cautious on the OpEx side than we have been, awaiting any new things happening.
All right. That sounds prudent. Thank you.
That was it. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. Looking forward to seeing you again in a quarter. Have a nice day. Thank you. Bye-bye.