G ood morning, everyone, welcome to our Q4 Interim Reports presentation. We're a few minutes early, but I would say, yeah, let's wait for some people to drop in. But I think, yeah, we can, we can start rolling. M y name is Kate Linwood . I am your host for today's webinar, and with me is our CEO, John Vestberg, and our CFO, David Nordström.
So we will start with the presentation of the last quarter, where John will share his key business insights, followed by David sharing the financial details. And after that, we will address any questions that you have at the end of the presentation. P lease post your questions in the chat, and then, yeah, we will pick those up after. With that, I would like to hand over to you, John.
Thank you very much, Kate. Again, welcome to this presentation. Q4 2025 concludes another year for Clavister. An interesting quarter, definitely with some both interesting metrics, but moreover, very interesting business events. Also, of course, events that took place shortly after the quarter ended, which we will talk more about as well.
If we sort of try to set a headline on Q4, the headline would be, as this page or picture says, "Improved profitability in a transitional quarter." What do we mean with that? Well, we see that our profitability, both in this quarter, both, EBITDA and EBIT and even net profit, is continuously improving. That's all good, even in a quarter like this, where we had a bit of challenges on the top line side and on the gross margin side b ut despite that, we continue to drive the profit journey.
Another headline I would say from the quarter would be still a very strong underlying market and demand. T he net sales growth in this quarter does not represent any weakness in the market or any, you know, weakness in the demand for Clavister products and solutions. We'll talk more about this soon.
In terms of a transitional quarter, one of the key events was, of course, the strengthened financial position, the entire revamp of the balance sheet that were conducted during the quarter. And finally, and we highlighted this already, before the quarter, that there are delivery delays on the military hardware side that causes slipover from this quarter into 2026.
If we look at the demand side, I think we will need to be continuously, sort of, better in explaining to both our customers, but to the market in general, that Clavister is a dual-use cybersecurity company, serving both the civilian side and the military side.
The demand, as I mentioned, demand remains strong. We see that in both of these segments, if you like, or sectors, where, you know, the amount of qualified discussions, dialogues, inquiries, and so forth, we're having with larger and larger and more volume of customers and prospects keep increasing. A gain, I think to some extent, we can thank, if you like, thank within quotes, the geopolitical situation for this. There is the strong push for European solutions, and we see that even more. In the civilian sector, there is a clear momentum.
We'll talk slightly more about the numbers later when David walks us through the financials. But I can say in general that in our key focus geographical markets, we have a very strong underlying momentum. Previous year's quarter was very tough from a comparison perspective, so that's why our net sales numbers have a, you know, from a growth perspective, a bit of a hard time keeping up. But if you would plot the, you know, three, four-year of trend, there is a very, very clear growth trend on our civilian business.
Similar than in the defense business, a bit of a different beast in terms of business characteristics. So typically, you see the large type of contracts, long lead times, and so forth. I t's maybe no surprise that this is the type of business that gets more exposed in terms of press releases and so forth.
I t goes almost without saying that this is a part of our business that is developing strongly. And I think the latest contract in Norway is a good testament to that. Again, the dual-use aspect of our business is a super important perspective. We actually don't want to be, you know, tied into one or the other bucket w e're neither a, you know, a pure defense company, nor a pure civilian company w e serve both domains.
That is important from several perspectives f rom the business perspective, it adds a lot of credibility to win large national defense deals when we, on the other hand, in the civilian business, have dialogues with, you know, critical infrastructure type of customers or large state agencies, and so forth. T hose businesses, they catalyze and they fuel each other.
Then from a pure P&L or cash flow perspective, they're also good in hedging each other because of the various characteristics. O n the one hand, on the civilian side, more volume, slightly smaller deals, but compensated with large volumes, shorter time to money, and so forth. And on the defense side, the opposite. Large projects, long time to order, long time to cash in, in most cases. But combining those two creates a good balance.
In terms of order intake for the full year, last year, we ended up at SEK 320 million, c learly the highest number ever. That takes us to an order book of SEK 378 million per end of Q4. A s we've communicated before, our order book includes now contracts that spans all the way through 2029, and this gives us a very, very good position with regards to visibility and outlook for the coming years.
Moving to the defense sector, it is, as just discussed, it is an important growth driver for Clavister. It is not the only growth driver. I think that is very important to highlight, that both the civilian and the defense sector, they keep pulling each other in terms of growth.
Specifically in Q4, isolated, sales in defense or revenue in from defense business grew by 66%, so it was a strong quarter from that perspective. One of the highlights was adding yet another contract of our CyberArmour products to the CV90 platforms with BAE Systems Hägglunds. This was an add-on order to a previously won contract for a European nation, value of SEK 26 million . Still within the defense sector, of course, we need to talk about our key win that happened, you know, slightly after the quarter ended.
W hat we've been participating in for a few years was a large tender from the Norwegian Defense Materiel Agency, so that's the Norwegian version of FMV. They are procuring a lot of digitalization projects to modernize the Norwegian Defense Forces, and they have a program called Mime.
O ur part of this, our contract, is one component out of maybe 20 in the large Mime program that sort of encompasses many billion NOK in investments. I would refer this contract as really a breakthrough contract for Clavister, but not only for Clavister, for a breakthrough as well in tactical communication within defense.
What the Norwegian government, the Norwegian Armed Forces, have done here is a many, many year of really solid design and requirements work to design the next generation communication network for armed forces. T his is something that many other nations now are looking with envy on the Norwegians, asking themselves, how the heck did they arrive at such a n interesting design.
There was a long tender process over three years. Fierce competition from really, really large vendors in the industry. But at the end of the day, we were able to win this deal due to several factors o ne factor being that we are building this solution on top of our existing product portfolio. That was a very strong key for the customer.
The other one, us being a European, but even more a Nordic supplier, that also played into our favor. I think also our heritage coming from an engineering-strong background, talking to, in this case, an engineering-heavy customer, also did suit us well. The project as such, or the contract as such, concerns two parts. One is the delivery and development of our solution. Again, based on Clavister's proprietary software.
After the delivery, it is followed by a four-year maintenance and support commitment. We strongly believe that these four years will be then followed by many years of continuous engagement with these customers, basically for the lifetime of the system.
I n summary, we're looking at a deal worth SEK 280 million. This is a committed order. We are looking at a project duration starting already now, it has already started, and continues for almost three years, or approximately three years. W e will be seeing, from a financial perspective, revenue and earnings support from this project throughout the project, continuously throughout the project.
We are highlighting in our quarterly report, our interim report, that cash flow from the project is also supporting us during 2026, but somewhat later during the second half of the year. But apart from that, it is more of a continuous revenue and earnings support from the project.
Of course, we need to talk about the supply chain constraints. This is no news, I think, for anyone. We announced this already last year. I think everyone is aware of the reasons. The strong buildup of the defense sector across Europe causes a lot of strain on the supply chain in the industry. M ore specifically, the producers are not being able to keep up with the pace, which of course affect the entire sector, not only companies like Clavister.
For us, specifically, the deliveries that we planned during Q4 is postponed into 2026, fully according to what we announced last year. In terms of numbers, we're looking at an impact of approximately SEK 10 million moving into 2026. So naturally, we will have the corresponding positive effect done during the first half of 2026. Again, this is a timing issue. It's not a business risk, per se . With that, leaving over to David to talk about our financial platform.
Yes, thank you, John. I think Q4 has been a very eventful quarter for us i mean, for a long time, we have, you know, planning and building the foundation for being able to refinance the, you know, the EIB debt that Clavister has been having since 2027, 2017 , with a combination of a directed share issue and a commercial loan. W e did a directed share issue of SEK 167 million , during, you know, November, December timeframe. Uh, we were able to raise a loan facility of SEK 100 million together with Swedbank.
The combination of the directed share issue and the new loan facility, that enabled us to repay all outstanding debt, including a repurchasing of all issued warrants to the EIB. W hen we end now, when we end 2025, Clavister have no longer any debt with EIB, and EIB no longer hold any warrants in Clavister i think these have been two, you know, challenges for Clavister that we have been wanting to resolve, and, you know, we're very glad that this is resolved.
This, in turn, leads to a significantly lower net debt from SEK 152 to 67 million. C learly, relieving a lot of pressure from our balance sheet. You know, the balance sheet has been gradually improved over the last few years, but this is a major step in bringing our balance sheet to a you know much better position. T he year-end cash position sitting almost at SEK 100 million .
A reduced leverage, we removed the EIB warrant overhang. This has been, I would say, a bit challenging. The FX exposure, those of you who have followed Clavister for some time, clearly know the volatility in our financial net due to a large debt in euro that is now removed. The current debt with Swedbank is smaller, but it's also in SEK. We can also see then other than the effects that you know the loan with Swedbank, it is cheaper, so we're lowering our annual interest costs.
I think important, as we are growing, this introduces a level of flexibility that we haven't had with EIB. EIB came with quite large restrictions on our flexibility. That flexibility, working now only with a commercial banks, means that we can be faster to act on certain, say, needs in the organization related to growth, raising. For addition, being flexible on how we finance potential working capital needs—as an example, not saying that this is something we're doing currently, but as an example, not having EIB there makes us more flexible, and that's important as we grow.
If we then look at financial, starting as always with order intake, a year-over-year comparison indicates, well, a decline of 26%, but looking at that from a different perspective, there was no large orders from the defense sector. There was definitely orders from the BAs, from BA with SEK 26 million , but smaller than we see in the comparison quarter s o that still means this is the 4th largest order intake order in Clavister. I would say still a strong order intake performance, and we still see an order intake trend line being on very high levels compared to historic levels.
Then looking from a net sales perspective, well, it is a modest net sales growth in the quarter, impacted by several things. As you know, a large part of our sales are in euro, and the SEK has improved quite substantially. We also have sales in USD, where the improvement of the SEK is even stronger s s o this comes definitely with an impact. But still, if you adjust for FX, net sales growth is not strong in Q4.
Still, it is the largest sales quarter ever in the history of Clavister, but growth levels are not on the levels where we have been used to seeing s o FX is one effect. Another, as we communicated during Q4, delays in deliveries of military hardware has an effect of approximately a little bit more than SEK 10 million, impacting this quarter negatively.
From the civilian business perspective, we saw very strong growth in Q4 last year, partially supported by one of life cycle effects, which we don't have in Q4 this year. T he civilian, I would say, growth challenges is a quarter -by- quarter challenge. It is not indicating challenges in our civilian business per se, and that's important to say. So I think we can pause there and then look at kind of civilian versus defense net sales, as this is something that being frequently asked.
There is a good growth in defense sales, 66%. However, we're missing SEK 10 million here that we expected to have, as we said, due to the delays, so it is less than what we expected w e expected it to be north of SEK 25 million. It ended up being SEK 16.4 million.
That delay is then deferred to the first half of 2026. Civilian business, well, as we said, a little bit under what could have been expected. One is FX effects, the other one is, as I said, the short-term challenging comps versus Q4 last year, but that is only a short-term challenge. I believe we will see a good growth in the civilian business going forward. And adding, I think, one more important component to the mix, that might easily get overlooked.
We see a lot of demand for security and cybersecurity made in Europe. W e are engaging with larger partners, larger end customers than before. But that also means that our sales force is investing a lot of time in building partnership with large organizations. Time that historically might have been spent in building business with much smaller partners and smaller end customer, where the benefit is, there's a shorter time gap from an initial discussion to a sales transaction, but a transaction is smaller.
Here, I would say we're chasing a lot of things that it doesn't generate sales visible in Q4, but it's building a foundation for future growth that I think is important s o I think one should also be aware of that effect. Hard to quantify the size of it, but I think it is important to do this transition. That's also one part of holding sales back in the quarter.
ARR growing somewhat faster than net sales. Why? Well, the key reason is in the ARR number, there is a lot of contracts, and the contracts are growing in value, which is driving ARR growth. The somewhat setback in net sales growth quarter -by -quarter is, as I said, we had life cycle events in Q4 last year, meaning quite a lot of hardware in the sales mix. The hardware part of the sales mix is somewhat lower in the civilian business in this quarter, and hence, ARR is growing faster than its sales.
This is, and those who have listened to these presentations for some time, know that a usual statement from me is when we see low growth in a quarter, we tend to see strong growth margin. This quarter, we don't. So this is an anomaly from that perspective, that we're seeing a small net sales growth and a weak growth margin w hy? Well, it's clearly very mixed driven.
That in this quarter, we have seen good order intake from the growth margin, strong parts of the civilian business, but that has not been able to translate into deliveries in supporting net sales in the quarter. So we have a weak contribution from the margin, strong parts of the business, combined with, as we said before, a 66% growth in defense deliveries, and those defense deliveries in this quarter are very hardware-centric. So this combination creates a challenge for the margin in the quarter. So these are the reasons.
However, I think this is an area where we are pleased to see that our focus on cost control is continued to yield results. So even though we are producing so far our strongest growth quarter, our strongest sales quarter, well, not that strong growth-wise, but sales-wise, it is the largest quarter, we are seeing a decrease in our OpEx. So I think we have invested a lot of getting OpEx under control, and it is under control.
I think with that, we can be able to scale, of course, operational costs when we see that there is a good traction of our sales, but cost clearly under control. And this translates into an improved EBITDA. I t is the cost control part is contributing more, I would say, since we have a challenging margin situation b ut overall in all, we are driving growing EBITDA and growing EBIT, and of course, we see a very strong net profit, and that is, of course, driven by that we're recording a deferred tax asset of SEK 30 million .
A ccording to IFRS, if there are clear proof points that you will producing taxable profits in future periods, you are required to record a deferred tax asset w e're doing this conservatively, and let's monitor that, and I would say then bring that asset up over time as we move forward, but let's start with a bit of conservative assessments here. But that's the clear explanation, why are we seeing such a large positive delta between EBIT and net results?
Thank you, David. T o round up before Q&A then, a bit of an outlook going forward here. I think we can summarize again, stating that there is a strong movement towards the you know increased digital sovereignty in Europe. It clearly benefits European vendors. There are not too many cybersecurity vendors that are able to provide the same scope of products and services and solutions that Clavister can.
A s David alluded to in the civilian side, structural growth opportunities, we're moving more and more towards larger partners, larger end customers as well, taking slightly more time to win and to onboard, but an investment well worth, I would say. And we're seeing the build-up of contracts in defense. This is then important, of course, knowing that from the SEK 370+ million of order backlog we had in Q4, adding then the now known SEK 280 million from the Norwegian contract, we have a very solid order book.
From that order book, we have, of course, as mentioned, a very clear outlook, very clear visibility, meaning that we can be a bit more certain in our planning position, and we can plan accordingly for strategic investments in expansion as well, specifically in sales and in some areas in R&D, but also doing structural investments that sort of creates the foundation for a Clavister that can sort of onboard the next phase.
We have updated our planning ambitions for the coming three-year period. Two reasons for that. Well, we're entering a new year, so it's due time. But moreover, coming from the fact that we're now sitting with a massive order backlog order book, we have much clearer planning horizons, meaning that if we look at our revenue targets or revenue ambitions for the coming years, we're stating that we would, with the contracts we have, with the growth we're seeing in new sales as well, we should be seeing revenue growth exceeding the overall market growth in this industry.
Despite this quarter being a weaker gross margin point, we are still convinced that the average of 80% still stands. There will be clear fluctuations still between the periods, but that is a product mix component, more or less entirely. And important to state as well, I mean, we are moving into positive cash flow w e have been seeing operating cash flows, positive cash flows for some time.
We are hovering around the zero mark in terms of EBIT, and in this quarter, even recording a fairly large net profit, even though it's driven by tax asset. But in any case, we are now seeing the possibility for the first time in many, many years to start reinvesting positive upcoming cash flows to drive further growth.
We are in no way near to saturate the market. The market is growing. We have still a fairly small portion of the market, so there is absolutely the ambition to capture a larger market share, and that comes from continuous, of course, continuous delivery on what we have and what we do with the current base, but also seeing investments in building, you know, future market shares. With that, moving back to you Kate , for Q&A.
Perfect. Thank you very much for your presentation, John and David. N ow time for some questions. We already have received a few of them, so but please keep posting them as we address the questions we have, so we can cover any... Yeah, we can address anything you want to want John and David also to maybe elaborate a bit more on. So please feel free to ask. F irst question. Could you please talk more about the postponement, postponements and when we can expect them to reverse?
A bsolutely. Y eah, as we're indicating in the report and in this call, we expect them to reverse during the first half of this new year, 2026. We're doing, of course, everything we can to accelerate that. It's clearly in our interest to do that, but we're sticking to the first half of 2026.
T here's a similar question around this as well, but the question was also, like, regarding is it in chips, or is it more in the raw material area, and do you see any supply chain challenges? Like, yeah, any worries that you want to specifically highlight, in regards to this?
I mean, it's clearly a quite complex situation. These are not products that are straightforward commercial off-the-shelf products that are produced in volume. It's, you know, complex engineering, many, many components. They have a lot of capabilities in them, also because of so-called industrial corporation offset requirements.
We need to do subcontracting production in other European countries as well, not only in Sweden or in few countries. So this, of course, adds production complexity, and as soon as you add complexity, you have increased risk for delays, and so forth. I t is not a single component, it's a mix of things. But no, I would say we have it under control, but still, of course, it's a bit frustrating.
I think then from an overall industry perspective, IT industry perspective, I think everyone is aware of the situation with RAM memory prices and memory supply. We're on top of that, I would say, but we're monitoring it. I see several vendors having challenges, also competitors to us, having challenges with prices and with supply of memory-related components. I think this is an industry-wide challenge, so that also means that there is a higher acceptance also from the customer base to absorb increased costs. But nonetheless, it's something we monitor.
Thank you, John, for elaborating on that. Yeah, I can't at the moment see any more questions regarding defense, so let's just move away into a different area. Yeah, we've got a comment here saying, "Great job you're doing in defense. However, you once again say that there is a strong interest in your civil solutions, yet the ARR only grew by 4.8%. Can you please explain this misalignment with a strong interest? Should we not see a larger ARR growth?
M aybe David, that sort of complements your, your description.
Yeah, I think I kind of answered it before, but let's reiterate that answer. There is a good momentum in the civilian business t here is a lot of inflow of customer contacts w e are much easier to find very good meetings, start dialogue with new potential customers, new larger partnerships. That's good.
To a certain degree, this is also holding us back because we're investing in building a foundation for future growth. Take the Arrow partnership that we disclosed during Q4 as an example. There's quite a lot of work in establishing new distribution channels in new markets. That requires a significant effort from sales, but if you don't do that effort, it will be hard to scale because there's no foundation to grow in certain markets. So that's important. That's part of the answer.
Another part of the answer is, as I said, we saw a strong growth in Q4 last year, partially supported by life cycle events, which creates, I would say, a bit of a false picture comparing year over year, a quarter with no life cycle events supporting growth, comparing to a quarter that had it.
But this is a one-off, so I think when moving into 2026, this is behind us. And then, of course, the last thing is quite large FX effects that also comes with an impact. But then, of course, saying that it's an ARR growth number of just above 4%, is that something that we're proud of? No, it is lower, it's lower than the levels that we're striving for, for sure. I think there are answers to that, and I think the ambitions is something different, and I think we're in a good market, so I believe we will yield different results.
Yeah, maybe this next question also touched on a similar area. How do you how do you plan to scale a civilian business, and what are you doing to capture the opportunities you see?
I think I can start, and you can complement, David, if you like. We are clearly sticking to the overall strategy that we set out a few years back. F ocusing on the so-called mission-critical applications for mission-critical customers, in the four customer groups we have selected. So the public sector in Europe, the energy and utilities companies, the defense sector, and the telecom sector. There is a lot of market share to capture in those four groups alone, so there is really no strategic reason for Clavister to start spreading thinner again, that we will not do.
From a geographical perspective, we have had our focus now for a while in the Nordic region, in the German-speaking region, taking also care of our partners, distributors, and customers outside of those geographies, dealing with those, managing those, supporting those from more of a central type of approach, a global sales team.
We have by far not reached a saturated market in the Nordics, nor in the German-speaking region, t hat's clearly the two geographical areas where we continue to scale. How do we do that? Well, we will not, from one day to another, just rapidly add a massive amount of salespeople or marketing spend. That would be irresponsible. So we're scaling it with caution, but doing it diligently and with a clear plan.
What does it mean in practice? Well, we're clearly adding people, we're adding resources, but we're also as David mentioned, focusing parts of the sales time, quite a lot of the sales time on building the more strategic partnerships, larger partners, addressing larger end customers, knowing that the return from those engagements are larger, but they also take more time.
We're doing similar activities in the German-speaking region, and naturally, I mean, it's also a combination w e can't be doing everything just in sequence, then it would take too much time to build up a total, you know, larger revenue base. So we are looking at additional geographical regions in Europe, and I think we will have the reason to come back to those later, in later quarters. But clearly that's part of a scaling plan to look at additional regions as well.
From an offering perspective, we are having since quite a long time now, a good foundation from an intellectual property perspective with our various software stacks, the amount of products and product families that we can create and are creating based on those software stacks.
I wouldn't say that it's unlimited, that would be, of course, wrong to say, but there are clearly many more opportunities coming from complementing, adding new products, new product groups from existing IPR. That's important. W e're not planning to invest heavily in new technology areas, rather refining the product portfolio based on what we have. I think we still can gain more scalability factors from that. I don't know, David, if you would like to comment something.
Yeah, but I mean, adding just one comment, and I think one example, the really good growth potential, where growth can really kick in, is when you add large resellers, because we're doing a two-tier sales model t his is which is typically in the industry. So we are selling to a partner that's selling to the end customer.
Typically, the very large resellers, partners in Europe, have had ecosystems that are very US-based. This is clearly changing due to a changing geopolitical landscape. H ow do I then get a large national partner who is selling the Ciscos and Check Points and Fortinets, that types of products, to instead sell Clavister and other products made in Europe? Well, by winning the customers who they care about. One good example, and we'll talk about public references, is a customer we won during last year in Germany, being LEAG.
LEAG is one of the largest energy producers in Germany. There's a lot of Swedes in this call, and you might not know LEAG, so it's easier to explain it. It's the former German division of Vattenfall, so the large Swedish energy company t heir former German assets. That became a Clavister customer during the year. They are then procuring our type of products from a partner called Bechtle, being one of the largest ones in Germany.
This is how you can gain traction, because then you win customers that in itself are important to us, because it's a big customer and an important reference, but they are also very important for the partner, because this is the customers that they care about a nd this then opens the door, how to then more broadly scale with a partner like Bechtle. This is a clear example on how we operate, and this has a lead time, of course.
The geopolitical situation have, of course, created a situation where partners and large ones, who formerly were, you know, sitting quite happy with a totally non-European system of products, are now facing a situation, especially in the mission-critical type of customers, but are questioning, say, "Why are we, as a state agency, an energy grid, so forth, building a very large dependency on non-EU products? This is a problem w hy are you selling this to me rather than the product that I actually want?" I think this is what will lock up a different growth level for us going forward.
Thank you both for sharing those insights. We have a question regarding our IAM business. How strongly does Clavister focus on sales within IAM? Do you have a sales management team with extensive experience in this area?
IAM is one of Clavister's now core product groups. It is part of our scaling strategy to sort of transform our IAM sales coming from what we did historically, where IAM sales was more of a direct sales model. That is good for a few perspectives, but clearly, it doesn't scale with volume. Especially not comparing how we see the firewall sales scaling through distributors and partners. So one of the key investments, if you like, in scaling that business has been to, first of all, package the products and the solutions in a more, let's say, lean way compared to before.
We're onboarding partners and both new and, you know, existing salespeople on that product group, with the clear intention to be able to scale it much more, you know, compared to previous, where you had more of a one-on-one relationship between salesperson and deal.
So far, we've been seeing the majority of IAM sales still in the Nordics, meaning that in our other European markets, like the German region and outside of Germany, there's a lot of untapped potential for IAM. It is slightly different compared to the firewall business in terms of various type of national or local requirements. Think BankID in Sweden, of course, you have similar type of authentication methods in other countries.
W e need to be sort of cautious not to trying to spread it too broad. We have to be picky about the markets, but we are. And yeah, so I think both in the company and even more throughout our partner base, there is a solid IAM competence that is also growing by the day.
Thank you, John. W e've got a question about the Norwegian contract. Can you elaborate on the incremental margins on the Norwegian contract? How many people, consultants, do you expect to add, and also add something on the project risk?
Good. A multifaceted question to answer. I'll try to answer it this way. At the heart of this project lies Clavister's proprietary IPR software, fully in-house developed, so that gives you a good hint on the sort of fundamental gross margins from a project like this. We are, and we wrote this in the quarterly report as well, we are adding more, more, more people to our development teams for delivering on this project.
More specifically, we're adding people during the first half of the delivery time t hat's where we will have the peak of delivery. I will not out the exact number of people because that's, you know, a bit fluctuating as well during the period. But from a, you know, total margin contribution, it is a very significant margin l et's leave it with that.
On project risk, I think the clear project risks with any type of large project like this would be getting the proper competence in time, onboarded, up and running. Making sure that the technical design is really meeting the customer expectations. What we've learned so far, you know, from working quite tightly with this customer during the tender process, but also in the recent weeks, is that this is a clear cooperation.
This is not a, they place an order, they place requirements, we deliver, and we hope for the best t hat's completely not the situation. This is a tight collaboration with team meetings happen frequently, them being engaged in our sprint planning, in our sprint demos, in our Scrum methodology, and so on. I think from that tight collaboration comes also a fair de-risking of the project. That said, it's not without risks, but you know, the good thing is it's completely in our control because it's our software. It would be tougher being dependent on third-party components, such as hardware, as we know.
To stay with the TSNS deal, then we have another question. Is the product you deliver there, is it comparable to Bittium's product? And are there any potential further tenders in other countries coming?
Bittium clearly has a similar type of offering. They did win a similar tender, if I'm not wrong, in Finland, not long ago. A s I mentioned, many nations are actually looking at what Norway is building now, as I wouldn't say as a template, but as an inspiration for upcoming tenders or upcoming modernizations of other European armed forces.
Whether that leads to formal tenders or not, that's of course still to be seen. But clearly it is in our interest, and as well, and I have to say this, it is in our Norwegian customer's interest to see our solution being spread to more customers, that would de-risk everything and create, say, an even stronger foundation. So naturally, that would be in the future cards, but so who, when, and if, yeah, that's too early to say.
We have some more questions that are regarding the defense area, so let's quickly stay here again. How far in the progress are we regarding the joint order of CV90s from Sweden and the Baltics?
Here we can only refer to what public statements have been made in the media, in the press, partly from BAE themselves. I think the latest consensus is that they're trying to reach some kind of agreement still during this year. Whether it's mid of this year or Q3, I would leave it to them to comment b ut you know, then of course, from a contract there until it potentially slips down to Clavister, that's typically you know, a period on its own. So we have to see there b ut I would say, let's see what the customer is exposing to the media.
W e have a few questions around our partnership with NXP Semiconductors. Yeah, what's the nature of the partnerships that we announced in 2025, and how exactly is Clavister's AI technology being integrated in their automotive platforms?
Mm. David?
Yeah. W hat was that based on initially? It was, you know, it's coming a lot of regulation around cybersecurity in on-road vehicles, personal cars, but other on-road vehicles as well. So you need to be able to have a solution in place as an automaker, where you are able to detect cyber attacks and do forensics on them.
T hey were then looking for AI capabilities to that within their ecosystem. Remember, NXP sells hardware. They sell computing power among others to the auto industry. T hey wanted to showcase what can be done on NXP hardware using software solutions for cybersecurity reasons. In that, we stood out as providing a very fast capability to against their cybersecurity use case i n this case, it was DDoS attacks on cars in real traffic.
T hat has been showcased. We have been doing some joint sales activities together with NXP, for example, in Detroit, meeting with automakers, showcasing our capabilities. And really, this is where the relationship is as well, where NXP is raising this as a capability when they promote their ecosystem to customers and potential customers in the auto industry. So that's really where this stands, and then, of course, the dialogue with NXP. How can we elaborate this, evolve this together? In addition to that, I would say Clavister is, in other areas, utilizing part of this technology, for example, in the military industry.
A gain, these AI capabilities in detecting cyber attacks is relevant in a car, but it's highly relevant in another type of vehicle, being military vehicles, and in other areas as well. Energy grids is a good example where you wanna detect these types of attacks. I t's moving forward s o that's really the background on where it stands now. I don't know, John, if you have anything to add.
No, I think that's a good summary.
To stay with you, David, we have a financial focus question d o you see any opportunities for a dividend for investors, maybe 2026, 2027?
I think that question is a bit early. I think let's prove that we clearly demonstrate positive cash flows, that we're able to reinvest in our business at levels that we think are good. But I think we're moving to a situation where we are becoming more and more cashflow generating. So I think let's revert back to that question in some future periods and see where we stand?
Okay. You referenced that the three-year plan is to achieve revenue expansion above the growth of the cybersecurity markets. V arious competitors have different forecasts as they grow. Which one are you looking at, and with what growth rate are you hoping to exceed that?
Clearly, there are some sort of different outlooks from different analysts. The fact is also that different sort of domains, product groups, and verticals have slightly different growth opportunity as well from a market perspective.
The reason why... One of the reasons why we don't want to be explicit is, first of all, coming from the fact that our, at the moment, strong order book is clearly driving a lot of growth going forward. Some components in the order book are of recurring nature, which of course adds the long-term growth potential here or long-term stability. Some of the deliveries in the order book are project-oriented.
As such, there will be a bit higher volatility in our net sales growth than what we have previously been seeing, and exposing a very specific target will be very challenging because of that nature. Y ou know, typically, if I don't know if there is a consensus in market growth, but, you know, we're seeing ranges from 15%, 14%, 15% annual cybersecurity growth in the firewall and IAM market, up to maybe 30% in some specific areas. I would say that's the kind of magnitude or the frame where we should be, you know, looking to beat.
There is another question around the defense solutions. Seems to be an interesting topic of today. Are there any similarities between a Saab TactiGate solution and the Norwegian order?
Actually, no. That's the quick, quick answer. The TactiGate, the product we're building together with Saab, solves a completely different problem. I t's something completely different.
Okay. J ust looking to... We've got a few more minutes. We've got a question about our fair, engagement at the fairs and the pipeline that comes through that s o do you see a lot more engagement in fairs from 2025, from earlier years, like 2023, 2024, from the past?
Maybe it's a question to you, Kate, because you're head of marketing.
Yeah.
We will be seeing more market activities. A lot more is dramatic, but yeah, we will see more. If we look at the type of marketing activities we do, typically participating in fairs and partner events are the type of activities that yield the best result for a company, a company like Clavister. So yep, definitely there will be more, more engagement.
Y eah, maybe I can add a very short bit. I mean, we do use the events as part of the marketing mix and an anchor point. Yeah, so they're definitely an important factor. And of course, now we're planning a lot of activities around that to actually leverage the whole journey.
Y eah, make sure that when we're at fairs, that people are addressed before that, and also that we capture the leads and nurture them throughout the whole journey. Yeah. So yeah, there's one last question I think we can answer regarding our portfolios. Does Clavister focus mainly on external front-end attacks, or do you also look at back-end attacks such as storage?
Good question. Not very easy to answer though, without becoming super technical. So if we look at our firewall product group, what our products do there is, you know, solving various type of attack-related problems or security-related problems, ranging from classical network segmentation, you know, limiting blast of radius or radius blast, if you like. If there's an attack, you need to be able to keep it from spreading. We're solving problems related to authentication, understanding who is who, who is trying to access your network, and what type of credentials do you have for reaching certain parts of the network.
If we stay within that domain on authentication and identities, we're solving identity federation, making sure that there are no discrepancies on identities within a larger organization, which is typically the case y ou're using multiple systems. Each system comes with their own set of user databases and so on. T here is a clear need to consolidate and to federate all of those identities. That's another problem we're solving.
We're solving external attacks, definitely. W hat's referred to as either denial of service attacks, that's one area, or trying to exploit vulnerabilities on internal systems that could be, you know, malware trying to infect a vulnerability in your web server, in your ERP system, or in the communication system within a CV90, let's say. With regards to storage specifically, that's not an area where Clavister is focusing, so that would be for someone else to solve.
Okay. Yeah, I think with that, I would like to close this session for today s o thank you very much for David and John for your presentation, but also addressing and elaborating on all the questions we had. Thank you everyone for your attendance and also all the questions you posted. Yeah, if you have anything else, please feel free to contact us at any time. And the recording of this webinar will also be available on our website. So yeah, thank you very much for joining today, and I wish you a great rest of the day.
Thank you.