Fingerprint Cards AB (publ) (STO:FING.B)
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Earnings Call: Q1 2025

Apr 29, 2025

Operator

Welcome to the FPC Q1 2025 earnings presentation. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a telephone question, please press star one one on your keypad to join the queue. To withdraw your question, press star one one again. Alternatively, use the Ask a Question tab on the webcast. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand over to Stefan Pettersson, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Stefan Pettersson
Head of Investor Relations, Fingerprint Cards AB

Thank you, Paul, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to FPC's earnings call following the release of our Q1 report this morning. We will begin by a presentation by our CEO, Adam Philpott, and then by our CFO, Frederik Hedlund. If you are following the call on the web, you can post questions throughout the call. With that, let me now hand over to our CEO, Adam Philpott.

Adam Philpott
President and CEO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Thank you very much, Stefan, and welcome to the Q1's earnings presentation, everybody. As always, I'm joined by Frederik, and we'll take you through the following agenda. If we go to the agenda, please, I'll start, as always, with an executive summary. We'll talk about the key numbers throughout the quarter and some of the key headline items there as well. What we'll do is, as you all know, we're going through a transformation as a company. It's something we've talked about on the last—I have got quite a number of earnings calls now. I'll take you back a little bit, first of all, to the first year of the transformation, what we were focused on there to stabilize the business and move towards profitable growth, and then where we are now in the transformation as we look to accelerate our growth execution.

I'll talk about how we're executing against the strategy that we put in place as a result of that transformation program. We'll talk about some of the things that we said we would do and what we're doing about them in Q1 as well. I'll hand to Frederik because we'll talk about discontinued operations, which I'll touch on in a second, and we'll go a little deeper into the Q1 financials. With that, let's get to the executive summary. Headline news: really strong growth in our core business. Great to see the revenues double in the year SEK 9.1 million in Q1 2024 to SEK 18.2 million in Q1 2025. Really positive to see how that revenue in our core business is continuing to improve. That 100% is a very precise number. It just happened to play out that way. Also, really stable, strong gross margin.

Of course, a big part of the transformation plan was to ensure that we were moving into more profitable markets where our value is desired and where we can monetize it. You can see there with those strong gross margins that that continues to be the case. It is about not only doubling revenue, but doing so with very, very strong gross margins as well. Our EBITDA performance looks very strong. That was underpinned by the Smart Eye deal of nearly SEK 30 million that we announced very early in Q1. As you look at the underlying EBITDA, of course, it is still negative overall, and we continue to drive improvements within that as we focus on the turnaround, but a good result nonetheless as a result of some of those asset monetization things we have been working on, particularly Smart Eye.

With free cash flow, - SEK 22 million was related to discontinued operations. We are improving. We're not yet positive, but we're seeing a really strong directional trend in terms of free cash flow, and you can see that from the historical periods noted there in the table to the right as well. Continuing to see it shows that the turnaround isn't done yet. We never said it would be. It takes time to transform the company, but as you can see, all of the indicators are moving in a very positive direction.

Of course, with headcount, again, not just about focusing on revenue and margin to drive our overall income performance, but also managing how we've done a thorough job as a part of the transformation in doing that, down 70% year- on- year in terms of headcount, really leveling out where we need to be from an organizational perspective. We've also improved our reporting clarity. You will see in this report, and Frederik will spend some time on this a little bit later, that mobile and PC is now classified as discontinued operations. We are doing that to give a very clean view of how the core business is performing. We will see that go completely away, and it allows us to then focus on what is the core business that we have and how is that performing. Not only that, it's a little bit last year.

We're moving R&D depreciation, which was historically categorized under COGS. We're moving that under development expenses. Again, we have a very, very clear view of gross margin. Tidying up the reporting as a result of the transformation that we've been through or are going through, we've now completed. As it comes to strategic execution, really important to think about how are we going to continue to grow? Where are we going to get new revenue from moving forward? We announced an Anonybit partnership very late in Q4 2024, and we've recently literally just announced that we are now starting to deliver the initial product coming off the shelves from that joint collaboration. A decentralized biometric authentication platform integrated with PingOne. I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation as to what that means.

Of course, we're at a moment that seems to be tariff, not necessarily the most beautiful word in the English language, but something we're very focused on, a very chaotic economic environment as a result, very unpredictable. Of course, as a leadership team, we have been very focused on this. We've spoken with many of our customers to ensure that we understand how this can play out and have a plan in place to act in a very agile way as it does. We feel that there are limited direct impacts from U.S. tariffs because of the amount of hardware we ship directly versus through our channel. We see managing that, but at the moment, it's very much under continuous review.

I think, like many of our customers, what we're not looking to do is overact, which could destabilize the business, but of course, just monitor how this is playing out and ensure that we have the agility built into our operating model to be able to act accordingly when it becomes appropriate to do so. Just a little bit there on tariffs as well. If we go to the next slide, this kind of is a reminder. Many of you will remember this. Gosh, I've seen this slide so many times, but this was really the transformation program. I launched this when I joined the company, and I launched it on my first earnings call, which was back in October 2023. These were the six pillars of the transformation. This was number one about stabilizing the company.

We were losing money at the time, and we had a lot of work to do in order to reorganize our core value that was desired in the marketplace. We did so through these six pillars. At the same time, whilst the focus was on stabilizing the company, it was also about the second phase, which was gearing it for growth. Whilst we were stabilizing, we were ensuring that the organization and the focus and the strategy we were putting in place was geared to be able to be a springboard to accelerate growth. That was the first phase we went through. That was about a year, that phase. I see us concluding that early into this year and late into last year. As we move to the next, this moves to the next phase of the transformation.

Year two 2025 is all about then moving to this accelerate growth phase. On the left, you can see we've left the stability phase. We've stabilized the company, and we are now moving towards accelerate growth. It does not mean that there are not things we still need to do. We need to be very disciplined still. We've done a lot of work on our OpEx, and we need to ensure that we do not lose those gains that we've had. We will continue to ensure that there is solid business rigor on an ongoing basis. That is something we simply need moving forward as a business anyway. Any good business needs that, but the focus now is on accelerating growth. Not only that, though, as we think about accelerating growth, we should also be thinking about where we're going in future as well. That is about having really strong operational excellence.

You can see these four pillars, and the fourth pillar really ties to that operational excellence as well. Three pillars, of course, are very growth-oriented. Let's go to the next slide, and I'll talk a little bit more about each of those phases. For each of those pillars, rather. For this next phase, year two, around accelerating growth, it's about execution. The first is around our core revenue. One of the items we look at here is around our sales capacity. I look at that in two ways. Have we got enough sales capacity to go and drive growth? That means a couple of things. It means, do we have enough people?

We are looking at expanding our sales initially in the United States, but there are other areas that we're also looking at as well as funding becomes available for us to invest through the income that the business generates. We are looking at how we're using our income to fuel our growth moving forward in terms of physical human capacity for sale. The other thing that we're looking at is it's not just throwing people at the problem. It's also about looking at the sales resources we have and how we can ensure that we maximize the amount of time our sellers have to be productive to get out there and do prospecting, for example, versus account management, just getting the balance right between having sufficient capacity to go out and build new customers as well. That's what we're focused on from a sales perspective.

That second piece around productivity ties to business modernization, and I'll touch on that in just a moment. The second piece of core revenue growth is our marketing engine. We've put a new marketing leader in place, and marketing for me is a sales function. The role of marketing is to generate business. It's a value-adding function. It's not a cost. It's an investment. Our job is to now transform or evolve our marketing into a tool that creates leads. It's metrics-oriented rather than just keeping the lights on. A couple of interesting things are happening in core revenue growth as we focus and spend more time prospecting there, whether that be through sales or through marketing. On the asset monetization side, the Smart Eye deal that we wrote in Q1 is a really good example of asset monetization.

This is really about patent partnerships. We have announced another partnership with patents. We have a great body of patents there that we are going out to monetize. We are focused on our high-value IP. There is lots of IP in the company, but really focused on those IPs that we think are of value that we go and therefore maintain moving forward. It is also about the licensing models we have. As I said, Smart Eye is a really good example of that. These licensing models throw up different opportunities. Some are incremental opportunities. Some of these opportunities are how we think about our larger existing business. Sometimes when we write new projects with our customers, it is about them baking our sensors into their products. There is a long sales cycle for our products into their products for them to test their products.

They have to take their product to market, and then they have to be successful. That's a really long set of steps before we get any revenue. Licensing models opens up a slightly different approach to that. Instead of waiting till the very end and we get paid per unit, we front, whether that be through NRE or through licensing. At the back end, when they start to sell lots of units, there's more of a royalty approach, lower than selling per product because we've de-risked it by front-ending some of the income. What that means is a slightly different shared risk model with our customers. It means we get some money upfront. It means we de-risk the success of the product.

For our customers, it also means they're skin in the game so that they're incentivized to sell higher volumes because then they really get breakthrough benefits on a per-unit basis. Of course, they reduce the overall cost of goods for their product at higher scale. A really interesting model that we've done some work on, and I see us doing more work on that as well. On new revenue streams, of course, Anonybit is a really big one for us there. We've made an announcement. We've got some more products coming in future as well as we expand what we do. I'll touch on that one in. This is about us expanding what we're selling to our existing clients for those clients who want to have shared devices, for example, and use one sensor for many, many fingerprints.

Also getting us into new clients, new logos, and into a new market of workforce authentication where password scaling most. This is a great new opportunity for both existing and new customers for us to go to market, and we're now starting to see product roll off the shelves. It is also about the edge. In the past, you may remember we talked about cloud and edge. The intelligent edge is also really important to us as well. This is not just inorganic through partnerships where we have additional modalities. It is also about what we're doing as an organization organically. We have great skills in Gothenburg. We have great skills in the company to innovate.

Part of what we're doing there is building intelligence into the edge, whether that's on the sensor, whether that's in our algos, in our software, including artificial intelligence to make very smart decisions and improve performance in terms of how those algorithms function. Of course, it's also about expanding the intelligent edge as well. Again, Smart Eye is a good example of that algorithm. There are other partnerships we're looking at in other biometric domains as well, whereby we can have a suite of different intelligent edge modalities. What that means then is it offers choice to users. They may want to use voice. They may want to use face. They may want to use iris. They may want to use finger. They may want to use behavioral. Very many different modalities that we can give them choice depending on the devices they're accessing their systems with.

Not only that, it means we can combine those modalities together. Having two modalities to authenticate a user offers much higher efficacy, is deepfake proof, and helps us avoid some of the AI attacks that we're seeing in terms of faking identity to be able to have a very, very strong security posture, but also a very, very strong user experience. Those are some of the things that we're doing on the intelligent edge moving forward. Finally, that's about how we operate as a company. We live today in an agentic world. AI agents are becoming more and more common in terms of how we execute business process at scale, how we offload capacity from our intelligent workers to have our focus on high-value problems, and they then have AI agents working on their behalf.

There are a couple of things that we are working on here as an organization. One is around revenue operations. What does that mean? That means professionalizing our sales engine in terms of how we do prospecting using the internet, using data, helping our sellers make smart, targeted decisions, and helping them use multi-channel ways, LinkedIn, email, phone calls, meetings as they reach out to clients in an orchestrated way, minimizing the administrative burden on them. That is a key focus which ties back to that core revenue growth as we think about sales capacity. As a company, we are now small. We have the opportunity to be very agile. Instead of adding headcount for every problem that arises, we first start with looking at how AI can help every single member of our staff.

We ask our staff to go and self-serve and find ways to solve problems using AI within our corporate policy in a way that's secure, of course, to augment themselves and to drive productivity at massive scale. That is really what we're focused on in terms of our business modernization. Let me touch a little bit finally on the, and I'll dip high into Frederik to talk about some of the financials. Late last year into January 2025, here is the partnership that we spoke about. We announced the need to have a cloud offering to be able to super scale biometrics by storing templates in a decentralized and secure manner. That is what our partnership with Anonybit enables. Since then, we've been working with them on joint product, and we announced last week that we've integrated with PingOne DaVinci. Who are PingOne?

A key part of the workforce authentication market is a space called IAM, Identity and Access Management, key pillar within cybersecurity and within workforce authentication. PingOne are one of a few key players in that space. They are an organization with whom we have much tighter links. That is the first product off the shelves. We are working with PingOne to ensure that it is very, very easy for their customers to use biometrics instead of passwords. This is about finally starting at scale to remove passwords from workforce authentication. Every time you want to log on to something, depending on the risk rating, we can use biometrics to be able to do that. Whether you are in the office, whether you are a frontline user in a healthcare setting, for example, different ways of using biometrics to solve that problem to improve security and to improve the user experience.

This is the first milestone we aimed for. We've hit it. Now we're going to market, certifying our sellers to be able to go out there and engage with customers, compiling target lists to go out there and reach customers. This is just the first milestone. There's a lot more to come from Anonybit as well, and we look forward to continuing that partnership. That's a little bit on the transformation, a bit on where we've come from, a little bit on where we are, and how we're doing what we said we would do. With that, Frederick, let me hand over to you, and perhaps you can talk a little bit about discontinued operations, what that means, and then deep dive into the numbers a little more.

Fredrik Hedlund
CFO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yes, thank you, Adam. Let's talk about the concept of discontinued operations. We have exited mobile and PC low-margin product groups, and now we are classifying them as discontinued operations. What this means in practice is that from now on, our financials will only show our ongoing core business. The mobile and PC numbers are pulled out so that you can clearly see the growth of our core business, but also the profitability of our core business. As you heard from Adam, revenue in our core business has doubled year over year. In classifying mobile and PC as discontinued operations, that makes our performance much more transparent and our discussions more focused on the future. We are really, really happy about this change. If you look at the table on the left-hand side, you can see what I would call the before view and what I would call the now- view.

The before- view would be to look at the bottom of the table, the total row, and there revenue from both non-core and core were mixed together. In the now view, you look at the top of the table, the line called revenue, and that is our core business, and that is our future. In summary, we're fully out of mobile and PC as of this quarter. From now on, it's going to be much easier to see what our real growth is in our financial reports, and we are 100% focused on growing our core business going forward. With that, let's look at some of the key financials on the next page. In terms of the first quarter, you know, we know now that we've grown our business in a healthy way, but also as Adam mentioned in his remarks, our gross margins are healthy.

The turnaround of our company is clearly gaining traction, which you can see from the financials. Let's do a quick rundown of some of the key metrics. Revenue up 100%, gross margin really healthy, 56.6%. From an EBITDA perspective, we recorded SEK 10.7 million positive EBITDA, but that was supported by the Smart Eye deal. Without the Smart Eye deal, we're still in turnaround mode, but we are heading in the right direction. From a free cash flow perspective, free cash flow was - SEK 36.4 million, but out of that SEK 36.4 million, -SEK 22 million was due to discontinued operations, i.e., it was due to the legacy mobile and PC businesses. We are absolutely laser-focused on improving our cash flow, and we're going to do that by continuing to grow our business and continuing to control our cost.

From a cash perspective, or cash in a bank account, we had SEK 52.6 million of cash, which is right where we expected to be post-rights issue at this point in time. Finally, I just want to touch on headcount because that is a very good proxy for how we are controlling our cost, how we are controlling our OPEX. On every call, I keep on saying that roughly 2/3 of our OPEX is headcount related. If you look at the headcount reduction, you will see that it is massively down year over year. It is 70%, but it is also down quarter over quarter, and it continued to trend down as we are right-sizing our cost structure to align with the ongoing core revenue. With that, Adam, back over to you.

Adam Philpott
President and CEO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Very good. Thank you. Thank you, Frederik. Just to conclude before we go to Q&A, excuse me, really solid progress on the strategic turnaround. The fundamentals are moving in the right direction. Core revenue, good to see strong performance there. Good to see us maintaining a very strong gross margin, which was part of the markets that valued our products where we could command the right gross margin and return, but also strong execution on our cost management, not just headcounts. There is significant rigor going through non-headcount cost as well. I mean, we go down to very, very low-value line items on a regular basis to ensure that we're applying huge rigor to the overall cost, that we're funneling our shareholder capital and our income towards those things that are going to drive growth because growth is, of course, where we're focused.

We've achieved a few milestones along the way, so great that we've continued low-value, low-margin businesses, and that's why we've separated them. As Frederik said, into discontinued operations, we'll no longer see those. We were able to monetize IRIS Technology through that great deal with Smart Eye. Really pleased about that partnership. Great cultural alignment with that team. There's some real benefits for us to be able to take that product into new markets in partnership with Smart Eye, which is also great for those guys as well. Of course, moving into new areas with decentralized biometric authentication in partnership with Anonybit and now starting to get product coming off the shelves in the very near future. Great progress there.

There's a lot still to do, of course, but we remain focused on where we need to execute and how we need to be agile and tweak our execution in order to improve performance and having a very performance-oriented mindset. The strategy focus moving forward is, of course, we're now in year two. It's about accelerating growth. As we do that, of course, that drives positive EBITDA and free cash flow. That's where we're focused. We continue to manage, of course, our costs, but focus very much on top line and on margin, of course. Expanding new revenue. We've got some new ones with Anonybit. We've got new ones that will be coming to the table in due course with Smart Eye, but we see other potential there as well. Of course, it's a balancing act. We're not going to spread ourselves too thin.

We see this as an overall portfolio that we can go and sell holistically as opposed to different markets. We see it as one collective whole, but we'll be expanding the sum of its parts as we move forward. Of course, from a business discipline perspective, to continue to monitor the tariff environment and ensure that we're adjusting as needed. We've had a good look at that overall position as much as anyone, of course, can be, and we'll continue to monitor that and tweak the operation as necessary so that we protect the business. With that, Stefan, perhaps I can hand to you, and we can take some questions.

Stefan Pettersson
Head of Investor Relations, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yes, thank you, Adam. I think we'll begin by taking questions from the phone line.

Operator

Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press Star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, press Star one one again. Alternatively, use the Ask a Question tab on the webcast. Please stand by while we prepare your first question. First question comes from Markus Almerud at Carnegie. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Markus Almerud
Equity Research Analyst, Carnegie Investment Bank

Yeah. Hi, gentlemen. Markus here at Carnegie. Can you hear me?

Adam Philpott
President and CEO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yes.

Markus Almerud
Equity Research Analyst, Carnegie Investment Bank

Yes. Perfect. Maybe let's start on the revenues, the SEK 18 million. I appreciate you're no longer breaking up between different parts of it except for geographically, but we've not talked any about the cards business, the cards part of the business during the call or in the report. Maybe you can just update us where you are on the cards part.

Adam Philpott
President and CEO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yeah. Maybe I'll start there, and then Frederik, feel free to jump in. Markus, what I would say is on the last earnings call for Q4 2024, we talked about how we're seeing convergence in the hardware stack for biometrics, particularly on the payment side. What we're seeing is a convergence into a function card, for example. Rather than payments being a product, it's actually a feature of a multifunction product. That's what I mean by convergence. Other features we see on the card are things like fintech features for crypto payments and cold wallets, for example, logical access, physical access, some of the things that you're familiar with that we already do. It's not just about looking at that as a single product. It's about looking at where the market is going and how we're responding to that accordingly as well.

That's kind of how we think about the payment side of the business. We saw strong business in Q1, as you will have seen, and that came across a number of different areas. Frederick, maybe I can hand to you if you want to have some other inputs there.

Fredrik Hedlund
CFO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yeah. Hey, Markus. Yeah, revenue, I mean, revenue is 100% hardware for this quarter. Hardware is our sensors, and going forward, it's sensors. It's not access and payment and any other configuration. We're selling sensors. We're selling hardware. However, as we start to launch products with Anonybit, there's likely to be a second category coming in called software, which would then be recurring to goods and revenue.

As Adam mentioned a little bit earlier on, he talked about asset monetization for Smart Eye, and it is a strategic focus to continue to do these really smart licensing deals. There is a potential that licensing becomes a revenue stream and not booked in other operating income like the Smart Eye idea was. Going forward, it is hardware, and we hope to be able to expand our product categories going forward.

Markus Almerud
Equity Research Analyst, Carnegie Investment Bank

Okay. Maybe follow up on the revenue side. I see that you have had a total of SEK 40 million, I think it was, in revenues from the licensing deal with EGS Technology on the mobile side. Is this part of the core, or is it part of discontinued, and will it continue? Because the revenues from mobile were very low, lower than SEK 1 million. How do you think about that, and how should we see that go forward? Is it a continuing stream?

Fredrik Hedlund
CFO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yeah. I could start, and Adam, you can jump in. Yeah, that is, I mean, those were only one-time payments, right? That is part of discontinued. It does not sit in our comparison point on the revenue side of things. Now, going forward, in terms of a kind of a continued stream from there, we have to see how EGS perform and what they do and how well they execute. It is way too early for us to see if there is going to be any meaningful revenue coming as part of licensing revenue. Adam, perhaps you want to add to that comment?

Adam Philpott
President and CEO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yeah. I mean, you also saw, that is discontinued, as Frederik says. We are focused on the future. We are looking at other asset monetization deals, more so in our core space in terms of just different business models. Continue to look at those as well. We will see new incomes coming in from some of those deals. Those deals are lumpy and take time. We will not always put those in our revenue, of course, because they can be extremely lumpy and quite different to regular revenue, but we will look to see some more of those in the future.

Markus Almerud
Equity Research Analyst, Carnegie Investment Bank

Okay. Okay. I will come back to discontinued, but first, on the cost side, I mean, cost is coming down very nicely, but we talked about before about the SEK 70 million cost base at the end of the year. First of all, technical question. Will that be including R&D depreciation? And if so, is the R&D depreciation going to be phased out? Because that is quite a high number.

Fredrik Hedlund
CFO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yeah. Okay. That is a good question, Marcus. Depreciation is depreciation. It is non-cash. We are still running the business on a cash basis until cash flow starts to become positive. From that perspective, I am not too concerned. R&D depreciation, when we talked about the SEK 70 million, it was outside of it. Now, it will be part of OPEX, but it will always be broken out in our financials in the text, so it can easily be adjusted out. The SEK 70 million does not include R&D depreciation is the answer to your question.

Markus Almerud
Equity Research Analyst, Carnegie Investment Bank

Okay . On the cash flow finally, maybe talk a little bit about the status on discontinued because, I mean, cash flow is negative, but SEK 22 million negative cash flow from discontinued. When do you expect that to be phased out in full?

Fredrik Hedlund
CFO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yeah. It is going to be pretty close to phased out as of this quarter, the first quarter. Now, we are still winding down legal entities. It takes time. You will have a little bit of legal entity cost in there going forward. When you have legal entities, you have a little bit of support cost going forward, but I do not think we are going to call out any cost related to discontinued going forward. Now, it is all part of the wind-down process towards that SEK 70 million. There will be a piece in the second quarter. Nothing or very, very little remaining in the third and fourth quarter.

Markus Almerud
Equity Research Analyst, Carnegie Investment Bank

Does the same come for cash flow? There is no lingering cash flow effects that we have not seen that will come towards, I mean, later in the year from discontinued. This is pretty much the big bulk here, SEK 70 million.

Fredrik Hedlund
CFO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Exactly. No, that is exactly right. We have been quite diligent during 2024 to make sure we right-size the balance sheet in line with where we were going. You are right. There should not be. If you actually have time and go through our financials, you will see that inventory is clean. It is down massively. Our AR looks good. Our AP looks good. This is the bulk.

Markus Almerud
Equity Research Analyst, Carnegie Investment Bank

Okay. Perfect. Thank you very much. That is all for me for now.

Adam Philpott
President and CEO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Thanks, Marcus. Stefan, what else have we got? There are not any further clarifying questions?

Operator

Yes.

Stefan Pettersson
Head of Investor Relations, Fingerprint Cards AB

Thank you, Paul. A couple of questions from the web then. Smart Eye has won some impressive design wins in automotive. Can you give some more comments on the potential for FPC of this and maybe other aspects of the Smart Eye agreement?

Adam Philpott
President and CEO, Fingerprint Cards AB

I am happy to jump in on that one. Yes, of course, we talk regularly with Martin and the team at Smart Eye about great design wins. It's a terrible joke, but whilst cars go fast, automotive goes slow. A design win isn't revenue. Martin actually put some really interesting posts about what a design win is on LinkedIn recently. It's really a case of saying, "Yes, we're going to bake this product ." As I mentioned earlier, in terms of the sales cycle, that design then has to be production-ready. It then needs to be delivered to customers. Customers need to order it. Customers need to buy it. Often, these things are optional, and therefore, they become options not in every vehicle. We are yet to see the revenue come from that.

Of course, that's really positive to see that we're getting design wins, and there's a huge amount of interest, which is why I think Smart Eye were very smart to move quickly and get the deal done. Really good to see that there's demand for our capability in there. I'm really looking forward to seeing the success, but it doesn't affect near-term cash flow. It comes once we start to see those orders. Net-net, really positive signs that we are seeing those design wins. We monitor design wins ourselves. They're an early indicator of future business, but that future business takes time, and I'm really focused on our time to revenue as well. That's kind of core to the deal, that capability that Smart Eye have to be able to offer an enhanced, a premium, a highly capable product leveraging our technology.

Really good win for us and great to see wins coming for Smart Eye and success from that deal for them. That is exactly what we want. In terms of other aspects to that deal, we talked about it being bi-directional as well. I think Smart Eye are really interested in how their technology, just as our IRIS Technology can manifest in automotive, how their face technology can manifest outside of automotive. We will be working with them. They are at Shanghai Motor Show this week and last week. We will be working with them when they return on looking at the face algo integrated with IRIS and how we can deliver that to our customers as well. That intelligent edge that I spoke about earlier, AI capability in there, eye tracking. There are some interesting things we are looking at beyond that together.

That is the next piece, that combined edge modality and where we can take that into our customers and, of course, bake that into our cloud capability with Anonybit also. Some very interesting things are happening in that space moving forward.

Stefan Pettersson
Head of Investor Relations, Fingerprint Cards AB

All right. Thank you, Adam. A question on headcount and office closures. It is positive to see that headcount has been going down. Can you also tell us a bit more about office closures, what you have done in that area?

Adam Philpott
President and CEO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yeah. Frederik, do you want me to start with that one, and you can jump in? I am happy to kick it off. Yeah. I mean, as I said earlier, we go through our cost, our non-headcount items with a fine-tooth comb. We look at that at a very, very low level in terms of how we are running the business. Offices absolutely appear on there as well. Copenhagen, for example, that office is now no longer part of our infrastructure. There are a number of other offices. I do not want to comment on them. We are getting very, very small now in terms of the offices that we have. We are looking at that infrastructure to make sure that we completely reduce it. There is no longer need for the infrastructure we once have. Of course, there are some negotiations happening, so I would not want to jeopardize those, but we have a very, very small portfolio footprint now. Frederik, please jump in with other comments there, though.

Fredrik Hedlund
CFO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Yeah. Yeah. The question was headcount, and then it was offices. I think headcount, just look at the numbers that we presented. You can go into previous presentations, and you can clearly see the trend, right? is coming down as part of our transformation plan. We will see where we land, but we have room for continued cost efficiencies, and we are executing on those. That is on headcount. I feel very good. Also, with a smaller headcount, or actually a very small headcount, we are in what I would call a luxury position to kind of keep that headcount fairly steady and leverage all the technology that Adam talked about that is just coming online now. It will probably be a massive efficiency enhancer in 2026. The way I look at it is we have done the hard work on headcount. We have optimized. We have a great team that is left. I do not know of anybody that has left that we absolutely wanted to keep, which means that it continues to be a great place to work.

We continue to have the people that we want and need staying at business. In terms of scaling from there, we have the luxury of leveraging new technology that come online and not only add headcount to support the kind of growth that we saw in this quarter. I just feel really good about this point in time where we are and what we have available to us to leverage efficiency going forward. On offices, closing down legal entities takes time. We are in the process. It does not cost a lot of money. It is just admin. From all practical terms, we have one office today, and that is in Gothenburg. It is one office. The cost is money. The rest is on a wind-down path. From an infrastructure point of view, we feel good where we are.

Stefan Pettersson
Head of Investor Relations, Fingerprint Cards AB

All right. Thank you very much, Fredrik. Thank you very much, everyone, for your questions. Let me hand over to Adam then for any closing remarks that you may have.

Adam Philpott
President and CEO, Fingerprint Cards AB

Thanks very much indeed. Thank you, everyone, for attending. Thanks for the great questions. I really appreciate you guys coming and continuing with us in this journey. Good set of results, I think, in terms of how the transformation plan is playing out. Good results in terms of revenue. Good results in terms of gross margin. Good results in terms of how we're managing the operational efficiency as well. We're not done with the transformation. The focus now is on growth. That's where we are as a company, continuing to manage those fundamentals, continue to expand to give us access to new revenue streams, but also driving growth within the core business now that we can really focus on it. With that, I want to thank everyone for joining, and I look forward to seeing you next time.

Operator

That concludes today's presentation. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.

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