Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q3 2022 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in Listen-Only Mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, you can press star one and one on your telephone or write the question in the box on the web. I would now like to hand the conference over to Stefan Pettersson. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you Roberto, and welcome to Fingerprint Cards earnings call following the release of our Q3 report this morning. We'll start with the presentation by our CEO, Christian Fredrikson, and thereafter by our CFO, Per Sundqvist. As Roberto mentioned, we'll have a Q&A session as well, and if you're following the conference call on the web, you can post questions throughout the call. With that, let me now hand over to our CEO, Christian Fredrikson.
Yes. Thank you, Stefan. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the call. I will focus now on the 1/3 1/4 of 2022. Let me start. As you can see from the key numbers on this Slide, we went through a very tough 1/4, marked by a significant drop in demand. The substantial drop in revenue is due to the destocking measures that are now being implemented along the entire supply chain.
I will discuss the background to the situation on the next Slide, but the short summary is that we have very quickly gone from a situation where earlier this year we were limited by insufficient access to production capacity due to the global component shortage, to a situation where we, our suppliers, and all our customers instead have to deal with a very sharp reduction in demand.
This demand drop is due to the extensive COVID-19 related restrictions introduced in China during this year, which have led to a significantly decreased demand for smartphones in China. As you know, China is our largest market by far, actually accounting for about 98% of our sales last year. The reduced sales volumes, coupled with increased price competition in mobile China, have had a negative effect on our working capital position in 2022, as well as our margins in this 1/4.
Planned depreciation on customer projects is included in our gross margin, and given the significant drop in sales, depreciation as a share of revenues rose to 15% of the 1/3 1/4 from the more normal levels of 6%. Our gross margin can also vary during quarters, based on our product mix.
With this, in this 1/4, the comparable gross margin, if we take the depreciation into account as normal levels, would be about 10 percentage points better. That gives you a big swinger, actually. Let's turn to the next Slide, please. Now, in order to improve our working capital position and also to cure the forecasted breach against the bond covenant, we have issued SEK 75 million in hybrid equity and will carry out a SEK 300 million rights issue subject to approval at the AGM on November 2.
We have already received subscription commitments and underwriting commitments covering this rights issue in full. Actually, the rights issue was oversubscribed by over 2.5 times, which shows the trust from investors in our strategy and our opportunities ahead despite the current Short-Term challenges.
The final terms will be determined by the board of directors no later than on October 31st. The rights issue will allow us to get through these Short-Term challenges while we can also keep investing in key customer projects for growth and our diversification.
We are seeing continued movement and positive sign outside of our core mobile capacitive business, which is in the capacitive sensors for the mobile phones, as biometrics is increasingly being adopted in new areas as well. Next Slide, please. As the COVID-19 crisis hit in 2020 and 2021, we saw an accelerated digitization, which drove the demand for chips. This led to a global semiconductor shortage, as we are all well aware of, which limited our growth at the time.
In response to this situation, sensor suppliers such as ourselves, but also other players along the supply chain, distributors, module houses, and mobile phone OEMs, had to purchase products many months in advance in order to make sure they could keep supplying their customers. This led to an increase in inventories throughout the supply chain.
Came the lockdowns in China, which began at the end of the first 1/4, and which had a significant negative impact on consumer demand for mobile phones. In response, producers started to scale back their orders for fingerprint sensors to a minimum while focusing on destocking. The same has happened with cameras, displays, memories, et cetera. The earlier component shortage we struggled with is clearly no longer a problem.
This change of scene happened more or less overnight and means, among other things, that we are now in a situation of excessive inventories throughout the whole supply chain, which ties up capital. In our industry, this chain consists of four different players and steps, and we are the furthest in this line, and we are the last to get to destocking of our inventory.
Manufacturers of mobile phones are at the front of the supply chain, and they plan for significantly higher volumes in 2022. During Q2 and Q3, they have focused on reducing their stocks of phones, pulling back on purchases from module houses to supply OEMs with volumes for assembly into finished products. The OEMs are now at normal inventory levels or actually even lower than normal, as they are pushing their inventories clearly lower than a normal situation, given the market uncertainty.
This means that module houses and the distributors who supply them with components have started to reduce their inventories, which is happening in Q3 and Q4. For Fingerprint, as a supplier to the distributors and module houses, this means that we can only start reducing our inventory during Q4, which is now happening.
Our peak in inventory happened in Q3, and we are now getting our inventory lower in Q4 and onwards. We have tied excess capital into inventory for close to SEK 200 million during Q2 and Q3, which of course, is a substantial amount that we are now depleting. Of course, our competitors are in a similar or actually worse situation, which has led to an increased price competition as everybody is destocking.
Many Chinese OEMs are facing strong headwinds as demand for phones in China has dropped much more than in the rest of the world. Given our currently high exposure to the Chinese mobile phone industry, the impact is significant, as you can see in the numbers of this 1/4. At the same time, our revenue streams are continuing to diversify, and in order to be relevant player in these segments driving the future growth there, we are also building up some inventory there.
This build-up and the increased price competition we have seen in capacitive sensor have created a Short-Term strain on our cash flow. Let me just try to describe this and how we see it and the Long-Term development as well.
If we first consider the near term, this is the next 6 and 12 months, we expect to see the effects of the lockdown in China to start decreasing, including a gradual increase in demand. As I said, we are able to start reducing our inventory now in Q4, which has a positive cash flow effect for us.
In addition, our previously announced cost reduction program will have full effect from Q4 with a 20% operating cost reduction. That being said, we do expect that the COVID-19 restrictions in China will continue to have a negative effect on sales and gross margins also for Q4 and Q1 2023.
If we take a longer-term view, industry analysts expect the global smartphone shipments will rebound in 2023, even though the consensus is that it will not be until 2024 that we will surpass the levels that we saw in 2021. Certainly, we expect a return to the historical demand for smartphones, while we also see continued solid growth in the PC access and payment areas in terms of biometrics.
As these new segments continue to increase their weight in our revenue mix, we expect an improved visibility into the production cycle and more predictable cash flows, and order cycles are generally longer than in the mobile segment. We will focus on executing on that strategy, and our Long-Term goals are unchanged. Next Slide, please. We continue.
We continue to introduce innovative new products in the mobile area, and we have increased our market share in capacitive fingerprint sensors during the year, which I find a great sign of strength in our customer channel. During Q3, we announced the first 3 models equipped with our new FPC1553 ultra slim sensor, and they have been launched.
This sensor is the latest result of our continuous innovation in this new segment of capacitive fingerprint sensors for smartphones, which we have created a few years ago. It is even smaller than its predecessor, supporting easier integration. Just to give you an idea of how small this sensor is, we have on the right side of this Slide illustrated the size of it relative to our FPC1020 sensor from 2014.
The FPC1553 has 132 × 32 pixels supporting an LGA size from 2.1 millimeters to 13.2 millimeters. We are using a new foundry production of these sensors with a second source supplier as well. Next Slide, please. At the same time, we are now entering a completely new product segment in mobile, as we have said before, optical under-display sensor.
As you may know, we secured a design win for our optical under-display solution this summer with a major Asian smartphone OEM following successful qualification test earlier this year. We expect to start shipments and volume shipments now in Q4. As you can see from the bar chart on the right, under-display sensors have around 1/3 of the market for fingerprint sensors for mobile phone.
Average selling prices are a bit higher for under-display sensor, so from a values perspective, the markets are more comparable in size. Our entry into this segment is expanding our total addressable market in a strong and meaningful way. We expect that under-display sensors will make a sizable contribution to our revenue from next year.
A s can be seen in the bar chart on this Slide, global shipments of mobile phones are expected to decrease this year, around 8% and some analysts expect even a bigger decrease, around 10%. The Chinese OEMs are seeing a larger decline because the Chinese market is the one market that is taking by far the biggest hit. Overall, in the mobile market, we expect a slight rebound next year. Let's turn to the next Slide, please.
We are also expanding into other new areas outside of the mobile phone industry. In fact, the segments outside of capacitive sensors for mobile are expected to account for approximately 30% of Fingerprint revenues by the end of 2022, and 45% by the end of next year. Of course, part of this shift in our revenue mix is due to the fact that our sales in mobile capacitive have decreased, as we can see, so strongly due to all the factors that I just described.
However, we are expecting meaningful growth in all of our new segment that is under-display sensor for mobile phone, as well as in PC access and payment segments. Since our gross margins are higher in a non-mobile segments than in a mobile segment, we expect that this shift in our revenue will continue to improve our gross margin overall.
As said, there are a few harder quarters ahead because of the inventory depletion that affects the whole industry at the moment. Next Slide, please. Going forward, the PC segment accounts for a significant part of this growth in the new areas for us. Four out of the world's top 6 PC OEMs are already using our sensors in their products.
During the 1/4, we announced the first PC using our Match-On-Chip solution that has now been launched. The fact that we can now effectively address the whole enterprise segment with this solution is significant, since Match-On-Chip solutions for business computers have a higher ASP and currently account for about 1/2 of our addressable market in the PC segment.
On the global market, the global shipments of PCs are expected to increase by between 10%-15% this year, and external industry analysts expect slight growth again from next year. Next Slide, please. We are also seeing now solid growth in the access area outside of China, where access cards and door locks account for a good part of our business.
In China, it has been the same impact as we have had in the mobile phones because the construction business has been taking such a hit. Outside of China, access business is showing, as I said, solid growth. This area is smaller than the others and quite fragmented, but ASPs are generally significantly higher than in a mobile area. We are seeing that biometrics is being adopted in a growing number of product segment.
One example which we announced in Q3 is the logbook for personal notebook or diary, which is secured by a touch fingerprint sensor from Fingerprints, so that only you have access to its contents. There are many new segments coming up the end of this year and next year as well for us. Let's turn to the next Slide. While it is still in the start in terms of volumes, biometric payment card is the largest Long-Term market opportunity for us.
We continue our business development efforts with high intensity, and in the 1/4, we announced a collaboration with TASC, with the objective of promoting and supporting the adoption of contactless biometric payment cards in the Middle East. As you know, Fingerprint is supporting 2 recently announced commercial launches in the area. This brings now a total number of commercial launches that we support worldwide so far to 10.
The next Slide, please. We expect to have 12 banks launched in Q4, all together 12. Additional banks in Europe are preparing to launch with our technology as well as more banks also in the Middle East. The feedback from consumers who have used the biometric cards is very good, and the ecosystem is now focusing on a very important part of the rollout that is improving the enrollment process so that the consumers do not have to visit a bank branch in order to enroll with their fingerprint.
Also, another thing that I believe will accelerate deployment is to start upgrading customer cards to biometric ones automatically. This is indeed what the banks who have launched biometric cards to their customers in Morocco will start doing. They will start to issue biometric cards to their premium customers automatically at no extra cost. It is not an opt-in anymore.
Previously, customers had to actively request a biometric card in order to receive one. Also interesting is to see that our Polish bank customer is starting to offer biometric cards as part of their debit segment. This means to all their customer base as an option, so not only to premium customer segments.
Overall, we see spreading rollouts in Middle East, in Africa, and much more interest now in Latin America and beyond Mexico as well. In Europe, also more banks in France will be launching. Next Slide, please. Looking ahead, our focus remains on profitable growth and cash flow generation, which obviously has been strained in the last couple of quarters.
As mentioned earlier, we have issued SEK 75 million in hybrid equity, and we carry out SEK 300 million rights issue subject to approval at the EGM on November 2. We have already received subscription commitments and underwriting commitments covering this rights issue in full. Again, the final terms will be determined by the board of directors no later than on October 31.
Our overall strategy remains unchanged, and we focus on strengthening our position, our market position, both in the mobile market and in the new fast-growing segments, despite all the Short-Term challenges. Fingerprint's revenue streams will continue to diversify at a rapid pace for the remainder of this year and going into 2023.
Our business model is highly scalable, so when we get back to volumes, we will again focus on cash flow generation while maintaining a high level of R&D activity to capitalize on the growing market for biometric solution, and our strong customer channel in all our key markets that we have now built up. With that, let me hand over to our CFO, Per Sundqvist.
Thank you, Christian, and good morning to you all. Let's now move to the first Slide of the financial results section. This Slide clearly shows the effect of the very significant drop in demand that we experienced in the 1/3 1/4.
Our revenue decreased by 60% in relation to Q3 last year and by 37% compared to last 1/4. At the same time, the previous inventory buildup throughout the supply chain, combined with a sharp drop in sales of mobile phones in China, have led to increased price competition, which you can clearly see the effects of in our gross margin, which decreased to 12% this 1/4 from 31% in Q1 2022.
The significant drop in revenue also means that the planned depreciation as a share of sales increased sharply in the 1/4, with significant relative impact on the gross margin, as Christian mentioned before. Next Slide, please. The rolling 12-month trend this 1/4 tells the same story, showing the impact of the Chinese lockdowns on our revenue.
We expect these effects to start decreasing with a gradual increase towards the historical demand for mobile phones, while we, at the same time, see continued growth in the PC, access, and payment segments, albeit from a lower level in those cases. However, we also expect a lag effect for us due to the inventory cleaning by module houses and distributors that are further down the supply chain.
We expect that our revenue will continue to diversify, thereby continuing to lower our risk level, as well as driving our Long-Term growth and improve our margins. Next Slide, please. Operating expenses in Q3 were SEK 77 million, versus SEK 90 million in Q3 last year and SEK 83 million last 1/4. Around SEK 3 million in restructuring costs in the 1/4 are included in OpEx this 1/4 due to the cost savings program currently running.
Other operating income and expenses increased to a positive SEK 15.8 million, versus a negative SEK 1 million last year. Most of that attributable to positive operating exchange rate effects. It should also be mentioned that the significant movements in currency have had an impact also on the line's other comprehensive income and parent company shareholders, as the recalculation effects on our USD-related assets take its effect.
Development costs of SEK 27.8 million were capitalized during the 1/4, which is to be compared with SEK 25.7 million in the same period last year. This corresponds to 52% of total development costs, which is roughly the same level as in the same 1/4 of 2021. As we communicated in our Q2 report, we are making necessary cost adaptations and reductions to mitigate for the short temporary demand drop in the market.
This cost reduction program will reduce our annual operating expense run rate by approximately SEK 80 million, with full effect from the fourth 1/4 of 2022. We'll keep maintaining a strong focus on cash, cost, and efficiency improvements going forward. Next Slide, please. Our core working capital, that is accounts receivable plus inventory less our accounts payable, was SEK 355 million at the end of the 1/4.
To be compared with SEK 170 million in the same 1/4 last year and SEK 251 million last 1/4. If you look at the development of core working capital in relation to our rolling twelve-month revenue, it increased to 34% from 13% in Q3 last year and from 20% last 1/4. The increasing trend in working capital is due to several sales and operational factors earlier mentioned by Christian.
First, earlier in the year, we built our inventory to meet expected sales growth and also to mitigate and minimize any potential supply chain disruptions. We have, of course, quickly changed our stance on this in response to the sharp drop in demand that we have seen. However, as Christian described earlier, there is a built-in lag effect in the whole supply chain structure.
Due to the inventory cleaning further down in the supply chain currently running, this means that we see that mobile phone OEMs are now starting to approach more normal inventory levels, which in turn means that the module houses and the distributors who supply them with components are only now starting to reduce their inventories.
That is in Q3 and Q4, meaning that we, being at the end of the chain, can only start reducing our inventory in a meaningful way during Q4. Next Slide, please.
Given the earlier mentioned factors, this of course has meant that our cash flow from operating activities was SEK -112 million compared to SEK -46 million in Q3 last year and SEK -28 million last 1/4. At the end of the 1/4, our cash position stood at SEK 71 million versus SEK 121 million a year ago and SEK 213 million at the end of Q2 2022.
The 75 million in additional Short-Term financing from the issue of the hybrid equity is, however, not included in our cash balance at the end of Q3 as we only received those funds at the beginning of October. Cash flow from investing activities, capitalized development expenditures, was SEK -28 million compared to SEK 26 million last year.
Thank you everyone, and we are now ready to take questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, we now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone. We got our first question, so please stand by. The first question from Markus Almerud from Pareto. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, gentlemen. Markus Almerud here from Pareto Securities. Can you hear me?
Yes, Markus. Good to hear you.
Yes. Perfect.
Hear you well.
I'd like to dig in a little bit to the situation, demand situation that you're seeing. If I talk through the value chain and I start talking about the end user demand, we can start there. We know that the lockdowns are less.
We have less lockdowns now than we had in Q2. Q2 was the worst, and we've seen people started moving again, and the mobility numbers are up. What are you seeing on the ground, and how are consumers acting right now? That is, what is the end user purchases of mobile phones at the moment? Just to get an idea of where we are.
Yeah, I think roughly, it is so that of course the total lockdown that happened in Q2, we have nothing of the kind now going on in Q3 or in the Q4. Even in China, they now call it instead of zero-COVID policy, they call it dynamic zero-COVID policy, which in a way, as we understand it, what they do is it goes up and down, the lockdown periods are shorter. They test and trace and isolate in a very fast manner, but it goes on all the time.
That means that we have the best view that we can say is that there is probably between 100 and 200 million people in some kind of lockdowns at least right now, roughly, right. We don't know exact figures. I suppose nobody knows, but it is not of the same magnitude as Q2, but it still continues. It has a dampening effect on demand, and it continues to have it, but of course nothing like in Q2.
Overall, we see roughly in global perspective, about 10% decline in mobile phone industry, mobile phones this year, roughly. That seems to be what the analysts are saying as well. Then, in China, about -20% decline.
That means that, of course, China is the biggest decliner, and that's where, of course, our customers have a large share. That's why I said that the Chinese OEMs are taking the biggest hit, of course, of all the other players, you know, mainly Apple and Samsung, right. We see that continuing, and that's the way we plan it from now onwards.
We don't know when they're going to ease it, but we don't see them making it harder anymore. I mean, it seems to be that they are not going for a full lockdown. Not even they can drive that anymore. It is so negative in terms of economy and for people.
In terms of if I look at number of mobile phones sold, if you look at Q3 versus Q2, the Q3 was higher than Q2.
Yeah.
The absolute volume of mobile phones sold was Q2.
Exactly. Absolutely. Q3 was much better than Q2.
Uh-huh.
What we also see is that the OEMs, you know, we talked about this chain. The OEMs are; they have taken their inventories down. Actually, they have gone below the normal levels that we have pre-lockdown.
They are going even between 30%-50% down on their inventory from what it was before in the Q1. Basically, they are taking safety measures, right, to for themselves. In a way that we are now in Q4, we are going down on our inventory, and we built over SEK 200 million in our inventory has been tied additional excess capacity, which is now going down from Q4 for us.
Mm-hmm. Okay. If we then move up and we say that, if we say that the destocking in the OEMs is kind of done, and then the module housing distributors are starting to draw their inventory down now, meaning that you also don't have any sales to these guys because they will use their inventories. How long do you expect that to go on? That starts now in Q3. Will it go on through Q4 and then they're done? Or how long is such a process usually?
I mean, it is of course first time in I suppose at least in my life and even in the mobile phone industry, which just has a lot of different swings when it is so dramatic as it is now. Nobody knows 100%. Clearly, OEMs are down below the levels they were even before. The rest of the chain above us in Q4 is going to be probably below the levels they were before. It's getting kind of. At some point it will be very empty in the channel actually, of course. You will have a re-
Mm-hmm.
There will be a kind of rebound at some point of time when, you know, you only have very little, well below the normal levels. We are then starting to destock now, from Q4 we are going down. Which of course helps us in the cash flow. Take this SEK 200 million that has been additionally tied in inventory for us is starting to go down.
In terms of sales, I guess, what will decide sales? When sales will trough for you is going to be when the distributors and the module houses are done with their de-stocking, then they will start buying from you again, so to speak. That'll be the point when sales for you will kind of, you know, turn up again to kind of meet demand.
Exactly. Then it will, you know, step by step improve for us again as this whole pretty crazy brake has passed and inventory has been taken down across the chain. We don't wanna give forecast, but we can say that it's not gonna get any worse on any numbers anymore than what we saw in Q3.
Okay. Sales wise also you would say that we are at the trough for you? It's not gonna get worse than we are right now.
No, no, it's not gonna get worse anymore. I think that because we are now. I mean, Q2 and Q3 we have built inventory as you can see, as I said, and it's been a huge break and now we are kind of getting down on our inventory levels here. We don't see it getting.
Mm-hmm.
We don't see it getting worse anymore.
We should expect a couple of quarters, something like that magnitude. It took a couple of quarters for the OEMs to de-stock, and that is kind of the normal change. The couple of quarters is also what it should take for you to kind of de-stock the inventory that you built.
Exactly. It will take us a couple quarters to get our numbers down as well now.
Okay. Then on pricing, if I look at, you're talking about price competition throughout the value chain. Can you talk a little bit to give us some more color on the ASPs of your product? Not just across the value chain, but what are we talking about? I guess prices are falling, but is it dramatic, et cetera? Just some more color.
Yeah. I think in especially mobile capacitive and also in mobile optical, so I think those 2 areas. Mobile optical is still having a higher ASP. But of course in those when we are probably the one with least, the smallest amount of inventory. We kind of stopped, with everything we could very fast and already in start of April actually.
Then you have these 6 months of inventory that we had bought beforehand because of the chip situation, right? In a way that means that all across the chain, everybody's, you know, you have inventory. It is stuff that you wanna get out. Then what happens is that people just wanna get it out. It doesn't matter so much what ASP they have as long as they get it out, right?
We have focused on maintaining and improving our market share. There will be a time when you de-stock when prices are lower. That's how it goes. You know, it seems to go every time when you have, even if it's been smaller, every case has been smaller before.
Mm-hmm. Just one final question on the effect of the price erosion you're seeing. What are you seeing among your competitors, I mean, in the market? Because I assume if you're suffering, everyone's suffering, and they are smaller. Are you seeing some producers being squeezed out? Or is it too early to say?
Yeah. It's not easy to say of course, but I think that I mean, obviously now with this there must be dropouts and consolidation in the market, right? During next year, in an 8-15 months period, right? It's just not possible to maintain so many. Of course now you can see also the customer base, the Chinese OEMs are suffering as well there. I think nobody is profitable except Apple and a little bit of Samsung, right?
Mm-hmm.
Everybody else little bit. Samsung is slightly profitable, right? Apple is of course very profitable. Then all of the Chinese OEMs are not profitable, basically. I think that's of course not a sustainable situation going forward. There will be consolidation, I'm sure.
Okay. Well, perfect. Thank you. I'll get back in line.
Thank you. Thank you, Markus.
Thank you for your question. There are no further questions at the moment.
All right. Let's take a couple of questions from the web. Can you please comment on progress in Iris and what we should expect from this area?
Yes, we have in Iris a continuous slight growth. It is not huge growth, but it's growing for us. Of course, it's a good margin, it's only software. It continues in different variations. The one is in, with, for example, CMITech, which is going into hospitals. Then you have also in payment terminals such that we have launched with different partners in India, where you use it for, and then for other access mechanisms.
I think the biggest opportunity for us continues to be in the car automotive industry, where we are in the rearview mirror with Gentex. That's the biggest opportunity which we have ahead of us going forward with Iris. Then we have some border control cases where we are working on.
There is slight growth in iris, but it's only slight, I would say.
All right. Thank you. Why has the rollout of biometric cards been so slow thus far? What is required for this to accelerate?
Yes, the biometric cards, the payment industry, right? That's Stefan, the question was.
Yes. That's right. Yeah.
Yes. I think it's basically, you could say, 3fold. One is that first, there has been very few players who have had and been able to deliver, of course, the full card. That took a longer time, clearly. Now we have more players, and especially in Q4, we get more players outside of the 2 big ones, Thales and IDEMIA, right? You get more access to more banks in the world.
From Q4 onwards, there will be more players who are now able to deliver cards, actually, who have integrated the whole system, have a working solution across the whole card ecosystem. I think the second has been, of course, getting banks to roll out and get it in. With that, now we have gotten rollouts.
I think the 1/3 part is that in all the rollouts that we have gotten, it has taken time, clearly, to do the enrollment and get the enrollment working. I suppose with that, also the last is to get the price levels down, and the price levels have been coming down. Actually, now we are below $15, closing towards $10, below $15 for a card in the end, for the bank, so to say.
That has been maybe the biggest reasons for it. It has been slower, clearly, than what we anticipated as well earlier on. I'm happy to see now that it is expanding, and at least it is going now according to the plans that we have made, and they're moving with that.
We are seeing new banks and new regions kind of jump on it, as I was explaining. We still have to work on the banks. Banks has to make their choices on enrollment. It is so that many of the banks that have launched have launched with the in the beginning with the central. You have to go to the branch to enroll, and to get more speed and mass, you have to go for home enrollment. That's maybe a few.
All right. Thank you.
I think I have to say, by the way, that I have to say on one thing that we follow very, very closely, of course, and it's very important, is that what is the consumer feedback? What are the users saying that are using it? That is overwhelmingly, clearly very positive. There are no returns of cards from our side.
We have no cards that are not functioning, and there are no customers who want to leave the biometric card once they have gotten it. I think that's a very positive sign and very important sign for us. That was always going to be the most important thing to have any success in this one, actually, that it actually works every time and there are no people who are not happy with it, so to say.
All right. Thank you. Why did inventory increase so much in Q3, and do you expect to see a meaningful decrease in Q4?
Yes, I was trying to explain that what happened was that we, because of the chip shortage, we went in 24 hours almost, we went from a chip shortage, the demand dropped. That had earlier in the last 2.5 years, there has been chip shortage.
All of the chip manufacturers, all of that supply chain has been able to have very long orders and purchases of equipment. You have to order your equipment 6 months, minimum 6 months ahead. That means that when you get the stop, as we got in end of Q1 and start of Q2, the full lockdown that started then, and our sales numbers and our orders started to decline.
We still had 6 months of orders ourselves that we had to do as the whole ecosystem has done, right? We basically had 2 quarters where we had already bought the equipment supply, and that meant that we stopped immediately, but still we had SEK 200 million, that additional cash that got tied into inventory because of that, kind of train effect that comes with or if you think about a, like a cycle competition when somebody breaks and you're behind in the queue and then it starts to move again.
Having said that, yes, we will start to destock or decrease our inventory levels from this 1/4. From Q4, we are going down now with our inventory. Because now, of course, we buy almost nothing and then we start to empty.
We don't have to buy equipment so much at all, almost very little, right? We now actually are destocking.
All right. Thank you. Maybe one final question then. If you look 5-10 years out, what would you say the outlook for Fingerprint as a company?
Oh, I'm very positive. I think we see growth in biometric, in identification, in digitalization across the board. This is a temporary challenge because of the mobile, and of course, we see the new areas. We are already going to four different areas from one area, and we are expanding in those.
We see a very positive future for the company, of course, and strong belief that we have so many opportunities. It is totally in our own hands to grow this company. This is a battle-hardened company, and we are getting through this one as now. As I said, it will not get worse anymore.
It's a fully pumped up future that we see for ourselves, even if it is, of course, very challenging for everybody and for the shareholders of the company to see this huge break that we have gone through here.
All right. Thank you very much. Let me hand back over to you, Christian, for any final remarks before we close.
Yes. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Tough 1/4 for us. We look forward to destocking and getting better on from here. We will talk to you soon again in the next 1/4. Thank you for listening. I wish you well to all of you. Take care of yourselves. Talk to you soon. Thank you, and bye.
That concludes the conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.