Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this analyst call, connected to the Q2 report for Yubico. Beautiful day here in Stockholm. Next to me is Camilla Öberg. I'm Mattias Danielsson. I'm the CEO of Yubico. Several of you may know us already, and I know, I expect that there will be a lot of questions related to the just released interim reports. We'd like to start off with a quick introduction to the company. Looking at Yubico high level, we typically like to highlight two things. First thing is the important mission that we have. Our mission is to make the internet safer for everyone, and we're targeting to do so by offering the most secure multi-factor authentication out there. What does that mean? It means that customers using our product can be sure that their accounts don't get hacked.
We've actually had zero account takeovers for customers who have implemented our product, something we're extremely proud of. We, of course, work very hard to keep it that way. Since the start of the company, we've sold and deployed some 40 million YubiKeys, protecting accounts worldwide. The other thing that we're really proud of, which is our customer list, we've been focused on working with some of the largest organizations and companies in the world. We have about 5,000 professional customers overall and millions of consumers using our products. The focus has been on working with the world's largest companies and the public sector. This includes some of the most prestigious companies in the world, very security conscious.
We're also very happy to see that to an increasing extent, more, it started out with tech companies, but to an increasing extent, we're seeing a very wide adoption of our technology because it offers that strong protection, which is needed by everyone today. In terms of the company, we were started in Sweden. About 2/3 of the business and the employees are currently in the U.S. In total, there's about 520 employees in the company. During the last 12 months, we had sales of approximately SEK 2.3 billion, so about $250 million. We're a hardware company. Fundamentally, our YubiKey is a hardware product. We're proud of that. In spite of being a hardware company, we've been able to maintain healthy gross margins, pretty consistently in the vicinity of 80%. That has enabled us to continue to invest in building the best product out there for multi-factor authentication.
That's a real quick overview into the company, and we'll talk a little bit more just about the product and the market before talking about the quarter. What's the market we're in? In a broader sense, we're part of the identity access management market. Specifically, we're in the multi-factor authentication market, MFA. There are several different ways to do multi-factor authentication. Just a step back, the most common way to log in is still username and password, where the username is the identity and the password is how you authenticate. Everyone knows today that password doesn't really offer good protection, even if it's a very complex password that you're using. You want to have an additional factor for authentication, not just something that you know, a password, but something that you have or something that you are.
Over the past decade or so, it's been popular to implement different software solutions for MFA, including phone apps. However, if you want the highest level of security, there's a growing consensus that you need hardware-backed multi-factor authentication. We are the leader in the segment for modern multi-factor authentication. The existing products out there in this segment for advanced authentication are typically smart card implementations. That's the biggest direct competition that we're seeing. Our unique offering is that we offer this at least the same level of security as a smart card implementation, but we offer it in a more convenient way, which is more user-friendly, and perhaps even more importantly, with a form factor which enables you to use this strong MFA across platforms and across devices. The market we're in, the addressable market, is estimated to be at about $5 billion today.
It's growing at about 14% per year, and we're consistently gaining, winning market share in that market. If we then move on to talking a little bit more about our product, what I highlighted before was that it offers a unique combination of good usability with the highest level of security. What's extremely important to understand, as you think about our product, is that fundamentally what we're selling is a key. It's only as relevant and as good as its ability to unlock locks in a secure way. We've invested a lot in making sure that you can use the YubiKey in a wide variety of locks, i.e., that it can be used in all the different environments and with all the different applications that you see in a typical enterprise environment. That's where we've spent a lot of time over the past 15 years, developing this ecosystem.
Talk a little bit more about our customers. I mentioned earlier on that we initially started selling primarily into tech companies and that we have been very focused on selling into large accounts. Already today, some 25% - 30% of the Global 2000 are existing customers of ours, and we're very proud of that. However, for most of those customers, they're only using our product for a subset of their users. Our sales strategy is one of land and expand, i.e., to get it, start working with that account, protecting their most sensitive users. As the customers realize that this doesn't offer just great security, but also is very user-friendly, that's when we start a conversation about rolling it out to a broader set of users within the organization. Because of that, we've seen a very high repurchase rate.
If you look at our biggest customers, any given year, we consistently see a yearly average repurchase rate in excess of 100%. Just to be clear, a big part of that is explained by the fact that we start with a small footprint and then expand within the organization. A final comment on our customers. It used to be very tech-focused. Last year was the first year when the tech sector was only our second biggest industry segment. Our biggest one was financial services, and the three biggest sectors that we have are tech, financial services, and then public sector. We can move on to the next slide, please. How do we think about growth going forward? We have communicated long-term growth targets of, on average, 25% growth per year and attaining a 20% EBIT margin. It's about expanding our offering, simplifying it, and evolving it.
Another way to cut it is to talk about what do we do in terms of our product. What we've been really good at and what we've been very focused on is making sure that if you use our product, your logins don't get compromised. We're protecting logins. However, what our customers, most of our customers, are really interested in is protecting users. To make that tie between login, between a key and a user, that's a critical link. We see a lot of opportunity for growth there, not just offering more users YubiKeys so that they can log in securely, but tying in a safe way their identity to that login solution. The other part, which is very exciting, is on the go-to-market side.
As I mentioned, we have been focused on large companies, and our typical sales model is a direct sales model where we interact directly with large accounts. We're increasingly now working with channel partners and with partners driving sales. It's both cybersecurity specialists and broader IT consultants now, including the use of YubiKeys in their offering. The next step there is making sure that we have better programs for partners to sell and also to be able to sell to some of our customers' end users, including banks and tech companies. We feel that there's a lot of room for growth, and we have a unique market position, which sets us up well for the long-term growth targets that we have. Next slide, please.
Turning then to the quarter, when we communicated the Q1 numbers, the financial numbers were quite okay, but we did highlight that we saw a drop in sales activity, or specifically that we saw that larger deployments and larger orders were taking longer than is usually the case. Essentially, we saw good momentum with small and mid-sized deals, initial deployments, but when a big customer was going to push the button and make a larger deployment, that's where things had slowed down. This was visible towards the end of Q1 and during the first half of Q2. We're very happy to report that during the second half of Q2, i.e., from end of May onwards, we saw a return to that sales momentum. Because of the slow start to the quarter, we only saw an increase measured in local currencies of 3%.
If you look at the composition of the quarter, the vast majority of that growth happened during the second half of the quarter. We carry that momentum into Q3. We feel that the underlying sales momentum is back. As you look at the numbers, you also want to keep in mind, as with many other Swedish companies, that for once, the Swedish krona has appreciated quite strongly to the U.S. dollar. Almost more than 80% of our sales is in U.S. dollars, and the remaining parts are in euros. There is a considerable FX impact on top line and an impact even on EBIT because of the krona appreciation during the quarter. The final part to consider when looking at the financial numbers is that we saw a breakthrough in our subscription offering. Worth mentioning before we get to there is that we do have two different business models.
One is what we call a perpetual sale, which is an outright sale of the hardware and all associated software, on a perpetual license at no additional cost. You recognize all the revenue upon delivery of the physical product. The other model that we introduced a couple of years ago is a subscription model, what we call YubiKey as a Service. In that case, the customer instead buys for protecting a set of users over a time period, typically a three-year period. In that case, we report the order bookings, i.e., the value of the order, during the quarter when the order gets placed, but the revenue gets typically recognized over the next 12 quarters. This quarter, we saw some big wins when it comes to YubiKey as a Service, meaning that we saw a higher number for order bookings than revenue.
Of course, over time, that will translate into revenue, but the short-term impact is negative for revenue and EBIT. In terms of specific successes, we highlighted already that we were very pleased to see that we saw a significant increase in subscription during the quarter, i.e., YubiKey as a Service. Looking forward into the second half of the year, we see that a substantial part of the biggest opportunities for the second half of the year is also in that fold, i.e., subscription or YubiKey as a Service opportunities. Another thing worth mentioning is that we have been working with some of the traditional tech companies for a long time. It seems like the next wave, when it comes to technology companies, i.e., the AI companies, are also realizing the value of using YubiKeys.
We see large customers both on the services and on the hardware side using YubiKeys, which is to us a great indication that even in the world of AI, you need a hardware root of trust, and YubiKey offers the best protection there is. With that, I'll hand it over to Camilla to talk a little bit more about the financial numbers for the quarter.
Thank you very much, Mattias. Yes. As said, the quarter as such is, of course, somewhat disappointing to us, also from an earnings perspective, although we see this underlying momentum coming back on the sales side. There are a couple of factors I would like just to mention before we go into the numbers, to understand the mechanics in the numbers. We see the lower revenue that we have here is affecting all the way down to the EBIT, as we have a very high or a very good gross margin. We are around this 85% approximately when it comes to the direct gross margin, the one that is directly related to the volumes. Of course, that has a major impact. We also saw the lower bookings in Q1. That is said at that time also, we have not so much with us into the second quarter.
The strong SEK, Swedish krona, that we have had throughout the full quarter here, also puts pressure on the gross margin. It is very visible when comparing the year-over-year growth in Swedish krona. On the positive note, though, when it comes to numbers, is the ARR development, due to the subscription breakthrough that we have seen, where the order bookings was more than 30% of the total order bookings related to subscription. The negative effect of that, as Mattias mentioned also, is that it directly has a declining effect on the net sales as it takes longer for the net sales to be realized in the P&L, which we see also the effects of now this quarter. Those are the big factors to have in mind when looking at the numbers you see here on the slide.
The net sales, perpetual and subscription, came in at SEK 499 million, and that was a decline to close to 19%. Measured in local currencies, a decline of 11% year-over-year. The gross margin, you see, is 79% compared to last year of 80%, though it's a small pickup versus the first quarter in this. On the EBIT, you see a more drastic drop from the 21.3% margin to the 4.2% margin, which is then totally related to the large effect we see when we have a drop in net sales. The ARR development of + 37% up to close to SEK 400 million now then. ARR is the value of the subscription portfolio measured on a yearly basis, for the contracts that we have at the end of the period. The contracts we have in our books as per 30th of June.
Thereby also, we have contracts who have not yet started to fully affect the net sales. Going into the bookings, which is an interesting metric this time, we see a sequential growth also. It's not only that we see a small growth in local currencies compared to last year, but we see the pickup from Q1 here, with close to 19%. You also see the large share of subscription, the green part of the chart, where we have a significant growth. year-over-year, we grow the subscription booking by 41% and now then represented 32% of the bookings. The perpetual bookings, though, declined year-over-year in value, but we saw also during the quarter that the number of deals are increasing, but the size is smaller.
We saw fewer large deals, related to this, what we talked about in Q1 with the delays of larger deals and more coming back now, rather. That is also affecting the bookings in Q2. We also see that the EMEA region is where we see the largest gap, percentage-wise year-over-year, although the EMEA is not the biggest contributor to the group. There we have had more effect of the turbulence and also some macroeconomic challenges in that region, specifically in that region or even Germany to be even more specific. The subscription bookings, the largest part of the subscription bookings are the new contracts and add-on contracts. Of the large part of subscription bookings, close to SEK 200 million, it's only SEK 43 million which are renewals.
If you remember that the renewals part that we see of subscription bookings is not really adding to our ARR , and not adding to new net sales. The largest part very much is the new contracts and the add-ons. That is really good for the future. We also see continued interest from the high tech, from finance and public sector. We see now in the AI space, and in the European defense industry, a lot of interest going forward. Looking at the net sales, where we have the decline, as you see here, we saw on the net sales side a subscription growth of 32.5%, which now then represents 15.9% of the total net sales, comparing that to the 9.7% last year. We already see good effects from the subscription development.
Of course, what we have seen in the ARR development also during last year, we see this growth. Why then on the perpetual side, that is where we also see the decline related in the net sales. That's related to perpetual due to that we didn't have those large deals, what we have from time to time, they were lacking in this quarter from the perpetual side, but we saw on the other side them coming in as subscriptions. The low bookings in Q1 is also, of course, impacting here. Yeah. Also, just to mention the subscriptions that we have been able to close during the quarter has, of course, been closed fairly late in the quarter. Thereby, we see minor contribution to the net sales, which, if we go over to the ARR, then you see a big step up in the ARR.
There is also then forecasting for some further increase of subscription net sales for the coming quarters. Quite much of this big improvement in the ARR will come to be through the P&L in the future. Just looking at the ARR, we had a growth of 37.1% year-over-year. The growth we see in the quarter, the SEK 49 million, close to SEK 50 million. There were released several new deals, and, of course, among them, this major current contract we signed with a high-tech company, which Mattias mentioned earlier as well. A few words on the profit side. As I mentioned, the drop in net sales has a significant impact on profit due to this high gross margin we have.
Thereby, we see these fluctuations and the EBIT, the profit, and the margin is very sensitive to the fluctuations we have in our net sales related to bigger perpetual deliveries. The gross margin, as I said, came in on 79%, slightly lower than last year, but slightly higher than Q1. We see still a negative impact from the currency exchange rates. The strong Swedish krona is putting pressure on the gross margin because we have, as I said, at least 80% of the revenue is U.S. dollar, and the rest is euro. While we, in the direct cost and also the indirect cost for COGS, we have a mix of U.S. dollar and Swedish krona. We see an impact there on that margin. On the EBIT side, we see a margin of 4.2% decline, I said. We still investing in our continued growth and in our strategic journey.
It's important for us. We have the build-up of sales and marketing, engineering, investing in marketing activities. We have done that also continuously since last Q2. Thereby, we see a headcount growth of 15% versus last year. At the same time, we see that the personal expenses only grew with 8%. That is so underlying, yes, our cost base is growing in line with how we expand the organization and grow that. Here, it's a bit odd because we then see a positive effect, so to speak, of the U.S. dollar depreciation here as we have a large part of our people in the U.S., and thereby, comparing the cost year-over-year in Swedish krona, then you see here the depreciation of the U.S. dollar around 10% versus last year, 9%, 9.5% to be exact, in here.
It's a bit odd, but underlying, we are growing, the organization has been growing. Going forward, continuing to be cautious on spending, but focus on the marketing and sales side and our product journey going forward. The LT programs, as you remember, we have a couple of PSU programs in the AGM in May. We had a new program approved by the AGM, which was launched in June. We have some more costs also for that program in Q2, but just for one month, is the new one. Comparing to last year, we have the similar effect there. In 2024, we also launched a new program in June, which is now then, of course, in Q2 2025. We have a full cost of that. We have our unrealized currency effects, which are related to working capital items in the balance sheet for the parent company.
Also, Yubico AB, which is reporting and has a functional currency in Swedish krona, has, of course, mostly U.S. dollar and euro balance sheets related to customers and also to some extent to supplier debts and also some intercompany transactions that are in there or balances, which are in there. These are items that are going up and down, but within the group, it's not really exposure, but we have to report them in this way as it's for the parent company. Going over to the cash flow and our financial position, we had a working capital positive effect from the working capital of SEK 81 million. This is as we had a good ending of Q1 from a net sales perspective and billing perspective. We have received, of course, good inflow from customer payments from Q1 net sales and also some subscription billing, which has been received.
We also see some positive effects actually from a reduction in inventory, which also gives a positive effect on the cash flow. I will come back to that further down. The operating cash flow is then SEK 123 million. We have a cash and cash equivalence at the end of the period of SEK 945 million. Net cash of SEK 900 million. Our interest-bearing liabilities are still only related to our office leases, SEK 43 million this period. Then coming back to the inventory, you also see the KPI we are measuring regarding our inventory in relation to our rolling 12 months net sales. We are striving for reducing that. This time, despite we have actually reduced inventory in absolute terms, we have a slight increase compared to first quarter, from 29% to 29.5% of the rolling 12 months net sales.
That is related to the decrease in the net sales, rather than anything else. We see that when we are looking to continued growth going forward, we see that this will also, in the future, continue to go downwards again. With that said, I leave over to you again, Mattias.
Thank you, Camilla. We should start by saying, when we summarize the quarter, we should start by saying, yes, we recognize that the financial numbers for this quarter were not satisfactory. Of course, we're not happy about seeing a decrease in net sales and the profit is off. What is satisfactory, though, is that we see a return to sales momentum. Compared to Q1, we had decent financial numbers, but we were concerned about the sales momentum. As we record Q2, the weak end of Q1 and the weak start to Q2 bleeds into the financial numbers that are reported for this quarter, but we see a return to the underlying sales momentum, which is very encouraging.
As we mentioned, the reignition of our sales momentum happened towards the second half of the quarter, and when you look forward-looking, we can see that we have a strong pipeline and we are seeing a good start to Q3. We're happy to see that the slowdown that we saw towards the end of Q1 and going into Q2 seems to have been a temporary one. There's still a lot of macroeconomic uncertainty, but it seems like we're back on a growth track. We're very happy about that. The second part is, yes, we are pleased to see an increasing share of subscription sales, YubiKey as a Service, and in particular that we're now able to attract high-tech companies to purchase in this mode.
This is something that we've been trying to achieve over a number of years, and it seems like we now have a product design which means that this offers value for big tech companies and for existing customers. We're pleased to see that. Short term, though, a transition over to more subscription sales has a negative impact on both top line and bottom line, as Camilla has explained. Just to keep in mind, if we continue to see this high share of subscription and a fast transition, short term, that will have a negative impact on the top line and the bottom line. Over the three-year period, the revenue and the margin is actually a little higher for our subscription customers. It's good for the longer run. We're very happy to see that the renewed momentum in sales is coming from growth sectors.
We seem to be relevant for the most security conscious organizations, even in the brave new world. The value of having hardware-backed multi-factor authentication is visible to the thought leaders, not just in tech, but in AI and across the public sector. That's very encouraging. We mentioned that we feel that we have a strong pipeline going into the second half of the year. However, we are aware that there was a big gap between the numbers and the analyst consensus. Clearly, we haven't done a great job in setting expectations and the impact of, say, a slow order bookings quarter like Q1. What impact would that have on Q2, or what's the impact of the FX effects? We take that upon us, and we want to make sure that we can explain both the market, the product, and also how the business operates in a better way.
We're inviting everyone to an Investor Day on November 19th. It will be held in Stockholm, but it will be in hours that will permit Americans to participate too. We'll get back to you with the details on that. Hopefully, that will mean that there's more transparency and more understanding of what our business model looks like. Finally, as you may have noticed, I want to highlight that this is not in the quarterly report. Right before the markets opened, we issued a press release that the board today has resolved to use its mandate to repurchase shares or a buyback. As you may recall, the AGM approved a buyback of up to 5% of the outstanding equity in May, and now the board has resolved to use that mandate to purchase up to SEK 200 million worth of shares in the market.
That will set us up to enable us to finance future acquisitions through shares and also give flexibility when it comes to our balance sheets. It's not related to the quarter, but since we released it in the morning, I think it's worth mentioning. With that, we'll hand it over to the Q&A session.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Erik Lindholm -Rojestal from SEB. Please go ahead.
Good morning. I wanted to ask on the accelerated shift towards subscription bookings here. You speak of an accelerated order momentum and a healthy pipeline into H2. I mean, how would you say that this pipeline looks? Is it mainly composed of subscription deals, or do you have some of larger perpetual orders that you hope to close here in the second half as well? I'll come back with another question. Thanks.
Thank you, Eric. Yeah, it's right. When you look into the pipeline and the opportunities for the second half of the year, there's an increasing share of subscription opportunities in there, especially for the larger, larger opportunities. In the U.S., it's actually a majority. In EMEA, I don't think it's yet at a majority. If you look at the biggest opportunities, especially in the American markets across several industries, the majority of the larger opportunities are in the YubiKey as a Service fold, which is our subscription offering.
Right. That's very helpful. Yeah, exactly, that's helpful. I mean, taking into account this new momentum in subscriptions, is it fair to say that you should see sort of negative sales growth here in H2 when you hope that this accelerates into 2026 and beyond, given that you reiterate your financial targets?
Could you repeat the question? Because I got lost somewhere midway. Sorry. Would you mind repeating it?
Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm just thinking of the accelerated momentum in subscriptions. I mean, is it fair to say that you should see negative sales growth here in H2 and that you hope that sales growth then accelerates into 2026, given that you repeat your financial target?
Oh, yeah. Okay. You talk about how order bookings translate into net sales. As you know, we don't provide individual guidance for quarters and years. We feel confident that we remain confident in our long-term growth targets. As you say, with an increasing share of subscription, there's a negative pressure on net sales growth. If we see a fast transition, it could well be that means that you see a strong growth in order bookings, but even a decline in net sales. It's really too early to tell whether that will be the case. Just to reiterate, over the contract period, which is typically a three-year period, the revenue from a YubiKey as a Service customer, on average, is a little higher than if they were to outright buy on a perpetual basis, per user. Longer term, it should be good.
After some time of the transition, you see net sales catching up because then you bring in a kind of a "backlog" of ARR that you live off every quarter.
Okay. Perfect. That's helpful. I just want to ask you on your sort of investment plans here. You mentioned that headcount is about 15% year-over-year. You continue to invest here clearly. Have you made any sort of changes to these plans given the weekly momentum that you saw heading into the quarter? I mean, have you made any decisions to sort of protect your margins or is this full speed ahead?
I'll put the hiring in three different buckets, just to simplify. One is on sales and marketing. There, the hiring plan was very front-loaded. Most of the planned hiring for the year has already happened during the first half of the year. There would be very limited hiring in that arena during the second half of the year. This is all according to plan, even the plan going into the year. The second part, the second bucket, would be R&D or product and engineering. That's not as front-loaded. It's more kind of a continuous hiring over the year. In that arena, we also continue to stick to the plan. The third one is what we call G&A, general admin. There we are seeing a reduction compared to original hiring plans. We're hiring a little bit more slowly there, being mindful that we invest in the right areas.
Given that, we need to, since we have such high gross margin, our business is very volume-dependent, and we want to make sure that we don't sit with a big overhead, of course.
All right. Perfect. I'll leave it there and maybe come back with some more content. Bye.
Thanks, Erik.
The next question comes from Thomas Nielsen from Nordea. Please go ahead.
Thank you for taking my questions. What do you think is the reason for the sharp rise in subscriptions and sharp bookings in Q2? Have you made any changes to this offering, or are there other circumstances driving this shift?
Thank you, Thomas. It's an interesting one, especially since we're seeing now subscription orders from segments that previously haven't bought on a subscription basis. I'm talking about tech companies. I think, and it's not about a change in pricing or anything. I think it is that we've figured out what is really important to these customers, that they see a partnership. If there's new technology coming out, if there are new threats appearing, how do we partner with the customer to make sure that their implementation of YubiKeys is the most secure way to authenticate? It's that partnership that has evolved. That's not really a different piece of hardware which is being supplied or a different price which is being charged.
It's about having that partnership so that they have direct contact with some of our best and brightest, making sure that we can support them as they implement and use our technology. I think it's really about us having figured out what does it take to succeed in segments outside of the ones where we've seen success in the past. Because historically, as I think I've mentioned, most of the subscription sales have been to financial services and public sector. Now it seems like we've figured out how to make this offering relevant and compelling to other industry segments. It's not a silver bullet. It's more on figuring out how do we build a partnership with other industry segments where this is a product which makes sense.
Thank you very much. As a follow-up to that, there was a multi-year agreement with one large tech customer in Q2 in terms of subscriptions. Could you give some indication of the magnitude of that deal?
Yeah. The guidance we can give is that it's in excess of $5 million. We did accrue for commission expenses for this individual order for the quarter in line with what we've done once in the past. It was well above $5 million.
Okay, thank you very much.
Thanks, Thomas.
The next question comes from Georg Atling from Pareto Securities. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. The first one is just on the guidance here for Q3. You mentioned that the momentum is picking up a bit. Just to set the expectations right, if you can compare that to the 3% bookings growth in local currencies in Q2, are we talking about an acceleration here to double digits, or is it lower than that? Also, maybe if you can comment on that in light of comps in Q3, where 10% of bookings last year was from renewals. Thanks.
On the final question, if I'll start with that, I think in Q3 last year, I'm not sure if 10% of the total order value was renewals. Wasn't it 10% of the subscription orders that were renewals? I hope I got your question right. Returning to the breaking question, in local currencies, the growth in order bookings during the quarter was 3%. However, as we communicated in the released Q1, we saw a drop during the first half of the quarter and then a significant pickup during the second half of the year. Without putting an exact number to it, that momentum remains going into Q3. It will be important, though, that we can't offer precise guidance for the remainder of the year, but we are noticing that we remain committed to our long-term targets, but there are variations on a quarterly and a yearly basis.
The second part to factor in, of course, as you think about how our order bookings translate into net sales and EBIT is what you just brought up. What share of that is really subscription? If we see an acceleration in subscription sales, short term, that actually means a lower growth in net sales and weaker profitability as we've talked about. I can say that we see the same momentum going into Q3 as we saw at the end of Q2. The average for Q2 was 3%, so it's definitely higher than that.
Yeah, that's helpful. Second question, just coming back to this high-tech customer in the subscription segment. You talked about $5 million or excess of $5 million for that contract. Just trying to figure out how much of that is coming into the ARR intake this quarter. If you could just comment on, is this a three-year contract or a five-year contract? Any more color there would be helpful. Thanks.
Yeah, you're talking about Q2 or Q3 then? Yeah, the major part of.
Yeah, Q2.
The major part of our subscription orders came in fairly late in the quarter, and thereby we see minor effects on the net sales from the ARR increase that we saw. That's what I can say. Looking at the ARR and the ARR growth, you get an indication in total of what we could expect in growth and net sales coming quarter, approximately.
If I just rephrase that, of that SEK 49 million sequential jump in ARR, how much is from that new large high-tech customer?
We cannot comment on that without actually telling the value, which we cannot do.
Okay. If that's in excess of $5 million, is that per year or over a three-year period or over a five-year period?
That is on a total contract value. That could be three or five or two years, in that sense. We have not communicated how long it is, if it's three years or if it's five years. We have said it's multi-year. We cannot, unfortunately, comment more on that, but you should see the indication in the ARR growth anyway.
Yeah. Understood. Just a final question on these buybacks that you announced. Some of that might be used for acquisitions. If you could just give us some more detail on what you're looking for in terms of acquisitions here in the short term, and also if you have a pipeline of companies that you're looking at or if this is just preparing if opportunities were to arise.
This is preparatory work. We're not committed to making an acquisition. We have highlighted that there is an area that we're particularly interested in. As we expand our product offering from protecting logins to protecting users, a critical component there is what's called ID verification. We've got our head around the pieces that would be more difficult or take longer for us to build internally. At the end of the day, it comes down to buy-build-partner conversations. There, we have seen a few interesting potential "targets" that offer complementary technology and that have good teams. Again, it's really still in an evaluation phase.
That's very clear. Thanks. That's all I had. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
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[Go ahead].
All right. The first question is, can you tell more about the transition to subscription? Do you expect the negative growth to continue because of this? I think this was covered by the question from Erik, or perhaps from Thomas. Just to reiterate then, it's really, like you note, when an order booking comes in as a subscription, it doesn't translate into net sales next quarter or the incoming quarter. It takes three years. If you see a very rapid transition, then on paper, you could have a positive order bookings growth and a negative net sales growth during a quarter. It really depends on the speed of the transition. I think it would take a lot to, yeah.
Even though we see a lot of subscription opportunities in the pipeline, I don't think you will see any dramatic effects of this, unless you call what we saw this quarter a dramatic effect, of course. Next question is, can you elaborate more on the improving momentum towards the quarter end? Sure. When we reported Q1 in mid-May, I think it was May 13th or 14th last quarter, we noted that we saw a slowdown for larger deals towards the end of Q1. That continued into the first six weeks of Q2. The old silver lining there was that it was, quote-unquote, "only larger deals." We saw good velocity on the small and mid-sized deals, i.e., typically initial deployments.
However, when it came to customers pulling the trigger on rolling it out to the entire company or to a larger employee base, that's where we saw delays in pretty much every customer conversation. Fortunately, that's changed. We saw business picking up again, and we saw the same velocity that we typically expect towards the end of Q2. That momentum continues into Q3. Now we're in the more fortunate situation of seeing good momentum for small and mid-sized order and back on a good cadence when it comes to the larger deployments. It's broad-based. We see it in most geographies and in most industries. I think the German market is a little challenging over the next quarter or so, realistically, but otherwise, we see it pretty broadly based. Have you seen any changes in the competitive landscape? Not so much.
If we talk broadly about the competitive landscape, the biggest competition is arguably passwords only. The biggest MFA competition are different software apps. When it comes to hardware-backed MFA, i.e., our solution, similar solutions based on passkeys and smart cards, I think there is a visible shift, for at least high-security applications, away from software to hardware, and that continues. When it comes to the competitive landscape in terms of what we're seeing on individual deals, I think I mentioned that if you asked me what competitors we see the most a couple of years ago, I would have probably pointed to low-cost manufacturers out of China. That has changed a little bit. Now, I think more and more companies in Western Europe and the U.S. doubt whether it's a good idea to trust cybersecurity to a Chinese vendor.
We're seeing increased activity from some of the incumbents, typically incumbents in the smart card industry that are now offering products based on passkeys, so competing with one of the protocols that we offer on the YubiKey. We see perhaps them leaning in more, and several of the customers that we're working with have been using smart cards in the past. They have existing relations, which means that these are competitors that I have a lot of respect for. I think we are agile and we are the leaders and recognized as the leaders in our space. I think we have an edge. Do you pay U.S. import tariffs? [Foreign language]. Yes. Most of the physical manufacturing of YubiKeys happens in Sweden. However, most of the value creation, i.e., when the YubiKeys are programmed, happens locally.
For the hardware that gets shipped from Sweden to the U.S., we are now paying import tariffs to the U.S. However, the impact is not that big. It's to the tune of perhaps 1% - 1.5% on our gross margin. In the short term, we don't see a significant impact because we have a large part of our inventory already in the U.S., which was imported before tariffs were implemented. As we go into the second half of the year and in particular in 2026, we do anticipate an impact of the tariffs on the cost of goods sold, probably to the tune of 1% and 1.5%. We'll have to figure out how to cover that additional expense or additional cost. Unless there are any last-minute questions, I think that's a wrap for today's sessions. Five minutes or four minutes ahead of time.
Again, Camilla, Alexander, and I are available for any follow-up questions. Please get in touch with us if you have additional questions. Thanks, everyone, for attending and wishing everyone a great day. Thanks, everybody.