Earnings Call: Q1 2019

Jun 22, 2018

Good morning, and welcome to the BlackBerry Fiscal First Quarter and Fiscal Year 2019 Results Conference Call. My name is Leanne, and I will be your conference moderator for today's call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. We will be facilitating a brief question-and-answer session towards the end of the conference. Should you need assistance during the call, please signal for a conference specialist by pressing star zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the presentation over to our host for today's call, Christopher Lee, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead. Thank you, Leanne. Welcome to the BlackBerry Fiscal Year 2019 First Quarter Results Conference Call. With me on the call today are Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, John Chen, and Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Steve Capelli. After I read our cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements, John will provide a business update, and Steve will then review the financial results. We will then open the call for a brief Q&A session. This call is available to the general public via call-in numbers and via webcast in the Investors information section at blackberry.com. A replay will also be available on the blackberry.com website. Some of the statements we'll be making today constitute forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of applicable U.S. and Canadian securities laws. We'll indicate forward-looking statements by using words such as expect, will, should, model, intend, believe, and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are based on estimates and assumptions made by the company in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current conditions, and expected future developments, as well as other factors that the company believes are relevant. Many factors could cause the company's actual results or performance to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including the risk factors that are discussed in the company's annual information form, which is included in our annual report on Form 40-F and in our MD&A. You should not place undue reliance on the company's forward-looking statements. The company has no intention and undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements except as required by law. As is customary during the call, John and Steve will reference non-GAAP numbers in their summary of our quarterly results. For a reconciliation between our GAAP and non-GAAP numbers, please see the earnings press release and supplement published earlier today. I will now turn the call over to John. Thank you. Just in case you didn't hear Chris, I'm using non-GAAP numbers. Good morning, everybody. We are off to a pretty good start for the fiscal 2019. We continue the momentum from the second half of last year or the last fiscal year. We see strong customer demand for our security-focused products, resulting in double-digit year-over-year software and services billing growth in the first quarter. The business that's shown the best momentum are two, the BlackBerry Technology Solutions and the licensing business, which I will elaborate on that a little later on. We are on track to achieve and deliver our financial guidance for the fiscal year 2019, which we just started. The guidance are double-digit billings growth in total software and services, positive earnings per share, and positive free cash flow. Let me now provide some highlights for the quarter. Total company revenue came in as $217 million. Total software and services revenue was $193 million, which was a 14% increase year-over-year. Gross margin was 76%. Operating income was $12 million, and operating margin was 6%. Earnings per share was $0.03, and total ending cash and investment were $2.3 billion. Next here are some of the highlights by the business. In the BlackBerry Technology Solutions, which include our embedded software and asset tracking, the revenue grew 31% year-over-year, driven primarily by BlackBerry QNX software embedded in connected and autonomous auto platforms. QNX continued a strong year-over-year growth momentum with several new design wins. One of the design wins was in digital instrument cluster for a major auto OEM through our partner, tier one partner, Denso. Unfortunately, we don't have the permission to state the name of the customer, the end customer. We are, however, very excited about this partnership win with Denso and the long-term business opportunity with both Denso as well as the customers. Another design win was with Byton. Byton is a China-based electric car startup, which has been publicly referred as a rival to Tesla. Byton has global aspiration and is targeted to make its car first available in China starting in 2019 and go global from that point. As you may be aware, China is the largest and one of the fastest-growing electric passenger car markets in the world with a very strong government mandate. These design wins reinforce the importance and success of our strategy to contribute at each level in the broad auto ecosystems. The companies in the ecosystem, starting with the auto manufacturers, which we loosely call OEMs, Tier one suppliers and chip suppliers. They all recognize the increasing importance of the safety and reliability capabilities provided by BlackBerry QNX software. In addition to the OEM design wins, we added several worldwide channel partners for QNX in the quarter. Those include Hitachi, Alsi in Japan, and Sasken Technologies in India. This supports our previously stated objective, that for this fiscal year, which include what we include. Well, in the fiscal year, we focus on expanding our sales channel, especially in Asia Pacific, that is. The addition of these partners is a good start. Before I move on to our asset tracking business, many of you are aware that QNX is embedded in 60 million cars. The statistic actually was from June 2015. This month, we received validation from Strategy Analytics and an independent third party, which with updated numbers. We are proud to say that we are now in over 120 million cars, more than doubling the install base three years ago. On the technology front in QNX, we continue to innovate. In the quarter, we announced update to our QNX operating system, hypervisors, as well as the advanced driver assist platform to improve the ease of use and enhance the safety features. These updated products supports both Arm technology and x86 architectures, and of course, adhere to the highest safety standard, certification standard. Moving on to our asset tracking business. BlackBerry Radar continues to show positive momentum from last quarter. We signed several new deals for Radar in the quarter with a number of North American trucking companies. We're also seeing an increase in repeat buy from multiple existing customer. Names that I could mention are Frex, Flexi-Van, and FedEx Custom Critical. The number of opportunities in our pipeline continues to grow, measured by both the number of accounts and the total dollar values. More importantly, our conversion rate of pilots to revenue is high per the industry standard. Next, I will discuss our licensing business. Licensing revenue experienced strong year-over-year growth as our base of recurring revenue continues to grow. Our technology licensing business showed progress as TCL, which is our Chinese handset partners, launched a BlackBerry Key2 several weeks ago with positive market reception. Optiemus, our partners in India, will launch multiple BlackBerry smartphones for the Indian market starting this summer. Yesterday, one of our consumer electronic partners, Punkt, announced a new mobile phone with BlackBerry cybersecurity technology integrated in the phone. In addition, after the quarter end, we signed a technology and brand licensing deal with Bullitt Group, an international manufacturer of branded connected device broadening our consumer reach. During the quarter, we strengthened our IP licensing business, and we now expect to do better than $100 million annual runway for the IP licensing that I mentioned in prior quarters. Now, I would like to discuss a little bit about our enterprise software business. I know several of you were disappointed that we did not provide fiscal 2019 revenue guidance during our last earnings call. The reason we did not at that time was because we want to get a better understanding of the impact of the new revenue accounting standard ASC 606. This change in accounting require us to recognize more of our software and services revenue on a ratable basis because we deliver a service component to our customer through our secure network operation centers. This aligns well with our long-term strategy to move to a more recurring software and services revenue model. We believe this model is better as it is more predictable. This change in accounting also led us to modify our business practice where we no longer offer perpetual software licenses to our customer, except for certain large government customers. As a data point, perpetual license accounted for approximately 20%-30% of our enterprise software revenue last fiscal year. Consequently, if you look at our number, revenue billings were negatively impacted temporarily in the quarter. However, recurring software and services revenue increased to approximately 86% from 70% in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2018. Our long-term goal is 90%+ in recurring software and services revenue, which I believe that we could accomplish within a year. Our definition of recurring software and services revenue remain consistent. This is the lawyer's words. It is total software and services revenue excluding IP licensing and professional services. I'll put it on the website, by the way, just to make sure. In the quarter, we witnessed continuous spend by worldwide government agency for our enterprise software solution. In the U.S., we added 3 new FedRAMP customers, resulting in a 13% sequential increase in FedRAMP users of our crisis communication solution. In addition, our endpoint management solution is also in the FedRAMP certification process. Outside of the United States, some notable customer win in this government sector, including the Bank BRI, which is one of the largest banks in Indonesia, the Department of Health in Abu Dhabi, and the government of Canada for the G7 summit. We also experienced strong growth in the healthcare vertical, doubling the number of closed deal both year-over-year and sequentially. Data security and data privacy is now on top of mind of many of our customers and prospects. Our ongoing conversation with decision-makers highlight that protecting data is now mission-critical for their business. This heightened awareness is very encouraging to us as these conversations play to BlackBerry's strength, because we are one of the few companies in the world to have assets and qualification in data security, data privacy, and mobility. I will now turn the call over to Steve to provide more details about the impact of the 606 and our financial statements, as well as our quarterly performance. Thank you, John. My comments on our financial performance for the fiscal quarter will be in non-GAAP terms unless specified otherwise. Before I go through the quarterly results, I'd like to summarize four primary points from the implementation of ASC 606 impacting our financial statements. First, we adopted ASC 606 using the modified retrospective method. Under this method, we are not required to restate our financial statements. This means that the income statement information shown for FY 2018 is under the prior accounting standard, ASC 605, and the income statement information shown for FY 2019 is under ASC 606. Noting that it creates comparability challenges, we have provided data to compare both periods under ASC 605 in our footnote disclosure. We will also provide a verbal comparison for both periods under ASC 606, which are unaudited, and I will do so for Q1 2019 shortly. Second, under the modified retrospective method, there is a one-time cumulative transition adjustment, increasing our deferred revenue balance by approximately $100 million, with an equal decrease to retained earnings. Third, the perpetual software licenses we transact will now be recognized ratably instead of upfront as it was previously. This is because we deliver a service component to our customers with the use of our secure network operation center. As a result, recurring revenue is expected to increase over time. Fourth, sales commissions are now recognized in conjunction with the matching revenue. This change is expected to have an immaterial impact to our financial statements. There is no impact to billings or cash flows from this new accounting standard. Additional details can be found in our public filings, which will be posted on our investor relations website later today. Now let me recap our first quarter results. We delivered first quarter non-GAAP total company revenue of $217 million and GAAP total company revenue of $213 million. I will break down revenue shortly. First quarter total company gross margin was 76%, up from 67% a year ago. The gross margin improvement of 9 percentage points from over a year ago is attributed to the increase in contribution from software and services to our overall revenue mix. Our non-GAAP gross margin includes software deferred revenue acquired but not recognized of $4 million and excludes stock compensation expense of $1 million. Operating expenses of $154 million were down 9% sequentially, resulting from lower legal and bad debt expenses and a smaller expense impact from foreign exchange. Our non-GAAP operating expenses excludes a charge of $28 million related to the fair value adjustment on the debentures, $22 million in amortization of acquired intangibles, $17 million in stock comp expense, four million in restructuring charges, and $1 million of acquisition and integration costs. Non-GAAP operating income was $12 million, and non-GAAP net income was $17 million. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.03 in the first quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA was $31 million this quarter, excluding non-GAAP adjustments previously mentioned. This equates to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 14%. I will now provide a breakdown of our revenue in the quarter. Total software and services revenue was $193 million, representing 89% of total revenue and up from 69% compared to a year ago. Total SaaS revenue was $16 million, and total handset revenue was $8 million. SaaS revenue continues to wind down as expected. Handset revenue resulted from the release of accrued expenses reconciled to historical carrier agreements. These expenses were accrued for in prior periods and benefited EPS. I will now further break down our software and services revenue in the quarter. Enterprise software accounted for 43%. BlackBerry Technology Solutions accounted for 24%, and licensing, IP, and other accounted for 33%. Please refer to the supplemental table in the press release for the GAAP and non-GAAP details. As we noted last quarter, ASC 606 only impacts our enterprise software and services business. On an apples-to-apples comparison under ASC 606, revenue declined 11% year-over-year. Now moving on to our balance sheet and working capital performance. Total cash equivalents, and investments were approximately $2.3 billion. Our net cash position was approximately $1.7 billion at the end of the quarter. Aggregate contractual obligations, which includes purchase obligations, operating lease obligations, interest payments, and other goods and services utilized in operations, was approximately $325 million at the end of the first quarter. This is a decrease of $59 million from a year ago. Moving to the cash flow statement. Free cash flow before considering the impact of restructuring and legal proceedings was a positive $3 million. Cash used in operations was $7 million, and capital expenditures were $5 million. This use of cash of $12 million was expected due to seasonality and the payment of fiscal 2018 bonuses in the quarter. That now concludes my comments. I'll now turn the call back to John to provide financial outlook. Thank you, Steve. We talked about that earlier. We affirm our fiscal year 2019 financial outlook, which are one, the total company software and services billing growth to be in the double digits. Two, the non-GAAP EPS to be positive. And three, to deliver positive free cash flow before considering the impact of restructuring and legal proceedings. With the ASC 606 now implemented, we're introducing fiscal 2019 guidance for total software and services revenue to be annual growth between 8%-10%. Our guidance is based on the following that the BTS has continued its double-digit growth throughout the year, the licensing to perform better than we originally planned, the Enterprise software to include impact of what Steve had gone through in detail about the 606. Total software and services revenue growth to be weighted towards the second half of the fiscal year, very similar to the last fiscal year. Recurring software and services revenue to be in a high 80% range in fiscal 2019. With that, I would like the operator to start opening our Q&A session. Operator? We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, please press star one to ask a question. We'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal for questions. We request that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. We'll take our first question from Todd Coupland with CIBC. Hi, Todd. Morning. You know, obviously a few things to clean up here on the quarter, so I'll start with a couple questions. I'm sure there'll be follow-ups from others. On the enterprise software business, it seems like the new run rate is about $83 million, which was down 11% year-over-year. Is that sort of the baseline we should model from? Then just, if it is, talk about the rhythm of that business as we think about it over the next few quarters. Thanks. The baseline probably is correct. You know, after the ASC 606 impact, which is there's a lot of ins and outs of that. You know, please bear with me a little bit on that. You know, we have, as I said earlier, somewhere between 25%-30% of perpetual licenses in prior quarters on average. Those now need to be taken ratably. And then of course there are from an accounting rule some deferred revenue movements and so forth. The net of all that is that we think the billing number to be reasonably flat year-over-year. It doesn't hurt our business on a long-term. It's just the reporting of the revenue in a short term will have to go down by probably, you know, high single digits, low double digits, and that will be the new base. But from a competitive standpoint and we also expected looking, you know, our business pipeline that the second half, as I said earlier, are reasonably strong. It kind of pretty much parallels or at the image of the last year. I hope that answered your question. There's a lot of in and out, but basic fundamental is we expect the business to continue to grow. Okay. My follow-up was, it seemed like QNX was a bit stronger than I was expecting, $47 million in the quarter. What's the rhythm of that business gonna look like, particularly with comments about second half being stronger? Thanks. Right. The rhythm is we expect double-digit growth throughout the year. As I said, this business for many years ago, you win the design win, you start seeing the royalty and as long as the economy is reasonably robust for the connected cars and the autonomous cars and other platform that we designed in, we expect to see this royalty to continue to uptick. Every time we reach a base, it doesn't have a lot of wild swing. It just keep, you know, that will be the new base. You should see, as I said last quarter, the mid-$40s million is the new base. I'm hoping obviously to go even further as we continue, but it's a very steady base, steady ramp. Great. Thanks a lot, John. Sure. We'll take our next question from Paul Steep with Scotia Capital. Morning. Hi, Paul. Hi. John or Steve, maybe you could talk. Obviously, you touched on the ASC 606 change. Maybe we could talk about the real world change in terms of the sales force now selling more on a, you know, recurring ratable basis versus a perpetual basis. How should we think about that rolling out and sort of implementing across the field over the year? Maybe then we can follow up and talk about any one-time impacts in the quarter. I think it took a little bit of adjustment when we took perpetual off their what do you call it? Calling card. Calling card sales kit. We just met with a global team that came in to Waterloo, and we had what I would call a decent meeting with them. They have well understood. That is what it is. That is the reality. It's good for the company because as recurring rate goes up, it makes our business more predictable. Actually you could argue the margin better. Everybody bought into it, and now we just need to go after the deals, not thinking about, you know, this multi-year large thing. I, you know, I'm comfortable that we are making all the right adjustments. Carl is very committed to this movement, and so he's training and retraining his people globally. I don't see that being a problem on a long term. Yeah, you don't have the hockey stick at the end, but you have the predictability, and as John mentioned, should be improved margins as well. We think long term, it's very beneficial. Just, Steve, maybe on the renewals portion of maintenance, how should we think about you transitioning over customers? This is solely new deal we're talking about, and the existing base sort of stays where it is. You know, how would you handle incremental seat sales for an existing client, I think is the struggle I'm having this morning. Thanks. Well, the first thing I want to say is that it'll be for contracts going forward. Second, there's not an absolute that we would never. Obviously, we have large government accounts that buy perpetual licenses, and so those items will be taken under consideration. Our sales motion will be non-perpetual and a recurring revenue model. We thought this was the right time to make that adjustment. That's why we were able to now give the new guidance. Also, with our QNX, we don't really have a lot of choices. I mean, it's not like we could, you know, randomly decide. Yes, it is obviously going forward. People who already have the perpetual, we're gonna need to get them to buy new licenses for new projects, and that's, you know. For the one who pay maintenance, we'll continue to bill that maintenance, of course. Okay. Thanks, guys. Yeah. We'll take our next question from Paul Treiber at RBC Capital Markets. Hi, Paul. Thanks very much. Good morning. Just on license revenue this quarter, it was a record high, and then you are seeing stronger momentum in that business. For this quarter, is that related to the handset deals that you have with TCL and others? Or was there any sort of unusually large IP license deals this quarter? We had some pretty good IP licensing this quarter. No, it's not. We have not seen the effect of the TCL because it just rolled out. I'm hoping. I'm very hopeful that we'll see some contribution there in the coming quarters. On your comment on billings, you mentioned that the enterprise billings would be, you know, reasonably flat this year. I assume that relates to the lack of having perpetual license. Should we assume that should pick up, or should we think of that picking up in time, as you shift over to selling the SaaS? Related to that, does that imply your double-digit billings growth for the year? That's obviously stemming from licensing in BTS. Is that correct? That is exactly correct. We expect the billings, because of ASC 606, to be pretty flat year-over-year. Yes, you will see a trend of the year after for sure. Well, that is definitely our plan. It's our expectation. It's a proper expectation. But this year, the double-digit billings growth gonna have to rely on BTS, which looks pretty solid, and the licensing recurring licensing revenue, and actually, that looks reasonably solid too. I can't guarantee anything like, you know, like the safe harbor language that Chris has recited every time, but we feel good about where we are. Okay. Thank you. I'll pass the line. Thanks. We'll take our next question from Gus Papageorgiou with Macquarie. Hey, Gus. Hey, good morning. Good morning. Can you give me an indication on the increase in revenue? Is that because is it volume, so is it more cars you're penetrating into? Or is it that the ASP is going up per car? Any color on that would be helpful. This is the BTS revenue growth. Unit count had gone up. Actually, Gus, it's a little bit of both. Unit count had gone up. As I chose one of the design win to discuss, it has to do with, you know, cluster. Actually, both of the design wins I talk about, you know, the one that we won through Denso in Japan and the one, you know, and the China electric car company, Byton, both of them are on the cluster side. As you know, the cluster ASP is higher than the traditional IVI business. The IVI unit counts are looking good too. We didn't really lose any IVI accounts. The... It's a both. We got more units and in some cases newer stuff. We even have some ADAS win. Gus? Great. Thank you very much. Sure. Yeah. Thank you. Next question. We'll take our next question from Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs. Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Mine are also on the perpetual license to subscription mix transition that's happening. I have for John or Steve, I'm hoping you can clarify it for us. If I'm a customer and I choose the subscription model, over what period of time do I break even versus the perpetual license and maintenance model? And then just a little bit of color on the billings number, the double-digit billings growth that you're seeing, what is the duration of those billings? Is the sales force incentivized to sign multi-year deals? Are there any discounts associated with billing multiple years upfront? And for the guidance assumption, what's the assumption that's embedded in there for billings? Thank you. On the contract duration. Okay. Well, on the first piece, you mentioned where the break-even point is. You know, typically, a perpetual license is roughly a 3.5-year to 4-year recurring license. You would expect a customer to have at least one more rebuying pattern to break even. After that, as I think you were alluding to, you would pass the break-even point. You'd probably need two cycles of a buying. The other part, John. The other question was related to? The duration of billings and how does that factor into our assumption for guidance? Do we incentivize the billings? We're over 14%. Do we incentivize people to go out and get multi-year deal? If they do a multi-year deal, they will be paid for the full- No. Do we incentivize? Yes, we do. Are we pushing people to do- Yes. The question is the 14% growth, are we pushing people to do multi-year deal, although we take it ratable, but, you know, so that's the- Correct. We do have the incentive is based on their total billings, and there is an incentive to drive multi-year purchasing. For guidance, are you assuming that duration in billing stays about constant or are you assuming any increase or decrease in duration assumption? Well, the billings guidance we give is on total company. In respect to this, we did not change our model for the duration of the billings. Okay. That's very helpful. The follow-up is for John on M&A. If you could just give us a little bit of an update on how you're thinking about strategic assets in, with respect to the M&A strategy. Thank you. Yeah, you know, I've always been, you know, in the last few quarters, been very consistent. Since the last year, I've been very consistent that we are looking to be active in the M&A. We've been talking to a number of companies, continue to look for strategic assets that make sense. I obviously cannot, you know, comment more about, you know, where we are discussing or looking at. You know, obviously areas of strategic interests, you know, on the cybersecurity side, on the mobile side and on the autonomous side. Thank you. I appreciate all the detail. All right. Thank you. Next one, please. We'll take our next question from Daniel Chan with TD Securities. Hey, Daniel. Hi. John, at the AGM, you talked about how you expect autonomous driving to be more of a long, slow rollout. With your strong BTS numbers, and as we look out to the second half of this year as well as next year, how should we think about BTS ramping up? Should we think of it as large step functions like we saw coming from last quarter, or should we start seeing it kind of more gradual? More gradual. I mean, I spoke many times about, you know. Well, I mean, let me put it this way, Daniel. Our plan is more gradual. Okay? That doesn't mean that we won't hit home runs to give us, you know, a bump. The three-year plan that we have, for example, in front of us are of a gradual nature. Okay, thanks. Steve, on your 8%-10% software and services guidance, that's under- Yeah. The new ASC 606, right? Do you know what that expectation would have looked like under the old accounting rules, just so we have some sort of apples-to-apples comparison on your guidance numbers? Well, we really haven't done a comparable that way because with the lack of getting perpetual licenses, you know, it's hard to configure. In a short answer, I would say if you took 20%-30% of our business called a perpetual and say that a more recurring license would be half that size, that might be the difference. You know, maybe it would be if revenues were flat, you may have 10%-10% growth, that type of parameter. Okay, thanks. We'll take our next question from Steven Li with Raymond James. Hey, Steve. Hey, thanks. Steve, just to clarify, and I think I missed it. If you were still under ASC 605, did you say your enterprise revenues would have been down by 11%? Well, that's taken into consideration that there would be no perpetual licenses, so that's what puts you in that same spot. You see, you can't make an easy conversion from perpetual to recurring. That's the difference. Right, because that comparison there is missing a perpetual license component that you might have had in Q1. Correct. Okay. I did hear you. You said it was down 11% under ASC 605. If you had Q1 under ASC 605. Correct. Well, under 606. Okay, wait. 11% under 606. Q1 2018 last year, if that was under 606 and compare it to this year, you would be down 11%. Yes. That would be a good comparison, right? Because then last year you would any perpetual that was in last year's Q1 would be relatively recognized. I think we're generalizing a number of parameters because in perpetual, if we sell something perpetual, the numbers are actually much higher than either single year or two years recurring. You know, the ASPs in perpetuals are usually higher. You know, you can't really do the strict math, so to speak, because you're comparing a higher ASP to a lower ASP expectation of more recurring. Right. Okay. No, makes sense. Okay. What is the impact on EBITDA or is there any impact on EBITDA from 606? It would be the EBITDA as we've reported, so that would be 14%. Okay. No, converting from ASC 605 to ASC 606, is there any impact on EBITDA? Not if you're considering the same revenue numbers. That's why there wouldn't be. We Okay. We haven't tried to, you know, make a complete modification running through the P&L. Yeah, we didn't really look at that, what the impact is. We know we have to report in 606, so didn't really calculate it down to the EBITDA, attention. Okay. No worries. Just my follow-up on Eddie, what was the contribution from Radar this quarter, and what was handheld devices of $8 million? Thanks. Well, the contribution of radar is small because the radar numbers are small. Radar just happened to have, you know, continuous growth in their number, in the, you know, the number of trials and number of wins and the repeat buy and so. Compared to QNX, obviously in the auto space, that's not a comparison. It's insignificant for that matter. And the handset with some of the contracts that we have signed, you know, have a, you know, a time for it to expire. Once it's expired, then we have to reconcile, you know, kind of who owns who, what money and all that. It so happened that we have it on our balance sheets, something that could be released because the fact is, you know, the contract ended with one particular carrier that we have no more further obligations. You see some of those, but you're gonna see less and less going forward. It's definitely not something we should depend on or rely on at all. Okay. Very helpful. Thank you. Okay, sure. We'll take our last question from James Faucette with Morgan Stanley. Hi. Hi, this is Eugene Anderson on for James, actually. Thanks for taking my question. Sure. A question on the licensing business. For the rest of the year, how should we think about the mix between, ramp-up in devices versus, say, you know, any incremental transactions that you might have in the pipeline? Right now the IP are as I talk about last quarter, we're gonna be a little bit better than $100 million run rate. Deals are all identified, or maybe one or two smaller transaction that might come in and might not. But irregardless of that, we expect to do a little bit better than $100 million in that IP world. The rest all come from licensing then. Obviously, you would see that that means that it have to grow year-over-year. Got it. Okay. That's helpful. Just a quick question on gross margins. The sequential decline from last quarter, is that just a function of the accounting change there or is there another variable that we should be thinking about? Oh, it's really a function of the revenue. The software revenue in Q4 was higher than in Q1, and that's what really drove the margin difference. That's more seasonal. Right. That's more seasonal because we, you know, our Q4- Is typically strong. was a big quarter. Okay. Got it. Thanks. Thanks so much. Sure. Okay. Since we have to wrap up the call, but I'd like to thank everybody for joining us today. Before I close the call off, I'd like to mention our upcoming Security Summit. You know, given that in 2018 we had very high demand for attendance last year. We're now again hosting two Security Summit events, the first one in London during September and the second one in New York during October. I look forward to seeing you all at the events. Thank you very much for your time. Have a great day. This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.