So just by way of background, BlackBerry is a $520 million revenue company founded in the 1980s, and it's really become a leading intelligent security software and services provider to businesses all around the world. Our focus today is going to be more on the car. And through their QNX division, BlackBerry has become a critical enabler of software-defined vehicles, providing safety-critical real-time operating systems and hypervisor solutions. So in other words, their software sits between the hardware, the silicon, or the domain controller and the applications that OEMs or other third parties may create. And in many ways, QNX has become the go-to OS provider for automakers, given their reliability, the high performance, and the strong safety track record. They're deployed on over 255 million vehicles on the road today.
They work with more than 45 global car makers, 24 out of the 25 top EV manufacturers, and virtually all the Tier 1 suppliers. And we'll discuss this in a minute, but QNX is really transitioning into more of a platform provider, leveraging their engineering expertise to provide applications and even cloud-based services. All of this is happening at the same time they've made great operational strides, closing the recent sale of Cylance, tracking toward $60 million-$70 million in EBITDA this recent fiscal year, and even now generating free cash flow. So here to discuss QNX and how the software and vehicle architectures are poised to evolve over the next few years, we've got John Wall, the Chief Operating Officer of QNX and Head of Product Engineering, and Tim Foote, the Chief Financial Officer. So welcome, guys.
Thank you.
Thanks, Ryan.
So maybe just to start, what's changed over the past year? What does BlackBerry QNX do now, and how does it relate to automotive, just to help set the table for us?
Sure, I'll take that one. So this has been a really transformational year for BlackBerry. We went through a process of dividing the business. So you mentioned around about the QNX side of the business, but we also have another part of the business that was previously focused on cybersecurity. And effectively, they're very different businesses. So we went through a process to make sure they're very separate and be able to focus clearly on their end market and the opportunities that they have. In the process, we were able to take out a significant amount of cost, particularly on the cybersecurity side of the business. We've taken out around $135 million of cost from our ongoing run rate. And to your point, we've managed to achieve both profitability and also positive free cash flow for the first time in three years. So significant transformation.
Recently, we noted that after doing all this work on the cybersecurity side of the house, we managed to get it to break even. Within there, there were four different product groups, one of which is a product called Cylance, which is endpoint security. Endpoint security, very competitive, difficult market to gain scale and traction. Ultimately, our Cylance business was subscale. Looking at that break even, we had part of the business, Cylance, that was losing approximately $50 million of EBITDA per year, and the rest of it was making about $50 million. We've just closed on a transaction to sell Cylance. We think it's a great transaction for both parties. Arctic Wolf, the buyer, gets an asset, which helps them scale their TAM. We get to remove the burn that we've been experiencing, but also we get to keep tax losses.
We get $120 million of cash at close and another $40 million a year from now. And it puts us in just a much different position as a company. But when we think about the last few years, most of the focus and investment of the company has really been on the cybersecurity side. With the sale of Cylance, we now have a business there that's Secure Comms, as we're calling it, that's profitable and stable. And it allows us to change our focus towards the QNX side of the house. This is a business that we're really excited about. John Wall's going to give a lot more color than I can on this, but it's our number one capital allocation priority now going forward, and we think that we've got a great opportunity there.
So maybe, John, in terms of what QNX does in automotive, do you want to take that?
Sure, absolutely. I mean, so QNX has traditionally been an operating system company. So we've expanded our portfolio operating system, hypervisor. We have a number of middleware components, QNX Sound. We have things that are very specific to ADAS, such as sensor frameworks. So we have really been focused on providing the highest performance operating system. So our target is Linux. We want the product to be as performant as Linux, but also maintain the real-time attributes, which are very important for systems like ADAS within the vehicle, but also maintain that functional safety, which is critical and the highest level of security. So that's kind of where we're starting from. But we're seeing a lot of more opportunities now that we're seeing kind of the struggle in software within the vehicle that we'll touch upon.
Yeah, that's actually good dovetail because I'm curious, when we were talking last year at the same conference, you talked a lot about some of the struggles OEMs are facing, particularly when it came to middleware and integration.
Yep.
I'm curious, 12 months forward, is that still a major challenge or have you seen?
No, it's absolutely still a major challenge. And at CES, we announced what we call a vehicle platform. And that platform is specifically to address that problem. And if you looked at that press release, you'll note it's not just QNX on its own. It's QNX with other industry players that we see typically in the programs. And the idea here is to provide a hardware-agnostic platform that takes care of a lot of what we call plumbing that is necessary for every ECU within the vehicle. So things like diagnostics, logging, lifecycle management. These are a lot of the areas that the OEMs and the Tier 1s were sourcing from different players than having to put it together. Now we're getting together with these companies directly. We're creating the most optimized integrations to provide the highest performance.
We're providing a safety case for the entire platform, whereas normally you'd get a safety case for every individual component. And this is really the area that the OEMs have struggled. It's not at the application layer. It's at this very base layer.
And then maybe to think about how to put this in the context of the QNX business model, right? I mean, in a nutshell, I think typically it's basically you sign an award with an OEM. There's two to three years of pre-production. You get licensing and engineering revenue during that period, and then the program runs for five to seven years, and you collect royalties per vehicle produced. So A, just how to think about the revenue buckets typically between those three areas, but then in the context of this platform, how does that change?
Yeah, okay. So I'll start. Maybe you want to talk about the platform. But so yeah, we do have three revenue buckets. So when we win a design, at the outset of the design, effectively an OEM will purchase from us a software development kit, the tools you need to develop on top of the QNX platform. So that's what we call our development seat. And that's around about 20-ish percent of the overall pie. Whilst they're developing the software, they'll consume engineering services from us. And that's another 20%. And that's kind of consumed over that two to three-year development cycle. So that, by the time the vehicle's ready to produce, we've taken about 40% of the revenue. From there, every time a vehicle gets shipped, we'll generate a royalty. And that pie, that royalty bucket, is around about 60% of the total economics.
That production run could run from three to five years in commercial vehicles. It could be even longer, up to 10 years. And when we report our backlog metric, which is currently at $815 million, we're due to refresh that number pretty shortly, that is purely about that royalty piece. So that's incredibly high margin. It's pretty much 100% margin. And it's obviously the main focus of the business. But John, do you want to speak to the?
From the platform perspective?
Yeah, the platform perspective.
The platform approach will not necessarily change the model itself, but what it will do is we will be the reseller of the platform, so this will increase the ASP because we'll have partner modules, we'll have our own additional modules, and the theory behind the platform is the value is more than the sum of the parts because there's also an integration, time to market, that hardware-agnostic, so we anticipate being able to increase, obviously, the ARPU significantly with this platform. From a business model perspective, given the need for over-the-air software updates, given the high security requirements these days, there is a talk about a subscription post-SOP because you're not necessarily going to be adding to the platform on a continuous basis.
I mean, today, I think the use of OTA is pretty limited, but it will be coming, and security is going to drive a lot of it.
And so for you guys, though, the opportunity could be to, because it's a platform, there's an opportunity for you to upsell more of your value add.
Absolutely, and there could be specific things for specific domains. For instance, in a Digital Cockpit, you have our Sound product that would be an upsell. The other thing that we're doing that I think is pretty interesting is we announced a program called QNX Everywhere that makes our product available for use for free for non-commercial use. So with the platform, we're looking to underpin a lot of open-source initiatives in the market. So there's Eclipse SDV, there's SOAFEE, there's Score being driven by BMW. The idea here is we will make our tooling and our platform available to all these initiatives.
Maybe coming back to the point, you talked about the backlog, $815 million. I'm guessing that number will be higher, but we'll find out in a few weeks, I guess, but about $500 million of that added in the last two years, but about $20 million of that is converting into revenue this year. There's kind of a long tail here. I'm just wondering, is that a function of the automotive product cycles, or are there challenges that OEMs need to overcome that won't really be solved until maybe 2028 or something like that?
Yeah, and so it's a great question. So yeah, the momentum in the backlog has been really quite astonishing. We've been adding to it around about a 33% CAGR over the last couple of years. So that's a reflection of just how well-positioned QNX is in this market. We've been winning across the board with much bigger designs than we've ever had in the past. But to your point, yeah, not a lot of that net new stuff that we've added recently has actually reached the P&L yet. But that is in part the fact that from the point from design win to start production is typically two to three years. So the revenue growth that we're seeing at this point doesn't have an awful lot of that backlog coming through at this point.
But John, I don't know if you want to speak to the impact of just general headwinds in the market.
Yeah, I mean, normal time period is two to three years, but programs have been delayed by a year, 18 months, which in the automotive industry, that was unheard of 10 years ago. You did not delay a product launch of a vehicle. It was a big deal. It goes to show how much of a struggle this is for the car makers. We've seen CARIAD. We've seen what's happening at GM. I believe that the car makers are getting much better. Part of the reason that we created this software platform for the car is not because we think it's a good idea. We did, and we developed the concept in 2019, but the OEMs weren't ready for it. They wanted to do software. Now, this is a pull.
This is a car maker saying, "We need you to do this, and we need you to provide this." So we're not actually going out and looking to create this for them. They're telling us they need us to do this, that they're wasting far too much time on software that nobody cares about, quite honestly. It just needs to work. It does nothing for their brand. And a BMW board member called it, "We spend too much time in the underwear of software." Those exact words.
I mean, maybe dovetails to my next question, which is there was an interesting presentation slide in the Investor Day deck where you kind of sized up the serviceable market, and there were two pieces of that. There's kind of like your core business, which is the OS and middleware application part, which I think is about $2 billion today. You see that growing to $3 billion by calendar 2028. So maybe just that part first, what's kind of driving that uptake? Because I mean, you're already very strong in that part of the market.
Yeah, it's more software in the car. I mean, it's quite straightforward. I mean, we started with digital cockpit. We've moved to ADAS. And believe it or not, when we talk about ADAS, there's very few cars on the road today that have an integrated ADAS system. These are coming. Most of them today are still individual ECUs running on microprocessors. There's that. There's gateways. Now we're starting to talk about zonal controllers. We're starting to talk about camera systems that are smart, LiDAR systems that are smart, that QNX is running on a LiDAR. So it's just more opportunity, more software in the vehicle. It's just naturally growing.
Okay. And then the other part of it was what would you refer to as the strategic investments, right, which are around like the platform services, some of the applications, kind of as you're moving up the software and the cloud stack, the $400 million serviceable market today, but that could be $3 billion by 2028, so a huge increase. I'm curious, what distinguishes QNX in these areas from some of the other?
Yeah. So I mean, one of our big plays is obviously the platform, but the platform also ties into the cloud. If we're going to create a platform that is hardware-agnostic, then it's got to be a cloud-first platform. And that's how we do the development, is the platform is developed in the cloud, and then it's moved to hardware. And so developing in the cloud forces you to take a hardware-agnostic approach. So what we're seeing from a development perspective from the OEMs, and not just automotive, but in other markets as well, is cloud development is where everything is headed. That is how people are going to develop in the future. It solves so many problems, logistics of managing hardware, logistics of managing versions, logistics of managing tools. You have a centralized repo that everyone around the world can access and do their development.
So we did a press release with Stellantis' last CES where they talked about it increased their velocity of development by 100x . So that is growing. It's hard to put a number on it, but we believe this is core to what we're doing. So we have our operating system, our hypervisor running in Azure and AWS.
And.
There's also things like Sound.
Sure, absolutely. I mean, some of the smaller bets that we're making like around Sound, our belief is the OEMs are going to move away from these amplifiers that manage the Sound, that there's enough horsepower now on the Qualcomm chips on the head units. This really runs at the whim of when the OEMs are ready to do it. But why are we well-positioned? Because it's integrated into our platform. And so if you're trying to reduce the number of vendors you're dealing with, and this is a real thing, I mean, the OEMs traditionally had one throat to choke. They had the Tier 1. Now that they're sourcing, there's lots of fingers being pointed, and this is part of the challenge. And so they still very much would like to be able to source a pre-integrated solution. So I think our advantages were already there.
I mean, on that point, I mean, as this ecosystem is going to evolve, what do you see the role of the OEMs, but then also some of the Tier 1s, right? Because QNX Sound, for example, is disrupting what a Tier 1 would normally do.
Absolutely. Especially a Tier 1 who provides amplifiers. In general, the changes that we're seeing in the market is obviously we're dealing with the OEM directly. So we're doing our licensing with the OEM directly. Depending on the OEM, some are doing all of the development themselves. Some are still using Tier 1s to maybe build hardware, provide some level of software. But the OEMs, I would say in aggregate, are very focused on owning the applications.
We'll pivot to a few other topics in a minute, but just curious on QNX, we've been focusing on the auto side, but non-automotive is about 18% of the revenue. It's growing. Just curious how you think about the serviceable market or the TAM in that area, and what do you see as some of the opportunities for QNX?
Yeah, so we actually see a lot of opportunity in what we call the General Embedded Market. Many people might not know this, but QNX prior to 2000 was a GEM company. We were providing software for industrial automation, medical, et cetera. Very fragmented market. It's a different go-to-market, I would say. Channel partners are important. So board vendors because it's lower volumes, but many more customers. But what we're seeing is the same thing we've seen in automotive. The customers are now looking to move to the next generation silicon, which means multi-core, which QNX addresses very well. Our new SDP 8 product, it scales one to one as the number of cores increase all the way up to 256 cores. So Linux-like performance, Linux-like scalability that the current incumbents that are RTOSs can't address.
So we see a lot of opportunity, especially with some of the bigger players in the industrial automation market. We already have a very healthy business in medical, but we see robotics as a very interesting market because cooperative robots, there is a safety standard that's coming out. And so we're this year making a lot of investments in product management, in go-to-market, in packaging our software for those different markets. So we feel that the General Embedded Market could be a very big market for us and help smooth out the ups and downs of automotive.
Yeah, this is definitely an area. So I mentioned number one, capital allocation priority shares. This is an area we're definitely leaning into this year. I mean, fundamentally, John, you keep me honest here, but the code base of QNX is the same. They're using it in automotive or elsewhere. Sometimes you have to support different chipsets.
Partnerships in that are different in some cases, but more or less, it's the same thing. The same challenges.
So that's why we see it as a go-to-market kind of issue, and that's why we're leaning in hard on that.
Yeah, but not so much leaning in from an R&D perspective.
No, no, no. From an R&D perspective, we're looking more what does a package look like for medical? It could be the boards we support, but the operating system is exactly the same. It could also be the partnerships. Do we have to partner with the Bluetooth stack, or do we have to partner for this? It's really from an R&D perspective, there's no additional code being written. It's packaging, and then it's the go-to-market, and it's the awareness in those markets about QNX.
Exactly.
Maybe pivoting to the secure communications part of the business. About half the revenue of the company. It's not an area that auto investors are probably as familiar with. Maybe you could just kind of talk a little bit about it. It's something that you've built up through M&A, and it's a sizable TAM. I think you've talked about $46 billion. You're playing in maybe about 10% of that. So just maybe talk about what BlackBerry is doing here, where you mainly focus your efforts, and where you see the big opportunity.
Yeah, great question. So obviously, for those of you who remember BlackBerry more as a phone company, at the heart of it was the security aspect. The keyboard was one thing, but the security was another. We still maintain that. Obviously, we're not making phones anymore, but the products we have, Cylance, now we've sold that business. They're very focused around similar type of customer, typically large government or highly secure financial services, legal practices, this type of highly demanding security customer. There are three main products in there. One is called Unified Endpoint Management, or UEM, which is about really controlling the data that goes to individuals' phones, particularly if you've got a bring-your-own-device type policy. The next one is called AtHoc, which is Critical Events Management. So think of this as AMBER Alerts on steroids. It's how we talk about it. Highly secure two-way communication.
For instance, during the Capitol riots of a couple of years ago, there's a picture actually of a message going out on, I think it was on Nancy Pelosi's monitor that was using AtHoc. We're number one in federal in that market, U.S. Federal, and we see opportunities to grow that outside of that market. Thirdly, we've got a product called Secusmart. This is really highly encrypted voice product, and it's used really by military, government agencies, Secret S ervice type applications. Collectively, we see synergy here because of the customer base. The Cylance business was very different. It was much more an SMB type play. This we see some opportunities. What we've done is we've streamlined the organization effectively to go after our target customers. Each of those three products have a particular sweet spot. UEM is really targeted at on-premise solutions.
It's really the only show in town. AtHoc, obviously, I mentioned the U.S. Federal, but some near adjacencies for that, things like blue lights, so police, fire, ambulance. We're seeing a lot of success moving into that market too because there's a lot of synergy, and then the Secusmart product is actually kind of a greenfield product in so much as a lot of people are using WhatsApp for this type of communication and don't realize that it's just not as secure as they think it is, so we're talking to a number of leading governments around the world. We had some recent success in Malaysia and an Eastern European country that took it on as well, so we see opportunities in each of these different businesses, but ultimately, as I mentioned, QNX is kind of our crown jewel.
So the main focus for me right now for the secure communications business, profitability and cash flow. So Secusmart, we think this should be a very solid business. We'll give some updated guidance of what we think we can generate. But at our investor day, we mentioned that this remaining side of the business was producing around about $50 million of EBITDA in cash each year. So clearly, if you're generating that from this business, hopefully more over time if we can grow it, that can be deployed in a number of different interesting ways in terms of other parts of the business.
Maybe on Cylance, this was a business you acquired in 2018. You divested it this most recent quarter. It was doing about $80 million of revenue, but I think it was losing about $50 million of EBITDA, right? The logic is not hard to understand. I think I'm curious about the deal structure because you've divested it to Arctic Wolf, but you've also taken equity in Arctic Wolf as well. Curious about the deal structure and then how should investors be valuing the stake in Arctic Wolf. It's a little bit hard.
Yeah, it's a good question. So lots of things that we're very happy about in terms of deal structure. So obviously, we mentioned the headline numbers, the $80 million of cash at close and $40 million a year after. The equity in Arctic Wolf, clearly, it's not a public company. So there's different ways of determining fair value for book reporting. So we'll be at the prudent end of that. So when we release our 10-K shortly, we'll obviously record that. We'll take a fairly prudent view there. But their CEO, Nick, has publicly stated that they're looking to IPO in the very near future. So hopefully that will crystallize and we'll get some further upside to this deal. A couple of other angles though that aren't as apparent. So clearly, Cylance was losing money, as you've outlined. That generated a lot of tax losses.
We've actually retained all those tax losses, which provides a very strong, effective shield for profitability in the United States for us, so BlackBerry Canada has a lot of NOLs. Now BlackBerry in the U.S. has got a lot of NOLs, and finally, we get to retain the patents, which over time, BlackBerry has generated a huge amount of patents, like nearly 40,000 patents. Cylance, in particular, was a pioneer in using AI technology in endpoint security, so we believe that there could be some potential upside to maintaining that as well. But to your earlier point, we were subscale. Simply to generate money in that market, you need to be huge, and we were faced with the choice or to get to being that kind of scale, we're going to have to increase the burn for a significant period of time.
And we just didn't have the appetite for that, particularly when you've got a business that we're as excited about in QNX. We just think it's a much better idea to focus our attention on that side, deal with the burn, and get the Secure Comms business being profitable.
Maybe coming back to QNX and just at an industry level, in the investor day, there was an interesting chart looking at where the industry is in the transition towards consolidated compute architectures. And basically, it looked like we were, at least most legacy OEMs were maybe three to five years away from really getting up to either a multi-domain or zonal architecture. Is that kind of a fair way to look at it? So maybe end of this decade is sort of when you'd.
Yeah. I think the first that we've seen is Digital Cockpit. That's a reality. There's car shopping. Not every car, there's car shopping. If you look at most ADAS systems, so every car company is working on a consolidated ADAS platform. However, if you drive off the lot today, a 2025 car, it's likely to still be discrete systems handling Lane Keep Assist. They tend to launch those programs in, I would say, low volume vehicles like an S-Class or a BMW 7 Series. They get some mileage on that, and then they end up going to more pervasive, so we're starting to see these systems launch at the end of this year with some of the car makers, so I think you'll start to see Digital Cockpit, ADAS, pervasive as consolidated platforms in the 2028 timeframe. Zonal controller is still early days.
It's still early days, but there are a lot of other opportunities within the vehicle. There's smart sensors, smart LiDAR, smart radar, surround views. We have wins in these areas as well. What is consistent is there's more software on high performance compute within the vehicle. Whether you call it zonal controller or not zonal controller, whether you call it centralized compute, everybody has different names. It's confusing, but just know there's more MPUs and more safety software required, whether it's these different platforms. Everybody's got different names for them, but by 2030, I think you're going to see that kind of promise of three to five big MPUs handling most of the functions in the vehicle.
Okay. Are there any questions?
You have a strong presence in China. If you see China really with Huawei and so on, they're taking over the architecture, and then they're also entering the software space and so on. Do you see a big risk to QNX and especially Hypervisor as a platform in China? Because if you look at the latest vehicles, they're trying to replace your systems.
Yeah. So we are definitely Hypervisor, for sure, because Hypervisor is a much lighter lift. The operating system is a much more difficult lift. What we're seeing within China is obviously they're going fast, and so safety is less of a concern. And they're going fast because there's so much competition within China. There's so many OEMs. What we are seeing is if the vehicle is destined for export, then they focus more on safety, and they would tend to use QNX. Now, are there solutions coming up that could replace QNX? The feedback that we get is there's nobody within three to five years of us. But that doesn't mean it won't change going forward. I'm much more concerned about the macro situation than losing on a technical basis in China. Tariffs, whether we will be able to sell software in China in the future.
Those issues are much more concerning to me than necessarily losing the Chinese market.
Okay, great. Maybe we can have a few more minutes here, but maybe we can just pivot to the operations of the company. The last 12 months have been pretty impressive. You've executed sizable cost reduction programs. I think you've taken out $135 million of run rate cost, reduced the corporate cost by $12 million over the last two years. And you're doing this while you're growing QNX and cyber, obviously high margin. I think if you look at BlackBerry QNX combined today, you're doing $60 million-$70 million of EBITDA ex Cylance. The target for 2027 is $80 million-$95 million. If I have those numbers right. So I guess, is there upside potential basically to 2027? Because it would seem like if you already had 60 or 70, you could be getting well above that in four years.
Yeah, it's a great question and to echo my earlier comments, I think the transformation in the past year has been really quite something. We'll come back and give revised guidance. I won't get into specifics, but directionally, I do think there is upside, and the reason I think that is, as QNX scales, I see a lot of operating leverage in that model, so we're currently running R&D at a pretty healthy pace. John's spending all the money over here. We brought a lot of product to market in the last 12, 24 months, so SDP 8, the new version, high performance, scalable version of QNX. Sound, the cloud version of product. QNX Everywhere is being launched. We're doing a lot of stuff, and we're running R&D at near 30%, which is pretty high.
But as we go forward and we see revenue growing, which as we expect it to, we don't need to scale that dollar for dollar. And actually, we see leverage there. Similarly, on G&A, as you'd expect, I think we're going to need to put some extra dollars into sales and marketing, particularly as John mentioned on the go-to-market side of GEM, these adjacent verticals outside of automotive. I think we do need to invest there. But I see a lot of the incremental revenue coming out of QNX just dropping straight to the bottom line. Similarly, as I mentioned, we're looking to really generate as much profit as we can from the Secure Comms business. And then there's the corporate costs. So squeezing hard on that and looking for opportunities everywhere.
So yeah, I think it's a story that we now have a very solid base, very profitable company and generating cash. And I think there's potential upside as we go forward and scale as well.
Yeah, and then maybe on the point of cash, you are generating cash now, which is great. You're getting your debt balance down to a healthier level, so as you think about the next few years, what are the priorities for cash?
Yeah, it's a really good question. Obviously, we need to know we've got some more money in the bank from the Cylance deal. It's something we have to discuss with the board. But what we've been saying is we'll look at maybe some tuck-in type acquisitions around the QNX side, particularly if it can help us scale the TAM a little bit. But there's also opportunities for things like share buybacks or even potentially dividends as well. But it's a great position to be in. It's a question I was definitely not getting a year ago. So it's a good question to have. But yeah, watch this space on that one.
Great. I think we're pretty much out of time at this point. So with that, we'll wrap it up. But thanks a lot, guys. Really appreciate you taking the time.
Thank you.