Good morning and welcome to NTG Clarity's Q3 2025 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Ali Farouk, Analyst at NTG Clarity. On the agenda for today's call, we'll start with management's prepared remarks on our financial and operating results for the three months and nine months ending September 30, 2025. We'll then have a Q&A period answering questions from covering analysts and investors. Note that the full published report with audited Financial Statements, Notes, and Management Discussion is available on SEDAR and our website at www.ntgclarity.com. This presentation aims to highlight and summarize the key information already reported there. We will be posting both the slides and a recording of the presentation on our website following the call, so make sure to subscribe to our mailing lists on our investor page on our website to get notified when those are available.
If you have a question that does not get answered, please reach out to adam@ntgclarity.com, and we will get you an answer after the call. With that said, I will be welcoming management for our remarks shortly, but first, I will start with a quick disclaimer. Certain statements in this presentation, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking information that involves various risks and uncertainties. Such statements relating to, among other things, the prospects for the company to enhance operating results are necessarily subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which are significant in scope and nature. These uncertainties may cause actual results to differ from information contained herein. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate. Actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.
These are all subsequent written and oral forward-looking statements, are based on the estimates and opinions of the management on the dates they are made and expressly qualified in their entirety by this notice. The company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements should circumstances or management's estimates or opinions change. In this presentation, we also make reference to non-IFRS or non-GAAP financial measures that management believes are useful supplemental measures but not alternative to net income and operating cash flow. Please see the non-IFRS measures section towards the end of this presentation, our press release, and our MD&A for details and reconciliation of non-IFRS measures to IFRS measures. With that, I'd like to invite Adam Zaghloul, Vice President Strategy and Planning, to begin his remarks.
All right. Thank you very much, Ali, and thank you to everybody who is tuning in to our Q3 2025 Earnings Conference Call. You know, I'm coming to you live from NTG's office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to really give an update on what we see as another strong quarter of growth. You know, Q3 marked 18 consecutive quarters of last 12 months' revenue growth. Our rolling 12-month, last 12-month revenue reached CAD 77 million, so we're definitely well on our way to meeting our full-year guidance of about CAD 78 million. What comes with this 18-month track record is reflected, or at least a reflection of our reputation and sustained demand for digital transformation really across Saudi Arabia and all of our Gulf Markets that we serve as well.
I think that the growth that we've seen this quarter and really over the last 18 quarters really demonstrates our client relationships and the importance that our clients put on the work that NTG does for them, or the work that NTG's resources does for them as well. I also want to just say a big thank you to the whole NTG team. You know, 18 consecutive quarters of last 12 months' revenue growth is a great achievement, and it wouldn't have been possible without all the hard work that people in Egypt, people here in Riyadh, everybody in all of NTG's offices is contributing to. My hats off to the NTG team as well.
Over the course of the year to date, we have been, you know, trying to stay focused on what we see as three key strategic priorities, and we really have been executing on all of them successfully, especially this quarter and year to date as well. The 1st one is to continue to, I would say, solidify ourselves as a trusted partner in digital transformation for some of our existing customers and expand our engagements with them. That has been showcased in really the amount of customers that we're working with that have increased their engagements with us. So far, year to date, 63% of our customers have actually increased the scope of their engagement. They've been giving us more work. They've been trusting us and the quality of services that we've been providing, and we're very eager to grow with them, for sure.
The second key priority is to expand our customer base, is to win new customers. A lot of the times, that's through referrals and word of mouth from existing satisfied customers. But so far, this quarter compared to last quarter, as in Q3 2024, we saw a 10% increase in the absolute number of accounts that we're servicing. Now, I caveat by saying that these accounts don't meet the CAD 100,000 per year threshold that we use to consider accounts clients in our metrics or customers in our metrics, but they are important 1st steps in, you know, getting those early-stage engagements going, even if they're smaller scale, to be able to scale them to the level that some of our other customers have scaled to. So we're really excited to be onboarding new customers. You know, an example of a new account is this quarter in Q3.
Back in September, we signed a three-year frame agreement with a brand new customer to provide digital transformation services. You know, it's noteworthy because, you know, it's probably the 1st time that a new customer has been comfortable signing a three-year engagement. It really goes to show just how our reputation precedes us in the market and how a lot of customers are eager to work with NTG. The third focus of the year is going to be really driving an increase in business to our NTG Apps proprietary software line of business. Of course, what comes with that is, yes, some great new revenue growth, but also potential margin expansion for higher margin software activities. So far, for the Q3 2025, we saw an over 650% year-over-year increase in revenue, and that brings the year-to-date increase in NTG Apps revenue specifically to 562%.
We're really excited to see the NTG Apps line continue to be attractive to a lot of our customers. Really, definitely what's been the case in Q3 is we've made evident a lot of our work towards a multi-year strategy to diversify our revenue base sort of beyond Saudi Arabia while also scaling up our ability and our ability to deliver our delivery infrastructure to support the growth really across the entire Gulf region. Now, our Egypt-based delivery model is something that we see as equally applicable to other countries in the Gulf outside of Saudi Arabia. Some of these other countries in the Gulf are pursuing digital transformation strategies for their economy, just like Saudi Arabia is. You know, I can give a couple of examples. The UAE has what they're billing as We, the UAE 2031.
A big part of that is economic diversification and a focus on technology. You know, Iraq as well, where we're already doing some business, has what they're billing as their national development plan for 2024 through 2028. They explicitly state that their goal is to digitize services and leverage technology to increase productivity in sectors like manufacturing and agriculture and really industry as a whole. There are huge market tailwinds supported by the government into digital transformation. To capitalize on these, in Q3, we established an office in Baghdad, Iraq, and a legal entity. It complements our existing presence in the north of Iraq in Sulaymaniyah, but this expansion positions us to capitalize on the excelling digital transformation in, you know, Iraq's government sector, telecommunications, and finance sectors as well in Baghdad as well.
In the UAE, you know, we also established a corporate entity in Dubai to pursue some opportunities with some organizations in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. You know, we're working on proof of concepts, specifically using our AI technology around, you know, testing automation and AI-based testing as well, which we're really excited about. Just at a more high level, over the quarter, we've also expanded our brand's reach by attending some key regional technology conferences. These include ITEX in Baghdad, Iraq, GITEX in Dubai, and the Global Health Exhibition in Riyadh. We are really focused on strengthening our brand awareness and recognition across all of these markets that we're targeting.
In the quarter, the rest of Middle East revenue that we see here, so that's revenue coming from outside of Saudi Arabia, grew 50% year-over-year, a little bit faster than the company as a whole, representing approximately CAD 900,000 for the quarter. It's still a relatively small contributor, just under 5% of our total revenue, but it's encouraging to see this sort of promising early traction from this side of things. That's, you know, the sales side. On the delivery side, you know, we're also expanding the scale of our Egypt offshore center. Through expansions throughout the quarter, it brought us to nine total floors of office space across four different locations in Cairo. We definitely are expanding our footprint in Cairo for sure and in Egypt.
We're also starting to think about other places where it starts to make sense to have a delivery center as well. In Q3, we opened an office and began hiring some resources out of Madinah, Saudi Arabia, on the west coast there. The idea behind this is Saudi's Vision 2030 is, you know, part focused on digitizing every aspect of its economy, right, and driving economic diversification. A key pillar is going to be employing, training, educating Saudi locals to be able to fill these technical roles. You'll actually be able to find a lot of benefits and subsidies in hiring Saudi nationals. We're intending to use our Madinah office as a sort of Pilot Operation for a Madinah nearshore office. We're hiring Saudi nationals, giving them the training, benefiting from these sort of government benefits.
Through those benefits, we're able to, you know, maintain cost effectiveness and cost competitiveness as well. I'm looking forward to, you know, sharing some further updates in the future about expanding our delivery center as well. Overall, I would say these investments in both the sales side and the delivery side are pretty deliberate in our long-term growth strategy. You know, we want to reduce geographic concentration, take advantage of all of the tailwinds in the region, and really expand our addressable market to maintain our status as the sort of Middle Eastern digital transformation pure play. I'll start talking about the financials. Revenue for the quarter came in at CAD 20.9 million, which is a 42% year-over-year increase.
Revenue growth was definitely led by our really increasingly popular offshore services, which came in at an 82% year-over-year growth, as well as the NTG Apps growth that I mentioned before, year-over-year up 685% for the quarter. You know, we're pretty happy with these trends for sure, trending towards our higher margin lines of business, especially NTG Apps, which now makes up 13% of year-to-date revenue compared to just 3% for the same nine months in the previous year. On the gross margin line, we saw gross margin come in at just about 35%, driving overall gross profit up about 32%. Now, the gross margin came in at the low end of our typical, you know, mid-to-high 30s gross margin historical range, primarily due to the mix of revenue. You know, we had fewer software implementation projects and sequentially fewer NTG Apps projects as well.
You know, needless to say, it's still well within the, you know, expected band that we can look to expect in the future for sure. With that in mind, you know, I'm very happy to reaffirm the revenue guidance that we put out. We are well on our way to meeting our full-year revenue guidance. Again, that guidance is CAD 78 million for the year 2025, which represents about 40% year-over-year growth, as well as about CAD 20 million more in annual revenue. I'll turn to the Operating Expenses next. What we have, what we've seen in Operating Expenses is an increase to about 24% of revenue, up from about 17% of revenue a year ago. The largest driver is definitely G&A expenses, which increased to approximately 17% of revenue, up from 11% last year.
Last year was definitely closer to our optimal cost structure, with almost all of our, you know, technologists being billable and deployed and not very many resources sitting on the bench. As we talked about previously, we've been strategically hiring, extending our talent pool to staff some major projects that we see coming down the pipeline, and we anticipate to close to. We've got what we would say is strong visibility on them, but it is taking longer than maybe expected to sign off on these contracts, longer than we had anticipated. That being said, we are still fully confident in these contracts closing and being signed off in the very near future. Aside from talent pool expansion, we also invested in geographic expansion that I mentioned in one of the previous slides.
You know, these costs are a mixture of both one-time legal fees and office setup costs, but also, you know, some ongoing office and support staff costs that are going to hit us going forward. In the long term, we really expect these investments to pay off in growing in an ever-digitizing Middle Eastern economy for sure. I will talk about the sales and marketing side as well. G&A was definitely the driver of increased OpEx, but our sales and marketing is sitting at a pretty sustainable level. You know, this quarter, we were only slightly above our, you know, target range of what we see being 5% or 6% of revenue. Moving on to profitability, you know, the net income for the quarter before taxes sat at about CAD 2.4 million compared to CAD 2.1 million the quarter before.
Of course, in 2025, we are paying both Saudi and Canadian income tax, bringing the net income down to CAD 1.9 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter came in at about 12% of revenue. The major difference between adjusted EBITDA is taxes. And just a quick note that, you know, there were some expenses this quarter around consultants related to our tax planning situation. I have no real material update on our plan to reduce our overall tax burden, but just know it is in progress, and I hope to share an update soon. Taxes on the first hand and also foreign exchange. It's worth noting that the significant downward impact that we experienced due to foreign exchange in Q2 has returned to being the slight positive tailwind that we have seen historically. That is very reassuring to see. I'll talk about adjusted EBITDA guidance.
For the first nine months of the year, we're sitting at an adjusted EBITDA margin of about 14%. Just admittedly, you know, it's below our previously guided range of 16%-20%. I think, you know, it's important to realize that the slightly lower adjusted EBITDA isn't to do with anything, you know, structurally wrong with our business or anything being changed in our business. It really reflects a timing issue. You know, we basically made a calculated bet, for lack of a better term, right, to hire ahead of contracts that we saw coming down the pipeline, secure talent in, you know, a competitive technology market. The contracts, like I mentioned before, they're still progressing, and we are confident that they're going to be signed in the very near future.
I think we as management have to admit and own up to the fact that we probably could have been more conservative on the hiring that we did ahead of these contracts. I think, you know, one more important thing to note is that the extended timelines on the signatures of the projects definitely show, you know, the scale and complexity and maybe even size of the contracts that we see coming down the pipeline. You know, they require senior resources that are a little bit harder to find and a little bit more expensive to hire. They also require very onerous decision-making and sign-off processes from some of our customers, which are taking longer than we expected. All of that to say, you know, we're revising our 2025 full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance to be in the range of about 12%-16%.
We think that this gives us the flexibility to hold those resources and continue investing in future growth, both in Saudi Arabia and abroad. You know, long term, I think it's important to stress that this doesn't change the potential profitability of our company, which I think we showcased very well in 2024. Again, it really is a matter of timing on the contracts that we see coming down the pipeline and not any changes in the underlying business for sure. On the cash flow side of things, we generated $2.3 million in operating cash flow before changes in net working capital. After those changes, it was a cash flow outflow, a cash flow use of $3.4 million. This was primarily driven by growth in Accounts Receivable and more specifically in the contract assets line, right?
Contract assets for the quarter at the quarter end came in close to $8 million. It's almost twice the size that it was at the beginning of last quarter. But it's not because of any sort of payment delay or aged receivables. It really is, you know, we reached milestones on some of our projects, especially some larger milestone-based Software Development Projects, to the point where we had to recognize the revenue, but we hadn't received, you know, customer milestone approval and the go-ahead to invoice those customers yet. It resulted in an expansion of our Accounts Receivable through those contract assets. So far, post-quarter, we've seen actually a large amount of those contract assets be billed, moved to invoices. It's probably about a third of them now that have moved on.
On the billing side, I think it's important to recognize that of our Accounts Receivable, if you look at both contract assets and trade receivables, you know, 97% of them are either sitting as contract assets or are aged below 90 days. Only 3% of them are over. We have, you know, no risk of bad debt as of right now. Our customers, once we get those invoices out, are actually very prompt in their payments. We don't have any pressing concerns on Accounts Receivable so far. Overall, that's pretty much the highlights for Q3. I think Q3 was another quarter of—sorry, a little technical glitch there. Got to love live TV. Overall, to summarize, I think that Q3 was another quarter of strong top-line growth for sure.
It marked our 18 consecutive quarters of last 12 months' revenue growth and was another all-time, you know, revenue record for NTG. It is validating our expectations for continued strong growth in the Saudi digital transformation market and really throughout the Gulf as well. You know, this quarter's revenue keeps us on track for that CAD 78 million target for the year. While adjusted EBITDA margin for the year-to-date is about 14%, slightly below that target that we gave earlier on in the year, you know, we're making the investments that we need right now to continue the growth going strong into future years as well. We look forward to leveraging those investments to continue building our reputation and capture a larger market share in the Saudi market.
I want to thank you for listening to the presentation, and I'll move on to the Q&A side of things, where we'll welcome some questions from covering Analysts as well as a few Investor questions that were written in ahead of the call. I'd like to invite Aravinda Galappatthige from Canaccord to the stage to start us off with questions. Aravinda , feel free.
Yeah. Hi, Adam. Morning.
Hi. Morning.
I guess it's not morning for you.
Yeah, it's 5:00 P.M. here, so good afternoon.
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I just wanted to circle back on the Accounts Receivable. You're saying that there's a portion of the AR that's actually contract assets and not sort of standard receivables. Is that correct?
Yeah, that is correct for sure. I mean, this quarter, it was definitely an anomaly.
It's probably twice the amount of contract assets than we had previously seen. It really is, you know, just like I was mentioning before, a factor of, you know, we're in the business where, you know, every month, you know, you can think of it like, we have to report to the customer on what we've done. Have we reached the milestone? Once we reach that milestone, they will accept our work and give us the go-ahead to issue them an invoice. That's usually how the process goes. This quarter, we basically had to recognize some revenue that the customer hadn't signed off on. It is all, you know, business-as-usual stuff. It just happened to be a larger contract this quarter.
You said 1/3 of it has already moved out, meaning sort of—I didn't catch whether you said 1/3 has kind of been reduced by 1/3 or it's down to 1/3 post-quarter. Just wanted to—
Yeah, reduced by approximately 1/3 post-quarter.
Okay.
Post-quarter.
Okay. Got it. Okay. That's significant. On NTG Apps, obviously, you continue to make pretty good progress there. Is it fair to say that, like, I guess put differently, what proportion of these NTG Apps contracts are coming from existing customers? Are you in a place where you're perhaps winning mandates from customers that never sort of subscribe to your more Standardized IT Services Offerings?
Yeah, that's a good question for sure. It's always good to keep an eye on where the pipeline of NTG Apps business is coming from.
I would say, you know, to date, the vast majority of our NTG Apps projects, and definitely, you know, if not all of the revenue, for all intents and purposes, comes from some of our existing services customers. You know, there are some small engagements that we've won, and we're testing proof of concepts and those kind of things. You know, there are a couple of exciting projects in Dubai, for example, where we're running up some proof of concepts on our Software Platform for new customers. You know, if you speak on a revenue basis, the vast majority is from existing customers. You know, we're finding an opportunity to work with our customers when they come with us thinking that they need a bespoke software solution. We're able to instead, you know, basically counter with an NTG Apps implementation.
It saves them time on resources and development and deployment. At the same time, it's a higher margin business for us, so wins all around. All that is to say, yes, NTG Apps business typically comes from existing customers and Cross-sell Upsell.
Okay. Just sticking with that, I mean, it does look like, I mean, the quarterly numbers, as strong as they are, obviously on a year-over-year basis, it's a little choppy. I know that sort of really breaking out what's recurring, what sort of implementation is not necessarily straightforward, but how should we think of sort of the run rate from here on? Is there, you know, any kind of, you know, indication that you can give investors as to how they should think of this line item?
Yeah, that's a good point too.
I take your point about how, you know, as NTG Apps becomes a larger and larger part of our business, it's going to become incumbent on us to, you know, be more transparent about targeting and where we expect that line of business to end up for sure. As of right now, you know, it's an interesting situation with NTG Apps because the long-term vision is, yes, we want to have a SaaS platform that we can roll out off the shelf and build a strong base of recurring Software Revenue for. The fact of the matter is that right now, you know, the vast majority of the revenue, I want to say 80%-90% even, is going to be, you know, more one-time implementation base. We really want to get early users of NTG Apps a bespoke solution that works for them. It'll be more sticky.
It'll provide a better reputation for NTG Apps that way. Later on down the line, we can take those implementations and hopefully roll them off the shelf. You have things that happen, like we saw this quarter. Sequentially over Q2, it was actually down revenue, right? Q2 was NTG Apps revenue about 20%. This quarter, just the quarter, was about 10%, averaging out for the year 13%. That really is because we had some, you know, bespoke software implementations of NTG Apps that maybe wrapped up in Q2, so the billings ended up being higher. I can sort of say, you know, looking ahead, this sort of area that we're at right now, you know, 13%-15% of revenue for NTG Apps, I would say that's in line with what our thinking is.
We still think that the demand for NTG's services lay in the offshore onsite services bin of things. And it's definitely something that we're going to take away as management and look towards hopefully providing some better guidance towards in the future. Right now, it's 80%-90% is implementation. It's the rest of it that's at the end. I would say a very rough estimate. Yeah, it is in that ballpark. Yeah.
Okay. Maybe just last question for me, that there was a Press Release earlier that you had put out about sort of a three-year agreement that I think you referred to as well. I know that there have not been any announced contracts from that client. Is there maybe just help us understand what's different about, if there is anything different, what's sort of unique about that client? I mean, is it just size?
I mean, would you say that you're anticipating sort of the commitments from that client to be materially larger than most of the commitments that you get typically? Or I mean, what's different about this one?
Yeah, I would say definitely what's different about that contract is primarily the duration of it, the length, right? It's a three-year engagement, which we typically don't see from brand new customers, right? Our typical engagements go, a customer will start working with us, maybe it might only be for a quarter or six months. You know, maybe they'll sign a one-year agreement after that. And then after we've proven ourselves over the course of a couple of years, then they'll be happy to sign one of those larger three-year engagements.
We're starting to hear more and more, especially when we go to these conferences in other areas of the Gulf, that, you know, our Saudi customers are traveling and telling people that NTG is a good customer to work with. We're seeing people be more comfortable to sign on for, you know, longer engagements right from the get-go. I think that's definitely a huge win from this contract. When it comes to the size, as you mentioned, I don't think that this one is necessarily going to be, you know, one of our largest ever contracts just because it is a new customer. I still think that they're going to want to start relatively small and see what their success is, which I have no doubt we're going to be able to deliver on.
Okay. Thank you, Adam. I'll pass the line. All right.
Thanks very much, Aravinda. Okay. We'll now move on to a couple of questions that were written in from Analysts ahead of the call. I'd like to welcome back Ali to the stage to start us off with some more of those questions, please.
All right. Our 1st set of questions are written in from Doug, an Analyst from Beacon Securities. First question, what is the current backlog of the company? What is the value of projects/contracts that are under negotiation?
Thanks for the question, Doug. Yeah. Our backlog is about CAD 88 million of contracts and POs that we have on hand as of the end of Q3.
I would say, you know, when it comes to the value of projects and contracts that we have under negotiation, you know, we do not publish publicly a pipeline Number Per Se, but I can sort of give some directional guidance that, you know, there are a handful of engagements that are on the same scale of those same three-year contracts that we have put out over the last year and a half or so. I want to circle back on the backlog item for sure because I want to call out just transparently that the backlog is down sequentially quarter over quarter, and it is important to recognize that. I think that the backlog is down sequentially for the same reason that, you know, we had maybe a little bit tighter of an adjusted EBITDA margin than we had originally thought.
You know, contracts that we've been preparing ourselves for have taken longer to close and therefore aren't being added to our backlog, right? Our backlog is only signed POs and contracts that we have on hand. At the same time, we have been billing against those other three-year contracts that we've noted. I would say that, you know, the way management is thinking about it right now is this dip in backlog is, again, just a timing issue that we expect to be just a minor blip as we wait for some of these larger contracts that are still very much in play to come through.
All right. Moving on to our next question, also from Doug. With the recent hiring that increased short-term costs, what is the expectation that the current overhead structure can generate in revenue when fully productive?
At that level of revenue above, what is the expectation for EBITDA margins?
Right on. Yeah. So definitely we did do a lot of work to expand our roster and get ready to hit the ground running on a lot of the new contracts that we see coming down the pipeline. You know, I think longer term, it would be reasonable to scale the existing talent base back to that 20% adjusted EBITDA margin over the long term. You know, I think we can assume that at least for the services side of our business, absent any margin upside, gross margin upside from NTG Apps, we can have a consistent, you know, mid to high 30% gross margin. And definitely what we see as a possibility is scaling back to that 20% adjusted EBITDA margin as we look to roll out the resources that we have on staff.
All right.
Our next question is also written from Doug. Can you speak to the current cash position and the company Free Cash Flow this past quarter?
I would say, yeah. So cash position at the end of the quarter is, again, CAD 6.6 million that we have on the balance sheet. Admittedly, we are probably for the 2nd quarter in a Row Cash Flow negative from operations, but, you know, we're pretty comfortable with the liquidity position. You know, we expect Q4 to be significantly better from a Cash Flow perspective as we collect on the elevated AR from the balance on Q3, which currently sit in the contract asset bucket that we were discussing with Aravinda. You know, I mentioned we had some significant invoicing in post-quarter of that contract asset bin. And, you know, our customers historically have been very strong on actually remaining payment.
I think we have confidence that Q4 we'll have a stronger cash position for sure.
All right. Our next few questions are written in from Chris, an Analyst from Activate Capital. How should investors think about the scale of the opportunity still to be grasped by NTG and Saudi? Can we compete with the Big Multinational IT service companies for much larger deals?
Thanks for the question, Chris. Definitely how we think about it is there still is an amazing amount of space to grow, even in just the Saudi market. You know, I like to always talk about the overall size of the Saudi information and communications technology market. It's about CAD 50 billion per year and growing. Some estimates put it between CAD 70 billion-CAD 90 billion by the point of 2030.
Hey, I didn't hear back. Middle of that question comes to you.
Sounds like you're good now, though.
My apologies.
All right. That's okay.
I think just I'll pick myself up and I'll pick myself back up about the upside potential in the Saudi market, right? You know, the Saudi market is sitting at about CAD 50 billion a year when it comes to overall ICT spend. You know, it's growing to the point where it's expected to be between CAD 70 billion and CAD 90 billion by 2030 by some estimates. You know, NTG represents a 0.1% of the market with lots of room to grow. You know, if we set an ambitious target to be about 5% of the market, that's still more than 50 times upside potential. I was just talking to one of our Account Managers in Saudi this week.
I learned that, you know, one of our Large System Integrator Customers has an annual IT budget of something like $10 billion annually, and that's just one customer. You know, we're trying to go after as much of it as we can. And customers are happy to expand with us, right? We've been announcing this year that CAD 22 million contract that we announced towards the end of last year. We're on track to reach about 50% higher billings for the 1st year. You know, similar in that CAD 53 million contract, 1st-year billings are up by double-digit percentages as well. The scale of investment in digital transformation in Saudi is there, and we're slowly but surely chipping away at growing with that market.
All right. Our next questions are written in from Evan and Institutional Investor. Can you speak more to the NTG Apps revenue breakdown?
It was 20% of revenue in Q2, but 10% of revenue in Q3. Shouldn't this be more SaaS-like and be less volatile?
That's a good question. Thanks for the question, Evan. I think this goes back to a little bit of the NTG Apps discussion that we had with Eravinda, right? The vast majority of revenue these days of NTG Apps is going to be software implementation type, like bespoke software development type revenue. We don't at this time have a very solid recurring revenue base of, you know, license and support and maintenance revenue. In the near future, that's what we want to have happen, right? Is onboard new customers, build a solid base of recurring license revenue, roll off more solutions on the off the shelf, and really be able to scale that way.
For the time being, you know, we want to focus on bespoke projects that really add value to our customers. We are going to see these sort of quarterly fluctuations in billings as, you know, maybe there will be more project activity one quarter, and then it wraps up for a following quarter that way.
All right. Amazing. Our next question also written in by Evan. What is going on with Accounts Receivable? On Q2, you said they would normalize a bit more. That does not seem to be the case.
Yeah, that is definitely fair to call out. I think it is important to reiterate, you know, the way that we look at maybe a drag on cash flow in Q3 is really a billing timing issue with some of our large clients, not a credit concern at all, right?
The increase was driven by basically concentration and the piling up of milestone billings that occurred late in Q3. They have not been billed by quarter end. Now we are already collecting some of those billings by Q4, you know, invoicing and collecting. Like I was talking about in the presentation, the AR aging remains healthy where 97% of our receivables are either sitting as contract assets or below 90 days. We do not have any bad debt exposure. With the majority of our revenue concentrated with some of our, you know, large, long-standing customers with strong payment histories, we really see this as timing, not quality of credit and receivables.
All right. Our next question is written in from Krishnan, a Private Investor. How is NTG positioning itself in the AI space relative to its competitors?
Could you share more on the kind of demand you're seeing for AI-driven solutions from your clients and how NTG is adapting its solutions to meet that demand?
Thank you, Krishnan, for the question. AI is what's on the top of everybody's mind these days. I would say, you know, AI is something that we as a company are exploring very deeply. You know, we've got an AI team that's dedicated to exploring the possibilities, who's numbering probably about two dozen employees now. You know, we see it as really an opportunity to expand the quality of the work that we do and really see it less of, you know, an existential threat to the entirety of our business.
We're rolling out programs such as, you know, making sure that employees are aware of the tools that are available to them, you know, programs and tools like Copilot and Cursor that can help them with their programming journeys. We're also integrating AI into some of NTG Apps' offerings, some of the NTG Apps' offerings, right? We've got some pretty exciting proof of concepts going. We've got an agentic salesbot working for one customer in Egypt, actually.
We've also got what's probably most interesting to our clients is the sort of AI-based software testing where, you know, instead of writing traditional test cases and having testers go in and manually do Functional, Non-functional Testing on the Web Apps and Mobile Apps and things like that, we're actually able to use our Automatic AI Testing Platform to Input B usiness Analysis and Business Requirements and basically automatically write up scripts for Software Testing that way. We're seeing some early interest for sure from some of our clients for some of these AI solutions right on. Overall, definitely AI is something that we see as something that we can use to bring more value to our customers because at the end of the day, that's what they're paying us for, not necessarily, you know, bodies and seats, but the value that we bring to the table.
All right.
Our next question is written in from Alexander, an Institutional Investor. What's your revenue visibility for 2026? How much is contracted versus pipeline?
That's a really good question. I'll start by talking about the backlog right now. You know, I mentioned backlog at the end of the quarter was CAD 88 million of POs and contracts on hand. I would say about a majority of that is expected to be billed within the next year or so. What's on top of that is going to be renewals and new contracts that we see coming down the pipeline. We're not giving explicit guidance so far for 2026. You can expect to see that come out early in the year like we have been doing in previous years.
I can say that, you know, from boots on the ground, demand in the Saudi market and really throughout the Gulf continues to be strong. We can expect to see, you know, these strong double-digit growth years, I think, for the next at least year to come.
All right. Our next question is written in from Graham, a Private Investor. You just got EBITDA guidance. How should we think about your guidance credibility going forward?
Thanks, Graham. I appreciate the call out on the guidance for sure. I think it's definitely very fair, you know, calling into question, how can we trust the guidance going forward? I think starting with the revenue is very straightforward.
You know, our revenue guidance is based basically entirely on our backlog of POs and contracts that we have on hand, plus renewals with existing clients that we have, you know, a very high certainty of renewing going on into the future. I think revenue guidance will always be based in, you know, a strong backlog that we have and that we have posted. When it comes to the EBITDA guidance, I think it's very fair. I think we have to admit that management was basically doing that calculated bet of hiring ahead of contracts that we saw coming down the pipeline. It turns out that in no small part because these are large contracts with large entities, some of them are government-adjacent, you know, as are all of our customers. You know, the approval cycles on them can take a little bit longer.
I think management has to own up to that and that we should have been more conservative on the guidance. I think we definitely will take that into consideration when we issue further guidance as we have done with this update. We are really looking forward to providing you with what we see as the most accurate possible guidance for sure.
Okay. For our final question from James, another Private Investor, if these projects do not start in Q1, what is your plan? Would you do layoffs?
Thanks for the question, James. That is a good question. I mean, you know, the question always has to arise when we get into a situation where we did a lot of hiring and investment beforehand but did not necessarily see it pay off right away. How can we get that investment back, right?
I think NTG has a couple of different ways that we think about that, right? It's not like the resources that we hire are, you know, dead weight or sitting around doing nothing. Our primary mode of operation is to use the resources that we hire ahead of time, get them trained up on especially our NTG Apps platform, and get them contributing at least to the development of that software before they're able to be rolled out with customers. You know, we can use them whether or not they're billable to the customer or not. We can also put their efforts towards some of the existing projects that we have ongoing with customers. We definitely will find a use for them. That being said, we also have the option to redeploy the resources to other contracts that we have coming down the pipeline.
Of course, as an absolute last resort, we can resort to reducing the headcount, of course. Now we're not anywhere near having to do that right now. That's the opinion of management. Of course, it is always going to be a lever. I think I'd just double down and reiterate that the contracts that we're preparing for are still in the pipeline. You know, we're looking forward to hopefully bringing you some good news in the near future.
That's the question. That's all the questions from my end.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Ali. Thank you to Aravinda and all the other analysts who wrote in questions. Thank you to the investors who wrote in questions. Thanks for joining us for another great quarterly conference call for NTG Clarity.
Again, you know, we really can't overstate the opportunity that there is to grow in the Saudi market and the Gulf more broadly. This quarter, we've been putting investments in place that we really see as necessary to keep the growth going for years to come. We're really looking forward to being able to deploy a lot of the investments that we've put into place this quarter and share with you some successes in future quarters for sure. With that, thank you very much. We'll see you soon for Q4, hopefully. Until then, thank you and take care.