In the enterprise and industrial segment. Now, if you look at that from a carrier standpoint of view, whether it's one of our great partners, T-Mobile, selling for their business customers, where they have a large sales force promoting Inseego product that, quite frankly, we partner a lot on in creating that whole end-to-end solution. The deployments are only starting, and there's not going to be a ceiling to the deployments because now the economics are completely different.
It's also great for us because we can go in with a broader solution approach. It's not a hardware play. You are talking about a differentiated, of course, device hardware, which I will have to talk. We met in Barcelona. There's a great story there, so hopefully we'll have the time to cover the announcements that we did two weeks ago.
The router OS, so advanced enterprise routing stack, and then, of course, our Inseego Connect cloud management platform. Now you can go into this growing space that is still at its infancy, work with really large scalable go-to-market partners, and just see how quickly we can accelerate the future of wireless broadband.
Before diving into things like Mobile World Congress, core capabilities in the skill set that you saw at Inseego, it's basically RF capabilities and expertise combined with platform and software capabilities, or are there some other elements in there as well?
It's funny. On a Friday, two months ago, I turned in my badge at Qualcomm, and then the following Monday, I drove to the building next door, which is where we have our super impressive lab setup. Our engineering, when it comes to modem and antenna, is some of the best in the world. The team has been together. We'll talk more about what has happened on the funding structure and the company journey over the past 18 months, and Steven has been at the helm of that, so he'll be happy to share more of that.
What's important to understand is that our core engineering team has been with the company. We have people who have been there two decades leading in wireless innovation. That's a very unique asset. The other thing that I see a great opportunity to differentiate is on the go-to-market side. A great product and sales team as well. Of course, we're going to drive a lot of new talent to the company. If you look at like the building blocks and the market opportunity, that's really the core reason why I was so excited to take on the opportunity.
Maybe let's hear on Mobile World Congress. Less than two weeks ago, you guys were pretty busy at the show. What were the takeaways there? What were you seeing the interest? Why are guys sitting down and talking to you?
The announcement that we made was that we were the first OEM to make a data call on 5G Advanced. 5G is advancing towards 6G in terms of releases. Release 18 is first 5G Advanced. You can deploy advanced network features, which you'll be seeing integrating us, integrating into our products. The carriers are very keen to understand how can we make their network differentiation matter for the end enterprise customer.
The announcement that we made is that we were the first to make a data call, which is just to like exercise the core muscle that the company has in the technology leadership domain. It was really about like what's next. How do we create more value? How can we accelerate wireless broadband compared to wired? I think it's really interesting that over the past 18 months, there have been more wireless broadband net adds than all of the wireless technologies combined.
Like I said, I still think it's early days in the market, and the technology is going to make the solution better. It's going to replace wiring more and more use cases and go from backhaul to mainstay. That was really the big discussion we had with the ecosystem partners as well as our customers.
Before getting into what's next, I want to take a step back, right? Because what's happened over the past 18 months has been instrumental in enabling you guys to move forward with the next level vision. Maybe, Steven, in terms of take us through what's happened from a balance sheet perspective over the past 18 months.
I think it's nothing short of remarkable. When you first came on board and I called you up and we had this conversation about where you guys were, I guess my question was, do you know what you just stepped into? It seems like you managed it pretty well.
Yeah, it was to a lot of your host good points about the attractiveness of the model and the product and the technology and the underlying fundamentals. It was clearly a bit of brokenness on top insofar as capitalization, liquidity, and frankly, insolvency. We set out pretty quickly with really good support from our key stockholders and the board. We made a bunch of management changes first, which was very much in need and put us in a position to work directly with our board and investors quite quickly.
We changed out, you know, the CEO, Head of Operations, Head of Product Management, Head of Sales, obviously my role as well. We embarked on really doing a few things. One, we cleaned up our working capital. We got rid of some very toxic ABL and borrowing facilities that were really getting in the way of properly financing the business on a short-term basis.
Two, we addressed the capital structure from a long-term standpoint and restructured the converts, you know, engaged with our external bondholders and negotiated what we thought was a really constructive low dilution compared to what the alternative was for stockholders for common. That worked out quite well. We embarked on a portfolio assessment to say, you know, the classic evaluation of what we should, could, would, and ought to be in the business of.
That led to the sale of the telematics business, which we were able to execute at twice the multiple that the previous transaction had gotten done. That freed up a whole bunch of cash. We were able to pay down a ton of debt. We have net debt today of something like $16 million-$17 million.
It was like 12 months ago, it was $150+ .
Yeah, when I got here in Q4 of 2023, it was $170 million of debt and about $4 million of cash. So it was different.
You're a magician. Congratulations. Nice job. By the way, now we're also at a position where revenues are higher, you're a positive EBITDA, expect to kind of remain at those levels and generate positive cash flow going forward. Is that kind of the expectation over 2025 and beyond?
Yeah, that's definitely the long-term trajectory of the kind of twofold profitable growth. Continue to grow, accelerate growth. The profitability comes in the form of gross margin expansion, but also may come in the form of EBITDA expansion. To your host's good points earlier, the different business lines that we add may not be massively gross margin accretive, but the nature of our cost structure and our operating costs are that that flows through pretty well to the bottom line.
Maybe to expand on that a little bit. There is our development strategy, something that I'm a huge fan of. We develop our own hardware platform. We make in-house modules. We buy the chip from Qualcomm, put it in a module, and that same module we can deploy on an industrial gateway, MiFi hotspot, FWA, you name it, right? It is highly scalable since we've developed the module, the same software.
Even if you buy our MiFi as an end customer, it will have the same routing OS stack that I just mentioned for our enterprise grade or industrial grade that we actually designed for FWA, but it is the same platform. Of course, the cloud element as well. To Steven's good point, as we increase our participation in some of these enterprise and industrial segments as the year goes along, that product-specific investment is actually very much manageable.
With that, all margin that we capture hits EBITDA. That's one of the strengths that we have from a strategy standpoint of view.
Let's talk a little bit about Inseego 2.0. Am I allowed to call it that? Or so next gen, or what do we?
It depends on when you start accounting.
Okay. Look, you've got a clean balance sheet. You've got a strong platform and core basic technology. You've got strong carrier partners and relationships. What's the vision as you're looking out over the next two, three years? Where do you take this, right?
Because you've got some of the hardware platforms are lower gross margin, but you've got software content. How does this all kind of go together? What does this company look like two years from now? What does the gross margin profile aspire to be? What does recurring revenue look like?
Maybe I'll start with the strategy, and then we can talk about quantifying some of that. Really where we are today from a net market standpoint of view, our mainstay is SMB. We have participation in enterprise. I'm not going to claim that we have a full enterprise- grade solution stack just yet from a device software, from a cloud, from a go-to-market standpoint of view. The immediate number one thing is to go and scale with carrier as the primary go-to-market path. At the same time, we have value-added resellers.
We have over 100 partners, and we need that to support the carrier motion. It's also driving; it's a lead generation engine of its own, right? Even today. What happens next is that our solution stack matures first to enterprise, or maybe first to industrial, then large enterprise, and then you can start looking at vertical-specific solutions for wireless broadband.
It is that journey from a, of course, hardware roadmap, but more importantly, investing in our solution stack and then maturing the go-to-market with the right partnerships, distribution, value-added resellers to capture the opportunity. There is so much great hunting ground right now with the carrier, both MiFi and FWA, that that is the immediate thing that we want to go and attain.
At the same time, continue to invest to then participate in the broad enterprise industrial segment where you really do need to access it more from a value-added reseller channel standpoint of view, the more niche or the more specific you get.
Is that going to require a ramp up in sales force and resources to pursue those different kind of verticals?
Eventually, yes. There's going to be definitely investment in that area. We do have a good core team in place, but then as the solution matures, you definitely do want to have more specialized sales force as well in the channel. I think that's a great point.
Looking on the recurring revenue side, I get the question a lot. You've got the core hardware capabilities, right? That some managed services and recurring revenue opportunities have had, you know, Cradlepoint comes to mind. And for those of you who aren't familiar, Cradlepoint was basically a router, wireless routing gateway company that transitioned to a managed services model, and they ultimately sold to Ericsson for 5x or 6x sales .
You know, is that where you're evolving? You know, how long does it take to get there? What do you need in terms of your technology capabilities to be able to provide more value-added services or higher value to the customer?
What we have today is a robust device management platform in the cloud. There is opportunity to add more advanced routing-related features into that offering. You could easily envision security-related functionality, intrusion detection. There is a lot in that space. One way of looking at it is that we can broaden the offering, but even with that, there are different types of customers, different needs.
Definitely looking at a tiered portfolio where some of our partners, large ones, might consume our cloud platform through APIs, which we are happy to do, but that is different monetization than if we sell our entire solution offering. You will see that evolving quite a bit, and it is going to be segment-specific, but also go-to-market- specific on how we build that out.
Okay. International opportunities, right? Historically, the company's largely been skewed towards North America. Does that change at all? Particularly when I see it at Mobile World Congress, right? It's also, I guess, all the U.S. customers are there as well, right? Because everyone.
It's pretty funny that you need to fly to Barcelona to meet with the U.S. customers, but I don't mind. It was an excellent topic.
I was going to say it goes here. Good, good paella, good football. Are you starting to look outside of the United States, those types of opportunities, or is that a distraction at this point in time when you're trying to stay focused, broaden the portfolio and penetration within the existing North American carrier base?
One of the things that Steven and the team did well before I arrived at the scene was that there was a global expansion strategy where may or may not have been executed flawlessly. The geostrategy pull back and focused on North America. If you look at the market opportunity for wireless broadband, U.S. dwarfs everybody else outside of perhaps China, right?
It's also a single huge homogeneous market from a product requirement, but also from a go-to-market standpoint of view. Canada, great example. It's the same technology platform, a couple of big players. I guess you could add Australia to the mix if you want to look at like similar type of market profiles. For us right now, there's so much work to be done, just like growing here in North America, that that's definitely the primary focus for the 2.0 or 1.0.
Okay. Let me ask you, in terms of penetration of the opportunity in North America, what kind of share do you guys have? Where do you think you can get to? It's interesting, right? At Mobile World Congress, I saw a lot more about fixed wireless access than I have in a couple of years, and particularly around 5G FWA, right?
Because you're increasing processing power at the edge, I guess, which is another question we can ask as well, like in terms of how you differentiate and leverage that. You know, what's the share? Where can you guys get to just within the existing base?
If you start with MiFi, the market opportunity seems to be around 2 million units annual. We're roughly the value leader. We're participating on synonymous with the premium tier MiFi today. Over 50% of our MiFi ends up in an enterprise or public sector end market. So there's a prosumer element there, but it's really our core assets and the differentiator that we just spoke about is pulling us towards the enterprise. I think we could do a great job for our partners also in the more mid-tier segment of the marketplace.
One of the observations I made already and largely addressed is that there are different development strategies for different segments, right? So there is, you make different choice points. You look at different partners if you're looking at the mid-market. So that's a good opportunity just to drive immediate revenue scale. Like Steven was saying, we already have the platform investment, go-to-market, all of that is in place. I don't see why we wouldn't participate there and grow.
The FWA is an interesting question because right now it's companies like Verizon, T-Mobile, even the MSOs, cable guys, they're talking about deploying fiber, whether it's a value-added service or it's a failover in addition to your cable. There's so much initiative in the marketplace, but the deployments are only starting. I actually don't even have volume numbers from last year because it gets mixed up with the consumer FWA, which at this stage is dwarfing it.
I think it's safe to say that the volume mix on FWA even this year is going to dramatically shift in favor of enterprise or SMB industrial end market.
One of the other trends at MWC was more processing power at the edge, right? Some of the Qualcomm announcements in terms of what's going into those edge devices, whether it's a hotspot or a CPE.
Market.
One of the other trends at MWC was more processing power at the edge, right? Some of the Qualcomm announcements in terms of what's going into those edge devices, whether it's a hotspot or a CPE or whatever. How does that impact you guys? How does it create the opportunity? How do you guys monetize that? Is it things like private networks? Is it more intelligence at the edge to be able to manage more devices within the enterprise? Where does that take you guys?
One of the differentiators for us is that if you look at some of the competition that you perhaps named here already during our discussion, you have multiple different processing units. You have one that's simply taking care of the cellular element. You might even have different for Wi-Fi. You need to do some processing, as in call it like generic CPU workloads. You end up having three different chips, up to three different chips on the same hardware. It gets very complex to execute, cost intense, all of that, not scalable.
One of the innovations that Inseego had early on was what we called MiFi OS. We were doing everything with that Qualcomm modem. The team is super skilled in getting advanced workloads done with a very narrow compute resource envelope. To your point, now it's changing. There's AI capability that's emerging on that modem chip. Also, it's now quad-core, massive development in terms of the resources that you have available. That's actually the thing that's enabling us to deliver this router OS, which we're now rolling out.
We can get the enterprise networking stack on that same modem that's also taking care of the cellular backhaul as well as Wi-Fi. When it comes to AI, I'm very intrigued by policy management. Now you can read more than just the header of the package that's going over Wi-Fi. You can make advanced routing decisions or just outsource that to AI.
Maybe I'll give you as an enterprise the controls to decide your policy on a high level. The AI will worry about implementing that, and it goes back to our cloud management platform as well. There's a lot of opportunity.
I was going to say, does that enable you to get paid more, or is that just going to be basic table stakes?
I think it's part of this. It goes alongside with creating a richer, more broad, more deep cloud offering for sure.
Okay. Maybe a quick question on the M&A front. I think, you know, as a balance sheet started to get cleaned up, there started to be maybe an expectation, not an expectation, but the question raised of inorganic opportunities for you guys. Where does that fit in the spectrum of prioritization, you know, versus it seems like you got a pretty full opportunity set in front of you. Is M&A on the back burner? How are you guys thinking about that?
I think it's a great option to consider. How do you accelerate this journey? You could look at getting, looking at opportunities to accelerate the industrial or the enterprise from both solution stack and go-to-market standpoint of view. That could be intriguing.
The other area would be just ARR with the cloud, like what would go well, what would travel well with our end market today, our existing solution offer, what else could we position as a part of it? Those are just like two areas that are good. I think there's good optionality there, but we'll be very thoughtful even when we engage.
Let me just bring it back to a couple of things to wrap up. The guidance for this year is very back-end loaded. Could you take us through the confidence level? You know, why are you so comfortable with a back-end loaded year? What are you seeing in terms of timelines for new products and/or expected customer ramps to the extent that you can talk about those things?
Maybe I'll take you in a bit on it. I'll start with the financial point of view, excuse me, which is we talked about coming into Q1, the beginning of the year, there were some headwinds from some legacy customer arrangements that were more periodic in 2024 and that we spoke with people about ending at the end of the year.
The beginning of the year now, it's a bit of a starting to ramp up, but to the whole dynamic to hand it off to Juho of having new leadership, new product portfolio, new go-to-market, new customer segmentation, the nature of the beast, it takes a while for that to hit and ramp.
Building on what Steven was sharing on Q1, we also have a major broad refresh right at the beginning of Q2 with our large FWA customer. Very comfortable in that that's going to accelerate the run rate. Many of the things that we're talking about here are going to come to play with that new generation launch. There is also a broader go-to-market behind that. You'll also see us expand more of the portfolio when it comes to value-added resellers or channels, we call it.
I would typically tell that the time to revenue, if you're working with the carriers, is 12 months. It's a little bit different with us because another thing that makes Inseego unique is that we tend to technically approve or enable our products across multiple different carriers, whereas your typical motion is that I'm going to sell this product only through that guy and that's it. We have a broader set of TAs. There's a lot of like the MSOs that we were talking about earlier that operate on other guys' networks.
We have ready-made products that have been approved across all of the possible options. That's something where I'm seeing a lot of really interesting dialogue happening, as well as then like how can we help some of our existing large partners to do better across MiFi and FWA. I think the industry is seeing the success that we're having with that one large carrier partner today on FWA, and I'm very much optimistic that that will draw other customers' base as well.
With that, any final thoughts, anything that we're missing?
I would just summarize that from my perspective, almost three months in, so take it with a grain of salt. Opportunity, amazing. I really like the team, the capability. We need to do a lot of work. I'm not taking away from that. I think from a strategy standpoint of view, we have very good clarity on how we're going to focus across the wireless broadband, what the end markets looks like, and what the channel looks like. Chatting here next year with you, hopefully you'll take us in again and we'll have a lot of new stories to share.
I look forward to the updates. Thank you so much for being here and look forward to the progress over the next couple of months.
Thank you, Scott.
Thank you.