SSH Communications Security Oyj

OMXH:SSH1V

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q4

[Niklas Nordstrom, Deputy CEO & CFO]

First, I would like to start this meeting by stating that we're, of course, very concerned about the geopolitical development, but SSH doesn't have direct exposure to Russian markets for customers, and we do not expect potential sanctions to be affecting adversely on SSH business. Having said that, let's go into the Q4. The cybersecurity market was active during the end of the year. And the final quarter of the year was a busy one for us, and we succeeded in all fronts and measured KPIs. Let's look how that's translated into numbers. Some of you may recall that in the previous investor call, Teemu predicted a super quarter. So let's break down how we did. As you can see, we doubled our revenue compared to the comparison period and improved profitability significantly reporting black numbers throughout. We closed a number of new customer cases, growing our recurring revenue base. And we did this while keeping our largest cost item, personnel cost stable. All of our regions performed well in Q4, reporting the best quarter as well as beating the comparison period. On an annual level, our revenue grew 41.6%, driven by solid demand and 70 new customer wins. What's worth mentioning here is that many of the new cases we announced in Q4 were subscriptions. So they will be fully recognized this year, supporting our growth plan. Our growth was achieved profitably on the operative level for the full year, our bottom line is still negative. And the difference is, of course, mainly due to depreciations, which have further increased last year due to the acquisition of Deltagon. What about the way forward or the view forward? We report 2 key metrics to offer visibility into the future baseline. The annual recurring revenue and the Subscription ARR, both of which have developed favorably throughout '21. The total ARR at the end of the reporting period was EUR 15.4 million, which is almost equal to that of our full year reported revenue. Our Subscription ARR likewise developed well, ending at EUR 7.3 million at year-end. And this represents almost half of our revenue. Now the success we have had in transitioning towards the recurring revenue business model is important for us because it lays the foundation for future growth. We have long-term contracts, extremely sticky products and happy customers and a revenue baseline of over EUR 15 million. So we do see that we are well positioned to continue on a growth path. On a full year regional level, Americas returned to a growth path, while APAC was still receded versus the previous year. EMEA grew significantly. We have started corrective actions in APAC, and we are moving our office away from Hong Kong to Singapore, where our key financial sector industry customers are located. And this is similar to what we did in Americas last year when we moved from Boston to New York. So we do expect to be able to change the APAC revenue trajectory this year. One more interesting thing I would like to show you is located on the balance sheet side. As you can see, at year-end, we're approximately twice the size of what we were in 2020 and this is, of course, due to the Deltagon purchase price allocation. I think the interesting thing here is, however, how our cash position has developed. Next off, effective cost controls and profitable growth, resulting in an improved cash flow. We have ended the year with a cash position almost equaling that of 2020. I'm personally very pleased about this result as last year, we did pay EUR 1.4 million in interest expenses and EUR 5 million of the acquisition purchase price. So overall, the operative cash flow performance was good. This concludes my review of the numbers. Any questions at this point? We can also take questions at the end. If not, Teemu will tell you some highlights from our operations last year. Teemu, please.

[Teemu Tunkelo, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Niklas. So I will now go a little bit behind the numbers, what made the numbers. And maybe some of you remember a year ago that I said that the boat is cleaned, it's ready. We have the crew on board. The wind is in the sales. It has to get going, but it takes a little bit of inertia. And I think the last quarter proved that we were able to deliver on our promises, and we are all in all, extremely happy with our results. Niklas already mentioned the growth and it was based on our products, especially PrivX and UKM rebouncing finally. We are now in a position of strength with our products that future proofs have developed a lot. I will get back to that in a little bit. On the business model side, we are now an MRR or ARR company. We are on Subscription revenue like Helsingin Sanomat, customer pay us. There is very, very strong customer base that stays with us. So the churn, as said in the Subscription business, is very low. And we have also been able to build out a professional services closer to what it used to be in the past. In all regions, looking at the last quarter, APAC shows early signs of recovery, even though I said about the full year, it was still a disappointment. Europe did extremely well. Americas is getting back to where it used to be and even better. And with the Deltagon acquisition, we finally have a home market because we used to be a funny company. We used to be homeless because over 90% of our revenues came outside Finland. Now with Deltagon acquisition, we have 25% of our revenues coming from Finland. We have a lot of common customers with the old SSH and Deltagon. And now we can also fish at our home waters. We don't have to fly over the ocean every time we want to go fishing even though America remains our largest region and EMEA is catching up pretty well. So let's see, we want to be strong in Europe because we are a European software company in cybersecurity. There are not many companies like us and cybersecurity is with the digitalization direction, it is more and more important for our customers. Especially in Europe, we believe we have a strong position, and I believe we can maintain our position in the U.S. and continue to grow at least at the market space. Now with these 4 elements that I described, we also made the numbers that Niklas already said. So on EBIT level, we are still negative because we are a growth company. We have to pay for the investments we've done, and we have invested in our portfolio. We are moving away from providing point solutions more towards solutions that offer customers less interface points, more comprehensive solutions, services that support the solutions, and we also invest in our partner network, both in upstream and downstream. And last, I will then tell you my views on what's going to happen in the next phase. So on the growth investments, we started with Tectia, making it fully Japanese version. We already found the first Quantum version of Tectia, making it future-proof for the coming years. And we also are launching out Zero Trust Edition of Tectia, which is our flagship product. It is our biggest and most profitable product line. PrivX is our current main growth engine already significant for the whole business. We made 6 new releases. So every second month, we brought in a new version of PrivX, highly influenced by our key customers on what are the features they want to have. We also went closer to customers by having the operational technology version and MSP version. I will come back to them a little later. UKM is also getting more integrated with PrivX by using PrivX Technologies, UKM Zero Trust Edition offers customers a [indiscernible] environment where they can more efficiently manage the control of their SSH keys, which are kind of largely the passwords between applications when they want to talk to each other. NQX, we brought in the PQC Edition, which is the Post-Quantum Safe Version of NQX and that has been very well received in the market, and we are one of the first companies in the world to provide a Post-Quantum Safe Version of our tunneling solution. And Deltagon with part of the integration, we also launched Deltagon Suite, again, on the same trend. We go from point products to solutions that solve customer problems more clearly. So we are closer to customers with our industry editions. We have new technologies that are driving our development Zero Trust and Quantum Safe and we have the new Deltagon Suite. So we have continued to invest in our portfolio, and we feel at the moment we are stronger than ever. So let me tell you a little bit about widening from the point products to solutions and revitalizing our services business and strengthening our partner network. So from PrivX side, we launched last summer already the operational technologies and managed service provider solutions. So OT is how do you get from the factory to cloud and back. And MSP makes it easier for data center operators, cloud providers, SaaS companies, to provide their customers data protection addressed in transit and in use. So those are really key elements that have been very well received in the market. We have got the major customer wins, and we can see also competition starting to follow us on starting to talk about these kind of needs in the PAM market.On the ecosystem side, we have 2 key elements. One is that we want to have stronger partners. And we have been able to succeed with that during the last quarter in EMEA. We are working on the other regions to do the same. So the go-to-market side is getting stronger. We are investing people in it. We are investing money in it, and we believe that we have the products, we just have to take them to the market. On the technology side, we used to have a history of doing everything ourselves. And now we are starting initiatives where we want to see what is already ready in the market that we could leverage with strategic partners. And that is really a fundamental change on how we used to do things. We used to almost -- if I make it a little bit funnier, we used to cut our own hair. We used to paint our own paintings, even the pictures on these slides are taken by me. Now we want to see what's ready in the market, and let's make our solutions built also with supporting technologies from other companies. We don't have to pull everything ourselves. So I believe that the OT and MSP Editions will be a big element of our growth engine this year. They have gotten a very good start. And we are leading the market in the PAM -- [ saying it's PAM, it's not a PAN ]. [ PAM ] is different for factories, [ PAM ] is different for service providers of IT services.And on the partner side, we want to be interconnected. We want to build a stronger ecosystem to fuel our growth, getting ahead and being leading in the market. On the product side, I want to bring up UKM because it's our 10-year-old product that is having really a stellar customer base. We are developing the product to manage the SSH keys, which are kind of the passwords between applications, as I mentioned. We are putting in new features with the customers, for the customers all over the world, especially in the U.S.A. and Europe. Asia still remains for UKM a big market opportunity, which we are also investigating as we speak. The highlight of the last year or the last quarter was that we got another Fortune 500 company choosing UKM for their SSH key management. And we are grateful for any major company that they after careful studies start to use UKM because of its automation features that reduces dependency on humans and dependency on human errors that you can manage millions of SSH keys which is the number of keys you have in big banks, big retail organizations, big government institutions. And UKM is also leveraging PrivX technology with Zero Trust. And we have gotten the first signs of that the customers see the value of the best [indiscernible] environment and high level of automation with the UKM Zero Trust, and we got already one of the major European -- global banks having headquartered in Europe, which bought UKM Zero Trust already last year. So UKM is growing strong. And UKM is being integrated with PrivX Technologies with the UKM Zero Trust Edition. And we see a lot of growth potential now, especially when we could see already last year that UKM is back in the very nice growth numbers. And UKM also is moving to Subscription business, which Niklas mentioned, it will be a solid foundation for our growth. It might reduce our short-term growth, but it will make us a future-proof company with a solid revenue base based on loyal customers who want to use our technology.And why is this Zero Trust so important? And not only because Biden also talks about it, but it has become an important term because Biden mentioned in May that he wants to get the government to go out of passwords, get rid of password rotation, which is the most annoying feature in big companies that you have to always invent new passwords. You don't need to because you don't know your password. You can get in with your fingerprint. And your control -- the control of your access to different systems will be real-time monitored between users and applications, between applications and other applications. We also can provide automated -- recognition of auto network devices within servers, laptops or routers. We can do all that easy for you automated, no human errors. And to do this in a big environment, one of the key elements we do is the modeling of the users that you don't have to give access rights to applications or users individually, you can do them role based. And that way, you can automate a lot of the administration on which connections are allowed. And that is really a key feature that our customers are highly picking up as the way to move forward, get rid of individual user management, go to role-based access control.And last but not least, in order to drive our Zero Trust initiative, we have been investing in patenting the innovations we have developed together with our customers. We have Just-In-Time access, Just-Enough access and Role-Based access control, all of these technology areas, we have patents being approved for us, which will help us to maintain our competitive position moving forward. So no password rotation, passwordless, real-time access even with your eye or with your finger print, and we are building our growth on a position where we remain a technology leader for the core areas that we believe are based for Zero Trust. The Zero Trust is one of our cornerstones moving forward. The other one is Post-Quantum Cryptography, which Niklas already mentioned. The business has started. That business could be longer-term half of the company business, if we get our growth plans implemented as we foresee at the moment. So PQC is a great opportunity for us. It is a longer-term investment, and it is paying back now.We are still waiting for the Traficom certification, which is limiting our short-term revenue opportunities. We believe we will get it this quarter. We have gotten several new customers, and we have gone with the Post-Quantum Edition for NQX. So that is the second growth engine, which will prove its power in the coming years.So now, finally, NQX is not only a promise, it's real, and it also goes Quantum Safe. Deltagon grew on its own very successfully last year, like it has been growing over the past year. We were able to complete the integration. So Deltagon Suite is now our fifth product line. The Deltagon operations that we took over are now integrated into our IT systems. We have common digital presence with our digital phase. And that is important in COVID times because you can't see face to face, at least you can see the digital face, and we are getting very good traffic on the website. We also have been able to do the cross-sell and upsell activities that we have common account and sales management processes implemented. Also leveraging the SSH network, which is mainly outside Finland. We have been able to get a lot of customer traction in all regions, and we expect to get the first major deals with the Deltagon Suite outside Nordic already on this first half of the year.We are investing in Deltagon, making it future-proof, making it more competitive. And the key element of that change is that Deltagon used to be 4 products. A little bit like us, used to be 4 different products. Now Deltagon Suite is a platform for safe data transfer between organizations and across countries. We are also putting new investments into R&D, making the user interface facelifted, getting more performance into the back-end technology. We are investing in marketing both in Finland, in Sweden or in the Nordics and in other SSH regions. So we see there is a lot of growth potential for Deltagon moving forward. And it is something new to talk to our customers in the traditional SSH markets. So Deltagon organic growth continues. And Deltagon is going to be even more competitive in the future based on the investments we do on the go-to-market and on the technology side. So I'm happy that you are hopefully still awake and because now I want to talk a little bit about the future.So what we accomplished last year, what we are still continuing to do is that we want to make our product portfolio to stay in the business competitive long-term. We've gone with the subscription business model, which is fundamental for any software company to get rid of license sales. And the great thing of that approach is that when you sell by subscription, the customers, you can grow inside the customer. So all the customers that we are getting with PrivX and NQX, they are expanding their use. So sales cost is lower. And we can easier build on the existing portfolio, which is recurring revenue and the existing customers buying more will make us more predictable growth company than ever before. Deltagon is our second largest, second most profitable portfolio element at the moment. And it is still delivering extremely good feedback from the customers, expansions in Sweden, expansions in Finland. It is really -- I'm really happy with the acquisition that we did.NQX, I already mentioned. It will, together with PrivX, be the growth engine moving forward. UKM with the Zero Trust Edition is also a good element to build a growth. NQX -- Deltagon will be growing maybe presence wise smaller because the base is bigger, but also Deltagon will be a key element. So actually, we have all our products in a position that we -- they can all contribute to the growth of SSH as a whole. And with going from point product solutions, we are also getting more opportunities to grow short term. We are getting closer to customers with our better service offering, which is focused on supporting the design and implementation and integration of our products in the customer environment. We are going for a stronger ecosystem.As I said, go-to-market side, on the technology side, and we are driving the organization to work in cross-functional teams, sales and professional services working with digital and physical marketing activities. And also getting our professional services, our technical people, our support people to work together closer to customers to make sure the customers are happy and supporting our land and expand approach. So we have 3 focus areas that the whole team is motivated to go for. First is getting closer to our customers because innovation happens with the customers, getting profitable growth from our full portfolio, and we want to also invest in our internal processes, in our R&D so that we can be more competitive in the future. So get closer to customers. We invest still a lot in our future. Half of our employees are in R&D and product management. And we are putting major efforts in getting our systems better than ever before. So the business outlook we see that we will continue on the growth trajectory that we have been able to establish, we will grow compared to last year in 2022, and we will do it profitably. So we will estimate that our EBITDA and cash flow from operations will both be positive this year. So that concludes my presentation. And now it is time for comments and questions. So maybe [ Chris ], maybe you can take over to manage the dialogue now.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions]

[Forbes Goldman, Research Analyst]

This is Forbes from Redeye. So I noticed that you acquired 70 customers, more than 70 customers in the quarter. How does this compare to previous quarters? And can you talk about which product lines that have driven the most?

[Teemu Tunkelo, Chief Executive Officer]

We have -- with NQX, we have got new customers, with Deltagon, we've got the new customers. UKM, we've gotten both expansion to new customers. With PrivX, we have gotten probably 1/4 of all the customers. I would say that the only product line that hasn't got a new customer is Tectia to the same extent. So Tectia is a more stable product, but all the other products are in strong phase of growth.

[Forbes Goldman, Research Analyst]

Great. And recurring theme is that PrivX deal sizes have increased. What can you say about this? And how have you managed to do so?

[Teemu Tunkelo, Chief Executive Officer]

It's about focusing to the right customer growth. It's about the land and expand approach. And over the last 2 years, our PrivX deal size has more than doubled. And it is driven by partially from UKM customers starting to buy PrivX technology with Zero Trust Edition, but also, I would say, success creates success. We have gotten really major customers on technology side, on banking side. And when these -- what I call them lighthouse customers, when one of the lighthouse customers buy from PrivX, then we get a lot of other customers who are interested in us. So we are more selective to whom we sell. And we are focusing on our core segments and the larger companies in those segments.

[Forbes Goldman, Research Analyst]

Great. I also have a question on NQX. And well, actually about Post-Quantum Safe because this is relatively new and it appears to resonate very well. And I mean, can you talk a little bit about the market for this? And if there are any other commercial, yes, solutions, yes?

[Teemu Tunkelo, Chief Executive Officer]

Niklas, maybe you want to take this.

[Niklas Nordstrom, Deputy CEO & CFO]

The technologies is very, very new. We believe we were the first company in the world to release commercially available solution for Quantum ready key exchange. We know that, for example, NSA is recording all web traffic in key exchange events already today. So especially large corporations that have intangible assets that they need to protect are waking up to the fact that quantum computing is coming. We don't know when, but the situation is that they cannot be prepared for it. So what we are seeing right now is that the early adopters are large institutions, governmental entities and especially governmental entities who have something to do with national security. So this is the market driver for PQC solutions at the moment.And what we are seeing and what is the case with many other blue ocean technologies, new technologies is that after the early adopters take into use, then it starts to become mainstream. And this was the case, for example, with Zero Trust. So first, nobody had heard about Zero Trust, what it is. We want passwords, but now it is mainstream. Customers are asking for Zero Trust, whereas just a couple of years ago, we were having to sort of always in the sales setting tell how great Zero Trust is, what it does and so on. Now it's the other way around. So I think this looks like a very familiar track for how we see PQC developing as well.

[Forbes Goldman, Research Analyst]

Great. So when you look at into 2022 and your 3 geographies, how do you think in terms of prioritizing sales and marketing between APAC, EMEA and Americas?

[Teemu Tunkelo, Chief Executive Officer]

Well, I think APAC is still a little bit on the turnaround phase. U.S., we started to change a year ago, a good year ago, U.S. is back on track, where I believe that last year was the year of EMEA, I believe that EMEA will be stronger than before. We have strengthen the sales. We have strengthened the support. We have strengthened the professional services in EMEA. And in my mind, Finland is not part of Europe. So we have invested in an office in Germany. We have French-speaking salesperson. We are looking at Italian speaking, Spanish-speaking people. We are already strong in the U.K. So what I would call the Mainland Europe, I believe, will continue its growth momentum, and we will do all our best to strengthen further the U.S. operations. And maybe this year is not yet the year for APAC for us. But next year will be.

[Forbes Goldman, Research Analyst]

Understood. And a final question then. You have a very strong cash position now, especially when compared to previously in 2021. How do you expect to utilize this in the main way?

[Teemu Tunkelo, Chief Executive Officer]

I would say that -- we are quite happy with the cash position. I don't see major acquisitions in the short term. I think we have to focus on the growth investments on the go-to-market side, and that will take money because now that COVID is getting away, we will sit in the airplanes again, we will go to the fares. So there will be more go-to-market investments, but we still primarily try to manage the cash position that we would be stronger with our balance sheet. So we want to basically pay our increased go-to-market costs with the growth we had from the business rather than spending the money because Niklas loves money, I think. So he wants to keep it.

[Operator]

Now we have good time for more questions. Please go ahead. Well, if there are no more questions, then I think we can end the call a bit early. As said in the beginning, the recording and the presentations will be uploaded to our website. And you are more than welcome to revisit them at a later stage. Thank you for your participation. Thank you, Teemu, and thank you, Niklas, for your presentations. And I wish you all a very, very good day. Thank you. Bye-bye.