Smartoptics Group AS

OSE:SMOP

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

Good morning to Hotel Continental and also good morning to those of you who are joining us online. We are here today to talk about Smartoptics and our Q3 result. Before we turn into the Q3 result, as such, I would like to take the opportunity to talk a little bit about the bigger picture, the long-term opportunity for Smartoptics and our position in the market, which is truly fantastic. For those of you who are new to the company and for those of you who need a reminder on our position in the market.

So the market that Smartoptics is in is the global market for optical transport networks. What are we talking about here? Well, we are talking about transport of data to, for instance, data centers, between data centers, between cities and from, for instance, access points in a network where a normal Internet user would connect to the network into the Internet itself.

This is a $16 billion market. Of course, the technologies and the solutions that Smartoptics work with and that we offer are relevant for many, many applications. As an example, the same type of technologies are used for transporting data between the United States of America and Europe over underwater cables, the same kind of technology is used to, for instance, connect the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States of America. Those markets that I just described we refer to as long-haul markets. And the same technology is used in the metropolitan and regional networks to, for instance, connect the data centers to each other and also, as I said, to connect various access technologies such as 5G or fiber-based solutions into the network. That is the part of the market where Smartoptics is present in the metropolitan and regional networks.

So if we look at and carve out the addressable markets for Smartoptics, we're looking at the $16 billion market, 50% of that roughly being metro. And then if we add another layer of smart optics on top of this, namely the markets where we are present, which is predominantly EMEA and North America. We see that, that is, again, 50% -- of the 50% of the $16 billion.

So in total, Smartoptics is addressing something around 30% of a $16 billion market, so in the range of $4 billion, $5 billion. So you can see that we are a challenger in a very big market. And this market is also quite special in the sense that it's serviced by very few companies, a normal $16 billion market would probably have a range of competitors shooting for different applications and different parts of the market. In our case, it's really about a handful of really large companies such as Ciena Corporation, Nokia, Cisco and it's a handful of smaller companies addressing this market. Why is it like that? Well, obviously, the advanced optical technologies and the software associated with that, that we work with is -- it's technology that requires a certain degree of domain competence, and that is not available anywhere.

Scandinavia happens to be one spot where you can find people who understand this market space and these kind of technologies. Silicon Valley is another example. But we're in a good position here in Scandinavia and able to recruit specialized staff to build this. So why is this market growing? And why is the market there to begin with? Well, the key driver is what we refer to as the ever-growing demand for bandwidth. That is kind of generally known and really never a question. And I think most of you who listen to me right now feel that you can kind of buy into that idea that you are consuming more and more bandwidth.

And when we scale this up and look at what's happening within the data centers, around the data centers, the trend becomes even stronger with old things that we have known for a very long time, like streaming video, you're watching more and more high-resolution video. That content is, of course, in data centers and being shuffled between them and to the end users, but also newer things coming on board, things like AI, how will that affect our network? Well, clearly, AI to date has been something that's been living mainly within a data center. And now we expect that the AI traffic, the bandwidth that's required to feed all those engines is no longer just going to be CPU to CPU communication and GPU to DPU communication, but also data center to data center communication.

So we're seeing new trends coming on board. But really, when you work with transporting bandwidth, it doesn't really matter what grows, if it's streaming video, if it's 5G, if it is broadband access in any shape or form, really, whether it's over fiber or over copper cables, it does not really matter because the more bandwidth that's out there, the better for us and the more data we need to transport.

Some of these drivers behind the bandwidth growth is not geographically evenly distributed. So if you, for instance, look at fiber access in Scandinavia, where we have nearly 100% penetration of fiber, nearly everyone has fiber, not only to their houses, but also to their summer residents and things like that. That is not the case throughout the world. So that technology is being rolled out into, for instance, rural parts of Americas, which is a huge market now where you see also big government funds to build that infrastructure, driving our market. So things that may not be too relevant in one market is very relevant in another market.

We're also seeing 5G being a driver for this. Optical technology is moving much closer to the base stations, higher capacities being fed from the base stations into the networks. That is, again, something that seems to be rolling out at different pace in different parts of the world where right now, Americas seems to be a little bit down and other markets are a little bit up on 5G.

Bottom line, whatever grows the need to transport bandwidth between data centers, 2 in from cities, 2 in from consumers into the Internet will grow with that. So hence, the ever-growing demand for bandwidth. So that's the market. This market is changing.

And if you look to the right of this slide, you see me talking about open and disaggregated solutions, a shift to something that we refer to as IP of DWDM. What is this? Well, so in the old world, in a legacy network, the market for transport equipment, what I'm talking about, what Smartoptics is selling, what's a well-defined market with its well-defined borders, staff in organizations, managing that network pretty much independent of what was happening around them.

That market in itself was an isolated market where organizations and people work with that technology more or less independent of other parts. The trends that I'm talking about to the right, which are a key driver for Smartoptics to develop the products that we develop and to go after this market really aggressively now, it's really about those 2 areas of the network becoming one. So they're coupling between the optical technologies and the IP layer, the routers and the switches become really, really close to each other, hence, at the end of the day, we will have a huge IP network globally where the optical networking technology is really an embedded part of the IP layer. And Smartoptics can develop products and ideas to fit that model in a very nice way.

So -- sorry, I should go back. So who is buying this technology? Well, it's really anywhere where there is a fiber we can sell our solutions, our software and our services. So enterprises, those are typically our small customers buy this to connect one data center to another data center or one data center to several other data centers, and cloud players, pretty much the same. And for us, it's predominantly the hybrid clouds, the midsized cloud players, but also, of course, the fans of the world, the Google, Microsoft, Facebook, the hyperscalers are also using this technology. So that's an opportunity for us in the future to go after also that market.

So anywhere where there is a data center, there is a need to connect it to other data centers. And there is a fiber and we come into play. We don't really work with the fiber as such, but rather the equipment and the software that's required to increase the capacity of the fiber.

Then we have the operator community. Operators is really anything from an AT&T, the biggest of the biggest down to a regional operator in a particular town or a part of a country. So there are, of course, thousands of them. As an example, in the U.S., there are about 2,000 alternative operators out there who are all building networks using this type of technology that we're talking about here. So Smartoptics sweet spot in that world is -- has been, I should say, the smaller operators, the so-called Tier 3s and regional operators. And we're now moving into addressing larger and larger opportunities and larger and larger customers as we develop our products to be suitable for bigger things, bigger networks and more advanced solutions.

So at the moment, when we talk about our ambition and our strategy to go after larger accounts, we're talking about up to the Tier 2 level in the United States of America. So effectively nearly all European operators fit within that framework, I should say. It's a great market, huge addressable market for Smartoptics. Many customers, many customer types, many verticals and the opportunities for us are really quite endless compared to where we are at the moment.

So we go to this market with very attractive technology. We have, for the past 5 years, been leaning on this trend to merge the IP and the optical network. We have developed a product to fit that environment. And we're really starting to see now that, that model is becoming a more standardized model. So from that perspective, we are ahead. We have deployed thousands of these systems where some of our competitors have not really come to release their first versions of products that's suitable for this environment.

So we have a unique position. One unique thing that's important to take back here is, of course, that we have no legacy technology in our company. Everything we do is leaning towards the IP of DWDM model, meaning we have no revenue to protect from old days. And also, we have no maintenance burden from old products where we need to spend large parts of our software resources as an example to keep that up to date. We can truly spend our money and go after the most modern of the modern of network technologies, and that's what we do. And we do that by striving to be the most cost-effective vendor in the market to address the metro and regional parts of the metro segment in order to address, for instance, the long haul and the subsea networks, we would need to do more of the same.

It's the same technologies, but it's more of it and more advanced ASICS and amplifiers and whatever is needed to do that. We're true to the message that we are going to be cost effective. We are going to be in the metro and in the regional networks, which in itself is a big enough market. We have a very good and solid customer base in the mid to -- sorry, small to midsized customer segment, the enterprises, the hybrid clouds, the smaller and regional operators. And we have some larger customers that are more that are buying our products. We have been talking a lot about Crown Castle in the past being a U.S. Tier 2 who has been using our products for a multitude of applications, including 5G, which was a very big thing last year that I will come back to.

And of course, our ambition now is to continue to expand into larger customers, the kind of customers that can be on a run rate level, $10 million, $20 million, $30 million, $40 million per year, deploying this type of technology year after year after year. That's the market we're going after. And we are still in a position where we have very good dialogue, very constructive projects going on with several of them. When I say several, we're talking about up to 10 of these customers that we entertain at one given moment, and they are all in different stages of maturity, I should say.

So going forward, looking into the future, of course, it's going to be instrumental for us to maintain and grow our existing customer base, our home market and also gradually add bigger accounts as we go along. It doesn't have to happen every day, not even every month, not even every year, but something like every 18 months, we should bring on a new larger customer to feed the growth of the company. We have a strong footprint in the U.S. and Europe. Looking back a little bit, Americas was the United States of America. So up to I would say, about a year ago, nearly all of our Americas revenue was the U.S. and nearly all of our European revenue was either DACH, U.K., Ireland or the Nordics. We have since then taken on Eastern Europe, which has been growing quite nicely despite the financial difficulties there.

And we're seeing meaningful revenues from the CALA region, Mexico, as an example. And we're counting now our revenues from Southern -- South America in millions of dollars. So clearly meaningful and another growth vehicle for the company. Similarly, APAC has been Australia and New Zealand, and I'm very hopeful now that we're seeing meaningful contributions from, for instance, Japan coming on board as we go along. And we are running this company.

We believe with a very strong financial model, we believe in profitable growth. We have been profitable for several years. We're practically debt-free, and we are a company that's paying dividends. We believe in this model, and we will continue to work according to that model. So it's all about gaining market share in the optical networking metro market segment and, of course, expand our addressable market through strategic product development into certain applications for larger accounts. That is what we're doing.

So that was a reminder. So let's take a look at how we've been doing so far, and I'm not going to go through the details. I believe many of you have seen this growth several times. But to me, every time I look at this graph, I can only see one thing that the business plan is working, and we are doing what we set out to do and have been doing it for quite some time now. Moving to Q3.

So Q3, we -- this is a slide that we're always using it has 6 metrics on it, 5 of them are absolutely superb and really proof points of that we're doing the right things. So we can start with the one, namely revenue growth, which is moderate this quarter. I would like to take you back to Q2 when we reported Q2. We talked about 5G and one particular account that has not really materialized in 2023. This is wherever you read about the operator market, you can clearly see that the larger operators have been CapEx constrained and have been holding back on investments through 2023, near all of them.

Most people are talking about a return of that in 2024 at some point. And really, our exposure to that market has been the Crown Castle 5G deployments that we did last year, which was about 15% of our revenue, and that has not materialized this year. So that is affecting us and making our comps more difficult, particularly in the second half of this year.

And despite that, we managed to grow in Q3 by a single percent. But if we compensate for the 5G business that we did last year, the underlying growth, the growth that we have with our normal customer segment is about 13%. So quite okay. But of course, we need to accelerate this growth as the market picks up going forward.

Gross margin, we're still on the positive trend that we have talked about for several quarters now. We do 50% gross margin in the quarter, which is fantastic. EBITDA, EBIT margin, we're at the upper level of our long-term aspiration. And of course, the cash flow, as predicted, is fantastic in the quarter. And earnings per share, which is a new metric that we recently started to talk about, I think looking at this, it's, of course, the 9 months accumulated value, that's the most interesting here looking at earnings per share in a particular quarter. I don't think it's too meaningful. But so about NOK 71 is the earnings per share for the first 9 months of the year. So quite healthy there in my opinion.

Breaking down the revenue. Like we always do, we always look at our different product segments. Of course, another reminder, the black and the green, which is solutions, software and services, that is effectively all of our advanced products that are used to do what I talked about early in this presentation to transport data between data centers and between cities and so on and so forth. That has been the growth vehicle for many, many years. They belong tightly together. So we sell green when we sell black. We do not sell green when we don't sell black to simplify things. So combined, we can see that the solutions, software and services is still the growth vehicle of the company.

The red piece optical devices, which is a market where we sell a number of optical devices that we use our software to tailor make to what it needs to do. We're selling -- it's a market where we're selling 300,000 optical devices, we get purchase orders nearly every hour into this company. It services as a stable foundation. And of course, it's a vehicle for us to upsell and cross-sell the black and the green when we have a customer buying red. So a very nice position to be in. And we're making money also in the red optical devices segment, and we have been using that money over the years to reinvest into the black and green where we believe the long-term shareholder value will be.

Looking at the different geographies, I think it's very interesting to see that and I normally say that when you analyze this, please don't look at one single quarter. You have to look at this over time because the quarters go up and down as we prioritize as customer orders come in, and there are several 2 short-term factors affecting whether or North America is the biggest or Europe. Last quarter, it was Europe that drove the growth. This time, it's Americas. And I think that's very interesting because we've been reading a lot about Americas being halted, particularly, again, coming back to the larger operators. And we see several people struggling in America, but America is actually the growth vehicle in this quarter. So that's very nice.

But the important message here is we have 2 really great markets, and we can continue to grow in both of them as we move further. And of course, the challenger here is APAC. It is still so small that one individual deal can affect whether we grow or decline. So it's very difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from -- really from one quarter to another.

The opportunity here, so the majority of the revenue that you see there is really Australia and New Zealand and a tad in other markets. But the meaningful opportunity here is if we can open up Japan and a few other markets where we have been doing active business development and have been seeing early successes over the past couple of years. So that is the opportunity in APAC going forward.

Great. I will hand over to Mikael to talk you through the balance sheet. Thank you.

[Mikael Haag, executive]

Thank you. Yes. So on the left-hand side, you can see our balance sheet. Magnus said, we have a strong financial position. It is a very strong financial position, very little debt, USD 1.3 million out of this. We have a great cash position that we increased this quarter. And in general terms, it is a very light balance sheet. There is no large portion of goodwill. There's no big assets. So what's on our balance sheet is our working capital and our cash. On the working capital, you see on the right-hand side, the trend is that it is going down. And the reason for this is that inventory did peak along with the semiconductor shortage and has been sort of trending downward the last couple of quarters.

Accounts receivable or trade receivables is coming down from Q2 as we had a very large portion of revenue in actually late June in Q2. That is being paid now. So we have a great cash flow from that. And on the payable side, it's largely flat development. So working capital is trending downward. So good progress on the sort of the balance sheet side.

Summary of the financials. Magnus talked about the revenue. The revenue growth was 1.1%. We're at USD 13.6 million. Gross margin has been trending upward. The trend perhaps flattening out a bit but it's a very strong gross margin that we've had. EBITDA and EBIT coming in at 2.7% and 2.2%, very strong. EBITDA and EBIT margin at 19.8%, trending upward, 16.3%. So trending up over the last couple of quarters. Return on capital employed is super strong. And that's an effect of the EBIT margin and a fairly light balance sheet. And to sum it up, the cash flow was very strong this quarter. So we're close to $10 million in year-to-date cash flow, 5.5 million in this quarter. Thank you.

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

Good. So if you intend to ask questions on the portal, I should say now is a good time to do that because there is a slight delay.

Thank you. So looking forward, the $100 million, which you have heard me talk about many, many times. It is a target that we have been carrying with us ever since the IPO, so about 10 quarters, and we see no reason. We have not seen any reason to change it, and we do not see any reason to change it at this point. We're about 62% of the target to reach $100 million in revenue in 2025, 2026 time frame, and we are looking at it. The other metrics that we have here, we're really above or at the higher end of our range and of course, this is quite a common question that we get, why do we not increase our targets when we are above them well, maybe we should, at some point, I believe the message that we want to convey is that we are here to grow our market share, to grow the company profitably, and we do believe that the best way to create shareholder value is to continue down this journey hence, we will continue to be aggressive in the market.

That's it for today. Thank you very much.

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

Do we have any questions in the room? Or do we have any questions on the portal? Yes. microphone, maybe.

[Markus Bjerke, analyst]

So Markus from SEB. Two main questions for me. I can start on the revenue side and maybe a bit on the market because you have some peers talking about a slower market. And then in relation to that, how do you see your 13 underlying growth without 5G into Q4 and maybe into 2024? Do you think that's a sustainable growth rate with the market we're seeing now? Or do you need to have an improvement in the markets to sustain that underlying growth rate? That's the first question.

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

So I think if we look at the market, there are certain knowns here, right? We do know that the large operators have cut back on CapEx. They are not -- 5G is not rolling out at the moment as it should. And the same goes for many other technologies. I think that the hyperscalers, they were first in on this change of behavior and some people now report that the hyperscalers have turned around and starting to invest again. I mean, sooner or later, they have to because the growth of capacity in all of these networks will continue. There is no doubt. Those people are also talking about the bigger operators turning around within a couple of quarters.

Now so our exposure to this part of the market is very little, as you know. So of course, if 5G turns around and if you see large build-outs of that, that will have a very positive effect on us. If you look at our home market, it's a little bit more difficult to analyze because it really goes up between the quarters in different geographies, in different segments. As an example, we had a 63% growth in the DACH region in Q3. We had very healthy growth in Nordics in Q3, very bad growth in the U.K. in Q3. We're seeing Nordics probably being not so great now while America is coming in with good opportunities. So I mean, clearly, we have tough comps in Q4. Coming into Q4, we grew 40% last year without 5G, yes, it's a different situation. But it's really very difficult to say how this will grow. We're a small fish in a big pond, so yes.

[Markus Bjerke, analyst]

And so just a follow-up on that. So if we exclude 5G, do you think that the market will look similar in Q4 as in Q3?

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

Yes, remains to be seen. But I do believe Q4 is Q4. Q4 is a quarter that can -- there's a lot of things that can happen at the second half of Q4, obviously. So -- and it's really too early to give any great estimate on that. So I have to remind you that looking back 4 quarters, we have done, I mean, 2/3 of our revenue in the last month of every quarter so far. So we will see.

[Markus Bjerke, analyst]

Understood. So my final question is on the cost items because very, very strong profitability despite a bit lower top line. So can you just dig a bit deeper into why we see sort of a good cost development? What was the driver here? And is that something we should expect going forward? Or are there any special items that we should be aware of?

[Mikael Haag, executive]

So there are a number of explanations for that. First of all, the first one is the seasonality effect of sort of lower payroll costs in predominantly Sweden. And we have more -- a higher share of our employees are now in Sweden because that's where we've been employing people at a faster pace in operations, but predominantly in development. Also, external consulting related to some of the external projects has been down in Q3 compared to Q1 and Q2. So that's an effect as well. And then there are some -- there's 2 reversals of sort of in the 50,000 sort of size. So it's a number of things, but the main one is seasonality effects of payroll and external spend.

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

Yes. Very good. So we have a couple of questions on the portal, the first one.

Can you please comment on the order intake during the quarter versus Q3 2022 and the current backlog? And for a very long time, we have not really commented on order intake nor backlog other than the fact that we have been saying now that really ever since Q3 in last year, our backlog coming into the quarters have gradually been decreasing, and we talked a lot about this in Q2 that we are really -- the majority -- absolute majority of the revenue is in and out within a quarter, which is, on one hand, very, very good because we have really short delivery times to our customers, they appreciate that -- and of course, we can win business on that. And on one hand, a little bit complicated because it makes it much more difficult to predict. But -- so the backlog situation has not changed from Q2 from where we were when we entered Q3. That's what I can say.

Another question is, can you talk about the progress on larger operators, tenders, et cetera? Yes, sure. So it takes time to win these kind of deals. When we did it the last time, it took about 3 years before initial contact and through to first purchase orders and rollout. We are in different phases of this. We are participating in 2 or 3 larger tenders that are sweet spot targeting exactly what we do with very large accounts at the moment. And we have products in at least 5 labs.

Now what needs to happen for those projects to convert is, of course, that the customers need to take the step to make this shift migration to deploy 400 gig versus 100 gig. They have to change the model and start looking at IP over DWDM. That requires a lot of architectural thinking and work. So it's very difficult to say when the next big one can start affecting our revenues, it can certainly happen in 2024 for sure, but we have to come back and talk more about the progress as we come along. But I'm very happy with the progress so far.

Next question is what's the status for listing on Oslo Busch? The status there is unchanged that we have, for the most part, prepared a company with a few exceptions related to Board composition and things like that. And we have not taken any other decisions than what we have done before, that the intention is to uplist. So we'll see when that happens.

We have one question. How is the pricing at the market? Is price increases hard to get out? Is the high inflation and the interest rates increases an opportunity -- okay, sorry.

Well, I think I would choose to interpret this question as the first part because I think that's the most relevant. So when the component shortage situation happened about 2 years ago now, I believe we went to our larger repeat customers and said that we have no intention to increase the prices.

We managed to compensate for that in the smaller accounts just by changing our discount policies and things like that. So we have actually, through this period, grown our profitability rather than anything else. So I would say overall, in Smartoptics, so yes, obviously, our profitability has gone up. That's a combination of certain price increases and of course, better costs coming in into the COGS, but really, we have no ambition to make huge price increases at this point.

Coming back to what I said, it's more important to win market share. It's more important to grow the company over time. And that's, I believe, how a challenge should act and we will continue to do that.

We have one last question. So why the difference between Europe and U.S. U.S. did very well considering the 5G backhaul headwind are telcos more CapEx constrained in Europe. So as I said, it is very difficult to analyze one quarter when it comes to geographies because it's not only what the market looks like. It's also choices that we make when it comes to prioritizing certain shipments and deliveries and so on and so forth.

I should say that our European business is a little bit more leaning towards the enterprise side, while our U.S. business is leaning a little bit more towards the operator and cloud and enterprise. The differences are very, very small, I should say. So don't draw any large conclusions from that.

I would say that we have not seen a material difference between any customer segment in any market really among the kind of traditional small optics customer base.

More question, please do not uplist. The only benefit is higher, taxes. Yes, thank you for the lines. Which product category are you seeing the most competition in and which product category are you expecting the greatest growth from? So probably the highest competition we see in our optical devices business, clearly, there are numerous players out there in that market space, we have a very unique position where we are kind of servicing a number of other brands in that market, selling the majority of our products under a different brand name than Smartoptics in that case in the device market, but clearly, the competition is the highest there, for sure. And where do we expect the big growth to come from, well, solutions, software and services where, of course, high-end optical devices belong in that category are part of those solutions. So they are very interlinked when we come to the high-end piece, the 400 gig and so on, yes.

[Mikael Haag, executive]

That was last question.

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

That was last question. Thank you very much for joining us today. Have a nice day.