Smartoptics Group AS

OSE:SMOP

Earnings Call Analysis

Company Targets $100M Revenue by 2025-2026

Amidst a competitive $4-$5 billion market, the company remains steadfast in reaching $100 million in revenue by 2025-2026, working with high-value accounts that could materially contribute this year and the next. Even with softer market conditions, 2023 saw a 2% revenue increase, a robust cash flow growth from $0.1 million to $11.8 million, and a maintained EBIT margin around its 18% target. Despite a temporary dip, the gross margin improved overall to around 50% from 44%. Cost efficiency efforts complement strong product development anticipated to ramp up in the latter half of the year. Their strategic focus includes growing in key geographies like APAC and LatAm, predominantly through partners, and leveraging upcoming AI-driven demand for bandwidth. With an equity ratio of about 60%, a dividend of NOK 0.50 per share will be proposed, reflecting the company's solid financial health.

Overview of Growth and Market Position

The company operates in a substantial $16 billion optical networks market, where it focuses on a more specific $4 billion to $5 billion segment, highlighting metro networks primarily in North America and Europe due to their growth potential and the company's competitive advantage in simplicity and cost-effectiveness. Moving towards aggressive expansion, the company aims to reach $100 million in revenue by 2025-2026, staying on track with its goal set since the IPO in 2021. The strategy includes capitalizing on a recovering market, especially in the U.S., and pivoting towards high-quality conversations with about 10 potential large customer accounts across various industry segments.

Geographic Expansion and Customer Base Diversification

The company is strategically targeting growth in Latin America, now counting its revenues there in millions of dollars, and expanding its footprint in Asia Pacific, with notable activities in Japan and Indonesia. They've increased their ordering customer count from 228 in 2022 to 267 in 2023, with 174 resellers, indicating a broad and diverse customer base that mitigates concentration risk. Notably, long-term relationships cultivated over five to six years are still contributing to about half of the current revenue.

Financial Resilience Amid Market Fluctuations

Even with revenue flat from the previous year, attributed in part to the absence of a one-time $8 million revenue in 2022, the growth in the Enterprise and ICP segments, combined with only a moderate decline in CSP, showcases the company's ability to effectively adjust and maintain a stable financial performance. This adaptation further exemplifies the resilience and strategic allocation of resources within the company's financial framework.

Sound Financial Health and Shareholder Returns

Exhibiting financial strength with an equity ratio of about 60%, the company has a robust cash position of $9.2 million and $7 million in available credit facilities. Due to this strong cash position, the Board is proposing a dividend of around NOK 0.50 per share. Year-over-year revenue has seen a 2% increase, but when excluding the one-off 5G revenue from the previous year, the increase is a substantial 19%. Margins are slightly lower compared to last year but still align with long-term targets, and the operating cash flow has significantly improved from $0.1 million to $11.8 million over the full year, indicative of a fundamentally sound and cash-generating business.

Future Ambitions Amidst Current Performance

The company remains committed to its $100 million revenue goal by 2025-2026, with opportunities in the pipeline that may materialize within the targeted timeframe. Although acknowledging the challenges encountered in 2023, leadership is optimistic about leveraging potential key accounts to achieve this milestone, maintaining an opportunity-driven approach to fulfill their long-term ambitions.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

You. Good morning and welcome to Hotel Continental and also welcome to those of you who are following us on the live stream. So we are here to present quarter 4 and 2023 full year result for Smartoptics. So the agenda today is going to be, first, a few comments from me on the quarter and the financials; then we take a step back and talk a little bit about the basics of Smartoptics, what we do, why we do it, and how we do it in order to attract customers; for new followers -- for the benefit of new followers, I will also talk a little bit about the growth drivers as I see them in 2024 and onwards, effectively looking at our journey towards $100 million; then we have a section breaking down the revenue from 2023, looking at some of the details, where is the revenue coming from, et cetera; after that, I will introduce my new CFO, Stefan Karlsson, who will take us through a couple of slides on the financials before we come back and talk about the long-term aspirations of the company.

So without further ado, I will begin to the overview of Q4 and 2023. And clearly Q4 is a quarter where I'm happy with everything, except one thing, which is, of course, the growth in the quarter. It is not contributing to the overall growth of the year. However, we are growing in the full year number. Q4 and the previous 4 quarters look pretty much the same. And it's a message that we've been talking about through the year where we compare ourselves to 2022, where we had a large customer buying our equipment for 5G backhaul applications. That revenue has not materialized in 2023, and the year has been all about compensating for that lost revenue, which we assume will come back, of course, when 5G in the U.S. picks up. But that has not happened so far.

So what happens then is our, what we refer to as our core business, is, of course, growing to compensate for the 5G revenue. And this is a very positive thing. And this time I've included a couple of slides to look a little bit more in details. What is the core business, what does it look like, who are the customers, et cetera? We can see a growth of the underlying core business, which is nearly 20%, which is phenomenal. And this is, of course, one important factor when we look forward towards $100 million. We have to grow everything, of course, also our home market, and we are doing that very strongly in 2023. So very, very positive there.

Another very positive thing this year is our gross margin. We set out on a journey to gradually improve our gross margin over a longer time, and we have been very successful with that. So we have 4 quarters in 2023 with very healthy gross margins. Why is that happening? Well, it is the product mix, clearly, where we are selling more of our software and services, we are selling more of our solutions -- more advanced solutions, where the gross margins are better. And I think it's also a matter of discipline in the company in terms of how we conduct our business. That's important. This trend is here to stay, and it's actually a little bit longer than what you can see on this slide. We are improving our gross margin with 10 points Q4 to Q4. However, in Q4 last year, we had some one-off effects related to the component crisis and spot market purchases that weighed us down a little bit. So, actually, we have been operating at a fairly high underlying gross margin for quite some time now. So that feels, of course, very, very good, despite the fact that we are continuing to invest in the company. What are we investing in? Well, we are investing in our product organization to broaden the addressable market and, of course, to become more competitive in the areas of the market that we are addressing. And right now, we have a clear focus on larger networks, regional networks where bigger deals and longer deals are happening.

So I will talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation. But clearly, in Q4, we're taking quite some steps to become more competitive for the more advanced segments of our market. We're also investing, of course, in our sales organizations and supporting organizations, but very selectively. The main focus is on the product organizations and selected markets that we prioritize. So despite the fact that we are continuing to invest, we are clearly delivering on the long-term aspirations here when it comes to both EBITDA and EBIT. So very good profitability, which I'm quite happy with.

Moving forward, talking a little bit more about the company. For those of you who are new to this, what is it that we do? Well, this is all about optical fibers, not the fiber itself, but the hardware, software, and support services associated with lighting up those fibers and bringing really, really high capacity, well, for lack of a better word, what we refer to as the Internet these days. A typical application for us is a number of data centers in a metropolitan area that needs to be connected with very high-speed connections where we deliver today, typically, bandwidths in the terabit range. So we are very, very far from what most consumers of bandwidth are used to buying, which is more megabits and possibly gigabits. We are talking about terabits. So the underlying technology here, one of them is something we refer to as wavelength division multiplexing, which is effectively same phenomena as you see every day when it's been raining, you see a rainbow that is white light scattering into different colors. We are using that phenomena to multiply the capacity of the fiber by simply sending different frequencies down the fiber, and of course, differentiating those at the far end of the fiber. So that's one technology that we are relying on to do this. Modulation techniques is another important one. We are right now in a major shift from where each of these colors was 100 gigabit, it's now becoming 400 gigabit, 800 gigabit is emerging per wavelength or per color in the fiber. So those are the type of technologies that we utilize to do this.

There are trends in our industry talking about how can we do this in a more open way, trends that are originating from the data center world, where open APIs, a more flexible view on how to build networks, allowing our customers to pick and choose a little bit more best-of-breed technology for what they need, and combine that. And we have been, I would say, for the past 5, 6 years, been at the forefront of this new trend, allowing anyone to operate on top of our networks, which is highly appreciated for the customers because it's breaking vendor lock-in situations and it's allowing them to innovate more efficiently in the network. So openness of our solutions, both from a data plane standpoint, but also the APIs that our customers are using to manage the networks, is equally important.

Smart design principles. I will soon talk about what our edge is. Our edge is clearly cost, and I will come back to that. And that is where the smartness lies to define and design effective products for the applications where we can make a difference and where we can find growth. So who are we selling this to? Well, I have outlined 4 customer categories at the bottom here. We're a little bit new where we talk about broadband providers as a separate customer category for us. It is a very important market for us, has been through Q4, and will continue to be in 2024 and onwards. This is the typical rural tier 3 telco, and typically in the United States of America, there are a couple of thousands of those, where large government funds is supporting the build of infrastructure for broadband technologies in general. And this is a market where we have added a couple of handfuls of new logos in the second half of 2023, and we'll continue to do that. So that's new. Of course, enterprises, that could be banks, it could be retail companies, it could be really anything, state government building data centers that needs to be connected together. They find the fiber somehow, lease it or own it or build it, and they turn to us to light up that fiber and to get these super-high capacities between their data centers.

Communication service providers, operators is a market that we have been focusing on for a number of years, developing products targeting the operator community in order to find growth and in order to find projects that are lasting over many, many years, which is the case. And I think our previously announced customer, Crown Castle, is a very good example of a customer where we are now qualified for a number of applications, one being the 5G stuff that has not quite materialized in 2023, but also where we have a multitude of applications and a number of new applications in the pipeline that can provide growth over longer time. So that's why communication service providers is interesting to us. And then of course, the content providers of the world, the Internet exchanges and similar, which is a market that is actually growing quite nicely this year. We are predominantly focusing on the tier 2 space. One good example is Internet exchanges, where we have a huge penetration. We don't have all of them, but we have a majority of them utilizing our technology to build these Internet hubs where everyone come together to peer between different operators and organizations.

So our edge, as I said, cost efficiency is really our thing. We are designing our products to be as cost effective as possible. We focus on the needed bells and whistles, rather than having all bells and whistles. We focus on, as mentioned here, merchant, ASIC technology, et cetera, optimizing those to really focus on cost efficiency rather than high functionality. And of course, with cost efficiency comes not only the hardware, but also the software, how we can design our software using modern design principles to allow and to achieve a high degree of automation and ease of use. That also helps our customers with the OpEx side of the cost. So this we're doing all in-house. All the hardware and software is designed and manufactured in-house by a world-class team. I normally say that there is nothing that our big competitors know about these technologies that we don't as a team, even though we're a considerably smaller company than some of our competitors, such as Ciena Corporation, Cisco, et cetera.

Yes, this market is a $16 billion market. The market for optical networks worldwide is around $16 billion. When we break out the parts that we are addressing, we're predominantly talking about a number of geographies; at the moment, the United States of America and Europe being roughly equal in size over a couple of years now, but clearly where Americas seem to have much better growth potential, I have to say, and some new markets. But from this perspective, we're mainly looking at North America and EMEA being our addressable market, and then the metro part of these networks, because these networks are used, these technologies are used to connect Europe with the U.S., Asian countries with the U.S., et cetera. We're not so much focusing on that high-end segment of the market, but rather how do we build a regional network and how do we build an efficient network in the metropolitan area where the volumes are higher and, of course, our edge, the simplicity, and cost effectiveness is very valuable. So all in all, we think that we're addressing a market which has a size of somewhere between $4 billion and $5 billion. So clearly a huge market where we can then grow and be a clear challenger over a very long period. So there is market out there. It's up to us to grab it.

Okay, looking forward a little bit to our next target, $100 million in revenue by 2025-2026. This is a target that we have been talking about ever since the IPO in 2021, and we're staying true to this target. It is a very good number for us to measure ourselves against. And when we build our plans, this is always the center of gravity for us in those discussions. So what is right now driving growth and what can drive growth over the coming years in order for us to reach our target? Well, it's clear that we have been through a period of a softer market, I would say, in particular in Q3 and first half of Q4, and in some geographies through Q4, and probably also early this year, and in other markets such as the U.S., where we see enormously high activity, basically second half of Q4 continuing into this year. So it seems that the U.S. is ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to coming out of whatever macro phenomena that has hindered investments. But if we look around, if we talk to industry analysts, it's quite clear that the second half of 2024 is going to be better than the first half of 2024, just for the simple reason that markets have returned to a more normal state where continuous investments to meet the ever-growing demand for bandwidth is continuing as they should. So that's one positive thing.

We have also been talking about the next step for our company, having a number of larger customers driving our growth beyond what we can do with our normal customer base, consisting of smaller service providers, Internet exchanges, enterprises, and tier 2 data centers. So we are now and have been for a very long time, we have some of these onboard as customers, and we have a list of, I would say, around 10 active opportunities that are better than normal, better conversations, higher quality in those conversations at the moment. And I think 2024, clearly a year where we are targeting to close deals, so a much better position now compared to about a year ago.

And who are these bigger accounts? Well, they are coming from effectively all of these market segments. This Friday, we are in the lab, qualifying our products for a Fortune 500 company in the media entertainment industry. That's one example. We do have conversations with a number of very large tier 2s in America. We do have conversations with hyperscalers. We do have conversations with a couple of also more traditional tier 1s, where some of them have been announced as early customers, and those dialogs are continuing.

What are we talking about? Well, the transition to 400 gig to 800 gig, the transition to a more open network infrastructure, the transition to a more low cost way of transporting bandwidth, introducing our new modern software platforms into their networks to help them with their growth. That is the center of all of these conversations, moving away from old into new. Of course, it takes some time, but the dialog is very positive at the moment.

Our product development is driving growth, particularly from the second half of this year, where we are releasing new products, not necessarily expanding our addressable market, but certainly making us more competitive in the higher end of what we define as our addressable market. Bigger networks, longer reach, higher capacities, and things like that, where we are releasing a wide range of products through 2024. So, again, something that points to second half of the year being slightly better than the first half of the year.

And, of course, our new geographies. A couple of years ago, we started to invest in LatAm, and we're now counting our revenues in Latin America in millions of dollars. So, very positive. I have high hope for some of the markets in LatAm for 2024 and, of course, continuing into the future. So that's one good example. There are other good examples of this, very selectively investing and targeting certain geographies in Asia Pacific, too, where Japan is one that has been with us for quite some time. We now have a very high activity level in Indonesia, as an example, a huge country that is developing really quickly, having huge needs to increase bandwidth and improve their infrastructure to service the population. So there are new geographies coming onboard contributing to our growth.

Okay, we will dive into 2023 and Q4. And those of you who have been with us for some time recognize this slide. It's the longer-term view of our growth. So clearly, I want to take you back to this. Well, sometimes it's good to look at the long perspective, too, right? And clearly, we are on a growth journey, even though 2023 was a flattish year, the important thing is now to return to growth as quickly as possible and continue this journey going forward.

I promised earlier to talk a little bit about our underlying business, what we refer to as our core business. What is that? Well, this is one way to describe it. There are probably several other ways, and I think this one clearly depicts what we are talking about. It's a number of customers, 267 in 2023, compared to 228 ordering customers in 2022. Out of those 267, 174 of them are resellers. And behind every reseller, there could be as much as hundreds of customers sometimes. Some of the resellers are distributors, targeting resellers in their geography, who in turn are selling our products to end customers. So I would say customer concentration is far from a problem in this company. And what's important is we are growing every year, as you see, and also in 2023, the number of customers that are buying products from us.

Looking at the average spend from a customer, it's flat from 2022, which is not unexpected in this segment of our market. And the revenue, it's a little bit higher in 2023 but not material in any way. We also see that our customers, in particular the resellers, are with us for a very, very long time. About half of the revenue this year is originating from relationships that we had 5, 6 years ago. So very, very positive, and of course, I expect that to continue. So this is what the core business really looks like. Many customers buying products from us in a year and growing.

Once per year we talk about this. In Q4, a little bit, breaking down the different market segments and also our direct versus indirect business. So to the left, you can see our 3 market segments: Enterprise, CSP, and ICP, Internet Content providers. And you can see growth in Enterprise and you see growth in ICP. And you see only a moderate decline in CSP, which I interpret as very positive, because, remember the $8 million of revenue contributing to this number in 2022, which is not there this year. And you can see that the difference isn't that big. We have actually compensated fairly well also in the CSP industry, where in this case also the rural telcos and such are included. Very similar on the right of this slide, indirect versus direct business. The big deals are typically more, tend to be more direct, and you can see that indirect business is growing faster, meaning our core business is growing faster this year. And the big deal that we talked about belongs in the red here. So we have actually compensated fairly well.

Moving into geographies. This is what I talked about a little bit earlier, and I think it's quite clear that the $8 million that we had in 2022 in the U.S. disappearing, and we're still seeing quite a healthy Americas in Q4. I think it was obvious to us that particularly second half of Q4 was, from an American standpoint, a very, very high activity level, and that activity is continuing in the year. Europe, however, not a very strong quarter for Europe, Q4. What is the problem there? Well, Europe for us is really a number of geographies. We can see Nordics being flat, we can see the DACH region being kind of flat, Eastern Europe a little bit growing, U.K., Ireland, however, is declining, and we had a huge Q4 in U.K. Ireland last year. So isolated to one market. APAC, yes, growing nice. Of course, we want more out of APAC, and I'm sure we will get more out of APAC. We need to stay focused on the geographies that we are targeting and the customer categories and opportunities we have.

Great. So I'm done. I will hand over to you, Stefan, and allow you to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about balance sheet and more details around the financials.

[Stefan Karlsson, executive]

Thank you, Magnus.

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

Great to have you onboard.

[Stefan Karlsson, executive]

Thank you. Hi, I'm Stefan Karlsson, and I'm happy to join Smartoptics as the new CFO. I have followed the company with a great interest during their growth journey, and I think the company has very nice product portfolio that they constantly develop, and it's great to be part of the team of Magnus with the dedicated and competent people. I have myself 20 years' experience from various finance roles within the telecom industry, such as Infinera and Transmode, and some background from PWC. Recently I've been finance director at Trustly, which is a Swedish payment provider. And I'm thrilled to be part of Smartoptics now and help developing the company towards the future goals.

Going into the balance sheet, we have a strong balance sheet with an equity ratio of about 60%. Noncurrent asset parts is based on capitalized development cost, intangible assets, as well as deferred tax assets. Current assets amounts to $32.7 million. It's mainly inventory and accounts receivables. We have a strong cash position of $9.2 million, and there's a sound, profitable business that generates cash. We have available credit facilities of about $7 million, and based on this strong cash position, the Board will propose a dividend of about NOK 0.50 per share. The noncurrent liabilities is mainly lease liabilities and favorable loans. Current liabilities is mainly AP, tax liabilities, and personnel-related liabilities.

The working capital development is good. It's reducing over the year. We have trade AR is going up a little bit due to late invoicing in the quarter of Q4. And the inventory has been slightly reduced. And then on the liability side, we see deferred revenue is increasing due to strong sales of the services. Trade payables is reduced, mainly due to lower inventories. And the other short-term liabilities increase from $6.4 million to $10.7 million. And that is related to deferred revenue and tax liabilities. Since we now are in a tax position, have consumed our deferred taxed assets.

The revenue year on year, we see a 2% increase, but excluding the 5G revenue in '22, we have an increase of 19%. In Q4 '22 we saw 2.5% of the revenue was related to 5G. the EBIT is in tune with our long-term targets. And the margin is 18% compared to 18.9% last year. The EBIT margin is also in line with expected and is 14.8% compared to 16.2% last year. The gross margin has developed very good during the year and is around 50% full year compared to 44% last year. And in Q4 '22, where we see that the gross margin was down to 40%. It was then, at that point, impacted by onetime cost related to spot market purchases, with an impact of around 4 percentage points.

Operating cash flow. The cash flow from the operating activities has increased from $0.1 million to $11.8 million on a full year basis. And that is based on that we have a sound business in the bottom, generating cash. And in 2022 we build up inventory and accounts receivable and that consumed cash. In 2023, we see that AR is stable, and we have a good cash conversion on AR, and inventory has decreased. Based on that, we have shorter lead times mainly and then we see deferred revenue that has increased as a result from strong service sales.

Thank you. Back to Magnus.

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

Phenomenal. Thank you, Stefan. So Stefan has been with us 2 weeks, and he is now at full pace with improving our processes and such. So I'm super happy with that.

Looking ahead a little bit, our long-term ambitions. I have already talked about the $100 million target that we set out for 2025-2026. So, given what has happened in 2023, how do we relay to this target? Well clearly there are opportunities in our pipeline that can take us to this level in 2025. We are working with such accounts. We have a number of them that can make a material difference for us this year and next year. Having said that, of course, given what happened in 2023, I'm quite happy that we provided a range on this number because, obviously, everyone with a pocket calculator realizes that if we resume our normal growth rate, we will probably reach this target in 2026. But the opportunity is there. So we will do everything in our power to reach it as quickly as possible.

With that, I thank you. And it's time for questions and answers. And I will open up the Q&A portal and see if we have any questions here.

[Magnus Grenfeldt, executive]

I'm going to start with the questions on the portal, and if there are any questions in the room, feel free to chip in. So we have a question here. Can you elaborate on the segment revenue mix development in Q4? And I assume that we are then talking about software and services versus solutions versus devices.

So I would say that solutions and devices are decreasing quite equally in the quarter, while software and services is growing quite a lot in the quarter. I believe maybe you can look that up, and we can come back. Software and service growth, I believe, it's around 17% or something, right? You can have a look. But clearly affecting both of our 2 segments.

Next question. You grew full time employees with 28% in 2023 while the revenue development were more or less flat. Going forward, can we expect that the FTE develop...

We will continue to invest. Obviously, where we are right now, slightly lower pace in Q1 and Q2 when it comes to recruitment activities. We have also done some minor changes second half of last year that we are now building up related to outsourced product development. But overall we have set a target now going forward to grow revenue faster than we grow our OpEx. So I believe that is really the answer. Where we have had an effect over some time, having a backlog of recruitment needs from 2021-2022, that we compensated for earlier. So it looks a little bit more material than what you would expect.

Question #3, considering the indirect-direct split in 2023 and a planned focus on market geographical expansion, do you see that realized mostly with partners, for instance, APAC, LatAm, or direct, especially related to the comment on trying to acquire larger customers. How is that related also to possible investing in own resources locally related to your growth plan? Thank you for good presentation.

You are welcome. Okay, so let's try to break this down. Obviously, in geographies like APAC and LatAm, there is a lot of partner business. I would say, nearly always we have a partner, at least for fulfillment of the project, even though my local resources may have been deeply involved in closing the deal that is related to import logistics in those geographies, which is a little bit more complicated sometimes than in other geographies. So mainly partner-related growth in such geographies. When it comes to the larger accounts, it is actually a mix. We do have some partners who are at a very good position to close larger deals and that have such relationships. And, of course, when we do, we work closely with our partners to achieve that. So I believe that's going to be a mix. Our own local resources. Well, as I've said, we are investing in certain strategic geographies. APAC, we have not invested in our own resources yet. We have a couple of agents working more or less full time for us, but we are relying, to a large extent, on our partner network. In APAC, LatAm, we have our own resources, and we will see. But certainly, investing in own resources will continue.

We have one question. How do you see the opportunities arising from the rise of bandwidth needs connected to AI? Very good question. And we actually had it on one slide earlier. Yes, so, AI, what is AI all about? AI is all about machine-to-machine communication, GPU-to-GPU, CPU-to-CPU. At the moment, the majority of that data resides within a data center. But I think the whole industry, the whole world, and everyone who knows anything about this is expecting that traffic, that capacity demand to hit the networks, because sooner or later you will outgrow the data centers, sooner or later you need to diversify the number of data centers you use for your AI-related engines. So I think it's just a question of time before we see networks flooded with new capacity being part of the ever-growing demand for bandwidth. And it's going to be driven from AI in the near future. That's how I see it. So clearly, an increased demand for our products related to AI and machine learning.

Next question is related to the semiconductor shortage. How have the semiconductor situation and industry development the last 2 quarters, and how do you see the development going forward? I would say that we are back to normal since a couple of quarters with our supply chain. We do not have any material semiconductor problems at all. So, knock on wood, I believe that is behind us now.

Can you elaborate on why is cost per FTE meaningfully lower year over year? I don't think it is, to be honest. I believe we're mixing up FTEs and number of employees here because when we recruit, we do it over a year. Certain resources are only with us for 1 or 2 quarters, obviously not at a different cost than someone who has been working the whole. I cannot see any reason why we would have lower average cost per staff. No, so flat, I would say, flat plus the normal little salary increases.

All right, we have no further questions on the portal. And any questions in the room? All right, thank you very much for taking the time to listen to us. Looking forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you. Bye.