Exclusive Networks SAS

PAR:EXN

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Operator]

Hello, and welcome to the Exclusive Networks First Quarter 2022 Update Call. My name is Julie, and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. Please note that the call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand you over to your host, Hacène Boumendjel, Head of Investor Relations, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

[Hacène Boumendjel, executive]

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Exclusive Networks First Quarter 2022 Conference Call, which is broadcasted live and will be available on demand on our website. The presentation slides and press release for this call are also available on our website in the Investor Relations section.

First, I would like to draw your attention to the disclaimer on Slide 2 of this deck regarding the information contained within this document, and in particular, the forward-looking statements. I invite all participants to read this.

Today's call is scheduled to last about 60 minutes, and I'd like to introduce our key speakers this morning: Jesper Trolle, CEO of Exclusive Networks; and Pierre Boccon-Liaudet, our CFO. The presentation will last about 30 minutes and will be followed by a Q&A session. If we don't have the time to take everyone's question in this session, I am available and happy to take any of your questions following up the call.

I'll now pass it over to Jesper for a few opening remarks and his overview of the Q1 performance. Jesper, the floor is yours.

[Jesper Trolle, executive]

Thank you, Hacène, and welcome, everyone, to our Q1 2022 trading update. We appreciate you take the time this afternoon to join us as we review our gross sales and our IFRS revenue results.

Following a solid 2021 performance, we are happy today to report a strong start to fiscal year 2022. I'm pleased to say that Q1 saw our fastest quarterly year-on-year growth in the last 3 years, which once again reflects the powerful momentum we have as a company. Our industry continues to grow, and I'm pleased to share that we are growing faster than the market in all of the top 6 cybersecurity segments. None of this, of course, would be possible without the extraordinary, in fact, world-class execution of our global teams, and I'm extremely grateful for their continued support and dedication in driving the success of our company.

But before we go into the details of our Q1 financial performance, I would like to share some observations and insights into what we are seeing within the current cybersecurity landscape. Some of the key trends that are driving our industry and how these are creating the conditions and opportunities for continued growth.

Geopolitical unrest continues to dominate the early headlines of 2022. None of us can ignore the human and economic impact of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which continues to fuel global tension and increased risk of cyber-attacks on businesses, government and national critical infrastructure. As it did throughout 2021, cybersecurity continues to dominate Board-level conversations within organizations around the globe as they are challenged with protecting themselves against the growing threat of cybercrime.

As we know and have said before, this trend will only rise in sophistication and frequency in the future as we are already witnessing in the first quarter of 2022 with additional high-profile ransomware attacks reported around the world. This increase in ransomware and global threat activity, coupled with attacks on data supply chain have spotlighted the increased vulnerability of security technology stacks.

According to research from the CyberEdge Group published in its 2022 Cyberthreat Defense Report, 71% of company surveyed were attacked by ransomware within the last 12 months. We are now starting to see the emergence of the post-pandemic business as the world starts to slowly recover and return to this new normal reality where businesses have reshaped their IT infrastructure and redefine the way in which they work, rapid digital transformation, the adoption of cloud infrastructure, the move to hybrid working or, in some cases, permanently remote as Uber just announced last week. And a growing reliance on asset service IT consumption has significantly expanded organization threat vectors.

This has now prompted businesses of all sizes to strengthen their cybersecurity infrastructure in order to keep their data, applications, people and digital processes safe and secure.

According to recent Cleveland Research -- research from Cleveland Research, sorry, this will undoubtedly lead to additional increase in cybersecurity spending in 2022 and beyond. Add to this, the continued an acute shortage of cybersecurity skills, currently, reported to be over 3 million cybersecurity job vacancies. It is well evident that the organizations are facing an unprecedented and growing cyber crisis, with additional and specific pressure on their internal cybersecurity teams responsible for defending their business in the face of these market conditions.

Security leaders are evolving their strategies to address these challenges of the new distributed enterprise. In a recent research published by Gartner's Peter Firstbrook, he states that by 2025, a single centralized cybersecurity function would not be agile enough to meet the needs of digital organizations. CISOs will need to move away from being solely a technical subject matter expert to that of an executive risk manager who advise businesses and leaders on how to make informed risk decisions. This emerging decentralized approach to cybersecurity will directly impact an already overwhelmed cybersecurity team, and it is likely to rise throughout 2022 and beyond.

At Exclusive Networks, we are ideally positioned to support these dynamics, including a more decentralized model, thanks to our global specialist approach and our network of highly skilled teams and ecosystems of partners around the world. Underpinned by our unique mix of services and our cybersecurity expertise on the ground, we are perfectly aligned and working hand-in-hand with our customers and partners to alleviate these challenges. And with this industry context in mind, let's go on to review our Q1 results.

I'm pleased to announce a very solid start to our fiscal year 2022 with a strong Q1 performance. This further builds on the positive momentum at our recent full year 2021 results and clearly demonstrates our ability to consistently outperform market growth, execute against our stated growth strategy and deliver against market expectations.

Gross sales increased by 24.9% year-on-year to EUR 932 million. This was underpinned by a strong market, high demand for our vendor solutions and the result of our growth and expansion strategy. Our continued focus on market expansion through new vendor acquisitions and adding new geographies for existing vendors, allows us to keep expanding our addressable market.

To put this in context in relation to these Q1 performance, the new vendors that we have onboarded and the new geographies in which we have expanded our current vendors into this quarter has increased our market opportunity or our serviceable addressable market by around EUR 500 million annually.

Also, we continue to see strong increase in our cloud-based business with a year-on-year growth of more than 52% in Q1. In fact, our cloud-based business now represents almost 1/3 of our broad sales compared to less than 1/4 just a year ago. This growth demonstrates how we continue to expand beyond the traditional distribution channels and capitalize on the demand for cloud-based solutions and digital go-to-market motions.

Although supply chain disruptions continue to affect the cybersecurity market, our strong Q1 performance demonstrates how resilient our business is in adapting to challenging market conditions. Our constant dialogue and strong relationships with partners and vendors have been key in enabling us to overcome supply chain issues.

Our teams in the field have demonstrated their strong operational and commercial experience by understanding customer needs and where possible, tailoring solutions to meet these needs with products, which are less affected by the current shortages. The cybersecurity market continues to grow at pace and our relevance within it is getting stronger. We are in the right market at the right time and with the right ecosystems. We have a clear plan for continued growth, and we remain confident in achieving the full year outlook, which we presented to you at the end of March 2022.

Moving on to our underlying business performance. I'm happy to report that we achieved positive developments across all of our core strategic growth pillars. These included the onboarding and acquisition of more than 400 net new buying partners and a strong increase in our cloud-based business including a ninefold increase in the number of new resellers and an eightfold increase in the number of transactions within our X-OD platform, all part of our cloud-based go-to-market motion, which I will present and expand on in a minute.

We signed geographic expansion agreements with 4 existing vendors and added 2 net new vendors to our portfolio. We also secured additional support services agreements for an existing vendor and are close to finalize an agreement to become an accredited service center for further 2 vendors, which sets us up to grow our services business.

On the M&A front, we have integrated our 2021 acquisitions of Networks Unlimited and Ignition Technology and are now focusing on scaling them up and accelerating the momentum within these 2 businesses. We are currently executing against the next phase of geographic expansion of Ignition Technology into Southern Europe. This reinforces an already strong Northern European presence across U.K. and Ireland, Benelux and the Nordics. The expansion of Ignition's market presence within the global footprint of Exclusive Networks increases our addressable market opportunity, allowing us to better service and support this next wave of disruptive SaaS-based cybersecurity start-ups.

We continue to increase our influence within the cybersecurity ecosystem, and I've previously discussed the growing importance of our non-transactional partners. These are not traditional sell-through partners but strategic partners that carry strong influence within the cybersecurity market. And today, I can share that we have just added to this list, a cybersecurity collaboration agreement with the NATO Communications and Information Agency. That will give us early insights into external cyber threats. This will enable us to anticipate and mitigate against any potential attacks on our own IT infrastructure as well as share knowledge and advice with NATO and our wider ecosystem of cybersecurity partners.

Finally, an area that often gets overlooked is our business operations. we are continually striving for operational excellence to deliver the highest levels of experience, service and satisfaction to our vendors and customers. To that end, I'm pleased to report that we successfully are on track with our operational excellence project with the objective of integrating and standardizing our back-office systems with the creation of a new ERP ecosystem. We are now able to better integrate with vendors and customers and assistance through EDI, API connections in customer portals, which in turn helps to deliver a greater and more seamless customer and partner experience across the board. We expect to have fully completed this project at current perimeter by 2024, which will be an important milestone for Exclusive Networks as they bring significant value and benefits to our company, but even more importantly, to our partners and customers around the world.

I touched on this earlier, but I wanted to expand a little bit to help demonstrate how our vendor acquisition and expansion activity is a key part of our ongoing growth engine. In Q1, we welcomed 2 additions to our technology portfolio: Sysdig, who specialize in security for containers and cloud; and Zimperium, a leader in mobile device and application security.

Sysdig is a great example of where we are expanding our market offerings around cloud security, helping DevSecOps teams as more and more businesses transition to the cloud and consumer applications on a SaaS basis. This not only gives us an innovative new technology to help differentiate ourselves, it also broadens our sales motion into operational teams within organizations where security decisions are being made outside of traditional IT and security functions. This is where we add significant value through our cloud native specialist Nuaware.

Similarly with Zimperium, which addresses the area of mobile endpoint security, again, a fast-growing and relevant sector of cybersecurity. And only recently, we saw the high-profile compromise of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez mobile phone, which demonstrates just how relevant solutions such as Zimperium are.

Additionally, we expanded with 4 of our existing vendors into new geographies, as you can see on this slide. BeyondTrust into EMEA and North America; Juniper into the Adriatic and Eastern Europe; and Netskope into Israel and Turkey; and finally, Ruckus into North America. These strategic vendor acquisitions and geographical expansions have increased our serviceable addressable market opportunity by EUR 500 million annually, which we'll be looking to capitalize on in the coming quarters and years.

And as I often have highlighted, the cybersecurity market continues to grow at pace fueled mainly by 2 forces. On one side, you have the rapidly expanding threat surface created by digital transformation, cloud adoption and this new hybrid working models. And on the other side, you have the emergence of new threat actors and the exponential rise in cyber-attacks, which has significantly increased awareness in corporate organizations and public entities.

In Q1, we continued to outperform the market, growing faster than every top-tier cybersecurity segment and as a result, gaining more prominence within each of these segments. This performance is a result of our ability to spot emerging cybersecurity trends, identify key cybersecurity growth sectors and then be able to attract and select existing and new innovative vendors in each of these segments.

And one way to illustrate this is to look at our growth within the endpoint cybersecurity segment. Endpoint security is all about protecting organizations endpoints, such as laptops, tablets, mobiles and other devices that are connected to the corporate network. Here, we are experiencing a very strong growth driven by customers' wish and most often needs to replace legacy endpoint solutions with new innovative and more automated platforms such as SentinelOne Singularity platform.

We are wrapping our value services around SentinelOne solutions and also help augmenting their reach into the MSSP market through our X-OD platform. This rare combination of being able to identify cyber sectors, spotting the innovators and winners in that space and then being able to deliver valuable services and routes to market that are relevant to where they are in their growth is what gives us a strong edge in this market. It is this flywheel effect that reinforces our capability and increases our capacity to capture future growth and relevance in all of the key cybersecurity segments.

I mentioned at the beginning how our cloud-based business continues to accelerate, more notably showing growth of 52% year-on-year, driven by an increasing number of partners transitioning from traditional hardware-based sales models to more software and cloud-oriented models. We see several key drivers for this trend that will certainly continue to positively impact our business growth and performance going forward: firstly, there is the growth in SaaS-based businesses that we have and will continue to generate for a growing number of our top vendors who are transitioning sales from perpetual licensing to subscription-based models; then there is the continued growth of our specialist cloud-native and DevSecOps business Nuaware, that is seeing significant growth and where we have some great wins across all of our theaters with vendors such as Docker, among others, who is 100% cloud-based business.

Some of these examples include APAC, where we closed a $95,000 deal at 15% margin with a large multinational bank to help scale its internal management and security measures within its application development cycle. Here, our Nuaware team completed a successful POC in just 2 weeks and have led the project from start to finish.

Similarly, in the Americas, we're working with one of our biggest GSIs. We closed $166,000 deal at 18% margin with one of the leading technology companies in e-commerce and fintech solutions in Latin America. Part of a larger digital transformation project, Nuaware delivered a solution to future-proof its development environments to accelerate its application and software delivery.

And finally, in EMEA, we closed a fantastic GBP 240,000 deal, a plus 30% margin with one of the world's largest retailers. This U.K. headquartered multinational supermarket, an issue in its development environment and was losing ground to its competitors. Nuaware again delivered a design architecture to modernize its application and software delivery process to enable it to remain competitive in its market.

Another solid contributor to our cloud growth is obviously Ignition Technology through its growing portfolio of SaaS-based cybersecurity vendors. And the final piece in our Cloud business segment is X-OD. As I mentioned at the start of this call, we continue to see strong year-on-year increase in demand for our X-OD platform. However, adding to this are also strong sequential increases, such as a 35% increase in active partners on the platform in Q1 of 2022 when compared to Q4 of 2021. And similarly, a 50% increase in number of transactions on the platform in Q1 of 2022 versus Q4 of 2021.

And with that, I would like to hand it over to Pierre to provide you more details on our gross sales and revenue for the quarter. Pierre, over to you.

[Pierre Boccon-Liaudet, executive]

Thank you, Jesper, and good afternoon, everyone. Just before we look at our sales performance, I'd like to address some methodology reminders. In the following slides, I will comment on gross sales and revenue. Gross sales represent sales recognized by the group on a gross basis before IFRS 15 revenue recognition adjustments. It represents our overall volume of activity. This is the value of transaction generated by our activity net of discount. And revenue is a similar metric to gross sales, but it includes the impact of IFRS 15 adjustments. For our activity, IFRS 15 considers we are principal for the sales of software and hardware and adjacent products, but agent for the sales of support and maintenance, which represents around 30% of the activity. So for support and maintenance, our activity is recognized on a net basis. The net margin generated on support and maintenance is the revenue of revenue with 0 cost of goods sold.

The second distinction we are making to help following the component of sales performance is on a reported and on a pro forma basis. Reported means as published in our financial statements without reclassification for M&A activities. And for better comparison purposes, we also report ourselves on a pro forma basis for large acquisitions impacting more than 5% of our total revenue. The acquisition of Veracomp back in December 2020 was part of that category. That's why for the last year and for comparison purposes, we have presented growth, including Veracomp as if Veracomp has been acquired as soon as January 2020.

Now entering into 2022, we do not need this kind of pro forma comparison as both 2021 and 2022 includes Veracomp's activity. That's why in this presentation, we don't mention pro forma comparison. And for further details on definitions, you'll find a slide in the appendix describing the definition of our main financial KPIs.

So now let's first review the key trends of our first quarter 2022. And here, as noted on Slide 10, gross sales in Q1 2022 were EUR 932 million, up 24.9% year-over-year, our fastest quarterly year-on-year growth over the last 3 years and faster than the 22.9% growth at constant currency, mainly thanks to the stronger U.S. dollar. Jesper already went through the strong growth momentum in the cybersecurity industry. Our superior growth compared to the market in each segment and the delivery against our strategy in each driver of growth.

So now let's zoom with our 3 theaters shown in the right-hand side of the slide. In EMEA, first, gross sales were EUR 742 million, an increase of 27% year-over-year. This represents a strong acceleration compared to previous quarters, plus 22% in Q3 '21, plus 9% in Q4 and 15% overall last year.

I know we will focus on the trends in APAC and in the Americas in a minute, but let me highlight that this quarter's growth in EMEA represents EUR 157 million, which shows that our historical and core base is extremely solid. To put some perspective here, this growth equals the sum of APAC and Americas sales together in the same quarter last year. And the EMEA growth was achieved with an increased backlog level, dismissing the idea of a sudden delivery of orders previously blocked by product shortage. This performance was strong across all vendors, including the Tier 2 ones with all types of resellers and was particularly strong at Nuaware and with cloud-based activities, confirming our recent acquisition and our strategy.

In the Americas, the spectacular growth of gross sales continued plus 62% in Q1 2022 to EUR 93 million, helped by the translation effect of the U.S. dollar. This growth was mostly driven by historical vendors and the rest was driven by the addition of Juniper in Q3 and [ Docker ] in Q4 to the portfolio. Even though already very impressive, this growth was delivered despite the continuation of supply chain constraints around product shortage.

In APAC, gross sales were EUR 97 million, a normalized increase of 3.8% year-over-year once adjusted last year, EUR 11 million exceptional deal in the public sector in Australia, which was representing itself 10% of the activity last year. That's why we adjust for it to show you the normalized trend. Demand remains sustained, but the APAC gross sales growth was impacted by the persistent product shortages and delayed deliveries and also by the partial lockdown still affected several countries in the region.

Revenue, so not gross sales, but revenue and revenue growth are presented in the Slide 16 in the appendix. Revenue growth was 27.6% higher than gross sales growth of 24.9% with a lower growth of support and maintenance in the mix.

Let's now look at which drivers of growth contributed to the 24.9% growth year-over-year. So in the middle, 29% of the growth came from vendor expansion. First, by onboarding new vendors such as Wasabi, [ Arista ] and Infinipoint in Q3, Security Scorecard, Docker sold security interest in Q4 and you just heard from Jesper Sysdig and Zimperium in Q1 2022.

And second, by geographical expansion of some existing vendors to a wider geographical footprint, such as Juniper, and F5 in the Americas and Fortinet, Palo Alto, F5, Juniper, Netskope in some EMEA and APAC countries.

The second category, 18% of the growth came from M&A with the acquisition of Ignition Technology early July 2021 and Networks Unlimited early December 2021. Respectively, EUR 20 million and EUR 13 million of additional gross sales this quarter. This M&A contribution is constant from last year.

And more than half of the growth comes from existing vendors in territories we were already working with EMEA. The demand accelerated brought to us by more and more resellers trusting our capacity to accompany them to increase sales and post sales efforts as well as delivering reliably. The supply chain constraints impacting the whole industry with product shortage in Q3 have significantly increased our backlog year-over-year. But it stayed -- it also increased compared to Q3 '21 with still strong order intake and an extremely limited number of order cancellations.

The first quarter '22, vendor renewal rates came in at 119% and customer renewal rate came in at 116%, which testifies the engagement of our channel partners on both sides. These metrics have always been above 100% for the last 3 years since we have tracked them, but they accelerated this quarter. Our vendors and partners are growing with us.

With our positioning in the ecosystem, we see increasing demand from our vendors to continue to be a critical engine to their success. And we see more and more traction from our resellers to get access to our portfolio and unique value-added services. Very good for the operating leverage.

Any evolution in the business mix. So that's on Slide 12. EMEA reinforced its size, respective to the other 2 regions, slightly from 78% last year to 80% now. This comes from partly the strong growth in the region and partly by the 2 acquisitions that happened to be in EMEA. Americas came along with APAC at 10% each as per the dynamics explained earlier.

In terms of size -- dealer size or deal size, the share of each category remained quite stable year-over-year with a category of very small deals giving up some little points to the very large deals but not a major change of mix this quarter. So overall, in Q1, we delivered on all our pieces of our sales road map, and we capture the best pieces of the very dynamic cybersecurity market with product shortage, industry-wide issues preventing from an even stronger performance, but all kept in the backlog, which increased from the end of 2021. And the USD strengthening also helped slightly the increase of sales.

I'll now hand over to Jesper to conclude with some key takeaways.

[Jesper Trolle, executive]

Thank you, Pierre. So to wrap up, in closing, it's clear that the strong Q1 performance and results of further reinforcing the validity of our business model, the market relevance we have and our continued ability to successfully execute against our growth strategy.

Cybersecurity continues to be a strategic imperative for corporations and governments worldwide as they struggle to combat the rising tide of the cyber-attacks. Exclusive unique position within this ecosystem gives us relevance, relationships and also resilience to deliver long-term sustainable growth.

Again, I would like to take the opportunity to thank all of our teams around the world for their hard work and dedication to our vision of a totally trusted digital world. Without them, this performance would not be possible.

On the back of this excellent Q1 performance, we remain confident and confirm our full year outlook. We are moving into the rest of 2022 in a great position. This comes with great optimism but also with the acknowledgment of the work we still have to do in the coming months and quarters.

With that, thank you for your time, and we'll now open up to questions. Hacène, over to you.

[Hacène Boumendjel, executive]

Thank you, Jesper. So operator, we can now take the questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question in the queue is coming from the line of Kathinka de Kuyper from JPMorgan.

[Kathinka de Kuyper, analyst]

Congratulations on the strong start to the year. Given your good performance, your guidance implies a bit of a slowdown in growth, but things that the demand environment remains pretty strong. So what is holding you back from raising the outlook? Is it the macro environment?

And then secondly, on the supply chain shortages, how much of a headwind do you think that was to your growth in Q1? And what are your expectations for Q2 and the remainder of the year? Do you think these issues are going to ease? Or do you see them continuing through the year?

[Jesper Trolle, executive]

Thank you, Kathinka. So let me try and answer both of these questions. So in terms of guidance, when we gave you our guidance for fiscal year 2022, this was only at the end of March. So of course, at that time, we were already well through a large part of Q1. So we have already baked in some of the good performance that we saw. And so as a result of that, we feel good about the guidance we gave 6 weeks ago and don't believe that we should raise it at this time.

In terms of supply chain, as we have said all along, we don't remain immune for the supply chain challenges, but we are working proactively with vendors and partners to try and mitigate as much as possible the impact from the supply chain. I would say, in Q1, we saw the supply chain was actually a little bit worse than what we had experienced in Q4. And when I look at the rest of the year, we have said at the end of last year, we said we think this will remain until mid-2022 at least. But now I would say based on discussions with vendors, I think this will probably remain as it is now throughout 2022.

[Operator]

And the next question is coming from the line of Antoine Lensel from Kepler.

[Antoine Lensel, analyst]

Just to come back on the mix of gross sales, and it's also related to the product shortage. Could you remind us what is the percentage of mix you have in hardware in terms of gross sales? And how do you see evolving going forward? And is there any big differences by regions?

[Jesper Trolle, executive]

Thank you, Antoine, and welcome among the analysts. We are excited to have you with us. So we don't really break out hardware versus other parts of our business. I mean we are not a hardware-centric model. We do use hardware as an underlying foundation, particularly within the wireless and also within the firewall segments. But if I were to give an indication, I would think of it as roughly 1/3 each. So 1/3 hardware, 1/3 software and 1/3 services. But it's clear that within that, and I think it's evident with the cloud growth that we have just highlighted of 52% in Q1 that the hardware portion of our business is diminishing over time.

[Antoine Lensel, analyst]

And if I may, I have a follow-up question. In this environment with a lot of headcount shortage in the sector, do you benefit from pricing power for your value-added services that could allow you to mitigate a bit salary inflation within your workforce?

[Jesper Trolle, executive]

Thank you. So I mean, first, we are not a big IT services company. So when you look at our gross sales versus the number of people we have, we're obviously very efficient compared to traditional IT service organization. But it's true that when we sell services and when we are delivering some of our own people on projects, we are obviously able to offset and compensate a little bit of the inflation in the amount we are charging to our customers on the services side.

On the product side, it's not really possible for us but we are obviously benefiting indirectly from the price increases that some of the vendors have communicated over the past months and quarters.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The next question in the queue is coming from the line of Alastair Nolan from Morgan Stanley.

[Alastair Nolan, analyst]

I think a couple have already been asked. But maybe, Jesper, could you comment on -- is there any comments you can make in terms of particular vendors or maybe verticals that have been particularly strong, just to kind of give us a feel for where in particular the demand is at the moment? That would be really helpful, actually.

[Jesper Trolle, executive]

Yes. So let me talk a little bit about vendors or segments and then I'll let Pierre maybe give a point on verticals. So on vendors, I mean, we continue to see very strong performance within the network security segment. This is historically a very large segment for us. So with vendors like Fortinet and also Palo Alto, we continue to do well. But also, as we highlighted on the slide with the segment, we see very strong growth in the endpoint segment. I think this is a -- this is an area of the cybersecurity market that's going through a lot of transformation, as I kind of highlighted in my prepared remarks. So -- but it's not, I guess, what you're pointing at is there 1 or 2 vendors driving this? And actually, I would say there is a really nice broad-based growth across all our key vendors. So it feels very good.

Pierre, do you want to give something on verticals?

[Pierre Boccon-Liaudet, executive]

Yes. And I'll just add that I put it in my notes that the Tier 2 vendors performance was very strong this quarter as well. So it's really a global picture. Then on the geographies, we saw that all geographies are increasing. We have APAC, which has this issue of product shortage more impacted from the other regions and also the [indiscernible] still impacted the region. But apart from that, it's across the board that the -- and in all countries in EMEA, we can see the strong demand happening. So no specific piece here.

[Operator]

And the final question in the queue is coming from the line of Ross Jobber from Citi.

[Rosslyn Jobber, analyst]

A slight sort of high-level question, if I may. Can you give us some sense of where you think we are in the network security technology cycle. Are we -- are you currently selling technology that is newer than average? Or are we currently using technology, which in network security terms is somewhat older, I'm sure it's not very old. I'm just trying to get a sense of the extent to which once new technology becomes mainstream, you get a boost in what is already a strong market. But at a time when there may be a perception that the technology cycle is coming to a natural lull, if you like, but maybe there may be slight reluctance. I'm just -- I don't really have a feel for where we are in that cycle right now.

[Jesper Trolle, executive]

Thank you, Ross. I would say that -- first of all, I would say in cybersecurity, there is less of a technology cycle, like you might know from other parts of the IT stack, whether that's storage or servers, et cetera. Within network security, which is kind of what you specifically were asking for, I mean there is a healthy blend of customers that are upgrading existing firewalls as an example, to newer and bigger firewalls because they need faster speeds. They need some of the more -- of the new added functionality that are in some of the new firewalls versus what they had. And then there are competitive takeouts as well where customers are going from 1 firewall vendor to another one based on maybe a more holistic platform offering from this vendor.

And so I'm not sure it's really the answer you're looking for in sort of specifically, but I wouldn't say we are in a firewall technology refresh cycle. I think there is a healthy mix of new customers buying new firewalls and then customers upgrading existing firewalls to larger and better and faster versions that are available in the market today.

[Rosslyn Jobber, analyst]

Okay. And if I can just ask a follow-up question on backlog. What role do you think some of the technical issues might be playing in terms of your -- the strength of your backlog? And when I talk about technical issues, I'm talking about things like the extent to which supply chain issues may have boosted your backlog, the extent to which cloud-based solutions on a like-for-like basis create a greater backlog. I don't know if they do or not, and the extent to which the growth in services might be adding to your backlog. I mean, all factors which are very real, but I just wonder whether or not they might create a slightly skewed picture of backlog growth.

[Jesper Trolle, executive]

Yes. Okay. No, I'm not sure it creates a skewed picture. I mean, clearly, there is component shortage, right? And every manufacturer have been talking about this. So there is -- there are certain components that goes into firewalls, switches, routers and other products that we take to market, that are hard to get their hands on. And so they can produce the units they need. But that's on the physical side.

Obviously, we live in a world that has more cloud, more services, more software than ever before. And so on one hand, you can say, why is the backlog growing? Well, the backlog is growing because the customer won't take delivery of a license, for instance, if the underlying platform is not available. And so the backlog certainly consists not only of the physical products that we can't get to because there are component shortage.

But it also consists obviously on the other parts of that solution, whether that is implementation, services, licenses that goes on top of a hardware platform and maybe also in some cases, to your points on cloud services. And so in a way, the issue is on a smaller piece, but it impacts a bigger piece of the solution because customers want the full solution before they take delivery rather than parts of it. Does that make sense?

[Operator]

And the final question in the queue is coming from the line of Derric Marcon from Societe Generale.

[Derric Marcon, analyst]

I hope you hear me well. I've got 2 questions. The first one on bookings. Can you share with us any metrics or indicators on the momentum of bookings and how it compares to your growth revenue rates, growth rate? And the second question on the backlog and the size of the backlog. You said that it has continued to increase in Q1 2022. Can you share with us how much -- what would be the coverage attached to that compared to your annual target and how it has progressed compared to last quarter to end of Q4 2021, just to understand the dynamic that you are still there.

[Jesper Trolle, executive]

Thank you. So we don't break out these 2 numbers, but I'll try and give you a feel for it. So our bookings momentum is obviously a key KPI that we pay attention to and are looking at driving on a day-to-day basis across all of our operating units. The bookings on income is very strong. It's -- I would say it's above our sales growth. So I give you that strong bite.

Secondly, on the backlog, it is true that the backlog is actually -- currently, at the end of Q1, above what we had at the end of Q4. Now part of that is not only because we saw a bit of a worsening in supply chain, but it's also because, obviously, we have a very strong bookings momentum, as I just alluded to. And so these two things are what builds the backlog. But we don't break it out specifically in -- as a percent of sales or anything year-on-year.

[Hacène Boumendjel, executive]

Thank you. I think we are now over with the questions. Thank you all for attending this call. And please, if you have any follow-up questions, I remain available to answer all of your potential questions.

[Operator]

Thank you, everyone, for joining us on today's call. You may now disconnect your handsets. Host, please stay connected.