Surgical Science Sweden AB

STO:SUS

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q3

[Operator]

Welcome to the Surgical Science Q3 2024 Report. [Operator Instructions]. Now, I will hand the conference over to the speaker, CEO, Tom Englund; and CFO, Anna Ahlberg. Please go ahead.

[Tom Englund, executive]

Hi, everybody, and welcome to the quarter 3 report presentation of Surgical Science, which is also the first quarterly report presented by me, Tom Englund, as the new CEO of the company. Next to me here in the studio, I have Anna Ahlberg, our company CFO. We will use the time today to first present the report, and then we will take questions from the audience.

To start off with, the Q3 report is a result that me and the Surgical Science team are quite pleased with. We saw currency-adjusted growth of 12% versus previous quarter 3 with an EBIT margin of 20%, and we see a generally positive development across the entire business.

As you know, we have 2 different business areas, Educational Products and Industry OEM, and it's great to see that both of our business areas are now growing. Educational Products grew 2% versus quarter 3 last year and 17% growth versus previous quarter, which means an accelerating growth and Industry OEM grew with a strong 22% versus same quarter last year.

Looking a little bit deeper into Educational Products. During the second quarter, we said that the turnaround had come for Educational Products and that we saw an increased customer activity and greater pipelines than before.

It's good to see that this turnaround continued in quarter 3 with plus 2% versus last year and 17% growth versus previous second quarter. All regions grew, but in slightly different pace. Europe was up 49%, North America, plus 4%; and Europe, plus 6% versus previous quarter.

Last quarter, we said that it's a question mark whether the business area will show growth for the full year and that it partly dependent on whether we received a large tender.

We can now say that the large tender will not affect quarter 4 regardless of outcome, and this means that we don't see that we will show growth for the full year. We, however, feel very confident about the growth prospects of Educational Products for 2025 and beyond.

Moving into industry OEM. We show a solid growth of 22% revenue growth, which is a continuation of the strong development we have had in the business area in the previous quarters. This business area consists of simulator sales to med device companies as well as software simulation packages to robotic surgery companies.

If we look at sales of simulators, it increased by 82% to SEK 26 million. And so far, this year, simulator sales have grown a whopping 182% to SEK 84 million.

We see a clear trend among customers to consider our simulators to be business critical for a wider range of functions and disciplines within their company. That means that simulators are now actively being used in departments such as education, sales and marketing as well as R&D.

And this, in turn, means that the number of simulators per customer is increasing. And during the quarter, we also delivered the first units of our ultraportable simulator to a very important industry customer of ours.

DevRev's developmental revenues contracted by 20% to SEK 9 million. This revenue is lumpy in nature, but we remain confident in the growth, and we have a very healthy pipeline of projects for the coming 12 months.

Looking deeper at the license revenues, they increased by 17% to SEK 65 million. We had a solid development during the quarter of our license revenues, and it's very positive for us to see that the robotics market is developing with more entrants now getting closer to start active sales or marketing of their products.

Distalmotion and CMR Surgical announced that they had received FDA approval for certain procedures and Johnson & Johnson, one of the world's largest med tech companies had filed for and just received an IDE approval for their Ottava systems, which is the step before the actual FDA approval.

These new entrants who also are a customer of ours, will drive robotics market growth and in turn, the training needs for robotics and therefore, the demand for simulation.

Regarding DV5, we have no further news than what we already shared in the second quarter. Intuitive is targeting a full launch of the DV5 system during mid-2025 and is currently conducting a controlled prelaunch to selected customers. These systems are equipped with clinical software-only and do not have simulation on them completely according to plan.

And to finish off, Intuitive is an esteemed customer of us, and we are working hard to ensure that Intuitive has a great digital experience, including simulation in time for the full launch of the DV5.

I have now been in the formal position for 6 weeks and before that, on a 6-week introduction period together with Gisli Hennermark, the previous CEO. And during these first weeks in the company, I have spent a lot of time with the team and with our customers to understand the ins and outs and the market that we operate in.

I've had the opportunity to walk alongside Gisli, it's been invaluable in the handover period. And on the slide, there to your right, the lower right picture, you can see a picture from one of our introduction meetings in our office in Tel Aviv.

And my focus on top of understanding the company and relationship building internally and externally has been to develop a plan and goals to help us achieve our short-term growth ambitions and longer-term market-leading ambitions that we have for Surgical Science.

As we now look towards 2025, I'm filled with excitement and energy for the continued growth journey. We have world-leading products, a super strong, highly engaged and global team. We have the stability and brand of a market leader, and we operate in a growing and rapidly developing market with prominent customers.

We have challenges mainly related to our ability to handle rapid customer growth and operational scalability, but these are challenges that I feel confident that we will be able to handle. And addressing these challenges will also help us build a much bigger and much more successful company.

And with that, I would like to hand over the word to Anna to go over the financial numbers.

[Anna Ahlberg, executive]

Thank you, Tom, and hi, everyone. So, starting with revenues per business area, as Tom said, we show growth for both our business areas. And our total sales were up 10% to just below $232 million.

In local currencies, it was up 12%. And this is the first quarter in a very long time that we have had negative FX effects. As I'm sure most of you know, we are heavily dependent on, above all, the U.S. dollar, where we have over 80% of our sales in that currency. And, of course, for translation differences, we are also dependent on the shekel.

Educational products. As Tom said, in our Q2 report, we talked about the turnaround that we saw for educational products. And we continue to see and feel this momentum.

We had some weak quarters before and a very weak Q1, but we now continue to see money flowing into the system, even though the picture is a bit different between different geographies. Sales was up 2% compared to Q3 last year, but 17% compared to the last quarter, Q2.

For Asia, we saw a good increase over Q3 last year and a smaller increase compared to Q2. China, an important market for us. And you know it's been affected by the anticorruption campaign for quite some time, and we are still cautious to say that it's over. But sales there were on par compared to Q3 last year, a bit lower than Q2, though.

The market that showed the strongest growth when you look at Q3 last year as well as Q2 was India. And we also commented on India before because that market was affected by the election taking place that affected both Q1 and Q2 but now the administration is in place, and we see very good development.

Europe, as Tom mentioned, plus 49% compared to Q2 and plus 10% compared to Q3 last year. And if we look at the markets where we had the strongest development and as we talked about also before, the money flowing into Eastern Europe, we see Poland and Bulgaria being very strong for the quarter.

North America, plus 4% compared to Q2 and lower than Q3 last year. The U.S. market was on par, but we had a larger order in Brazil last year that affected the comparison numbers.

Industry OEM, up 22% and license revenues ended at $65 million, up 17%. We also see the continued very strong development for our simulator sales within industry OEM plus 82% ending at $26 million.

Development revenues were down slightly. I will come back to that on the next slide, where we see our different revenue streams, and you have them also divided by business area in the report.

License revenues up as we talked about and also then as a percentage of total revenues, 28% compared to 26% Q3 last year. Emphasizing again and as always, this is lumpy for new entrants since they purchased their licenses in batches. And we have seen for 2024 that sales of new packages has been weaker than last year to new entrants.

Our simulator sales, if we combine simulator sales within educational products and industry OEM, this was the strongest that we've had since Q4 2022. And it was plus 10% compared to Q3 last year and plus 18% compared to Q2.

Development revenues, as I mentioned, then a bit weaker if we compare to Q3 last year. But as you can see, that was also a very, very strong quarter if you compare to the other quarters in 2023. And it was still a bit stronger than in Q2.

This is industry, development revenues is all within industry OEM, and it consists of both robotics projects as well as projects tied to sales of simulators.

Moving on to look at our costs and the EBIT margin for the quarter, our gross margin was 69%, same as in Q3 last year, a bit stronger than in Q2 when we had 68% despite the fact that we had a higher share of license revenues in Q2. And this is then due to the volume factor that we had now higher volume of simulators, meaning that fixed costs are then distributed on a higher number of simulators.

Comparing to Q3 last year, the increased share of license revenues has a positive effect on the gross margin. We also had a favorable product mix. However, our average sales price was slightly lower.

Sales costs, they were a bit higher than last year, but on par with Q2. We had in Q3 a lower activity when it comes to congresses and trade fairs than in Q1 and Q2, and that is the pattern we have every year. So, that is normal.

The lower costs due to this were offset by the fact that we in the quarter had higher agent fees, and that is really dependent on where we sell during the quarter, 18% of sales, same as Q3 last year.

Administration costs were on par with last year and a bit lower than Q2, 8% of sales. And then R&D costs, they were a bit higher than Q2 and significantly approximately SEK 10 million higher than Q3 last year.

We continue to invest in our R&D organization. We continue to employ skilled software developers. We also activated less, and that depends on what we are working on, what type of projects.

And we also, as I mentioned before, had less development revenues, and that means that we move less costs to cost of goods sold. So, it becomes a bit technical here, but you can find our R&D costs in three different lines: the cost of goods sold, the actual R&D line and then in the balance sheet where we activate.

If we combine these and look at the total R&D costs, we see that they did not increase SEK 10 million, they increased SEK 5 million from SEK 58 million to SEK 63 million.

Item other consists primarily of option programs and FX effects. And in Q3, we had a larger effect when it comes to the option program, and that is attributable to the new program that was approved by the AGM in May. And that is the Swedish part of the program where the participants get the premium as a bonus, and we pay social costs on them, and it's also the IFRS 2 effect.

And that was the same now in Q3 this year as in Q3 last year, but it's a higher effect in Q3 than previous quarters.

Organization. Going out of Q3 this year, we were 270 employees in the company compared to 260 going out of Q3 last year. And you can see the split between the different sites down to the right.

The adjusted EBIT margin for the quarter was 22% compared to 27% in Q3 last year and up from Q2 when it was 19%. And for the 9-month period, we had an adjusted EBIT margin where we have the EBIT and we adjust for costs attributable to our acquisitions, amortizations and depreciations. The margin was 20% for the 9-month period compared to 26% last year.

Our finance net was a positive SEK 7 million. Most of that is attributable to interest on our bank balances. And then we also have items related to revaluation of internal loans to our subsidiaries and an IFRS 16 effect. The net result for the quarter was SEK 43 million.

Our cash flow for the quarter was a bit weaker than what we have been used to. From operating activities, it was a plus of SEK 22 million. In that amount, we have a minus of SEK 9.4 million due to the fact that we paid out taxes in Israel on a previous financial year.

And then we had a negative change in working capital amounting to SEK 32 million. Inventory changed marginally. However, our accounts receivables increased significantly.

I usually talk about accounts receivables and the work that we always do on that. We've been working very diligently on it for quite some time, and we had a very big positive effect after getting the AR stock from 3D Systems when we acquired Simbionix, and then we continue to work on that, and we've had a very nice development and especially in the U.S., which is our largest direct market, where that's always something to work on.

So, of course, I've said before that I don't think that this will decrease much more if we look at the percentage, average accounts receivables as a percentage of rolling 12-month sales. But, of course, we would not like it to go up.

We don't see any general increasing trend or any cause for concern. It's more a timing issue that when orders and payments come in, we had quite significant amounts falling due in the beginning of October.

And then cash flow from investing activities, that's mainly investments in development costs. The item from financial activities was very small for the quarter. And then we had a negative exchange rate difference in cash amounting to SEK 7 million. That meant that we ended the quarter with SEK 666 million on our bank balances.

And with that, we conclude this part of the presentation. And I think we can open up for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Ulrik Trattner from Carnegie.

[Ulrik Trattner, analyst]

A few of them on my end. And I'll start off with, you mentioned in the report healthy order intake for the educational segment. And since you don't disclose orders, can you talk a little bit more about what this actually entails?

And in addition, based on the current tender activity out there, are you able to provide us with some kind of direction on the average selling price in [indiscernible] since what we have seen over the last few years or at least the last few quarters is an average selling price for AGU modules coming down.

So, just based on the tenders and the specification of these, in what direction is this moving? That would be my first question, please.

[Tom Englund, executive]

Hi, Ulrik, thank you for the question. I can start with the first part of the question, which relates to the traction that we see, generally speaking, in the market. What we saw in a year ago was that the market started contracting and due to both budget issues and also general inflation, it got harder for our customers to procure simulation products, broadly speaking, globally.

And this then has resulted in the negative trend that we've seen for educational products until the turnaround came last quarter. So, the pipelines that we had and the opportunities that we had during this period did not like just go away. The POs were still out there. It was just that they didn't turn into sales.

And what we see now when the money comes flowing back into the systems, also globally speaking, but in different places is that these tenders, they are then reactivated and they are then turned into orders.

We saw some of that in quarter 2, and we saw an even stronger development in quarter 3. And I would say that, that has been the main reason for the slow activity and declining sales in Educational Products. It's not we feel, we estimate that we lose market share to competitors that deals completely vanish, but rather they have been put in the freezer and now they're coming back.

So, this means then that everything that we have worked on up until now and in terms of sales activity, we think that a lot of that can translate into sales.

[Anna Ahlberg, executive]

And then I can continue a bit on your question on the average selling price. When we sell our simulators, it's, of course, the hardware, and then we have a basic software package that is sort of included in that. And then on top, we have like a library often of different modules, more advanced procedures that you purchase.

And, of course, the more software we sell on each hardware platform, the better it is also for the margin. What we saw last year when the market started to contract is that the hospitals were hit by inflation and the budgets were set before that, so they didn't have enough money.

The demand was still there and they wanted to purchase, but what happened in the beginning was that they then purchased the hardware platforms with less software. And that meant, of course, that our gross margin was affected by that.

So, it's important for us to sell, of course, we can also upsell and we do that. We have sales that are pure software on the existing hardware platforms. And I would say that the product mix here is more important for our gross margin because we have a broad range of products. Some of them are not that large.

We have them because it's important for us to have a full range so that we can supply for a full large tender. We see that we have a very high win rate for the large tenders. So, that is important for us. But, of course, with lower volumes, some of these products might not be sold that much separately. And with lower volumes, the margin on them is less, generally speaking. I hope that answers your question.

[Ulrik Trattner, analyst]

Yes. And potentially if you could give us some kind of flavor here and because that was kind of my point where I was getting at, that we saw an average selling price coming down last year due to sort of the budget restrictions that's out there.

And if you're in current tender are seeing a shift in activity to be more willing to buy more advanced simulators or with a more advanced software package?

[Anna Ahlberg, executive]

Yes. No, definitely, I should say that, absolutely. Then sometimes, of course, since you know the large tenders, there is a long lead time. So, often, the prices and everything are set, there is a lag in the system due to that, the lead times. But yes, generally speaking, yes, that's correct.

[Ulrik Trattner, analyst]

And if I were to turn to OEM and what we have seen here in the last few quarters, and I asked the same question in Q2. I note very sort of strong sales in OEM simulator hardware. And I would guess that would indicate very sort of strong demand and continued demand outside of robotics.

And again, same question asked in Q2. Have you reached some type of inflection point when addressing the sort of OEM non-robotic customers and have their behavior changed or anything?

[Tom Englund, executive]

I think that the medical device part of the industry OEM business is an absolutely fantastic opportunity for us to continue to see growth and some things that we perhaps don't speak enough about here in these calls. We tend to focus a lot on the surgical robotics side of the business.

And you can definitely say that we have seen a very strong increase from relatively low numbers, it should be noted. 182% is great, but it comes from a low base. But what I said in the beginning holds true, meaning that we see that simulators are used within the med device companies in a much wider number of functions.

So before, they might have been used primarily for education of surgeons of the new equipment. But now we also see the simulators are being used in R&D activities and also as sales and marketing tools for the med device companies' sales force and marketing functions. So, they're used much more broader.

And in that, they're also becoming a more critical tool for these med device companies. And if you go into any typical large med device companies such as Medtronic or Boston Scientific, they do conduct a lot of product launches every year with different types of medical devices that need training towards both sales and marketing people, but also, of course, towards surgeons who are going to use the tools.

And there, we see a very strong potential to continue to grow the simulator sales across a wide range of companies and across a wide range of different application fields. Does that answer your question?

[Ulrik Trattner, analyst]

Yes, absolutely. And potentially, just a follow-up on that. It's kind of back to the original question. Is it your focus on these customers? Or is there a change in customer adopting simulation to these products? Or is it a combination of both?

[Tom Englund, executive]

Yes, I think it's a combination of the both. This has been a clear and outspoken strategy for us to get deeper into these customers. And by doing so, we also communicate the value much more stronger to them. And then in turn, that drives the user uptick on their part. So, the total addressable market here is very big, and that's something that we then start to realize in real sales.

[Ulrik Trattner, analyst]

And as well, a question on the OEM, and you mentioned this ultraportable lightweight simulator. What is this?

[Tom Englund, executive]

Yes. So, if you take, for example, the sales and marketing teams at our customers who are going to use simulation as a tool to either sell and market the med device company's products, right? They usually do so at the customer location. That could be in a hospital or it could be at a conference or a trade show.

And then the need to have an ultraportable device that is still extremely realistic in the experience when you run the simulator is very big for our customers. So, having everything ultraportable in a suitcase that you can demo and show to your potential customers means a lot for them.

And we see this trend also in the surgical robotics field where the robotics manufacturers want to show off simulation and the robotics experience outside of the console itself.

So historically, we have primarily sold software licenses to the surgical robotics companies that are then used on the console, but we see an increased demand and interest also for surgical robotics companies to sell simulators with the simulation on top that are more ultraportable and outside of the console.

[Ulrik Trattner, analyst]

And last question on my end would be to you, Anna, and you ended the presentation talking a little bit about this. But, in Q3 here, I'm looking at quite poor operational cash conversion as well as free cash flow. And you talk about accounts receivables remaining stable to percentage of sales.

But what should we extrapolate from Q3 and what should be obviously, sort of the FX or tax for based on sort of historical tax rates in Israel, but what level here is a sort of sound foundation, because we're coming from quarters where you've had fairly high cash conversion now down to fairly poor.

[Anna Ahlberg, executive]

Yes. And we should have good cash conversion, then I think that we've had very, very good. And, as I said, we had a big effect from the fact that we could work a lot with the AR stock that we received when we acquired Symbionics, but then we continue to work on that.

What I can say is we have a healthy, that's AR stock is something we follow closely. And, of course, sometimes depending on who you sell to, if it's the larger industry companies, for example, it might be that you have a bit longer payment terms, et cetera.

But it's also 1 day that you measure this. It's on the 30th of September, right? So, timing is sometimes a bit difficult and might affect the number that specific day. I'm not worried about our accounts receivables stock.

But it's something you constantly have to work with for sure. But, as I said, we don't see any cause for concern or any general sort of shifting in trend or what have you. It can also be, of course, different between different countries, I must say. So, yes.

[Ulrik Trattner, analyst]

And since you mentioned different countries, perhaps I can end with one last question. Which countries are sort of best in terms of payment cycles and which ones are on the sort of worse end?

[Anna Ahlberg, executive]

In some countries, it might be that it takes a longer time. We have distributors in most countries outside of the U.S. and it sometimes takes longer for them even though we have general payment terms towards them, et cetera.

And so, I will not pick or choose specific countries. But the important thing for us is that we feel that we have a healthy AR stock. And we also said before that we have such a strong cash position. So, if we need to use it somehow then we might do that also for a shorter period of time to give people maybe a longer payment term or the large med device companies or what have you.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Viktor Högberg from Danske Bank.

[Viktor Högberg, analyst]

So, for educational and the full year, no real surprise that you won't grow for 2024 over 2023. But is the only swing factor, the large tender you previously mentioned? Or are there other factors in play as well? Just trying to triangulate the size of it. The largest order that we do know about is the USD 7 million order received 2 years ago.

I would assume this is lower than that. So, anything you could help on the magnitude of this and the swing factors in terms of EDoo growth this year?

[Tom Englund, executive]

Hi, Victor. I can say that the swing factor is definitely the large order, but it's definitely not only that. In general, we see a strong recovery in the year to business across the board in all countries.

We operate in many countries with many different budgetary systems and different economical situations and we have a quite large pipeline. And it's difficult for us to predict exactly how these tenders will come back and how fast the recovery will be country by country and then try to extrapolate that into some sort of global development and then it's also a moving target.

So, I would say that, that's the main factor. And Gisli said used the quote, it's a race against the clock. We see recovery. It's coming. We saw recovery from quarter 2 to quarter 3. And we have good hopes for continued growth in the Educational Products segment. So, that's how I would like to describe it.

[Viktor Högberg, analyst]

And on the R&D side in your CEO letter talking about some challenges on getting the organization in place to be able to deliver, seems like a nice problem to have. But what do you need in order to get it all right and according to plan? Is it a worry for you or just business as usual to get all of this in place?

[Tom Englund, executive]

It's a very good question, and you could be like alarmed if there is a challenge. There is always challenges at companies, especially companies that are growing in the pace that we are.

To start off with, I feel very confident that the global team, fantastically passionate, engaged and very competent and experienced team that we have will be able to address these challenges.

When more specifically then on the R&D challenges, the challenges they pertain to our ability to scale our capacity in R&D to handle both customer requests and customer projects that come in, broadly speaking, in both business areas throughout the business. And there is a lot of things that we need to do in order to increase this capacity. And some of them are, of course, hiring more people and onboarding them in an efficient and successful manner.

But it's also the ways of working, the tools we use, the platforms we write code on and so on, where we can improve. And, of course, that will also then contribute to increased capacity. So, it's definitely a very high focus area for us right now, and it will be for the coming year and years.

[Viktor Högberg, analyst]

And a follow-up on that one, given your experience in other companies, is this something which you think you want to change the way the company has been working, tweaking it? Or is this in line with previous modes of operation? Just thinking about the flavor you're adding now that you're looking at.

[Tom Englund, executive]

I think that, first of all, I inherit here the CEO position of a company that has been tremendously successful with the team and previous leadership of Gisli, which is a fantastic position to be in. And we look at how we're going to address specifically this question and which I understand that you ask about, is that, I think that we have really good solid developers in all the different offices that we have in Surgical Science, and they are working in a very efficient and professional manner.

I do think that we have some challenges which comes to the integration of the different platforms that we have from the different companies that we have acquired, if you know, Simbionix, Sense Graphics and Mimic and they all come with different technical platforms into Surgical Science.

So there, we have a specific challenge to how to get that kind of entire code base into one uniform one and then get aligned ways of working around that. So, that's a specific challenge that we have due to the M&As that we have done.

[Viktor Högberg, analyst]

Is that major work to be done? I would have assumed that it has been bridged or done already given that Simbionix was acquired 2 years ago. I would assume it's just final tweaks on it.

[Tom Englund, executive]

Yes. This is a work that has started the way back and is continuing. I think that the necessity for improvement in this area has largely to do with the fact that we see so much uptick in customer activity and much many higher inbound requests coming into us.

So, it becomes a more acute matter then. But I think we're doing great progress, and I'm very confident in the team's ability to handle this challenge. They're awesome.

[Viktor Högberg, analyst]

Final question for me and might be an external question, not up to you. But with the tariffs that might be put into place for exports into the U.S., have you put any thoughts into any scenarios on this given that the U.S. is a large market, you're selling and shipping a lot of products into it? Any thoughts on that one? Or is it too early maybe?

[Anna Ahlberg, executive]

It's early, of course. One initial thought is probably that it or initially, it looks like it might be on products, not on services or like licenses.

As you know, our products are primarily shipped from Israel, where it might not be the case. Again, it's being early, but we don't at all see any cause for alarm or concern regarding this for us. And then as you know, we have a smaller production unit in the U.S., and we also have teams working on our software projects in the U.S.

[Viktor Högberg, analyst]

And are those sites able to scale up if need would be? Would you be willing or is it possible to expand those production sites in the U.S. to source locally basically if that would be a requirement?

[Tom Englund, executive]

We commented earlier on that we had an increased R&D spend for the quarter compared to the previous quarter, right? And this is a long-term investment for us in order to cope with the increased demand.

We invest that money into all the different sites. So, we grow all the sites with headcount. And we see that we will do so also for the foreseeable future. So, we are investing, and we don't make any specific plans due to change those investments around. We actually think that it's quite good to have a distributor developer network across our offices.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Christian Binder from Redeye.

[Christian Binder, analyst]

A couple of follow-ups. You've already discussed a little bit in terms of when it comes to like being able to handle higher volumes and that's going to be achieved through both new hiring, but also increased efficiency. Can you specify a little bit more?

Do you expect to make new hires selectively in certain areas? Or can we expect a quite marked increase in employees and corresponding costs, so to speak?

[Tom Englund, executive]

Thank you for the question. So, first of all, regarding the investments that we do in people, we will do them quite broadly across the different offices, as I just said, in R&D. And then when it comes to our ability to handle increased capacity, it's very important to have a focus on what I call operational scalability, which means that you increase the output with the same resources in place.

And this is how we're also going to achieve our profitability targets long term. And the way you do that is that you become more efficient. And this does not, of course, only go for R&D, but it goes for all the different functions that we have.

And the way you get more efficient in R&D is through the use of the similar code base is the fact that you work on one code and then you can branch out rather than have different code bases for the different customers that we have. That means that we can turn a customer request over to a delivery of a final product, software product in a shorter time period and also that all the customers can benefit from the different innovations that we do in the code, in the functions that we deliver since they're part of the common branch, so to say.

And then there's also other things like languages, ways of working and processes and automation tools and so on that we can work on. So, there it's like a very big array of different activities that all will drive capacity increases in our ability to serve our increasing customer base.

[Christian Binder, analyst]

And you already mentioned that, obviously, that educational product is unlikely to grow this year. But just in general, can we expect like a more normal pattern this year in terms of Q4 being the best quarter sales-wise? Or is that too early to say?

[Anna Ahlberg, executive]

Yes. Christian, we never give out short-term forecast. We have our long-term financial goals. And then this year, we talked more maybe of the short term because we had the Q1 that we had, et cetera.

And, yes, Q4 is usually the strongest. And last year, it was not, and that was actually the first time many of us experienced that. So, Q4 should be a strong quarter, but we cannot give any specific comments on this one.

Usually, as we said last year, also, it's important to remember and usually, the orders come pretty late in Q4 last year, we still had all these discussions.

There was no sort of reduction in demand and no change in competition or anything like that. So that is important to remember that it was due to the fact that the hospital simply did not have the funds left in their budgets when they came to Q4.

[Christian Binder, analyst]

And then to round off, I mean, it's obviously been discussed before. But when it comes to capital allocation, are you going to be pretty internally focused in terms of investing in the organization, developing the organization in the coming year? Or are you planning to use the cash pile of around SEK 660 million, SEK 670 million, for example, additional M&A?

[Tom Englund, executive]

We have said repeatedly that we will have a very strong organic growth agenda and ambition. And we also look at continuously inorganic opportunities.

We have done consolidation of the market already, and we will continue to explore those options. So, you should consider us to be able to allocate those funds both into growing the business organically as well as inorganically.

[Anna Ahlberg, executive]

So, let's see if we have some written questions here. There is a question if we will release information when we win the big European tender.

We have not said where the tender is. So, we said it's a big tender that we talked about in Q2. Usually, we don't, we have large order. We have orders of different sizes. Usually, we don't go out with separate press releases unless it's like the U.S. order that we had in 2022, which was a press release because it was so big. But, yes, we will, of course, follow up and give out information on this one since we mentioned it.

Then we also have someone asking about if we could use our cash to buy Bitcoin. No, we think we can have better use of our funds as we just talked about in the plans that we have.

And then on the DB5, there are some questions if it's launched mid-'25, when do they usually buy licenses?

The way it is today, it's sold a separate simulation package, and you can either purchase it with a robot, which is most the case in most cases. And then there is also a subscription to that. And for us, we get paid then afterwards, getting a report on how much has been used.

And again, as we said, we cannot really comment on more than we have done on the DB5. It's also a question if we should expect a large one-off jump in license revenues. We have been asked that before. And coming back to what Tom said that we are working with Intuitive towards the time line. There is no simulation on the DB5s right now. And a lot of things will be added going forward then when they do the actual commercial launch.

Then we also have a question on AI and AI tools for our software development.

[Tom Englund, executive]

Yes, it's definitely on the plan of not just the R&D teams, but broadly in the company to employ AI more in the business, both primarily as a productivity-enhancing tool.

[Anna Ahlberg, executive]

And then there's also a question about buyback of shares, and that is correct that on First North's growth market, we're not allowed to do this type, we cannot purchase our own shares. For that, you have to be on the main market.

I think that concludes also the written questions. Thank you for all the questions.

[Tom Englund, executive]

Thank you. Any more questions before we round off? Okay. That's all from us. Thank you, and have a great day. Bye.