BlackBerry Ltd

TSX:BB

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q4

[Operator]

Good afternoon, and welcome to the BlackBerry Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results Conference Call. My name is Sadie, and I will be your conference moderator for today's call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn today's call over to Tim Foote, BlackBerry Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Tim Foote]

Thank you, Sadie. Good afternoon, and welcome to BlackBerry's Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2021 Earnings Conference Call. With me on the call today are Executive Chair and Chief Executive Officer, John Chen; and Chief Financial Officer, Steve Rai. After I read our cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements, John will provide a business update, and Steve will review the financial results. We will then open the call for a brief Q&A session. This call is available to the general public via call-in numbers and via webcast in the Investor Information section at blackberry.com. A replay will also be available on the blackberry.com website. Some of the statements we'll be making today constitute forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of applicable U.S. and Canadian securities laws. We'll indicate forward-looking statements facing words such as expect, will, should, model, intend, believe and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are based on estimates and assumptions made by the company in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments as well as other factors that the company believes are relevant. Many factors could cause the company's actual results or performance to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These factors include the risk factors that are discussed in the company's annual filings and MD&A, including the COVID-19 pandemic. You should not place undue reliance on the company's forward-looking statements. The company has no intention and undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. As is customary during the call, John and Steve will reference non-GAAP numbers in a summary of our quarterly results. For a reconciliation between our GAAP and non-GAAP numbers, please see the earnings press release and the supplement published earlier today, which are available on the EDGAR, SEDAR and blackberry.com website. And with that, I'll turn the call over to John.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Thank you, Jim -- Tim. Sorry, sorry. Thanks, Tim. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. I'll begin with 3 headlines for the quarter. The first headline is licensing. This quarter, we entered into an exclusive negotiation with a North American party for the sale of the portion of the company's patent portfolio primarily related to mobile devices, messaging and wireless networking. BlackBerry will retain rights to use these patents. Patents associated to company's strategic software and services business, including Spark, QNX, IVY, Secure Communication and Critical Event Management will continue to be owned and managed by BlackBerry. The company has not yet reached a definitive binding agreement and negotiations are ongoing. The company limits its licensing activities in the quarter due to the negotiations and because of accounting rules, which Steve will explain later. This results in licensing revenue being lower than expected. The second headline is Software and Services. This quarter, we saw a slight sequential revenue improvement from Spark and a continuous -- continuing recovery for BTS. BTS had a good quarter despite vehicle production headwinds from the global chip shortage. Software and Services billings grew strongly and are now back to the level of a year ago. The third headline is BlackBerry IVY. Discussion with automotive -- automakers and Tier 1s are progressing well, and I'll touch on some of the exciting developments later. Now let me get into the more details. BlackBerry reported total company revenue of $215 million, 2-1-5. Software and Services revenue was $165 million, 1-6-5. Licensing and others was $50 million, 5-0. Gross margin was 73%. Earnings per share was positive $0.03. Cash generated from operations came in at $51 million. Total ending cash and investment as of February 28 was $804 million. I'll now turn to our business commentary, starting with Software and Services. Our ongoing strategy is to safeguard the Internet of Things with Intelligent Security. We achieved this by combining our 30 years-plus of expertise -- of security expertise with newly acquired technologies such as Cylance, AI and machine learning. We currently serve the market in 2 different ways: the first is to provide cybersecurity for enterprise, particularly large, highly regulated verticals such as government, financial services and health care. Here, we protect endpoints, networks and communications with our Zero Trust Architecture. The second is to embed technology to provide safety and security to the endpoint. Here, our focus is currently largely in automotive, again a very large, fast-growing market. Starting from a QNX installed base of over 175 million cars on the road today, QNX and IVY, in partnership with AWS, have significant growth opportunities. Over time, these 2 paths that I mentioned will intersect and provide tremendous opportunity for BlackBerry. Investment in smart mobility and smart city infrastructure will help drive this convergence. But obviously, the market is still early. We recognize the need to be louder when communicating our strategy and who BlackBerry is today. This month, we launched a major new digital radio and print branding campaign across North America and the U.K. to get the message out powerfully into the marketplace. From a financial reporting perspective, starting this Q1, which is this quarter we're in, we intend to report Software and Services as 2 separate revenue lines, namely cybersecurity and BTS. The cybersecurity line addressed -- include and address the cybersecurity endpoint management and Critical Event Management markets. Our main competitors, including other leading next-generation endpoint security providers as well as notable UEM vendors. We address these markets with our AI-driven Spark, a fully integrated UES and UEM platform, along with AtHoc and Secusmart. BTS addresses the embedded software and vehicle data analytics markets, notable competitors including Auto Grade Linux, Android and proprietary operating systems. Our QNX product over the highest level and better functional safety and security of BlackBerry IVY will provide an end-to-end solution for harnessing data in the car. We believe that this change will help investors to gain greater insight into the performance and opportunity of these businesses going forward. Moving on to Software and Services metrics. ARR was approximately $458 million, slightly down from last quarter, primarily due, as expected, to the pandemic-related impact on BTS. Dollar-based net retention rate improved sequentially from 90% last quarter to 91% this past quarter. Net customer churn remained low at around 1%. Now moving on to BTS. As a reminder, QNX is by far the largest component of BTS. As we anticipated during last quarter earnings call, we saw improvement in both QNX design win, design phase revenue and production-based royalties. This improvement continued despite the challenge from the global chip shortage, and it's impacted -- and its impact on auto supply chain. It's not fully clear what the impact will be on production volumes, at least not for how long will it last. However, we continue to expect improvement on BTS in the upcoming fiscal year. Our plan of returning to a pre-pandemic normal revenue run rate of around $15 million per quarter by fiscal -- by mid-fiscal year assumes that the new challenges are overcome by that point. Looking beyond the short-term headwinds though, Strategy Analytics, a leading research firm estimate that there will be a large expansion in a number of embedded systems in a car by 2027. They estimated this growth will be mainly driven by ADAS, which is advanced driver assist systems (sic) [ advanced driver assistance systems ] or as well as data gateways. This system require the highest level of safety certification and are increasingly deploying chips with higher compute power. Both factors play to QNX' strength and recent wins, some of which I'll mention a little shortly, give real data point that supports this trend. This validates our strategy of focusing on safety, critical application and points to an increasing ASP per car. During the quarter, QNX strengthened its leadership position in a safety critical software. We announced enhancement to our Hypervisor, which, by the way, is the only 1 in the market certified to the highest level of functional safety. We also announced a number of design wins, including our Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, will be using QNX Black Channel Communication technology in its next-generation driverless vehicle. Also, Baidu announced that their machine maps, a critical component of autonomous driving, will also be built on QNX and designed into the New Energy Aion models from GAC, which happen to be a leading Chinese electrical vehicle automaker. These announcements demonstrate that QNX is at the heart of ADAS vehicle technology development, positioning the business well for future revenue growth. It was also confirmed at CES that QNX has been selected by Sony, the latest Sony new Vision-S car. Furthermore, Scania selected QNX as its primary operating system for its heavy-duty trucks. Overall, in the quarter, QNX had 25 design wins with 9 in auto and 16 in general embedded market or GEM. The auto wins were predominantly ADAS and digital instrument cluster designs. The GEM wins include a mail processing control system for UPS or -- for USPS -- sorry, United States Postal Service; a connected manufacturing plant system from GE and a next-generation eye surgery equipment from a leading medical device company. We are delighted to report that now we have win -- design wins or have design wins, sorry, with 23 of the world's top 25 electrical vehicle -- electric vehicle OEMs, which together represents 68% of the global EV production. This is an increase, by the way, from 19 of the top 25 last quarter, with recent wins including Toyota and Honda. In the recent reports, Deloitte estimated the CAGR, the compounded annual growth rate, for global EV growth sales will be around 29% over the next 10 years, and QNX is well positioned to benefit from this growth. Let me now provide you with an update on IVY. Since the announcement in December, the response from OEMs has been very positive. We have held many discussions, many workshops with a number of leading automakers and are pleased on how these discussions have progressed so far. Many use cases has already been discussed showing the potential of this platform once creative app developers are able to build on it. Most of these use cases are being developed under NDA and can't be shared right now. However, one we can share is the Right to Repair Initiative. Gartner, the leading analyst, has identified BlackBerry IVY as a potential solution to the problem of safely and securely sharing standardized vehicle data with repair shops without compromising either vehicle safety or the OEM's IP. To support the development of the app ecosystems, this quarter, we made an investment to grow the IVY R&D team. This includes starting an ecosystem development group led by a new executive joining us shortly from a major OEM. We recently announced the creation of an IVY Innovation Fund. The fund will drive use case innovation and adopt of IVY -- adoption of IVY by startups. We intended to start with a $50 million investment in the fund. Portfolio company, by the way, will also have access to up to $100,000 in AWS credit as well as insight and guidance through the AWS Activate program, a program that has already helped develop hundreds and thousands of early-stage start-ups. We're also soon to unveil an IVY Advisory Council designed to shape and advise the IVY development community, focused on defining vertical specific use cases. Among the first things we have already signed up, our leading insurance company, technology company as well as telco -- and telcos. Their input will complement the auto industry expertise provided by the top OEMs and Tier 1s. Following our IVY announcement, major players such as Ford and Google as well as Bosch and Microsoft had announced commitments to the vehicle data market. Because IVY is hardware, operating system and cloud-agnostic, we do not see these announcements are competition -- or as competition, but rather opportunity for IVY to partner and add value. The vehicle data analytics market is both large and growing. McKinsey in the monetizing data car data report estimated the TAM, the total available market, will be in the region of $450 billion to $750 billion per year by 2030. We recognize that this market is going to be competitive but we're still very well positioned. While we are already working with OEM, in October, we expect to release the early SS version of IVY. We also expect to ship -- we should start shipping the product in February of next year. Now moving on to Spark. As a reminder, we launched our new Spark Suites in May and a Cyber Suite in October. Pipeline for our Spark Suites grew strongly sequentially. The typical sales cycle is during 9 months, so we're expecting a good second half of the fiscal '22. We continue to have success in upgrading our UEM installed base to Spark, adding unified endpoint security or UES. This year, we will start focusing on new logos through the Cyber Suite. Across Spark, we start to see strength in both renewal and upsell in our key verticals. Let me share some names with you, some wins. These included Q4 businesses with IRS, the United State Department of Commerce, the [ Kato ] Development Bank, the Scottish government as well as the Scottish police, the London Metro Police Services and the U.S. Marine Corps as well as Bell Canada, just to name a few. On the service front, I must mention that none of our Guard MDR managed service customer were negatively impacted by the recent SolarWinds breach. While I'm on that subject, the Hafnium's state-sponsored attack on Microsoft Exchange Server identified earlier this month was an example of threat actors leveraging patch vulnerabilities. The script control of our EPP product, Protect, has demonstrated we can safeguard customers from this threat. Optics, our EDR product, provides additional protection. We're excited about 2 upcoming products that will launch and are an important part of our Extended Detection and Response or our XDR strategy. The first is our cloud-based EDR product, Optics 3.0 that due to be released this coming quarter, and we'll expand data query and provide richer content for alert triage and threat hunting. The second is our BlackBerry Gateway Product that will be the first to offer a Zero Trust network assets to both SaaS environment as well as on-prem applications while enabling Cylance AI for faster detection and response. We will provide more detail at our virtual Analyst Day next month. Finally, a brief word about Secusmart and AtHoc. We have been pleased with the progress made by Secusmart this fiscal year. Secusmart technology is now used by 18 governments worldwide, offering the highest level of security for voice and text communication. AtHoc had a strong position in federal government around the world, including protecting over 70% of U.S. federal government employees. We see a significant opportunity for AtHoc in the enterprise. And following the quarter end, just most recently, that is, we announced a new BlackBerry Alert product. Alert is built on our critical event management expertise in the public sector but with additional features tailored to the needs of the enterprise, such as integration with Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow. While it's much early in this stage of our sale, we have already recorded enterprise win, including Fujitsu. I'll now turn the call over to Steve to provide more details about our financial performance. Steve?

[Steve Rai, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, John. My comments on our financial performance for the fiscal quarter will be in non-GAAP terms unless otherwise noted. Please refer to the supplemental table in the press release for the GAAP and non-GAAP details. Please note that starting in the first quarter of our new fiscal year, we will no longer adjust GAAP revenue for deferred revenue acquired. This means that GAAP and non-GAAP revenue will be the same going forward and comparatives will be conformed accordingly. We delivered fourth quarter non-GAAP total company revenue of $215 million and GAAP total company revenue of $210 million. Fourth quarter total company gross margin was 73%. Our non-GAAP gross margin includes software deferred revenue acquired but not recognized of $5 million and excludes stock compensation expense of $1 million. Fourth quarter operating expenses were $140 million. Our non-GAAP operating expenses exclude: $32 million in amortization of acquired intangibles; $22 million in impairment of long-term assets, primarily due to rationalization of real estate due to the transition to remote working models; $16 million in stock compensation expense; $3 million for software deferred commissions expense acquired; and $258 million fair value adjustment on the convertible debentures, which is a noncash accounting adjustment largely driven by market conditions. Needless to say, this is due to the exceptionally high volatility and trading volume in the company's shares during the fourth quarter. Fourth quarter non-GAAP operating income was $18 million and fourth quarter non-GAAP net income was $16 million. Non-GAAP earnings per share was $0.03 in the quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA was $35 million this quarter, excluding the non-GAAP adjustments previously mentioned. I will now provide a breakdown of our revenue in the quarter. Software and Services revenue was $165 million. Software product revenue remained in the range of 80% to 85% of the total, with professional services comprising the balance. The recurring proportion of software product revenue was approximately 90%. As John mentioned earlier, for the new fiscal year, we intend to report Software and Services revenue in 2 lines: Cybersecurity and BTS. Licensing and other revenue was $50 million in the fourth quarter. Further to John's comments regarding negotiations relating to a potential sale, licensing activities have been limited not only due to the ongoing negotiations but also because revenue from additional transactions that could have been completed in the quarter would have been treated as contingent revenue and deferred to future periods. Therefore, had negotiations not been in progress, we believe licensing revenue would have been higher. Now moving to our balance sheet and cash flow performance. Total cash, cash equivalents and investments were $804 million at February 28, 2021, an increase of $47 million during the quarter. Our net cash position increased to $439 million at the end of the quarter. Fourth quarter free cash flow was $48 million and cash generated from operations was $51 million and capital expenditures were $3 million. That concludes my comments. I'll now turn the call back to John.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Thank you, Steve. For this coming -- upcoming fiscal year, our primary focus is for Software and Service -- is on Software and Services growth. As mentioned earlier, we will not be making any non-GAAP adjustment to revenue starting this fiscal year. Therefore, any revenue outlook comments I will make today and Steve will make today will be on a GAAP basis. Because of the ongoing negotiation regarding the patent portfolio that we discussed, we are unable to provide a full year licensing revenue outlook at this time. But I will give you some color at the end so that we have some plans, but it's still moving -- a lot of moving parts on that. So first, we anticipate double-digit billings growth for both Cybersecurity and BTS for the fiscal year '22, resulting in total Software and Services GAAP revenue in the range of -- sorry. Yes, resulting in total Software and Services GAAP revenue in the range of $675 million to $715 million, 6-7-5 to 7-1-5. This represents a growth rate of between 9% to 15% from fiscal year '21. Cybersecurity, which will include UEM, UES, AtHoc and Secusmart, is expected to have full year GAAP revenue in the range of $495 million to $515 million, 4-9-5 to 5-1-5, millions, of course. I'm sorry. BTS is expected to have full year GAAP revenue in the range of $180 million to $200 million. For both Cybersecurity and BTS, we anticipate revenue in the second half of the fiscal year to be stronger than the first half. Because of the ongoing negotiation regarding the patent portfolio that we discussed, there is uncertainty around the licensing revenue outlook. However, appreciating that it will be useful to have an outlook for modeling purpose, the most conservative scenario in which sales -- a model that sales does not happen or does not complete, full year licensing revenue would be in the region of $100 million. In this scenario, we assume that negotiation and regulatory review continue for the first half, and therefore, we expect revenue to be limited in the range of maybe $10 million to $15 million per quarter. However, we believe that the completion of the transaction will be beneficial to our shareholders. We will, of course, update you on any of the major developments. This has been an unusual and challenging year to navigate. Despite the challenges, we had a strong year executing our technology road map, bringing 59 new products to market. That's up from 30 last year. In particular, the Spark and Cyber Suite has made significant step forward. We also made significant progress with strategic partnership, both from a technology as well as a go-to-market perspective. Our IVY partnership with AWS has obviously been a particular standout. I would like now to open for the call for Q&A. Operator, will you please help us?

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] For our first question, we have Mike Walkley from Canaccord.

[Thomas Michael Walkley, MD & Senior Equity Analyst]

Congrats on all the announcements so a busy year for you guys. I guess the first question for me is just trying to understand the licensing negotiations a little better. Should you complete the sale, just the vast majority of your portfolio and you won't have any licensing revenue going forward, is it really the whole portfolio or is it just a portion of it? Just trying to gauge that.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Well, it's a major portion of our portfolio. As I said, we cover 3 major areas: cellular, wireless communications and networking. So things that is relevant, but it's not useful to us today in our strategic software part of the business. And we retained all the embedded and all the finance and all the encryption and security technology patents.

[Thomas Michael Walkley, MD & Senior Equity Analyst]

Okay. Great. And then my follow-up question. Just on the guidance, I think it would be great to break out the 2 divisions. On the 9% to 15% growth is -- can you maybe help us think about the 2 areas, which one you think will grow stronger? I'm assuming it's BTS, given the recovery in auto. But any color on how the 2 different divisions, Cybersecurity and BTS might grow?

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Yes. I think -- because it's revenue -- first of all, let me just clarify one thing. Billings, we expect double-digit growth in both Spark and BTS. From a revenue standpoint because it's subscription-based revenue, we expect single-digit percentage growth in Spark, and we expect double-digit percentage growth in BTS. So you are right in expecting BTS to have a strong growth because of the recovery.

[Thomas Michael Walkley, MD & Senior Equity Analyst]

Yes. But double-digit billings in both would be great. Okay.

[Operator]

For our next question, we have Daniel Chan from TD Securities.

[Daniel Chan, Research Analyst]

Just a question about how you're hoping to structure the deal for the patent sale. Should we expect ongoing royalties to come from, maybe you get a portion of the licensing fees that you're -- that the buyer will take? Or is this more of a onetime deal?

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

There is a majority of the deal will come in one time early but there is a tail that goes on. I can't give you the details of this for multiple number of years.

[Daniel Chan, Research Analyst]

Okay. Now you mentioned in the past that you've had offers for the entire portfolio. So what's different now that's making you consider selling it?

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Two reasons. Number one is, I really think it's the wrong thing to sell the entire portfolio because there's so much of -- we have an ongoing business in Cybersecurity and an ongoing business in BTS, which, of course, includes IVY and QNX. I think selling those portfolio will be extremely unwise for the company and for the shareholders. So I think the team were able to get connected with parties that are willing to address the portfolio part that is not being used by us today. So it just worked out from a business-friendly point of view.

[Daniel Chan, Research Analyst]

Okay. And just one more, if I may. If this deal does go through, any thoughts on how you'll deploy that capital?

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Yes. We're going to invest in both Cyber and -- we have an ambition in Cyber. And I know we have lost a couple of years because of our integrations and we have our product all caught up, so you'll see us being more aggressive. In fact, we ran an ad today, intelligence security everywhere, an ad today. I just saw it on New York Times. And so we're just going to step up in both people and spending and resources to go after the market. And it's a huge -- as you know very well, it's a huge market and no winner, no clear winner at this point and the barrier entries are not that high. So we should be able to capture some new businesses. So we're going to invest in that. And then, of course, we'll invest heavily on IVY. In-vehicle data platform is very important to every OEM, whether they build it themselves, you work with somebody else or work with somebody like us is all very important. So our relationship with AWS, in this case, is a big plus. So those are the 2 businesses that we're going to invest in.

[Operator]

For our next question, we have Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities.

[Tripatinder S. Chowdhry, MD of Equity Research & Senior Analyst]

Congratulations on a very challenging year, very good execution, John. 2 quick questions I have. If I reflect upon the popularity of Apple iOS, it also started with a innovation fund that Apple created. But the difference is it was not just Apple, but they also got 2, 3 venture capitalists along with it. And we know some which is called app economy, which is a multibillion-dollar market and Apple is a prime beneficiary. If we look at the IVY platform that you have, it is spectacular, like you are moving really at the speed of light. In October, the product will be launched. And I mean, for the developers, for the developer preview, next year, it will be in the market. And you have the Innovation Fund, exactly $50 (sic) [ $50 million ] worth of seed money Apple put in. But wondering, do you have -- or have you thought about also bringing in venture capitalists also and jump start a sub app economy, automobile applications economy or something along those lines? Have you thought on those? And also, do you think you could provide -- which would be very, very solid differentiation for your company is, if you could not just provide the money like what Apple did, but also provide intellectual property, patent protection to each and every company that creates products or applications on your platform and take an equity stake in each one of those start-ups. That would make you completely, a little speculative, but it could be a much better strategy than Apple had with its iOS platform. Any thoughts you may have then? I have a follow-up question.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Okay. Great, Trip. Thank you. So we only -- initially, we put up $50 million of this fund. And the objective -- so everybody, the objective is to make sure that we could build application. And we believe that although we could build a very solid data, in-vehicle data analytics platform, without good applications and use cases, it will not be sticky. It will not be adopted. I think there are a lot of companies that can build data platforms maybe as more secure XYZ and so forth. And having a partner like AWS helped, but at the same time, you won't get the stickiness. So I didn't want to learn the experience, so learn the lesson twice. So this is important that early on, I stand up the enablement group that go after applications, that we build some ourselves. But the majority is going to have to be encourage startups and even established companies that's interested in working with AWS cloud and working with BlackBerry QNX and all the other technology that we provide and build up application on the IVY. And I also added that we are going to start an Advisory Council, which are vertical people, vertical industry people, as I said, and they will then bring in some ideas that this is how I could see IVY help out in my business case going forward. To answer your questions, with the limited fund that we have to establish initially $50 million, we will have to work with other VCs. And so now I haven't gone through the steps of trying to pull them in and being a co-funder, but we will have to work through their pipeline and identify a target company that could be benefit from both the AWS offer, which is $100,000 worth of free cloud usage, so that they could run their tests and the development. AWS also have a lot of tools and a lot of know-how and navigate, call the navigate to help them. We, of course, provide them a test bed and the technology support and help. As far as IP is concerned, I don't think we're going to touch other people's IP unless that we see ourselves owning part of it. We don't let the company own that IP, the company that we invest in. So I don't know whether I could help you protect them. But they -- obviously, we could help them to accelerate the IP filing. We have a lot of people that knows how to do this very well.

[Tripatinder S. Chowdhry, MD of Equity Research & Senior Analyst]

Very good, John. As you know, today, intellectual property and patents are the new gold.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Yes.

[Tripatinder S. Chowdhry, MD of Equity Research & Senior Analyst]

Second question I had was regarding the intellectual property portfolio you have. The last time I counted, it was more than 30,000 patents.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

38,000 to be exact.

[Tripatinder S. Chowdhry, MD of Equity Research & Senior Analyst]

Wow, that's amazing. Now I know it's very difficult to put the details of your ongoing negotiations. But ballpark figure, are you talking about the 20,000 patents which will be sold or 15,000 or 30,000? Just a ballpark if half of...

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

I dare not to do this, to provide the answer, sorry about that because it's part of our negotiation. And so the category I put out was probably the best you could get at least for now. The categories, obviously, are cellular, networking and -- I'm missing one. Cellular, networking and messaging, and messaging, and messaging. So cellular, networking and messaging. And then encryption, security, IVY, QNX are all separated from this, are not included.

[Tripatinder S. Chowdhry, MD of Equity Research & Senior Analyst]

Excellent. I think I had my questions answered. All the best. I'm looking forward for an exciting 2022 fiscal year.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Thank you, Trip.

[Operator]

For our next question, we have Paul Treiber from RBC Capital Markets.

[Paul Michael Treiber, Director of Canadian Technology & Analyst]

On the patent sale, the $100 million in patent license revenue that you expect for this year, just if the sale goes through, does the $100 million go away? So eventually, all the patent licensing revenue goes with the sale? And conversely, if hypothetically speaking, if the sale doesn't happen at all, should we think of patent licensing revenue being in that -- continue at that, I think, $250 million in the past is what you said on [ yearly ] basis.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Good. Paul, that's a good question. So this is an unusual year so let's talk about if the patent license goes through, the sale goes through, we will have -- we will record a onetime gain of a reasonably big number followed by a tail of a -- a tail of up to 7 years. So we're not going away to 0. There are some recurring stuff that most of them will not be with us. But -- so it will not be 0 but it will be quite small if the patent sales go through with 1 big year in this fiscal year 2022. If the patent sale does not go through, then the first couple of quarters will be low because as the patent sale is being negotiated right now, I actually are unable to do more other negotiations going on. So the pipeline basically is frozen but it won't go away. So if the patent sale does not go through, I may have to suffer a little bit for the first couple of 2, 3 quarters. And then -- we will then resume the target, $250 million a year, patent licensing. Did that answer your question?

[Paul Michael Treiber, Director of Canadian Technology & Analyst]

Yes. No, that's very helpful. And I assume that the cash flow would be similarly aligned with those revenue numbers.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Unfortunately, yes, the cash flow will be similarly aligned.

[Paul Michael Treiber, Director of Canadian Technology & Analyst]

Okay. That's very helpful. And then the second one is -- big picture, like with the stock having gone through the rally that it's gone through, finance theory would say, cost of capital, your cost of equity is lower. And so the question is seeing the sort of newfound enthusiasm, lower cost of capital, have you contemplated issuing equity at these levels, seeing how it could enhance the strategy, having more equity or more cash?

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Yes, that's a good question. It's been a constant conversation with various bankers from our strategic planning group and our M&A group. I, today, are not working on any specific thing. But we're open. I mean we're not -- there's no principle that we won't do. The only thing that we won't do is we won't intentionally dilute our shareholders just to keep some money in the banks or on the balance sheet. I'd like to make sure that we have at least some idea of the usage. So when people come to me and say, "By the way, you could raise and convert at 0% and a premium of X percent up, 40%, 50% up, let's say," I see that very attractive. But then I keep asking my people, "So okay, once you get the money, what are you going to do with it?" Because you have a dilution hanging over your head. And so I don't know whether I answer your question. I guess just kind of explain how I think about it. I'm not against it. I know there's very attractive terms out there. And at this level of equity, so -- but I wanted to make sure that we have a targeted use that could help the business first.

[Paul Michael Treiber, Director of Canadian Technology & Analyst]

And maybe another way to ask the same question is for your strategic plan, you don't require a significant acquisition or deployment of capital to execute on that current plan that you have?

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

No, we do. The plan I gave you, 9% to 15% growth does not assume any acquisition.

[Operator]

For our next question, we have Paul Steep from Scotia Capital Markets.

[Paul Steep, Analyst]

John, just recognizing it's challenging with the situation with licensing, but I guess with the proceeds, if we assume this proceeds, would -- how would we think about deploying that capital? I know you answered it earlier, but I guess the point being, is it envisioned that you would look to do like some type of a strategic or transformative M&A to materially accelerate growth in the business, I think, becomes the question? I do have a quick follow-up that's somewhat related...

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Yes. It really is -- it's really somehow depending on the target out there. The answer to your question is I will always love to do that, I really do. And so there's also a question of affordability. But especially in the auto space, in the auto tech space, I think our position with QNX and stuff we were doing on IVY with Cylance as technology that could go into a car, I think we're well positioned in terms of what we could put in. There might be some acquisition we need to make to further growth rate of our revenue. That will be a target, an interesting target. And today, there is no specific target I had in mind. My people always have a list of names that they go look at, but I don't have any specific thing. But the answer to your question is the usage, those will be a priority usage for us.

[Paul Steep, Analyst]

Okay. And then maybe related, let's set aside whatever is going to occur with the patent sale, will transpire or not as the case might be. Just dialing back to your comments earlier in the call, can you talk to us about how we should think about the level of spend? I know you're not guiding EBITDA or free cash flow and I respect why. But maybe just help us put it in context. I think you talked about accelerating increased growth. But then when I look at the spend, and I know maybe Q4 isn't the best spot to look, sales and marketing is up 10% year-on-year, 10%. And I know it's got stock-based comp in there but R&D actually offset it. So should we think net that you're actually dipping in and we might go negative a little bit or no?

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

No. That's not our intent. We have a reasonably large number of hires, mostly in sales and marketing, sales and field marketing in our plan that I just provided you. I mean I know -- you're right. I'm unable to give you the EPS guidance and cash flow guidance only because the licensing part is shifting so much. So we didn't want to go there at this point. But -- so the answer to your question, it was not intended to reduce many. However, we are taking reduction in G&A. We are also going to take reduction in real estate. If you noticed that, as Steve had mentioned, we have an impairment charge of $22 million and a lot of them related to real estate. It's because we decided to cut down our real estate's footprint by maybe up to 25%. And this way that we will have, after the pandemic, we will have roughly about 20% to 25% of our team members that will be working remotely on a rather permanent basis. We will provide some hoteling offices. And I think you see that in many company, especially in kind of a software tech company, we decided we don't want to go all 100% because we want to maintain level of creativity and personality involvement. But -- so we're going to save some money from infrastructures. We're going to save some money from IT and some of the consolidation work over there. And then we will then fund engineering and mostly fund go-to-market.

[Paul Steep, Analyst]

Great. I'll just ask one last quick clarifying one. Can you just comment, and I respect that it's difficult, but like obviously, we had the situation in Japan relating to chips and automotive. What's sort of the broader mood, John, in terms of the base? Obviously, these decisions don't get made in a vacuum or overnight. But is there overall maybe a bit of a pause going on or people are still moving forward with projects? And I'll pass the line.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

So far, with the 25 design win we have in the quarter with some really big name wins, Toyota, Honda and EV, Scania in trucks in Sweden and other things, other wins that we have, so far, the auto space are still very vibrant from a design win standpoint. Then eventually, it will hit us. I just -- I'm following what GM and Ford has said publicly, that GM has stated that second half of this year, the chip shortages issues will be overcome. And they assume reduction of the 3 shutdown factories right now. So that's why we said, when we do our planning today, we assume that we continue to win design wins in QNX, that we will then have developed a license as revenue and hoping that we'll do some more professional services. And then the production obviously kicked in, in the future. It does affect us immediately a little bit. But since we're in the recovering mode, I think it's being absorbed in somewhat. So our guidance of $180 million to $200 million for the year assume that this problem -- shortage problem with the plant shutdown problem ends in midyear. Now that's just a stake in the ground. I mean we have to model it somehow, somewhere. If that prolong, then that will prolong our recovery. But I'm hoping to minimize as best as we can. Not every plants are shut down, by the way. Obviously, you know that.

[Operator]

Next, we have Steven Li from Raymond James.

[Steven Li, Director & Equity Research Analyst]

How profitable are these licensing revenues? Is the gross margin, for example, higher than your corporate average?

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Yes. Yes, which is painful for us in the first couple of quarters because we expect, one way or the other, it's going to be a low revenue, low level. But the answer is yes, it's higher than the corporate number by significant percentage.

[Steven Li, Director & Equity Research Analyst]

Okay. So John, if the patent sale goes through, could your EBITDA turn negative, for example?

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Yes, it could be. And I'm hoping that our EBITDA go negative. I didn't calculate EBITDA go negative. The EPS will go negative. But I am hoping that we will start registering some growth in Software and Services to offset it.

[Operator]

We don't have any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to John Chen, Executive Chair and CEO of BlackBerry for closing remarks.

[John S. Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO]

Thank you very much. I don't have any remarks. And thank you all for your interest in the company. We will have a very interesting year ahead of us here. We believe our Software and Services and especially -- when we separate the 2 lines, we already know that Spark will do some growth in billings, revenue growth will come in mostly from BTS. And licensing, it could go either way and we'll keep you posted. And so I'm sorry, it's being late in the evening in the East Coast. Thank you all very much for attending today's call, and have a great evening.

[Operator]

This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.