TBIIF - Tobii AB (publ) (TBIIF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Tobii AB (publ) (TBIIF)

Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call

February 7, 2023 3:00 A.M. ET

Company Participants

Anand Srivatsa - Chief Executive Officer

Magdalena Andersson - Chief Financial Officer

Henrik Mawby - Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Erik Larsson - SEB

Daniel Thorsson - ABG

Mikael Laséen - Carnegie

Presentation

Operator

Anand Srivatsa

Thank you and welcome to the Tobii 2022 Year-End Financial Report. With me are Magdalena Rodell Andersson, our CFO; as well as Henrik Mawby, the Head of Investor Relations for Tobii. Now, we will be taking questions right after this presentation. So, if you have any questions, please feel free to start posting them now.

We are changing the format of our earnings call a little bit. We are going to spend a little bit less time on the introduction and get to the quarterly results more quickly. If you have questions about or need more information about Tobii in general, please feel free to visit our Investor Relations website or reach out to Henrik Mawby. He can certainly share those details with you.

So, let me first start by providing a quick overview of Tobii. Tobii is a Swedish company. We've been listed on the Stockholm Nasdaq since 2015 with the majority of our employees here in Sweden. Over the last two decades, our company has established ourself as the world leader in eye tracking, and our mission has expanded in the recent years to deliver technology that will improve the world by understanding human attention and intent.

We call this new emerging field attention computing and hopefully the video that you saw gave you a better sense of the vast potential that we see in front of us. Tobii is on a journey to build from our leadership position in eye tracking to become the world leader in attention computing as well. So, let's jump now into the Q4 business results. I'm very happy with the results that we've delivered for the quarter.

We delivered our first EBIT profitable quarter since our IPO in 2015. And we have done this despite the fact that not all of our business has actually been hitting on all cylinders. This milestone has been reached because we have driven a focus on improving profitability and improved profitability on a year-on-year basis for the last several years. And I'm super pleased to achieve this breakthrough in EBIT profitability in Q4 2022.

The results for the quarter are a clear demonstration of the benefit of the diverse portfolio that Tobii has and the fact that we have very healthy operating leverage in our business models. We believe that the combination of this and the clear focus on profitability has helped us deliver this result today.

For the quarter, we delivered an organic growth of 19% and once again, this was led very much with a strong performance in the integration segment. We see very strong license revenue in the VR market. And we also see that we are building long-term traction in both customer engagements in VR, as well as customer engagements on the automotive side.

When we look at the design wins for the quarter. We received two design wins this quarter. One, for a VR solution that is going to detect intoxication. And the second for a vision skills assessment and improvement tool using our Eye Tracker 5 platform.

Now, on to products and solutions. What we've seen on the products and solutions side is that we've seen improvement from a weak Q3 to a 2% growth organically for the quarter. This was led with a pretty strong gaming peripheral performance, our Eye Tracker 5 peripheral, which is a direct-to-consumer product, but we also saw a quite strong finish to the quarter in the Chinese market for our research solutions.

Now, the strong finish in China is a very encouraging piece of news for us, but it is a little bit early to see if this is a trend or something that is a pent-up demand that we were able to enjoy in Q4. We continue to see some signs of lingering weakness in other geographies. And so, as we look forward into the year, we see potential upside in markets like China, but some uncertainty still in the macro environment.

Now, if we think about significant events for the quarter, it starts, of course, with the PSVR 2. We shared this as well in our previous earnings call that the PSVR 2 started pre-orders on November 15, 2022, and the headset is expected to launch in February 22 of this year. This is a huge milestone event for Tobii as we see the adoption of our technology now showcased for millions of users this year. We think the impact of the Sony launch isn't going to be limit it to VR alone, but we think the awareness that this device will bring will help us actually grow all parts of our business.

In 2022, we've also put a strong focus in maturing as a more sustainable organization. And in Q4 specifically, we saw a significant set of achievements that I wanted to highlight to you today. First of all, we were recognized as a top ranking company in Allbright´s gender equality report. We're one of the few tech companies in Sweden to be rated this high. And this report, of course, looks at gender equality in management.

We've also seen the focus we've delivered on sustainability show up in our external ratings with MSCI improving our rating from BBB to A, and our focus on improved governance has delivered us ISO 27001 certification during the quarter. We exit 2022 with a much stronger cash balance, and Magdalena will talk about that a little bit more, but specifically in the quarter, we received SEK166 million of additional COVID tax relief that puts us in a strong financial footing as we execute the rest of our organic business.

Now, with that, I'm going to hand it over to Magdalena to talk about the numbers in more detail. Magdalena?

Magdalena Andersson

Thank you, Anand. Yes. It's always a pleasure to present what we have achieved each quarter, but I must admit that this quarter I'm especially pleased to present the results. The high revenue of 262 million in this quarter equals an organic growth of 90%. We had some growth within the Products and Solutions segment and a really high growth within the Integration segment. And I will get back to the segments in more detail on the next page.

Gross margin was 78% in the quarter, 1 percentage point higher than last year, very positive effect from shift in product mix was somewhat offset by currency effects. Finally, EBIT was SEK9 million in the quarter with an EBIT margin of 3%. This is an improvement with SEK40 million versus Q4 2021, equaling an EBIT margin improvement of 19 percentage points.

Here is where we can see the quick positive effect from incremental revenue and also in combination with [prudent cost control] [ph]. It is of course very encouraging to deliver a profitable quarter. However, as we have communicated before, we do not expect to stay on this positive side in the short-run.

Year-to-date, the organic growth was 14%, mainly driven by the Integration segment and the gross margin was 76% for the full-year, an improvement with 4 percentage points where the positive net effect was driven by a product mix. And then for the whole of 2022, EBIT was minus 122 million, compared to minus 186 million last year, which is an improvement of 64 million.

We acknowledge that the macroeconomic situation did affect us negatively in our running business during the year. Despite this, we managed to achieve this improvement while at the same time being able to invest in future business opportunities. We're now entering 2023. We remain confident and committed to reaching our financial goal of being EBIT profitable in Q4 2023.

And then looking into our segments. Products and Solutions had an organic growth of 2%. The Gaming peripheral Eye Tracker 5 showed continued growth, and from a regional perspective, we closed the quarter on a strong note in China after the release of COVID restrictions. And ending of the bad debt year for universities, while the other regions had a softer Q4.

Gross margin in the quarter was 72%, compared to 78% last year. The deviation between quarters was related to product mix shift and currency effects. And then looking into our integration segments. The organic growth was 59%. The revenue growth was driven by a combination of license revenues and development projects. As we have mentioned before, depending on milestone payments and larger payments of license revenues, it is to be expected that this segment will exhibit large fluctuations in growth rates in its early days.

Gross margin for the Integration segment was 88% in the quarter versus 76 last year. The improvement was derived from the product mix shift towards more software license and development project revenues. And then looking year to date, the organic growth for Products and Solutions was 3%, compared to 70% in 2021. The growth drivers in 2022 were the gaming peripheral Eye Tracker 5 and the strong growth in China for our behavioral studies and research solutions, while the growth was hampered by contraction in Japan and in North America.

Year-to-date, the gross margin was 69%, compared to 75% last year were higher components and freight costs in combination with the product mix shift has put a pressure on the margin during 2022, compared to 2021. In integration, the organic growth was 42% for the whole year over 2022, compared to minus 2% in 2021. And year to date, the integrations gross margin was 89%, compared to 63% last year, which was an improvement related to mix shift from hardware to software licenses.

And so, over to our balance sheet and cash flow. We have an equity of 754 million and an equity ratio of 62%. Our free cash flow during this quarter was 147 million. This cash flow was positively affected by 166 million in temporary COVID-related tax release from the Swedish tax authorities.

If you take that out, the free cash flow would otherwise have been minus 19%. These tax release were originally due in February 2023, but after closing of the quarter, 161 million of these reliefs have been prolonged to February 2024. And with that, we ended the quarter with 402 million in cash and cash equivalents.

And with that, back to you, Anand.

Anand Srivatsa

Thank you, Magdalena. So, now let's talk a little bit about the full-year because I firmly believe that because of the lumpiness in our business, the right way for us to assess Tobii's progress is to consider full-year results not just quarterly alone. On a full-year basis, you could see from a segment perspective, from a full-year basis overall, we delivered 14% organic growth, as Magdalena stated before. And from a segment perspective, we delivered 42% growth in the Integration segment and 3% growth in Products and Solutions.

We see good momentum on the gross margin side as we've increased 4 percentage points on an annual basis from 72% to 76%. And we see of course that our profitability over the course of the year continues to increase. In this case an improvement of 14 percentage points to minus 16%.

If you look at the underlying trends, one of the things that we have consistently stated is that we see a mix shift from hardware to software. And if you consider the mix of revenue that we've seen through the full-year, you can clearly see a 15 percentage point improvement in the mix of software as part of our revenue. And this largely comes from an equivalent decline in the mix of hardware based revenue for the company.

If you step back and then consider what trends does this full-year picture show us, I believe it highlights three major trends. The first one is that on an annual basis, integrations is delivering very strong organic growth. The second is that we continue to see the business fundamentals driving high operating leverage. And this is driven by both the product mix shift, but specifically also the move towards more software revenue. And both of these things are pretty apparent on the chart on the right.

Finally, we also have made significant progress this year in driving to the mass market adoption of our technologies. In 2022, Tobii Technologies were deployed in 1 million devices in the year, that's a substantial achievement for us. And of course, looking forward into 2023, we expect that this number will increase with the launch of the Sony PlayStation VR 2.

Now, let's talk about one other highlight for Q4, at least one other spotlight that I would like to put in this quarter, which is, our focus on automotive. I think for us to understand where we are in automotive DMS, it's good to put the current state relative to the overall development we've made in this particular area. Tobii started investing in an automotive DMS product in early 2019. And the focus from the very early stages of our investment was to focus on what we call DMS core signals, signals like gaze or head pose.

In August of 2021, we announced that we'd acquired a company called Phasya, and they gave us additional signals, feature level signals that allowed us to deliver new capabilities like drowsiness. The combination of Tobii's initial investment and focus from an engineering perspective, plus Phasya meant that we could deliver to OEMs all of the signals required to meet EU legislation, but it wasn't until Q1 of 2022, that we were finally able to get into what we call the demo and evaluation phase of our product. The first time that customers were able to actually see Tobii DMS in action, either in a lab, physically, or in a car environment.

We've continued to expand the availability of these showcases both in public demonstrations that we made in Q3 of 2022 with showcasing of our DMS at the in-cabin event in Brussels, but we've also started to take our solutions out on the road to showcase the customers. Now, if you think about the development phase of our product or the demonstration and evaluation phase of our product, we think this is an ongoing effort.

We know that as more and more regions adopt driver monitoring systems, the requirements change, and we're going to have to continue to develop new capabilities to address them. For example, in regions like the United States or China. Similarly, in the evaluation phase, we hope of course that customers will be able to go and test Tobii's solutions in their own labs across the world that all customers and all Tier 1 companies can test them, and this is an ongoing effort for us to go drive.

Where we are now is that starting in early 2022, as customers were able to evaluate our solutions, we started to enter into this RFQ phase where customers with positive evaluations of our technologies started to include us into RFQs for OEM DMS design win opportunities. And we exit the year with a significant amount of traction with several global Tier 1s to participate in these DMS RFQs.

I'm very happy with where we are at the end of 2022, even though we haven't reached our stated goal of getting to one automotive design win by the end of the year. I think where we are now with this solid traction we built with these Tier 1s, we believe that we are quite close to achieving that goal, and in 2023, we hope to close multiple design wins.

So, let's summarize now how the quarter has been for us overall. Q4 2022 was a strong finish to the year, and of course a significant quarter for Tobii to demonstrate the progress that we've made from a profitability perspective being the first EBIT profitable quarter for us since our IPO in 2015. Our full-year performance continues to show clear progress from a growth perspective, as well as an improvement in profitability.

We have strengthened the underlying business fundamentals of Tobii, both with our engagements in areas like XR or upcoming focus in the automotive DMS space, but also, as you could see, the product mix shift towards software, which allows us to continue to drive improvements in profitability going forward. We enter 2023 now with strong optimism, despite the fact that there are still some uncertainties in the macroeconomic environment. And we are confident and committed to hitting our financial goals, which is to be profitable, EBIT profitable once again in Q4 of 2023.

With that, I'd like to hand it over for questions. Henrik?

Question-and-Answer Session

A - Henrik Mawby

Thank you, Anand. So, it's time for Q&A. Please let me remind you that for listeners on the webcast, you have a Q&A function available in your web client. So, please post questions there. Let me remind you that there is a bit of a time lag in the system, so post them sooner rather than later. Analysts, please indicate in the chat or in the Q&A if you wish to ask a question or questions verbally.

I will kick-off this with a few questions from Daniel Djurberg with Handelsbanken. His first question is, how would you position your IPR portfolio on a global comparison, i.e. with key peers such as Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, etcetera? And also, would you say that there are areas you can collaborate in also with these large vendors?

Anand Srivatsa

Okay. So, let me take that question. So, again, we believe that in the field of eye tracking, we have a very strong IPR portfolio. This is part of the reason that large customers choose to do business with us. And so from that perspective, we think that we are quite strong. We, of course, understand that many of these companies that were listed in the question, they have very strong research and development organizations as well, and they’ve also filed IP in the spaces that we are active in.

Now, when we talk about collaborations with those kinds of companies, we've been quite open with the fact that even though we see some of these companies specifically in the virtual reality and augmented reality space, having eye tracking capabilities of their own, we don't view these companies as competitors of Tobii. We think of them as potential customers. And you should expect that we are working with all of the major XR players in the world and engage with them for them to evaluate our solutions.

We believe that our solutions are world-class. And in many cases, we expect that these companies will over time look at us as a potential complementary solution to what they have in-house. And in some cases, they may choose to use us instead of what they have at their companies. So, we're continuing to engage with all of them.

Henrik Mawby

Thank you, Anand. And another question from Daniel Djurberg. Looking ahead, will you continue to develop your own purpose built ASIC or will it be possible to start to use COTS, perhaps they are good enough? If so, what would the implication be also from a competitive point of view?

Anand Srivatsa

Yeah. If you think about sort of how our solutions are delivered today, it actually in many cases already is running off of off-the-shelf silicon. So, for example, if you think about the design wins we've announced in the past, like the [Pico Neo 3 Eye] [ph], we had our algorithms running on a Qualcomm piece of silicon.

We do believe that there is a role to play for ASICs depending on the system design for eye tracking, but for a lot of our business, we continue to see the potential to run our algorithms on silicon that is already available. This is the case, for example, in automotive. This is the case also in the extended and virtual reality space.

Now, the second part of the question, what does that mean from a competitive perspective? We believe, of course that when you deliver attention computing or eye tracking, there are two parts to the solution. One is the system design or the specific hardware that enables these signals. And we believe that even when we don't deliver all of this on our own proprietary solutions, whether it's our sensor or our compute silicon, we believe the knowledge we have in optimizing the system design is a unique capability that customers value.

The second aspect, of course, is the algorithm itself. The algorithms in these spaces need to improve to go and deliver the performance needed for the user experience, but we also see the algorithm needing to change, whether it's because the geometry of a headset changes as VR goes to thinner headsets or if it is to reduce the overall power of the algorithm to enable future form factors like augmented reality.

We think that the lead that we have here in algo development, our expertise in bringing it to mass market and dealing with large populations, those are unique capabilities for Tobii or at least very highly differentiated offerings from Tobii, and we continue to believe that puts us in a strong position.

Henrik Mawby

Thank you, Anand. And last question from Daniel Djurberg. In Driver Monitoring Systems, you were quite explicit that you expected a Tier 1 design win during the autumn of 2022, did you lose this one or has it been postponed?

Anand Srivatsa

So, I would say that we are participating in RFQs. In some cases, of course, we see some of our partners lose designs. In some cases, we've also not been ready to win at this point in time. But again, the engagement continues to increase, and we believe that the more RFQs that we participate in, the higher the chances that we are going to be successful, and we think that we're pretty close to that now.

Henrik Mawby

Thank you, Anand. And with that, we have a few questions from analysts online as well. Erik Larsson, are you – you may go ahead, please.

Erik Larsson

Yes. Thank you. I hope you can hear me, and that you're all good. So, I have a question on costs because in Q3, you mentioned that you will address your cost base a bit, and from my understanding, you expect a slight decline in OpEx in 2023. And I'm just curious how this is progressing and whether we've seen any effects from this in Q4?

Magdalena Andersson

Yes. Just to clarify, we have been clear on that we are controlling costs. We have not stated that we specifically will reduce them immensely, but we are taking down the pace on how we before increase them rather. And yes, we are following our plan.

Erik Larsson

Okay. Great. And then just a question on the revenue splits, you showed a bit there, but if you can sort of specify the share of project milestone revenue in Integrations would be great?

Magdalena Andersson

Yes, that would be great, but we will not share that specifically. So, we're more talking about it in the broader sense, but we will not share the details.

Erik Larsson

Okay. Fair enough. Thank you.

Henrik Mawby

Good. Erik, was that all questions?

Erik Larsson

Yes. That's all for me.

Henrik Mawby

Thank you. Okay. Let's move on to Daniel Thorsson from ABG, please.

Daniel Thorsson

Yes. Thank you. Can you hear me?

Anand Srivatsa

Yes.

Daniel Thorsson

Okay. Excellent. So, first one related to Sony, when you announced the deal, you said that it should contribute to 10% of group sales in 2022, can you follow up where did we end on that figure, please? And then secondly, can you something on how much you expect Sony revenues to contribute to 2023 sales?

Anand Srivatsa

Yes. Again, I think the forward-looking number, we're going to be very careful about, Daniel. We don't talk about specific customer expected revenue. And of course, in this case, we are quite dependent on the success of the product. That's very common for us in the Integrations business.

Now, when we announced the deal, we talked about the fact that part of what we had structured the deal as was some level of inventory build and prepurchase of licenses as Sony was going to build the inventory for their launch of PSVR2. And we believe that the revenue from that, which was a little bit more deterministic, would be about 10% of the overall revenue for Tobii as a whole, and we ended a little bit higher than that, but in the same range.

Daniel Thorsson

Okay. Excellent. So, the inventory, yes, okay. I understand the inventory buildup was around what you expected at least, which was on slight line in terms of. Okay. Fair enough. Then secondly, on Integrations, the gross margins seem to have reached a new level around 90%. Is this a level we can continue to see sustainably during 2023. I guess that the answer is yes, given the new product mix, but just to confirm it.

Magdalena Andersson

That's a – it's a sort of a – be very clear because just as we said that the revenue will be lumpy, we cannot sort of be really – it's not that stable still. So, it will vary also going forward. But of course, we are going towards a more strong margin. That's for sure.

Anand Srivatsa

And I would say that that's sort of where the commentary is on looking at the full-year picture. I think that the trend you see where we see more and more software revenue, this is definitely the case in areas like Integrations. So, if you look at it on a higher or a longer period, I think it's quite a fair statement that you make about this is, sort of the kind of levels that we need to expect because we expect that things like VR, where we will be running on off-the-shelf silicon or automotive over time will grow and become a significant portion of the Integration business as they are right now. But on a quarter-to-quarter basis, there are variations here, and we still continue to have hardware revenue as part of that mix.

And so if you have a particularly strong quarter in one area like, let's say, health care, then you could see some of that changes materialize. And that's why I think the lumpiness in Integrations, it definitely shows up on a revenue basis. It has some impact on the gross margins, but I think the global trend is that we should expect strong gross margin as the product mix shifts towards software.

Daniel Thorsson

Yes, understand. Thank you very much.

Henrik Mawby

Good. And with that, we move on to Mikael Laséen from Carnegie, please.

Mikael Laséen

Okay. Good morning. Yes, I have a few questions. And I would like to start in China. And if you can say how much China generated of Products & Solutions revenue in 2022 or in Q4?

Magdalena Andersson

We are not breaking down the revenue in that detail, but of course, we have a balance over the world from our different regions, which we also – that we show within our annual report where you see Europe, U.S., and Asia, that's how we split it.

Anand Srivatsa

What we would say, of course, and I think Magdalena spoke to this in the comments we made here is, the China growth, our strength was very much at the back half of Q4, very much tied to, sort of the reverse in the Zero COVID Policy. So, we saw a pretty strong response after that. We have seen weakness in the other markets still on the Products & Solutions side, if you think about the research business. On the gaming peripheral, of course, that's a worldwide business, where most of the revenue is coming from markets like the United States and Europe.

Mikael Laséen

Okay. But [you] [ph] can't say, I mean, broadly speaking, how much it is, is it 20% or 30% in...

Anand Srivatsa

Yes. At this point, we're not breaking the segments down, down to the regional level. We provide regional guidance on – or regional at least revenue on the overall Tobii number.

Mikael Laséen

Yes. I think in previous reports, a few years ago and when you were combined with Dynavox, you mentioned this from time-to-time that China is actually in a substantial part of Tobii Pro. And this must be the case still, I guess.

Anand Srivatsa

Yes, it wouldn't fundamentally have changed. And you get a sense a little bit when we break up, sort of the U.S. revenue and European revenue and the rest of world revenue. The rest of the world revenue is a significant contributor for the overall Tobii number.

Mikael Laséen

Okay. Yes. So, let me see. Yes. And another one is that service revenue increased significantly in Q4, compared to Q3. What was the reason for this?

Anand Srivatsa

So, I think the service revenue, we talked a little bit about sort of the project revenue on the Integrations side. So that shows up from a services perspective. We also have on the Products & Solutions side consulting services that make up that number, but we saw a pronounced strength on the project revenue side for Integrations showing up in Q4.

Mikael Laséen

Okay. And you also commented in report that you expect EBIT to be better in 2023 than 2024. That's kind of a broad statement, and you mentioned the cost run rate that you will not increase it as much. Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean with this statement about EBIT being a bit better? Can you be a bit more precise, please?

Anand Srivatsa

Again, I think that we've sort of provided financial targets, so we'll reiterate that, but I think it's important to maybe put this in the context of how we've been operating the business. If you look at our EBIT profitability over the last couple of years, 2021, 2022, we've continued to improve profitability on an annual basis. And so that is something that we continue to drive towards. And so, I think it's pretty safe to say that, that improvement is something that we will expect and execute to in 2023 with a combination of increased revenue and of course, the focus on cost.

When we look at more granular specific targets, the target that we've taken and we continue to be committed to is that we will be EBIT profitable once again in Q4 2023, but over the other quarters, we've said that we expect to not be at that level by definition since the target is Q4 2023 to be EBIT profitable. And we expect that, again, there will be some variation quarter-on-quarter in terms of annual performance depending on the macroeconomic environment and, sort of how the Integration revenue materializes.

You can see over the course of 2022 that we've had variations in Integration performance, whether it's Q1 to Q2 or Q4, there have been big changes there. And even our Products & Solutions business, of course, has had quite different performance if you look from Q1 to Q4. We think that in the current macro environment, we expect that's a similar kind of outcome. So, the right way for us to go and forecast the business is more on an annual basis, but we believe that in Q4, which is our strongest quarter, we will once again be EBIT profitable.

Mikael Laséen

Okay. Good. Got it. Anand, it would be great if you can also please summarize the key revenue drivers for the Integration segments in 2023 and maybe say something about the backlog, what type of design wins you have going from, sort of early phase to more mature phase and actually generating revenue?

Anand Srivatsa

Yes. I mean when we think about, sort of where is the revenue coming from in 2023. Again, from the Integration side, we've talked about the strength that we see in virtual reality. And so with the Sony launch, we expect again that Sony will be a major contributor to our overall revenue for the year. We expect to see continued engagement with multiple customers in the space.

Some of that will start out in things like project revenue, which are on the path to potentially design wins in the future. And then we have, of course, a broad customer base in different parts of our business, whether that's in health care, where we see small companies starting to get FDA approval and we'll start scaling.

We see them also in other parts of our business like our PC business, we talked about multiple design wins in – at the end of Q3, and these products are now starting to launch. So, we think that it's actually fairly broad-based, but the standout in terms of growth will still be in virtual reality.

Mikael Laséen

Yes, that's helpful. And my final is on the DMS side, if you can – you talked about it, of course, in your presentation, but can you elaborate a bit more on the outlook as revenue potential in 2024, 2025 and the cash flow profile of this type of product area in 2023 and also need for working capital maybe over time?

Anand Srivatsa

Sure. So, let me take the revenue outlook and then maybe Magdalena and I can both comment a little bit on the, sort of the expectation on cash flow. So, as we've said, in our targets that we had before, we were very much looking at start of production in 2025 and start of production 2026 type of design wins. That is still the current expectation for the RFQs that we see coming in.

We believe that as we get more and more evaluation from global Tier 1s, the stages we see is that the global Tier 1s go and evaluate us, they want to see performance in their labs, in their hands to really characterize the performance and capabilities of the solution. As they get quite confident with that, they start inviting us into RFQs, which, of course, we're jointly then participating in. It's us in combination with the Tier 1.

And for us to win, of course, the Tier 1 also has to win and they are typically putting in the entire system. In this case, the hardware subsystem and of course, we are the Tier 2 providing the algorithm for DMS, and there may be other software that's part of it. So, for us to win, we need the Tier 1 to win and, of course, the Tier 1 to have chosen Tobii. And what we see right now is that we are participating in more and more of these RFQs and more Tier 1s are giving us very good evaluations on our technology as we're able to deliver these systems to them and demonstrate the capabilities of what we're offering.

So, that's sort of where we are today. So, I think the first outcome of this is that we, of course, have to win our first DMS design win. And we acknowledge that, this is a space where there are strong incumbents. And so, we're going to have to go and demonstrate that we are somebody that people can bet on.

We believe that after we win the first one, the next set of design wins should become easier because we will be more of a known player in the space. And so, we are very much laser-focused on the first design win, but we think in this year, we should hopefully close multiple of them.

From a revenue perspective, we expect that these things will play out as maybe small NRE revenue, maybe even in 2023 or 2024, depending on the projects we engage in. But the real revenue, of course, comes in when license revenues show up after start of production of a particular vehicle.

Now, from an investment perspective, we have been in an investment mode in automotive since 2019, investing in developing the solution. And we expect to continue to be in that mode all the way through 2025 and beyond as we start to see license revenue scale up, and of course, pay us back for the investment that we've made. We're not breaking out actually the specific investment that we make in the automotive side, but I don't know if you had any other comments that you wanted to make?

Magdalena Andersson

No, but it's just as to say, of course, right now, it's a cash flow negative vertical for us. We are investing. We don't have any revenue, but we intend to change that.

Mikael Laséen

Okay. Thank you.

Henrik Mawby

Good. Thank you. We have two more questions from the chat that we're going to do, and then we will have to round off this call. Starting with [Sergio Alegre] [ph]. Do you think that the slowdown in the gaming sector with fewer games published, profit warnings, et cetera, will delay your goals for 2023 in terms of revenue for the AR/VR segments?

Anand Srivatsa

Again, I think that the major driver for us here is going to be success of the Sony PSVR2 headset. So, from that perspective again, it's not very strange in the Integration segment. When our technology is embedded into somebody else's solution, the revenue that we receive depends on the volumes that they're going to ship.

One of the special things, of course, of Sony is that they are an ecosystem builder. They have spent a lot of time in curating games for the PSVR2. They've had tremendous success with the PS5 console so far. They announced as recently at CES that some of the marquee titles which they have in-house are coming to the PlayStation VR2 platform, games like Gran Turismo 7. They have 30 launch titles at this point.

And so, at least from our perspective, if you look at the reviews that you see from the technical press, we've had a chance to try out the headset, we see very positive indications both from the experience that's delivered, as well as the benefits of eye tracking. I think that's very positive for us as a company. Of course, that has to translate into success for the headset selling, and that's very much in Sony's hands.

I don't think that necessarily the broader gaming slowdown, which I think is actually something that would be indicative of PC sales or e-sports or things like that would necessarily have an impact yet in this market. I think more – this is a new category with a new experience, and that's maybe the bigger variable here.

Henrik Mawby

Thank you. And lastly, will the current cash position stay positive until Tobii becomes cash flow positive over time without the need for a new share issue?

Magdalena Andersson

We have a positive cash position now, and we foresee that we will be able to maneuver within that.

Henrik Mawby

Good. And with that, the Q&A – we finish the Q&A here. Any final remarks, Anand?

Anand Srivatsa

No. Once again, thank you very, very much and very happy with the quarter and looking forward for 2023. Thank you all.

Henrik Mawby

Thank you, everyone.

Magdalena Andersson

Thank you.

For further details see:

Tobii AB (publ) (TBIIF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript