UBLXF - u-blox Holding AG (UBLXF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-03-06 13:02:10 ET
u-blox Holding AG (UBLXF)
Q4 2023 Results Conference Call
March 06, 2024 08:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Rafael Duarte - Head of IR
Stephan Zizala - CEO
Roland Jud - CFO
André Müller - Chair, Member of the Board of Essemtec AG
Conference Call Participants
Harry Blaiklock - UBS
Presentation
Rafael Duarte
Hi, everyone. Welcome to u-blox's 2023 results. Warm welcome for the ones here in the room with us. So it's always good to see you in-person. For the ones in the webcast, also welcome. Quick note for those, when it comes to the Q&A session, we're going to go as usual with the questions from the audience, and then we go for the for the webcast. So the format here, very simple as usual. So we'll have the presentation of the results by our CEO, Stephan Zizala; and CFO, Roland Jud, and then we go for the Q&A. So Stephan, now for the highlights of 2023.
Stephan Zizala
Good afternoon, everybody. So welcome to our results press conference for our fiscal year 2023. So I need to [Multiple Speakers] so when we entered 2023, we came out of a very strong year 2022. It was our record year. It was the year with the most severe shortness of semiconductors. And the first half of 2023 was very strong for us. But when we entered the second half, we saw already a decline in our revenues. So the year itself was different. If you look overall and if you look at constant currencies, we saw our revenue down by 2.7%. And if you compare this to the global semiconductor market, which was down by 9.4%, we performed better in this environment versus the global semiconductor market. With this result we achieved a profitability margin of adjusted 12% EBIT and over the year, a cash flow of 10%. If you look what else have we done in this year, we reworked our strategy and this was important for us because we set up the company for its future growth. The Board of Directors, the executive team and the whole of u-blox, embrace this strategy. And I'm really proud of this that it's not just a top down thing but it's something what we see now active in the company. We embrace it and I will come to this a bit later to recap some parts of our focus, innovate and execute strategy before we come then to the numbers again.
There are two highlights of the strategy, which is important in two key areas. One, innovation area, in the area of combined satellite and cellular communication, but also in autonomous driving, we already see success in this -- of this strategy in a very early stage, which confirms that we are on the right track. Let's see if -- now it works. On this chart, you see the quarterly revenue development. And here, 2023 was special. Because coming out of this semiconductor supply crisis, our customers wanted to have firm orders for 2023, which we agreed on. And of course, this also put a certain obligation for our customers to consume those parts. And this effect you see mainly in the second quarter and the fourth quarter where our customers took more than they actually needed. Now, there's one part I'm proud of because it shows the strong customer relationships u-blox has. So we have an agreement with our customers and our customers executed on those agreements to a very large extent. And this is exceptional nowadays that both parties, we as u-blox but also our customers, really live the sense of such a partner, meaning of such a partnership. Now obviously, if they took more than they actually needed, this means they have now a higher inventory and this we will see in the quarter one and two of this year....
u-blox Holding AG (UBLXF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript