Clavister AB

Clavister AB

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Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptFebruary 12, 2026

Kate Linwood

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q4 interim reports presentation. We are a minute early, but I would say, yeah, let's wait for some people to drop in.

I think, yeah, we can get start rolling. My name is Kate Linwood.

I am your host for today's webinar, and with me is our CEO, John Vestberg, and our CFO, David Nordström. We will start with the presentation of the last quarter, where John will share his key business insights, followed by David sharing the financial details.

After that, we will address any questions that you have at the end of the presentation. Please post your questions in the chat, and then, yeah, we will pick those up after.

With that, I would like to hand over to you, John.

John Vestberg

Thank you very much, Kate. Again, welcome to this presentation.

Q4 2025 concludes another year for Clavister. An interesting quarter definitely with both interesting metrics, but moreover, very interesting business events.

Also, of course, events that took place shortly after the quarter ended, which we will talk more about as well. If we sort of try to set a headline on Q4, the headline would be, as this page or picture says, improved profitability in the transitional quarter.

What do we mean with that? We see that our profitability, both in this quarter both EBITDA and EBIT and even net profit is continuously improving.

That's all good, even in a quarter like this where we had a bit of challenges on the top-line side and on the gross margin side. Despite that, we continue to drive the profit journey.

Another headline I would say from the quarter would be still a very strong underlying market and demand. The net sales growth in this quarter does not represent any weakness in the market or any weakness in the demand for Clavister products or solutions.

We'll talk more about this soon. In terms of a transitional quarter, one of the key events was, of course, the strengthened financial position, the entire revamp of the balance sheet that were conducted during the quarter.

Finally, and we highlighted this already before the quarter, that there are delivery delays on the military hardware side that causes slipover from this quarter into 2026. If we look at the demand side, I think we will need to be continuously sort of better in explaining to both our customers, but to the market in general, that Clavister is a dual-use cyber security company, serving both the civilian side and the military side.

The demand, as I mentioned, that demand remains strong. We see that in both of these segments, if you like, or sectors, where the amount of qualified discussions, dialogues, inquiries, and so forth, we're having with larger and larger and more volume of customers and prospects keep increasing.

Again, I think to some extent, we can thank, if you like thank within quotes, the geopolitical situation for this. There is the strong push for European solutions, and we see that even more.

In the civilian sector, there is a clear momentum. We will talk slightly more about the numbers later when David walks us through the financials, but I can say in general that in our key focus geographical markets, we have a very strong underlying momentum.

Previous year's quarter was very tough from a comparison perspective, so that's why our net sales numbers have, from a growth perspective, a bit of a hard time keeping up. If you would plot the 3, 4 year of trend, there is a very, very clear growth trend on our civilian business.

Similar then in the defense business. Defense business, a bit of a different beast in terms of business characteristics.

Typically, you see the large type of contracts, long lead times, and so forth, it's maybe no surprise that this is the type of business that gets more exposed in terms of press releases and so forth, goes almost without saying that this is a part of our business that is developing strongly, and I think the latest contract in Norway is a good testament to that. Again, the dual-use aspect of our business is a super important perspective.

We actually don't want to be tied into one or the other bucket. We're neither a pure defense company nor a pure civilian company.

We serve both domains. That is important from several perspectives.

From the business perspective, it adds a lot of credibility to win large national defense deals when we, on the other hand, in the civilian business, have dialogues with critical infrastructure type of customers or large state agencies and so forth. Those businesses they catalyze and they fuel each other.

Then from a pure P&L or cash flow perspective, they're also good in hedging each other because of the various characteristics. On the one hand, on the civilian side, more volume, slightly smaller deals, but compensated with large volumes, shorter time to money, and so forth.

On the defense side, the opposite: large projects, long time to order, long time to cash in most cases. Combining those two creates a good balance.

In terms of order intake for the full year last year, we ended up in 320 million SEK, clearly the highest number ever, that takes us to an order book of 378 million SEK per end of Q4. As we've communicated before, our order book includes now contracts that spans all the way through 2029, and this gives us an very, very good position with regards to visibility and outlook for the coming years.

Moving to the defense sector, it is, as just discussed, it is an important growth driver for Clavister. It is not the only growth driver, I think that is very important to highlight that both the civilian and the defense sector, they keep pulling each other in terms of growth.

Specifically in Q4 isolated, sales in defense or revenue from defense business grew by 66%, it was a strong quarter from that perspective. One of the highlights was adding yet another contract of our Cyber Armor products to the CV90 platforms with BAE Systems Hägglunds.

This was an add-on order to a previously won contract for a European nation, a value of 26 million SEK. Still within the defense sector, of course, we need to talk about our key win that happened slightly after the quarter ended.

What we've been participating in for a few years was a large tender from the Norwegian Defence Material Agency, so that's the Norwegian version of FMV. They are procuring a lot of digitalization projects to modernize the Norwegian defense forces, and they have a program called Mime.

Our contract is one component out of maybe 20 in the large Mime program that sort of encompasses many, many billion of Norwegian kroner in investments. I would refer this contract as really a breakthrough contract for Clavister, but not only for Clavister, a breakthrough as well in tactical communication within defense.

What the Norwegian government and Norwegian Armed Forces have done here is a many, many year of really solid design and requirements work to design the next-generation communication network for armed forces. This is something that many other nations now are looking with envy on the Norwegians, asking themselves how the beep did they arrive at such an interesting design.

There was a long tender process over 3 years, fierce competition from really, really large vendors in the industry. At the end of the day, we were able to win this deal due to several factors: one factor being that we are building this solution on top of our existing product portfolio, that was a very strong key for the customer; the other one, us being a European, but even more, a Nordic supplier, that also played into our favor; and I think also our heritage coming from an engineering-strong background, talking to in this case an engineering-heavy customer, also did suit us well.

The project as such, or the contract as such, concerns two parts. One is the delivery and development of our solution, again, based on Clavister's proprietary software.

After the delivery, it is followed by a 4-year maintenance and support commitment. We strongly believe that these 4 years will be then followed by many years of continuous engagement with this customers basically for the lifetime of the system.

In summary, we're looking at a deal worth of 280 million SEK. This is a committed order.

We are looking at a project duration starting already now—it has already started—and continues for almost 3 years, or approximately 3 years. We will be seeing, from a financial perspective, revenue and earnings support from this project throughout the project, continuously throughout the project.

We are highlighting in our quarterly report, or our interim report, that cash flow from the project is also supporting us during 2026, but somewhat later during second half of the year. Apart from that, it is more of a continuous revenue and earnings support from the project.

Of course, we need to talk about the supply chain constraints. This is no news, I think, for anyone.

We announced this already last year. I think everyone is aware of the reasons: this strong buildup of the defense sector across Europe causes a lot of strain on the supply chain in the industry.

More specifically, the producers are not being able to keep up with the pace, which, of course, affect the entire sector, not only companies like Clavister. For us specifically, the deliveries that we planned during Q4 is postponed into 2026, fully according to what we announced last year.

In terms of numbers, we're looking at an impact of approximately 10 million SEK moving into 2026. Naturally, we will have the corresponding positive effect then during the first half of 2026.

Again, this is a timing issue. It's not a business risk per se.

With that, leaving over to David to talk about our financial platform.

David Nordström

Yes. Thank you, John.

I think Q4 has been a very eventful quarter for us. It For a long time, we have, planning and building the foundation for being able to refinance the the the, the EIB debt that Clavister has been having since 2027 2017 with a combination of a a a a directed share issue and a commercial loan.

We did a directed share issue of 170 167 million SEK during, November-December timeframe. We were able to to to raise a a loan facility of 100 million SEK together with Swedbank.

The combination of of of of the directed share issue and the new loan facility, that enabled us to repay all outstanding debt, in and including a repurchasing of all issued warrants to the EIB. When we end now when we ended 2025, Clavister have no longer any debt with EIB, and EIB no longer hold any warrants in Clavister.

I think this have been two, challenges for Clavister that we have been wanting to resolve. I'm, we're very glad that this is resolved.

This in turn leads to a significantly lowered net debt from 152 million SEK to 67, clearly relieving a lot of pressure from our balance sheet. The balance sheet has been gradually improved over the last few years, but this is a major step in in in bringing our balance sheet to a, much better position.

The year-end cash position sitting almost at 100 million SEK. Reduced leverage, we removed the EIB warrant overhang, this has been, I would say, a bit challenging.

The FX exposure, those of you who have followed Clavister for some time clearly know the volatility in our in our financial net due to a large debt in in in euro that is now removed. The the current debt with Swedbank is smaller, but it's also in SEK.

We can also see then either then the FX that, the the the loan with Swedbank, it is cheaper, lowering our our annual interest costs. I think important, as we're growing, when this introduces a level of flexibility that we haven't had with EIB.

EIB came with quite large restrictions on our flexibility. That flexibility working now only with a commercial banks means that we can be faster to act on on on on on certain, say, needs in the organization related to growth, raising for additional, being being flexible how we finance potential working capital needs for as an example, not saying that this is something we're doing currently, but as an example, not having EIB there makes us more flexible, and that's important as we grow.

If we then look at financials, starting, as always, with order intake. Year-over-year comparison indicates a decline of 26%, but looking at that from a different perspective, there was no large orders from the defense sector.

There was There was definitely orders from the BAEs from BAE with 26 million SEK, but smaller than we see in the comparison quarter, so that still means this is the fourth-largest order intake quarter in Clavister. I would say still a strong order intake performance, and we still see an order intake trendline being on very high levels compared to historic levels.

Then looking from a net sales perspective, well, it is a modest net sales growth in the quarter, impacted by several things. As a large part of our sales are in euro, and the SEK has improved quite substantially.

We also have sales in in USD, where the improvement of the SEK is is even stronger, this comes definitely with an impact. Still, if you adjust for FX, net sales growth is not strong in in Q4.

Still, it is the largest sales quarter ever in the history of Clavister, but growth levels are are not on the levels where we have been used to seeing. FX is one effect.

Another, as as we communicated during during Q4, delays in deliveries of military hardware has an effect of approximately a little bit more than 10 million SEK, impacting this quarter negatively. Then from the civilian business perspective, we saw very strong growth in Q4 last year, partly supported by by one-off lifecycle effects, which we don't have in Q4 for this year.

This this this civilian, I would say, growth challenges is a quarter-by-quarter challenge. It is not indicating challenges in our civilian business per se, and that's important to say.

I think we can pause there. Then look at kind of civilian versus defense net sales, as this is something that being frequently asked.

There is a good growth in in in defense sales, 66%. However, we're missing 10 million SEK here that we expected to have, as we said, due to the delays.

It is less than what we expected. We expected it to be north of 25 million SEK, it ended up being 16.4.

That delay is then deferred to the first first half of of 2026. Civilian business, well, as we said, a little bit under what could have been expected.

One is FX effects; the other one is, as I said, the the, short-term challenging comps versus Q4 last year. That is only a short short-term challenge.

I believe we will see a good growth in the civilian business going forward. Adding, I think, one more important component to the mix that that might easily get overlooked: we see a lot of demand for security and cyber security made in Europe.

We are engaging with larger partners, larger end customers than before. That also means that our sales force is investing a lot of time in building partnership with large organizations, time that historically might have been spent in in in building business with much smaller partners and smaller end customers, where the benefit is is is more, there's a shorter time gap from an initial discussion to a sales transaction, but a transaction is smaller.

Here, I would say, we're chasing a lot of things that it doesn't generate sales visible in Q4, but it's building a foundation for future growth that I think is important. I think one should also be aware of that effect.

Hard to quantify the size of it, but I think it is important to do this transition. That's also one part of holding sales back in the quarter.

ARR growing somewhat faster than net sales. Why?

The the key reason is in in in the ARR number, there is a lot of of of of of of contracts, and the contracts are growing in value, which is driving ARR growth. The somewhat setback in in net sales growth quarter-by-quarter is, as I said, we had lifecycle events in Q4 last year, meaning quite a lot of hardware in the sales mix.

The hardware part of the sales mix is somewhat lower in the civilian business in this quarter, and hence ARR is growing faster than net sales. This is, and those who have listened to these presentations for some time know that a usual statement from me is when we see low growth in a quarter, we tend to see strong gross margin.

This quarter, we don't. This is an anomaly from that perspective, that we're seeing a small net sales growth and a weak gross margin.

Why? It's it's it's clearly very mix-driven.

That in this quarter, we have seen good order intake from the from the gross margin-strong parts of the civilian business, but that has not been able to translate into deliveries in supporting net sales in the quarter. We have a weak contribution from the margin-strong parts of of the business, combined with, as we said before, a 66% growth in defense deliveries.

They those defense deliveries in that in this quarter are very hardware-centric. This combination creates a a a a challenge for the margin in the quarter.

These are the reasons. However, I think this is an area where we are pleased to see that our focus on cost control is continued to yield results.

Even though we are producing so far our strongest growth quarter, our strongest sales quarter, not that strong growth-wise, but sales-wise, it is the largest quarter, we're seeing a decrease in in our opex. I think we have invested a lot of getting opex under control, and it is under control.

I think with that, we can be able to scale, of course, operational costs when we see that that there is a good traction of our sales. Costs, clearly under control.

This translate translates into a a an improved EBITDA. It is the cost control part is is is contributing more, I would say, since we have challenging a challenging margin situation.

Over all in all, we are driving growing EBITDA and and growing EBIT. Of course, we see a very strong net profit, and that is, of course, driven by that we're recording a deferred tax asset of 30 million SEK.

According to IFRS, if there if there are clear proof points that you will producing taxable profits in in a in future periods, you are required to record a deferred tax asset. We're doing this conservatively, and and and let's monitor that and I would say then bring that asset up over time as we move forward, but let's start with a bit of conservative assessments here.

That's the clear explanation why are we seeing such a large positive delta between EBIT and and net results.

John Vestberg

Thank you, David. To round up before Q&A then, a bit of an outlook going forward here.

I think we can summarize, again stating that there is a strong movement towards the increased digital sovereignty in Europe. It clearly benefits European vendors.

There are not too many cyber security vendors that are able to provide the same scope of products and services and solutions that Clavister can. As David alluded to, in the civilian side, structural growth opportunities, we're moving more and more towards larger partners, larger end customers as well, taking slightly more time to win and to onboard, but a investment well worth, I would say.

We're seeing the buildup of contracts in defense. This is and important, of course, knowing that from the 370-plus million SEK order backlog we had in Q4, adding then the now known 280 million SEK from the Norwegian contract, we have a very solid order book.

From that order book, we have, of course, as mentioned, a very clear outlook, very clear visibility, meaning that we can be a bit more certain in our planning position, and we can plan accordingly for strategic investments in expansion as well, specifically in sales and in some areas in R&D, but also doing structural investments that sort of creates the foundation for Clavister that can sort of onboard the next phase. We have updated our planning ambitions for the coming 3-year period.

Two reasons for that: well, we're entering a new year, it's due time; but moreover, coming from the fact that we're now sitting with a massive order book, we have much clearer planning horizons, meaning that if we look at our revenue targets or revenue ambitions for the coming years, we're stating that we would, with the contracts we have, with the growth we're seeing in new sales as well, we should be seeing revenue growth exceeding the overall market growth in this industry. Despite this quarter being a weaker gross margin point, we are still convinced that the average of 80% still stands.

There will be clear fluctuations still between the periods, but that is a product mix component more or less entirely. Important to state as well, we are moving into positive cash flow.

We have been seeing positive cash flows for some time. We are hovering around the zero mark in terms of EBIT, and in this quarter, even recording a fairly large net profit, even though it's driven by tax asset.

In any case, we are now seeing the possibility, for the first time in many, many years, to start reinvesting positive upcoming cash flows to drive further growth. We are in no way near to saturate the market.

The market is growing. We have still a fairly small portion of the market, there is absolutely the ambition to capture a larger market share.

That comes from, of course, continuous delivery on what we have and what we do with the current base, but also seeing investments in building future market shares. With that, moving back to you, Kate, for Q&A.

Kate Linwood

Perfect. Thank you very much for your presentation, John and David.

Now time for some questions. We already have received a few of them, but please keep posting them as we address the questions we have.

We can address anything you want John and David also to maybe elaborate a bit more on, please feel free to ask. First question: Could you please talk more about the postponements and when we can expect them to reverse?

John Vestberg

Absolutely. As we're indicating in the report and in this call, we expect them to reverse during the first half of this new year, 2026.

We're doing, of course, everything we can to accelerate that. It's clearly in our interest to do that, but we're sticking to the first half of 2026.

Kate Linwood

There's a similar question around this as well, but the question was also regarding is it in chips or is it more in the raw material area, and do you see any supply chain challenges, any worries that you want to specifically highlight in regards to this?

John Vestberg

It's clearly quite complex situation. These are not products that are straightforward commercial off-the-shelf products that are produced in volume.

It's complex engineering, many, many components. They have a lot of capabilities in them, also because of so-called industrial cooperation, offset requirements.

We need to do subcontracting production in other European countries as well, not only in Sweden or in few countries. This, of course, adds production complexity, and as soon as you add complexity, you have increased risk for delays and so forth.

It is not a single component. It's a mix of things, but I would say we have it under control, but still, of course, it's a bit frustrating.

I think then from IT industry perspective, I think everyone is aware of the situation with RAM memory prices and memory supply. We're on top of that, I would say, but we're monitoring it.

I see several vendors having challenges, also competitors to us having challenges with prices and with supply of memory-related components. I think this is an industry-wide challenge, so that also means that there is a higher acceptance also from the customer base to absorb increased costs.

Nonetheless, it's something we want monitor.

Kate Linwood

Thank you, John, for elaborating on that. I can't at the moment see any more questions regarding defense, let's just move away into a different area.

We've got a comment here saying, "Great job you're doing in defense. However, you once again say that there is a strong interest in your civil solutions, yet the ARR only grew by 4.8%.

Can you please explain this misalignment with a strong interest? Should we not see a larger ARR growth?"

John Vestberg

Maybe David, that sort of compliments your descriptions.

David Nordström

I think I kind of answered it before, but let's reiterate that answer. There is a good momentum in the civilian business.

There's a lot of inflow of customer contacts. We have much easier to find very good meetings, start dialogues with new potential customers, new larger partnerships, that's good.

To a certain degree, this is also holding us back because we're investing in building a foundation for future growth. Take the Arrow partnership that we disclosed during Q4 as an example.

There's quite a lot of work in establishing new distribution channels in new markets. That requires a significant effort from sales, but if you don't do that effort, it will be hard to scale because there's no foundation to grow in certain markets.

That's important. That's part of the answer.

Another part of the answer is, as I said, we saw a strong growth in Q4 last year, partly supported by lifecycle events, which creates, I would say, a bit of a false picture comparing year-over-year a quarter with no lifecycle events supporting growth comparing to a quarter that had it. This is a one-off, I think when moving into 2026, this is behind us.

Then, of course, the last thing is quite large FX effects, that also comes with an impact. Then, of course, saying then is an ARR growth number of just above 4%, is that something that we're proud of?

No. It's lower than the levels that we're striving for, for sure.

I think there are answers to that, and I think the ambitions is something different, and I think we're in a good market. I believe we will yield different results.

Kate Linwood

Maybe this next question also touches on a similar area. How do you plan to scale a civilian business, and what are you doing to capture the opportunities you see?

John Vestberg

I think I can start, and you can complement, David, if you like. We are clearly sticking to the overall strategy that we set out a few years back.

Focusing on the so-called mission-critical applications, or mission-critical customers, in the four customer groups we have selected: so the public sector in Europe, the energy and utilities companies, the defense sector, and the telecom sector. There is a lot of market share to capture in those four groups alone, there is really no strategic reason for Clavister to start spreading thinner again.

That we will not do. From a geographical perspective, we have had our focus now for a while in the Nordic region, in the German-speaking region, taking also care of our partners, distributors, and end customers outside of those geographies, dealing with those, managing those, supporting those from more of a central type of approach, a global sales team.

We have by far not reached a saturated market in the Nordics nor in the German-speaking region, so that's clearly the two geographical areas where we continue to scale. How do we do that?

We will not from one day to another just rapidly add a massive amount of sales people or marketing spend, that would be irresponsible. We're scaling it with caution, but doing it diligently and with a clear plan.

What does that mean in practice? We're clearly adding people, we're adding resources.

We're also, as David mentioned, focusing parts of the sales time, quite a lot of the sales time, on building the more strategic partnerships, larger partners, addressing larger end customers, knowing that the return from those engagements are larger, but they also take more time. We're doing similar activities in the German-speaking region.

Naturally, it's also a combination. We can't be doing everything just in sequence, then it would take too much time to build up a total larger revenue base.

We are looking at additional geographical regions in Europe, and I think we will have the reason to come back to those later in later quarters. Clearly, that's part of a scaling plan to look at additional regions as well.

From an offering perspective, we are having since quite a long time now a good foundation from an intellectual property perspective with our various software stacks, the amount of products and product families that we can create and are creating based on those software stacks. I wouldn't say that it's unlimited, that would be, of course, wrong to say.

There are clearly many more opportunities coming from complementing, adding new products, new product groups from existing IPR. That's important.

We're not planning to invest heavily in new technology areas, rather refining the product portfolio based on what we have. I think we still can gain more scalability factors from that.

I don't know, David, if you would like to complement something.

David Nordström

Adding just one comment, and I think one example. The really good growth potential, where growth can really kick in, is when you add large resellers, because we're doing a two-tier sales model, which is typically in the industry.

We are selling to a partner that's selling through the end customer. Typically, the very large resellers, partners in Europe have had ecosystems that are very US-based.

This is clearly changing due to a change in geopolitical landscape. How do I then get a large national partner who is selling the Ciscos and Check Points and Fortinets, that types of products, to instead sell Clavister and other products made in Europe?

By winning the customers who they care about. One good example, and talked about public references, is a customer we won during last year in Germany being LEAG.

LEAG is one of the largest energy producers in Germany. There's a lot of Swedes in this call, and you might not know LEAG, it's easier to explain it is the former German division of Vattenfall, the large Swedish energy company, their former German assets.

That became a Clavister customer during the year, and they are then procuring our type of products from a partner called Bechtle, being one of the largest ones in Germany. This is how you can gain traction, because then you win customers that in itself are important to us, because it's a big customer and an important reference, but they are also very important for the partner, because this is the customers that they care about.

This then opens the door how to then more broadly scale with a partner like Bechtle. This is a clear example on how we operate.

This has a lead time, of course. The geopolitical situation have, of course, created a situation where partners, and large ones who formerly were sitting quite happy with a totally non-European system of products, are now facing a situation, especially in the mission-critical type of customers, with their questions of, "Why are we, as a state agency, an energy grid, forth, building a very large dependency on non-EU products?

This is a problem. Why are you selling this to me rather than the products that I actually want?"

I think this is what will lock up a different growth level for us going forward.

Kate Linwood

Thank you both for sharing those insights. We have a question regarding our IAM business.

How strongly does Clavister focus on sales within IAM? Do you have a sales management team with extensive experience in this area?

John Vestberg

IAM is one of Clavister's now core product groups. It is part of our scaling strategy to sort of transform our IAM sales coming from what we did historically, where IAM sales was more of a direct sales model.

That is good from few perspectives, but clearly it doesn't scale with volume, especially not comparing how we see the firewall sales scaling through distributors and partners. One of the key investments, if you like, in scaling that business has been to, first of all, package the products and the solutions in a more, let's say, lean way compared to before.

We're onboarding partners and both new and existing sales people on that product group with the clear intention to be able to scale it much more compared to previous where you had more of a 1:1 relationship between salesperson and deal. Far, we've been seeing the majority of IAM sales still in the Nordics, meaning that in our other geographical markets like the German region and outside of Germany, there's a lot of untapped potential for IAM.

It is slightly different compared to the firewall business in terms of various type of national or local requirements. Think BankID in Sweden.

Of course, you have similar type of authentication methods in other countries. We need to be sort of cautious, not trying to spread it too broad.

We have to be picky about the markets, but we are. I think both in the company and even more throughout our partner base, there is a solid IAM competence that is also growing by the day.

Kate Linwood

Thank you, John. We've got a question about the Norwegian contract.

Can you elaborate on the incremental margins on the new Norwegian contract? How many people, consultants do you expect to add?

Also add something on the project risk?

John Vestberg

Good. A multifaceted question to answer.

I'll try to answer it this way: at the heart of this project lies Clavister's proprietary IPR software, fully in-house developed, so that gives you a good hint on the sort of fundamental gross margins from a project like this. We are, and we wrote this in the quarterly report as well, we are adding more people to our development teams for delivering on this project.

More specifically, we're adding people during the first half of the delivery time, that's where we will have the peak of delivery. I will not out the exact number of people because that's a bit fluctuating as well during the period, but from a total margin contribution, it is a very significant margin.

Let's leave it with that. On project risk, well, I think the clear project risks with any type of large project like this would be getting the proper competence in time, onboarded, up and running, making sure that the technical design is really meeting the customer expectations.

What we've learned so far from working quite tightly with this customer during the tender process, but also in the recent weeks, is that this is a clear cooperation. This is not a they place an order, they place requirements, we deliver, and we hope for the best.

That's completely not the situation. This is a tight collaboration with team meetings happen frequently, them being engaged in our sprint planning, in our sprint demos, in our Scrum methodology, and so on.

I think from that tight collaboration comes also a fair derisking of the project. That said, it's not without risks, but the good thing is it's completely in our control because it's our software.

It would be tougher being dependent on third-party components, such as hardware, as we know.

Kate Linwood

To stay with this T&S deal, though, we have another question: the product you deliver there, is it comparable to Bittium's product, and are there any potential further tenders in other countries coming?

John Vestberg

Bittium clearly has a similar type of offering. They did win a similar tender, if I'm not wrong, in Finland not long ago.

As I mentioned, many nations are actually looking at what Norway is building now as I wouldn't say as a template, but as an inspiration for upcoming tenders or upcoming modernizations of other European armed forces. Whether that leads to formal tenders or not, that's, of course, still to be seen, but clearly it is in our interest and as well—and I have to say this—it is in our Norwegian customer's interest to see our solution being spread to more customers.

That would derisk everything and creates an even stronger foundation. Naturally that would be in the future cards, but who, when, and if, yeah, that's too early to say.

Kate Linwood

We have some more questions rather regarding the defense area, let's quickly stay here again. How far in the progress are we regarding the joint order of CV90s from Sweden and the Baltics?

John Vestberg

Here we can only refer to what public statements have been made in the media, in the press, partly from BAE themselves. I think the latest consensus is that they're trying to reach some kind of agreement still during this year, whether it's mid of this year or Q3, I would leave it to them to comment.

Then, of course, from a contract there until it potentially slips down to or seeps down to Clavister, that's typically a period on its own. We have to see there, but I would say let's see what the customer is exposing to the media.

Kate Linwood

We have a few questions around our partnership with NXP Semiconductors. What's the nature of the partnership that we announced in '25, and how exactly is Clavister's AI technology being integrated in their automotive platforms?

David Nordström

Yeah. What was that based on initially?

It's coming a lot of regulation around cybersecurity in on-road vehicles: personal cars, but other on-road vehicles as well. You need to be able to have a solution in place as an automaker where you are able to detect cyberattacks and do forensics on them.

They were then looking for AI capabilities to do that within their ecosystem. Remember, NXP sells hardware.

They sell computing power, among others, to the auto industry. They wanted to showcase what can be done on NXP hardware using software solutions for cybersecurity reasons.

In that, we stood out as providing a very fast capability against their cybersecurity use case. In this case, it was DDoS attacks on cars in real traffic.

That has been showcased. We have been doing some joint sales activities together with NXP, for example, in Detroit, meeting with automakers showcasing our capabilities.

Really this is where the relationship is as well, where NXP is raising this as a capability when they promote their ecosystem to customers and potential customers in the auto industry. That's really where this stands, and then, of course, the dialogue with NXP, how can we elaborate this, evolve this together.

In addition to that, I would say Clavister is in other areas utilizing part of this technology, for example, in the military industry. Again, these AI capabilities in detecting cyberattacks is relevant in a car, but it's highly relevant in other type of vehicle being military vehicles, and in other areas as well, energy grids as a good example, where you want to detect these types of attacks.

It's moving forward. That's really the background and where it stands now.

I don't know, John, if you have anything to add.

John Vestberg

No, I think that's a good summary.

Kate Linwood

To stay with you, David, we have a financial focus question: Do you see any opportunities for a dividend for investors, maybe '26, '27?

David Nordström

I think that question is a bit early. I think let's prove that we clearly demonstrate positive cash flows, that we're able to reinvest in our business at levels that we think are good.

I think we're moving to a situation where we are becoming more and more cash flow generating. I think let's revert back to that question in some future periods and see where do we stand.

Kate Linwood

Okay. You referenced that the 3-year plan is to achieve revenue expansion above the growth of the cybersecurity market.

Various competitors have different forecasts as they grow. Which one are you looking at, and with what growth rate are you hoping to exceed that?

John Vestberg

Clearly there are some sort of different outlooks from different analysts, and the fact is also that different sort of domains, product groups, and verticals have slightly different growth opportunities as well from a market perspective. One of the reasons why we don't want to be explicit is, first of all, coming from the fact that our at the moment strong order book is clearly driving a lot of growth going forward.

Some components in the order book are of recurring nature, which, of course, adds the long-term growth potential here or long-term stability. Some of the deliveries in the order book are project-oriented.

As such, there will be a bit higher volatility in our net sales growth than what we have previously been seeing, and exposing a very specific target will be very challenging because of that nature. Typically, I don't know if there is a consensus in market growth, but we're seeing ranges from 14%, 15% annual cybersecurity growth in the firewall and IAM market up to maybe 30% in some specific areas.

I would say that's the kind of magnitude or the frame where we should be looking to beat.

Kate Linwood

There is another question around the defense solutions, seems to be an interesting topic of today. Are there any similarities between the Saab TactiCall solution and the Norwegian order?

John Vestberg

Actually, no. That's the quick answer.

The TactiCall product we're building together with Saab solves a completely different problem. It's something completely different.

Kate Linwood

Okay. We've got a few more minutes.

We've got a question about our engagement at fairs and the pipeline that comes through that. Do you see a lot of more engagement in fairs from '25 and from earlier years like '23, '24 from the past?

David Nordström

Maybe it's a question to you, Kate, because you're Head of Marketing.

Kate Linwood

Yes.

John Vestberg

We will be seeing more market activities. A lot more is dramatic, but clearly we will see more.

If we look at the type of marketing activities we do, typically participating in fairs and partner events are the type of activities that yield the best result for a company like Clavister. Definitely there will be more engagement.

Kate Linwood

Maybe I can add a very short bit. We do use the events as part of the marketing mix and anchor points.

They're definitely an important factor. Of course, now we're planning a lot of activities around that to actually leverage the whole journey and make sure that when we're at fairs, that people are addressed before that and also that we capture the leads and nurture them throughout the whole journey.

Yeah. This one last question I think we can answer regarding our portfolio.

Does Clavister focus mainly on external frontend attacks, or do you also look at backend attacks, such as storage?

John Vestberg

Good question. Not very easy to answer, though, without becoming super technical.

If we look at our firewall product group, what our products do there is solving a various type of attack-related problems or security-related problems, ranging from classical network segmentation, limiting radius blast, if you like. If there's an attack, you need to be able to keep it from spreading.

We're solving problems related to authentication, understanding who is who, who is trying to access your network and what type of credentials do you have for reaching certain parts of the network. If we stay within that domain on authentication and identities, we're solving identity federation, making sure that there are no discrepancies on identities within a larger organization, which is typically the case: you're using multiple systems, each system comes with their own set of user databases, and so on.

There's a clear need to consolidate and to federate all of those identities, that's another problem we're solving. We're solving external attacks definitely, what's referred to as either denial-of-service attacks, that's one area, or trying to exploit vulnerabilities on internal systems.

That could be malware trying to infect a vulnerability in your web server, in your ERP system, or in the communication system within a CV90, let's say. With regards to storage specifically, that's not an area where Clavister is focusing.

That would be for someone else to solve.

Kate Linwood

Okay. I think with that, I would like to close this session for today.

Thank you very much for David and John for your presentation, but also addressing and elaborating on all the questions we had. Thank you everyone for your attendance, and also all the questions you posted.

If you have anything else, please feel free to contact us at any time. The recording of this webinar will also be available on our website.

Thank you very much for joining today, and I wish you a great rest of the day.

John Vestberg

Thank you.