Okay, let's kick it off here. Good morning. Thank you for joining us. My name's Luke Junk. I'm the Baird Analyst covering electronic solutions and vehicle tech. It's my pleasure to introduce to you today BlackBerry, a company built around two distinct franchises. QNX, a safety-certified operating system embedded in more than 275 million vehicles and increasingly as well, brought to industrial, medical, and robotics platforms, and security communication, mission-critical voice, critical for end-point management solutions. Please accept Tim, CFO, seated to my left, and John Wall, President at QNX, joining us for the discussion today. Tim and John, thanks for being here. Thank you. Start the conversation. Over the past year, BlackBerry's transitioned back to profitable growth and increasingly you're positioning it as the software and the QNX-led company. Tim, can you just bring how you look at the business today, what's changed in the business, and more importantly [audio distortion]. A lot. On a bit of a trip. Still on a turnaround. I'm here to say that the turnaround is complete and BlackBerry is now a growth company. We've done a lot of hard work over the last couple of years, since we had a change in the management team, to really look at what's working. We took a look at the portfolio, made the decision to sell off a business called Cylance. We took a lot of costs out of the company. Ultimately, what we've done is we've managed to focus the remaining organization on two key objectives. We've got John here, who runs our QNX division. It's a division we're very excited about. We see a lot of runway for growth. I think we're really only just getting started. QNX, there's a long way to go. Like I said, I think now we're finally getting to a point where we can get back to profitability through cost reduction. Quite some time. Tim, just bringing that to the here and now in terms of fiscal 2027, if we look at the growth for QNX revenue, around 15% growth or so. Effectively, the EBITDA side of the equation flat at the midpoint as you're reinvesting. Can you just walk us through how you're prioritizing reinvestment versus expansion this year? In terms of upside drivers, maybe what would to go through 2027. Great question. Yeah. You're right. Guiding 15% at the top end, which is our target, obviously priced in a bit of risk for that growth. 15%, that's an acceleration of growth for QNX year-over-year. We were at 14% last year, moving to 15%. Right. We could have taken the decision from a capital allocation standpoint this year to kind of harvest the incremental EBITDA that's coming off as a result of that. We decided to strategically reinvest in a number of the operating. Our new Alloy Core product. You can see that we see things like AI, medical, automation. There's a whole plethora of new markets that we're really quite un-penetrated or not even penetrated before, where our product resonates very strongly. We've made the decision to reinvest into the business. The most value growth from here is really going to come from accelerating that top line and trying to harness the opportunities we see. Mm-hmm. Another lens we can look through the royalty backlog. You disclose at the end of the year, I think it was around $815 million. In fiscal year 2026, if I remember right, it grew about 10%. I mean, more is coming into the backlog than is being recognized on the P&L. The royalty is only part of that QNX. John, maybe if you can talk about what is driving that acceleration in terms of new design wins, expansion within existing programs, content per vehicle, some of the major growth drivers in the backlog. Yeah, I think the major growth drivers at this point have been more content per vehicle. We're seeing more high-performance compute in the vehicle. When we used to think of an ADAS platform, we would think of a single platform with high-performance compute. Now there's a smart camera that's attached to it that's yet another socket for us. There's zonal controllers coming into the vehicles to just multiply the number of sockets there are to go after within the vehicle. I think on top of that, we've introduced our SDP 8.0, which is designed to scale with hardware, with eight core, 16 core, 32 cores, basically cloud compute-like. We're creating a higher level value for the OEMs and the Tier 1s, we're seeing more value coming out of that. Specifically, as Tim mentioned, we have Alloy Core, where we've partnered with a company called Vector in Germany, now we're providing more than the operating system. We're providing kind of the base level platform for an ECU. We're providing diagnostics, logging, communication, as well as the operating system, life cycle management, et c. This really has the opportunity to increase the ASP by 2x, 3x, or 4x of what we're currently doing. If you look at the expansion of the number of sockets, our initiatives to push higher up the stack, that's really what's driving it. Mm-hmm. Well, I want to revisit a few of those points as we go through the conversation here. In the near term, I'm sure one of the questions on people's minds is just, given that royalty backlog, looking beyond fiscal 2027 into fiscal 2028 and 2029, just what sort of midterm visibility that you have in the business even sitting here right now, Tim? One of the great things about the QNX business is the level of visibility that we have. Compared to a traditional SaaS company where you might really have a year visibility, when we get locked into a design, we're in that design for three, five, seven, even a decade, number of years. It's a long-term model, which means that clearly we've got a lot of benefit coming from that. Right now, we see an acceleration heading forward in terms of the amount of revenue coming out of the backlog on an annual basis. This past year, we had it nearly double compared to what we took out into the P&L. If you maintain that kind of ratio over time, clearly you're going to see a significant rise in the amount of royalties to the P&L each year. Yeah. Just to remind everyone, if you'd like to ask a question, it's session five at rwbaird.com. This is also small rooms. If you want to just jump in, feel free to do that as well. I want to talk about some of these foundational things that you've been investing in and are setting up the story on the QNX Auto side, and certainly want to talk about GEM as well. On Auto, John, you mentioned SDP 8.0 and some of the parameters there. Can you maybe bring it to life in terms of where we are in the adoption curve right now, in terms of what you saw in design wins in fiscal 2026? For existing programs, just how customers are looking at that upgrade path on a go-forward basis? Yeah, I think the changes that we made to SDP 8.0 versus SDP 7.0 Are significant enough that all our customers are moving to SDP 8.0. Any new program today is going to be an SDP 8.0 program, and those that started maybe a year ago or two years ago on SDP 7.0 have a plan to migrate to SDP 8.0. What we've heard from some of our customers is they could actually downgrade their hardware moving to SDP 8.0 because they get so much better performance, and that's a very strong equity when it comes to the value of the chip versus the uplift of our software. It's a value proposition for the customer. We see SDP 8.0 as the product going forward, moving anybody that's on SDP 7.0 to the next programs on SDP 8.0. Our partners have all moved to SDP 8.0, our silicon partners. The adoption has been very good. Can we talk about some of the nearer term wins? I think you had a digital cockpit upsell in the most recent quarter, ADAS systems in Europe with certainly a chip connection there in terms of Qualcomm as the supplier, and then a Tier 1 supplier award for China on a Chinese SoC. Can we talk about which of these, or maybe all of them, are most representative in terms of where these next legs of growth are coming from? It really touches on some of the things that you mentioned, John, in terms of what's been going into the backlog writ large. Yeah, we also mentioned the BMW Neue Klasse as a big win as well. Those are all indicative ones. The camera, the cockpit, ADAS, these are all areas that we've formed strong relationships with the silicon partners. We're winning really across the board within the vehicle, and I think that's a small representation of the design wins that we're winning. One's a smart camera, digital cockpit, ADAS platform. I want to talk about China as well. Competitive positioning there, it's been a growing piece of the story. If we look at the last few quarters, China's coming up more and more often in terms of the QNX story. I think the Xilinx System-on-SoC award this quarter on the back of some wins in recent quarters is really showing where that momentum is going. Can we talk about just the positioning from a high level today, domestic OEMs versus multis in China, and how you're competing against local alternatives in what's obviously historically been a pretty price-sensitive market? China is a very unique market. It's certainly different from the other markets because there are a lot of domestic competitors to QNX. I think the way that we've been looking at it is that we position QNX as a platform for the world, that no matter where you ship your vehicles, this is going to be an accepted platform from a safety perspective, from a security perspective. I think we have a better product, that from my perspective is without debate. We often like to position QNX as being Switzerland when it comes to selling software. I think we have a better product, that from my perspective is without debate. What we're doing is we're trying to work with more local Chinese vendors that can bring more value to the platform. Similar to what we did with Vector for the rest of the world, we're working with some local Chinese companies to end up bringing more of a platform play, try to increase the speed of their deployments. A lot of people talk about the speed of China. They move faster, but they also had no baggage. Now they're starting to have baggage. They're starting to have cars that are in the market that they have to support. The platform play that we're doing with Vector is something that we want to do in China as well, but maybe using more of a Chinese flavor of companies. Yeah. You mentioned certainly exports, I think are a key part of this. Also just safety certification and maybe if we could unpack that advantage, your comment, John, that you think, QNX is the best solution. Just some of the alternatives in China and where you're seeing incremental focus from local OEMs. Certainly, if there's more of a safety halo around the decision, I would assume that puts QNX in the driver's seat. It absolutely gives us an advantage, and I think without naming them, I think some of the software players in China are not necessarily well-accepted outside of China. I think that the export market plays a big role in helping us to sell our software in China. That is how we position it. Trying to maintain two platforms, a domestic platform and an export platform, which is what they were trying to do in the beginning, I think is very difficult. So I think it's an advantage for us to be able to sell something they can use domestically and on the export market. Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, I've waited long enough. Let's talk about Alloy Core and the middleware opportunities. Maybe to just level set, this, I think is on track for general release this calendar year. John, your CEO, has called it one of the most underappreciated parts of the business. What needs to happen from an execution standpoint between now and year-end for that to feel more obvious in the BlackBerry story looking out over maybe the next year or so, John? Yeah. We need to have some design wins that we can talk about. I think that's the number one piece. From an execution, from developing the platform, we've got it. That's not a problem, w e're well in control. We have a number of customers that have made comments. Mercedes-Benz made a public comment about Alloy Core. We're in the process of a design win today in Europe that we hope that we'll be able to announce in the next two weeks to two months, depending how the contract negotiation goes. I think that that's really what's going to help propel this. We have a number of customers that we can't name that have the platform, have an early access to the platform, and that's both in North America and Europe. As we can start to announce some of these wins, I think this is what's going to really start to bring this to light. Mercedes is the one customer you've said that is publicly trialing Alloy Core right now. Can you just talk about that engagement specifically and how closely you can work with them to drive towards hopefully a design win in the near future? Yeah. We've been talking to Mercedes about this concept and other OEMs for several years. I think that the thing that's very interesting, and I repeat this, is this is not us trying to push this platform into the market. This was a pull. We were asked to build this by one of the OEMs because the platform is really a non-differentiating piece of the car. People don't see this part of the system, but it is the foundation of the system, and it's where a lot of the car companies have struggled. Performance, stability, and a lot of delays have been based on that layer of the platform. We feel pretty good that we're building the right platform because we're building what we're being asked to build. We're not rolling the dice on a roadmap here. This is what the customers have asked for. If the customer wants vanilla, we give them vanilla. In this case, they want more, and we feel very comfortable that we're going to be validated on this platform. Mm-hmm. Tim, you've said the ASPs here could be, I think your exact quote is, many multiples- Yeah ..correct me if I'm wrong, of the core OS royalties. Just help us understand the unit economics in terms of some of the drivers of that comment, and then obviously there's a little complexity here in that you've got a partner in Vector. Just the value attribution. I think more of the value ultimately is going to land with QNX and BlackBerry, but just maybe any way to contextualize that. Yeah. From a unit economics perspective, we see this as potentially being transformational. Selling the real-time operating system, it's a relatively small part of the software stack. It's a critical part, one which we feel very passionate about obviously, and we feel has got a strong competitive moat. As soon as we start to move up the stack and take all these other components that John mentioned, start to pre-integrate, safety certify, you're effectively taking a lot of work off the plate of the OEM. You're actually giving them a superior product as well. It's much more integrated, and it's much more robust. Really there's a lot of value to the OEM coming from this. We're able to free up a lot of their software engineers to go and work on the pieces that John was saying, this is undifferentiated. Go work on the differentiating things like the applications. How good is your perception engine? How good is your infotainment system? These are the things that make a vehicle look different to another. By taking all of this off their hands, and actually, we believe even with the significant uplift in unit economics from our perspective, this will actually potentially save money for the OEM. It's a very compelling proposition. In terms of a relationship, yes, the IP is predominantly QNX, so very significantly QNX-focused. We'll take the full top line, and then the share for Vector will come through cost of goods sold. In terms of gross margins. We got very strong gross margins in QNX. We're in the low to mid- 80s for QNX. We're not going to be too far removed from that for Alloy Core. It's clearly not going to be quite the same, but it won't be too far removed. That's why I say this could potentially be transformational, because significant uplift, many multiples of the unit economics just for the operating system. Yeah. Can you talk about Vector as a partner? I think maybe there's a mixed knowledge base of who your partner is and just reputationally, what they represent as someone that you obviously had some choice in and chose to work with. Yeah. We call Vector a like-minded company. Vector is a German company, and they provide what's called classic AUTOSAR and A daptive AUTOSAR. Classic AUTOSAR, think of that as the software foundation for brake controllers, engine controllers. They are the dominant force in the world. They work with everybody. Adaptive AUTOSAR is a framework, an application framework, for high-performance compute. They're the dominant force. We would joke that, hey, we're in programs together all the time. Why don't we work more closely? The industry started saying, hey, we really need the industry to work more together. We got together at the Arm APM a few years ago and decided we should give this a go. The teams are integrated. It's one software team that's building this, and it's been a great experience working with them. They are a dominant force in automotive. Yeah. What about the competitive set for this offering? Should we think about folks like Elektrobit and Conti, internal OEM stacks like CARIAD, something else, or even is there a competitor for what you're bringing to market right now, would you say? Yeah. There's lots. You mentioned a few. The Tier 1s are trying to build the platform. The problem there, you see, one of the things when you talk about the Alloy Core platform, it has all the properties that Tim talked about, really tight integration, high performance, etc. It's also a platform they can take from chip to chip and to Tier 1 to Tier 1 and be able to reuse their assets. Soon as you get locked in with a Tier 1, you're in their ecosystem, and you cannot take what that Tier 1 has built and bring it to another Tier 1. One of the big advantages of Alloy Core is to provide a consistent foundation that allows the customer to be able to reuse their assets regardless of the chip and regardless of their integrator, whether it's a Tier 1, whether it's just a software integrator. It just gives them a lot of, I would say, flexibility on who they work with. Mm-hmm. Tim, can you just remind us on timing? Ostensibly, if you get that first design win and hopefully follow-up design wins, we're still probably talking a couple of years out in terms of the revenue attribution. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. It follows the normal QNX model in such that the really interesting part, talking about this multiples per instance, really comes when the vehicles are being produced. Clearly leading up to that, there's going to be a period of time where there's a development phase, which is exactly the same as you would see for QNX. There will still be some early-stage revenue, development seats, services as before, and also a subscription. A subscription to have access to the platform. That's something new that we've not had before. The really interesting part would obviously be once the vehicle's into production. What you'll see initially, Luke, is it'll go into backlog. At scale, this could be really significant for backlog. Obviously, we've got to get a couple of design wins in the bag as John says, but once we do, assuming we do, we'll definitely be talking about the impact that that has on our backlog because we believe that could be significant. We'll look forward to that. Want to switch to the other big growth engine within QNX, which is GEM, as you refer to it, or the general embedded market. It's, I think, about 20% of QNX revenue today, but I think you've said it represents more like half of the SDP 8.0 pipeline. Yep. How should we think about mix looking out a few years from now, and maybe more importantly, the gating factors driving that, be it sales capacity, deal size, obviously structurally this is a different kind of market, pipeline conversion, just the main things that you're thinking of? Yeah. When we look at the market, what we're really focused on today is we decided we're going to go after medical and medical robotics, industrial automation, and then robotics. What I learned is that those that are building robots at scale for factory warehouse or warehouse automation have the exact same requirements as automotive. Highest levels of safety. These robots, and they're not humanoid robots, we're talking about automated forklifts, skateboards that carry cargo. They need to operate in uncaged environments, and they must not do harm to any humans. We're going to start to see more interaction between the robots and the humans. These are actually, the scale is quite large. These are millions of units. That looks very good from our perspective. Some of the other markets, industrial automation, yeah, the deals are smaller, but there's more of them. I think from our side, it's getting more feet on the ground, more salespeople that can actually take advantage of these opportunities. The opportunities are there. The world is shifting to high-performance compute. Everything's getting more automated. That requires safety. The big thing that we see in robotics that is a real feather in the cap for QNX is QNX is a real-time operating system, which means it's deterministic. What does that mean? That means we can react to an event in a very consistent manner, same way every time, no matter how busy the system is. That is essential in robotics that's operating in very tight spaces and has to be able to react to an event. We were told this over and over last week, we visited a bunch of customers, that determinism is critical in these fields. What about content? I think that's one of the offsets is you mentioned QNX from an RTOS standpoint in automotive, relatively smaller contribution relative to what you're thinking about for Alloy Core. Should we think of this being a more content-rich environment? I think you've also alluded to the fact that maybe with M&A you could add something that looks like Alloy Core, but really more positioned on the GEM side of the equation. Yeah, we're learning. This is a new market. What I learned about the robotics market, it's a nascent market. It really is. We see humanoid robotics dancing and choreographed, but the reality of it is, it's going to be robots that are automated forklifts, skateboards to help manufacturing warehouses, etc. We've already started understanding there are a lot of things in common with Alloy Core that they require. There may be some tweaks, there may be some changes, but I think we're going to get to a platform like Alloy Core for medical, for industrial automation, for robotics much sooner than we did for automotive. I think there is more of a willingness in those markets to embrace a platform that does more for them and for them to really focus on the applications. Tim, would you want to touch on the acquisition side of that at all? One of the things I said earlier that we've done a lot of heavy lifting, we've come back to profitability and also positive cash flow generation. Last year, we generated $50 million of operating cash flow. This year, we're guiding to doubling that up to $100 million. Our balance sheet is strong, we do have capacity. What I would say is we've come a long way in terms of getting focus and obviously improving significantly the financials. Any M&A, if we were to do it, the bar's going to be pretty high. It's going to be high on both sides, strategic fit, and also the financial profile. Why I say strategic fit is really important, John has got a heck of a lot of opportunity in front of him. That we're still in the relatively early innings on the automotive side, and we're really only just getting going on the GEM side. Huge opportunities in front of us organically. What we definitely don't want to do is distract from that in any way, shape, or form. However, if we can find an acquisition which makes sense, that can give us some of that scale, that critical mass. In automotive, we're a household name. We don't really need to do an awful lot. The OEMs come to us, in terms of marketing and so on. In GEM, it's a totally different story. There might be some ways to fast-track that growth. Regardless, I'm very excited about the organic opportunities we've got in front of us right now. Yeah. Got a couple minutes left. Maybe a final question on GEM would be chip maker relationships. A couple months ago, had an announcement with Nvidia. Maybe if we could double-click on that and then blow that out to, it's not just a Nvidia story. No, absolutely. Qualcomm and- Exactly. ..whatnot as well. Yeah. In our regular QBRs with silicon partners, whether it's Nvidia, Qualcomm, TI, NXP, etc, the move into robotics is to basically take the automotive stacks that they've had and tweak them for the robotics because, again, the properties are so similar, safety, security, determinism. We were able to make an announcement with Nvidia that the IGX platform, which is their platform for robotics, will be running QNX similar to their AGX platform or their DriveOS for automotive. We're seeing the same thing. We've talked to other silicon partners. Their plan is to take QNX and position that for the other markets as well. We believe the silicon partners play an enormous role in our success. We're thrilled that this is kind of where this is going, and it really helps us when we get to the customer because, again, in a lot of these situations, customers pick silicon before they pick software. It's starting to change. With Alloy Core, we will see that will change where it'll be the software platform will be picked first and maintained, but traditionally, the hardware is picked first. All right. Well, unfortunately, we are just about out of time for questions here, I'm going to stop it there. John, Tim, thank you so much for the time. Thank you.