Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Q-Free's presentation for the results for the third quarter in 2022. My name is Thale Kuvås Solberg, and I'm the President and CEO of Q-Free, the primary mover in intelligent traffic solutions. Together with me today, I have Trond Christensen, who is our CFO, who will be presenting the financial results later on in this presentation. For those of you who are not quite familiar with Q-Free, I just wanna give you a brief insight to who we are and what we do. We are founded more than 40 years ago, and Q-Free has, with its heritage, been a pioneer in the industry of intelligent transportation systems for decades. Q-Free today is an international player with a Norwegian footprint, and we have offices in more than 15 countries, selling to more than 50 different markets worldwide. We have revenue of NOK 900 million the last year, and as you will hear later, we have been through a shift in our business models. Now having a significant growth in annual recurring revenue, and also having a record high order intake and backlog. With regards to sales, we have 1/3 of our sales in Americas, 60% of our sales in Europe, as well as 10% in Asia, Pacific, Middle East and Africa. We are more than 330 transportation technology professionals and enthusiasts working every day to address the key challenges in the modern society. Megatrends such as population growth and congestion is what we actually are working on every day. Urbanization brings with it mobility challenges such as congestion, accidents, and pollution. That is why Q-Free is dedicated to develop and deliver intelligent solutions for efficient, safe, and sustainable transportation based on innovative technology and open platforms. Congestion alone was, in the U.S., estimated to have an annual cost of $53 billion in 2021 alone. In Q-Free, we have dedicated our solutions for Q-Flow, as we call it, helping out with traffic signal management, regional freeway management, as well as multi-lane free-flow charging, all contributing to a better flow of traffic. We are designing solutions for a world with less congestions, better air quality, as well as less frustrations for those who are queuing, and we're ensuring that traffic is going from slow to flow. Another price that we pay for increased mobility in the world is actually the fact that 1.35 million people lose their lives in traffic yearly. That means that just today, 3,700 people will lose their life in traffic. That has an impact on both individuals as well as society, and it has a high cost. That's why we in Q-Free are delivering solutions contributing to safer roads and travels. A solution package that we call Q-Safe. Our solutions consist on accident management, connected intersections, weigh-in-motion, where actually we collect weight data without disturbing the driver, as well as automated license plate recognition called ALPR enforcement. The population growth also brings with it a higher transportation demand. Research shows that this will double both in people and goods the next decades. With more freight transportation, there will become more pollution as well. WHO estimates that 18% of global CO2 emissions actually comes from road vehicles. That is why our solutions, such as congestion charging and low emission zones, will be very vital in the days to come, as they contribute to less noise and reduced air pollution, healthier communities, as well as generate funds to ensure that we have more sustainable infrastructure going forward. If you go into the more technical side of our solutions, we do divide those into two main lines of business, tolling and traffic management. Within tolling, we deliver hardware, onboard units, tags and transceivers that are sold into tolling systems, as well as back office systems. We're also a world leading supplier of ALPR technology that recognizes and identifies the vehicles based on the license plate. Almost 220 of our colleagues are working with the tolling business line, and they generate a revenue of NOK 600 million. 80% of that revenue share is still based in Europe, but we are seeing a shift in that as well. Within traffic management, we have most of our business in the Americas. Traffic management is actually about signal monitoring and freeway monitoring through hardware and software solutions. As previously mentioned, we have weigh-in-motion, as well as traffic counting and classification equipment for monitoring traffic, which a lot of our customers are appreciating because they need to understand how the traffic flows and who is using our roads. Traffic management is currently delivering 1/3 of our revenues with, as I said, 75% of the revenue coming from the Americas. If you're looking to where do we deliver our solutions and products, we have a significant global impact and legacy. We have delivered intelligent traffic solutions worldwide for decades. I'm not gonna go through all of these here, but some of the ones that we have delivered is the congestion charging in Stockholm. We have toll collection systems in Norway, Portugal, Australia, Thailand, and Chile, meaning that we're actually delivering tolling systems worldwide. We have delivered truck tolling systems in Slovenia, statewide ATMS systems in Virginia and in Colorado, signal management in Georgia, and you get the gist of it. We are worldwide. If we then look into some of the major wins that we've had in the third quarter, 2022. Of course, I'm not gonna go through all of our wins here, but I'm just gonna give you a short snapshot into some of the new wins that we've had. We did in the U.S. earlier this quarter, win the North Carolina statewide traffic signal contract. That is worth NOK 48 million, and it has a basis of seven years of recurring revenue. Again, supporting our shift to recurring revenue business model. We do also see that there's potential and significant upsell opportunities within that contract. In the U.K., we did win again the Department for Transport's frame agreement. It is as it is a frame agreement, it's implying an annual sale of NOK 18 million. We're very happy to see that we are getting repeated confidence from that customer, which has been with us in Q-Free since 2008. We also have a large order in France with NOK 32 million tag order for one of our customers there in VINCI Autoroutes. Again, we're being chosen by the customer with who we have a long track record with, and that tags will mainly be supplied in 2023. All of these add up to an already solid backlog of orders. That means, also given that we have more recurring revenue contracts coming in, our recurring revenue this quarter is up to 37%, up from 30% same period in 2021. We do also work every day on innovation and development initiatives. In October, we have also shared with the market some exciting news on the new efforts that have been taking place. Horizon Europe consists of many various research and development projects, and the new MODI project is a new and groundbreaking project demonstrating automated freight transport on both public roads and confined areas in the northern part of Europe. We're very happy that Q-Free has been selected as one of 29 partners to actually contribute with our knowledge into this project. We will here use our competence and products within C-ITS, GRIPS, as well as back office, working with our new partners in the MODI Project and participating in actually forming the future ecosystem for automated driving. It's a sign of quality in what we do, the knowledge that we have being actually chosen to be participating here. On the traffic management side, we did in October, launched our new connected mobility platform at the ITS World Congress in mid-October. This is the first single truly integrated traffic management system which provide mobility across local, intercity, and regional traffic operations. It is web-based ecosystem, and it actually elaborates and allows collaboration on common mobility goals across conventional operations and jurisdictional areas. We'll get back to more information on the connected mobility platform, in next quarter as well. Having given you a snapshot on the organization and what we're working on this quarter, I'm gonna hand it over to our CFO, Trond Christensen, who will take you to the financial results for the quarter. Morning, everybody. Same as last quarter, I'm going to start by taking you through the five key takeaways that we have on our financial figures, this quarter. Our annual recurring revenue, as Thale has already mentioned, continues to grow, and it grows significantly. We are up almost 30% compared to same period last year. This is now a substantial part of our total revenue. Q-Free is now definitely no longer a mainly project-oriented organization. We are an organization that continues to deliver continuous services to our customer. Also, our backlog is significantly growing. We are up 36%, which is also a testament of the long-term perspective of the contracts that we are currently entering with our customer. We are also back to quarter-to-quarter annual growth on our turnover, and this is in spite of some pretty significant issues on the supply chain situation, as well as the conversion to a recurring revenue in our business model. We will give you more details on that later. Our earnings are not fantastic this quarter, but it's very important to notice that there are some one-off effects of NOK 7 million on the quarter that we will also comment on later, as well as some effects of currency adjustments, et cetera. In general, we still think we have very good control of our operating expenses. Working capital is also slightly negative this quarter, also affecting our net interest bearing debt. Again, affected by the supply chain situation, but expected to improve significantly during the next couple of quarters. These are the main figures. 6% annual growth on the revenues. This growth would have been two-digit percentage if it had not been for the conversion to annual recurring revenues. Give you more details on that later. The recurring revenues are up 30%, which is just amazing figure, and we have that for quite a few quarters now. I cannot promise you that we will have the same growth rate every quarter moving forward, but this is definitely a trend that's there to stay. NOK 15 million and EBITDA down a bit from last year, but again, affected by both the supply chain situation and one-off expenses of NOK 7 million. Cash flow from operations, combination of invoicing arrangements with the customer, milestone payments, et cetera, and we're still building a bit of inventory to make sure that we have the ability to deliver in the future, has affected that negatively. That's cash flow from operations is negative with NOK 11 million. Yet again, a fantastic quarter when it comes to order intake, NOK 316 million, more than double what we had same quarter last year. Now for the main P&L. Again, not an amazing growth on our top- line, but we are growing organically. We have more than NOK 10 million in turnover that would have been added to the top line if we were selling tolling projects according to our previous business model, rather than selling them as long-term recurring revenue projects. We would have had a significant growth. Also, if we did not have any supply chain issues on product deliveries, the growth would have been significantly larger. We now also see that the recurring revenue proportion of our total revenues are up at 37%. That's significantly up from 30%, same quarter last year. We quite clearly here see the transition that we're making from a project and product delivering organization to being more a service and long-term maintenance delivery organization to our customer. Gross margin remains fairly stable, even if there's definitely a price pressure on components and everything that happens with freight, et cetera, in the supply chain organization. We are quite happy that we managed to maintain that at a very healthy level. Our earnings, NOK 15 million, quite a bit down from last year, but there's a few very important things to notice there. We do have one-off effects in the quarter of NOK 7 million due to changes in the management team and other organizational things that we have put into our group expenses. These are expenses that we will not have moving forward, but that we have considered to be sensible to prepare the organizations for the future. Also, as you know, there's a lot of fluctuations in the macro figures, especially the U.S. dollar versus Norwegian kroner have had a significant effect on the OpEx line, and you will see that if you look at the traffic management figures in our segment reporting, where most of our expenses are in U.S. dollar. That's also actually a quite big explanation for the increase in OpEx. Of course, Q-Free, like everyone else, feels the inflation. We see the pressure in salaries, perhaps especially in the U.S. and in Norway, but also all over the world. Of course, it affects the figures, and will do it moving forward, but we think we have that under reasonably good control. No big surprises expected in that area. We have also consciously increased somewhat on the number of people we have and the categories of people we have to prepare the organization for the future and investing in both technology increasing our commercial footprint and preparing for the future. Should also notice that after COVID, the world has now really opened up. Of course, travel expenses increase, but not dramatically. We are investing more money into going out there, meeting our customers, whether it's one-to-one on projects or if it's in trade fairs or conventions or whatever, which has now started getting back to more normal levels compared to what it was before COVID. Revenue development. Again, we are now at an organic growth rate of 5% quarter-on-quarter. Not a very big growth, but would have been double-digit if tolling projects in Norway would have been delivered according to a normal project model versus an annual recurring revenue model. Also, we would have had significant more deliveries if there were no supply chain issues in the quarter. The market is there. We do have the capacity to deliver, but we prioritize to transfer more of our business to a recurring revenue model. We are, of course, affected by what is happening out there in the world with the supply chain. It's also good to see that traffic management is starting to take a bigger proportion of the total revenues. Again, recurring revenues at 30%, year-on-year. We expect that to keep increasing in the next couple of quarters as we are deploying new projects in the market where we have entered contracts, but we are in the process of deploying this. Of course, we cannot promise the same growth rate kind of uninterrupted in the long-term perspective. There will be some slowdowns initially, but we are now doing more and more of our development into products that are more suitable for recurring revenue business models, which will give us long-term earnings. Now look at the revenue, and look at the split on the segments. Tolling has a reasonably slow growth, but tolling is, at least in this quarter, the segment that is most affected by both the component shortage and the conversion to the recurring revenue model. Because they have a few significant projects that would have generated revenue and profits if we had been doing them under the old business model. This will continue to vary a little bit from quarter- to- quarter, depending on what contracts, what the customer actually wants, et cetera. This will fluctuate somewhat. It's also now good to see that traffic management is at a good organic growth rate, of course, helped a little bit by currency effects since this is a lot of U.S. dollars in those figures. But they are growing, and we think there's a huge potential in the traffic management segment. Historically, they are varying a little bit more from quarter to quarter because they have some significant deployments that can have some significant one-off impacts on the quarter, depending on what we are deploying in the specific period. That will definitely vary. EBITDA is down. I have mentioned the main reasons for it. Again, one-off effects, NOK 7 million. Some currency effects on OpEx. Of course, not a huge growth in turnover due to supply chain issues as well as the conversion to the annual recurring revenue model. This is also what we see quite clearly on the EBITDA per segments. Where we see that the main effect on OpEx, especially if you go to the notes in the financial report, you will see that the most significant effect on OpEx is perhaps on traffic management, and that's where we are most affected by both inflation in the U.S. plus the currency effect, U.S. dollar versus Norwegian kroner. Where we also consciously has started increasing a bit on hiring new people, and some of them quite expensive, to make sure that we have the right resources available for future growth, both in more footprints in the marketplace, but especially perhaps within research and development, to be able to take more future-looking products to the market. That's something that we will give more information on in a later quarterly presentation. Order intake. Really happy about that one. We have been significantly above one on book-to-bill now for several continuous quarters. NOK 316 million order intake in the quarter. 168% increase from same quarter last year. Amazing book-to-bill, especially traffic management, had a really good period this quarter. Two major very important contract. That's all told about earlier in the presentation. This continuous increase in order backlog that we are seeing is definitely helping us to secure the future. It's getting longer perspective on our backlog due to more recurring revenue contracts. The growth there is also huge testament that the customer is definitely putting its trust in Q-Free and our ability to deliver on future projects. Our cash flow and our available funds and our interest-bearing debt have gone a little bit the wrong direction this quarter, but for good reasons, and it's been conscious decisions on our side, how we have been handling this. Like I mentioned previous quarters, we are willing to spend cash because we have cash. We're willing to spend cash in building inventory and securing future deliveries. 2022 is not the year to think about just-in-time deliveries on your projects. When you get a project, you need to secure the deliveries of all key components so that you know that you will be able to deliver, be able to keep your people busy, be able to meet customer expectations. We're willing to put that cash up there and do those purchasing maneuvers to be able to get the projects going and keep delivering what we need to do. We feel ourselves that we have very good control on this. We have quite large supplies of cameras and other equipment lying in Spain ready to get put up in the gantries to be delivered in the fourth quarter. We have Weigh-in-Motion systems that were initially planned to be used in Ukraine, which for obvious reasons are not going that way now, but makes us more able to deliver on projects compared to our competitors. Also expect quite a lot of that to be moved out in the next couple of quarters. We also have quite a lot of general supplies available in Norway to be prepared for project deliveries in the months to come. We feel this is under very good control, and we do expect this to improve in the next couple of quarters. The balance sheet in total is, of course, reflecting this, but still, we are very solid with an equity ratio of 50%, and still have all the cash we need available to make the good business decisions moving forward. Our leverage ratio is still way beyond many of our competitors. Even if our financial expenses will naturally rise with both the change in interest levels and the amount of cash and net interest bearing debt we have, we are still very comfortable with the level that we are at. Okay. With that, I think I will let Thale come back and talk a little bit about the future. Thank you, Trond. As shown in previous quarterly presentations, and also shown here today, a solid foundation has been made to make sure that we have an organization that is catering for scale and growth. We have reduced business complexity, as well as we have continued to build strong presence in our existing markets. Given new management, the strategy plan still sails firm. We do see a positive outlook on the future because the megatrends that we have described earlier today, with increased population, increased traffic and congestion, and also subsequent pollution, a lot of new markets are opening up where governments see that they need to take a stance in order to make sure it's a sustainable tomorrow. We do see new potential in France as the country is moving away from traditional barrier tolling to multi-lane free-flow, which we do deliver here from Q3. The Baltic States and as well as other European countries are also looking into national truck tolling systems and congestion charging, much the same as we did deliver in Slovenia back in 2017 and 2018. Also, Switzerland is moving towards road user charging, an interesting new area where we have done a lot of R&D development. Italy is now moving to deregulating the tag and roadside market, a new opportunity that has arisen. All of these are interesting opportunities in new markets, as well as there is a lot of a potential in our existing markets and customers, as well in the U.S., where we have still some states that we need to target. In summary, the outlook, we are ready for further growth. We will continue with our efforts of building systems that will meet market expectations in the months and years to come. We will further strengthen our sales organization to ensure that we do reach out to existing and new customers with our new products and solutions. We will continue to leverage our scalability in our product portfolio. Not least, we will ensure that we still continue to capitalize on Q3's clear sustainability agenda. We will continue transformation of a more robust and scalable recurring revenue model, which we also have presented the first signals today. We are well-positioned to benefit from the megatrends that we do see for efficient, safe and sustainable transportation. With a growing pipeline of upcoming tenders as shown, as well as projects to bid on, we are definitely well-positioned to deliver on long-term revenue growth targets going forward. With that, I think we are ready for our Q&A session. Please join me, Trond. Yes. I'll try to do that without breaking down our mini studio here. We have a few questions. One listener is asking how we are affected by the chip shortage in the world, microchips, that is. Of course, we have been affected by that like everyone else. Our third quarter figures are definitely affected by it. We have a significant backlog on tag deliveries. We were not able to manufacture and invoice as much as we hoped for in third quarter, but it looks a lot better for Q4 and moving forward. We expect to be able to manufacture at close to maximum capacity. As a general comment, I can also say that with the effects on the global economy these days, where things are definitely slowing down a bit and inflation, et cetera, what we see in general is that a lot of consumer electronics related business is slowing down, and that's actually having a positive effect on us because it makes more microprocessors available in the market, so the lead times on these components are going down. What we also see is that when we bid to customers, our availability on products are at least no worse than our competitors. It rather tends to be slightly better in some cases. So we are fairly comfortable with that one. We also have one question about what we think about if we can say something about our share price. The answer to that is no. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on the share price. Our job is to build a profitable Q-Free in the long-term perspective, and we try to do our best to communicate our plans and how we're thinking and what we are planning to do as best as we can, even if we are a small cap and have very limited resources to spend on investor relations. But we do not comment on the share price itself. What kind of cost inflation adjustment clauses do you have on the long-term contracts? I mean, we are in so many markets that it's hard to give a very general comment on that, but we are, of course, taking that into account when looking at new contracts, and we would never enter a very long-term contract without having taken that into consideration. As a general comment, I can say that we're not considering that to be a major threat to our business. Let me see. There's one comment or a question regarding CapEx. There is an increase in CapEx, yes. There are three reasons for it. Slight increase in research and development activities. We do have a lot of interesting research and development going on to get off-the-shelf products that we will be able to provide as a recurring revenue product moving forward. That's one factor. We have had an investment this year in a new ERP system, which is a few million NOK. We are finished capitalizing with that. We're live with the new system, so that's kind of all done with. Remember that we have some contracts now where Q-Free actually installs, owns and operates tolling systems, roadside equipment, where we have put value on these systems in the balance sheet in the third quarter, but not recognized any revenues. These are systems that are going live either late third quarter, in fourth quarter and the first quarter of next year that will generate recurring revenue, but there is some CapEx related to those. It's a mixed effect on those things. Can you talk about the challenging macro we are currently facing, how this would affect us into 2023? Also whether this affects customer behavior. Not really a big issue for us. When it comes to customer behavior, to start with that, it's more that we now see things opening up after a corona, very affected by corona period, where it has been difficult to talk to customers, perhaps especially public authorities, where it's not so easy with home office and Teams and those things. On the customer side, it's easier to communicate, and we see that there are some fairly significant projects that have been on hold for several years that are now starting to move. We are optimistic on those opportunities. Even if macro figures say that things has to slow down and things like that, I think it's more consumer and perhaps also some industry-related, but not so much public sector, which is a big part of what we are doing. I think it's less of an effect for us compared to many other companies. Also the megatrends with regards to increased population and also focus on sustainable transportation, it definitely opened up a lot of new markets for us as presented here previously as well. It also ensures that some of the old technology is being changed over to more new technology that we see in various states as well in the U.S. Yeah. We also have one question related to some backlog and the figures there. It's pretty technical, so I won't take that on the webcast, but the person who has posted that question, if you drop me an email, my email address is on our Investor Relations page. Just drop an email and I'll give you an answer to that one. Okay. I think that's the last question coming in here. With that, I want to thank you all for joining us this morning, and I wish you all a very nice Friday. Thank you so much.
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