Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to RaySearch Earnings Conference Call for the first quarter of 2021. My name is Johan Löf, and I'm the CEO and Founder of RaySearch. With me, I have our CFO, Peter Thysell, and together we'll try to answer any questions that you may have after my presentation. I will start by giving a brief overview of our first quarter. The COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on RaySearch also in Q1. Market conditions remained challenging in Europe and North America, while they improved in Asia. Last year, pre-COVID, we reported a record high order intake, net sales, and operating profit in the first quarter. In the first quarter of 2021, our order intake was SEK 145 million, representing a 52% decline year-on-year. Our net sales declined 22% to SEK 182 million, which is explained by lower license sales due to the pandemic and the strong Q1 in 2020. Our recurring support revenue continued to rise and now accounts for 38% of our net sales. As a result of our lower sales, our operating profit declined to SEK 12 million, representing an operating margin of 8%. Cash flow remained strong and was SEK 33 million in the first quarter. Thereby, RaySearch has generated a positive cash flow of about SEK 100 million during the past 12 months. However, the lower profit in Q1 also resulted in a breach of an EBITDA-based covenant in our revolving credit facility agreement with our bank, SEB. As a consequence, SEB has requested prepayment of the outstanding debt of SEK 50 million. This is unfortunate, but not a big problem for us since our liquidity amounts to more than SEK 200 million and the company has a net debt of -SEK 66 million. The credit facility will be available for utilization as soon as the company satisfies all the financial covenants according to the agreement. Despite the challenging market conditions caused by the pandemic, the past year has still been productive for RaySearch. Some examples. Our customer base increased by more than 100 new cancer clinics, which is actually more than previous years. We strengthened our product portfolio significantly by continued development of our core systems, RayStation and RayCare, and the launch of two new systems, RayIntelligence and RayCommand. Our customer satisfaction ratings have remained at a very high level. Our cash flow has remained strong, and our financial position remains solid. One of the main news for RayStation is that we are introducing support for Accuray's CyberKnife machine. We already supported TomoTherapy and Radixact machines, and thereby RayStation can provide complete support for the entire suite of Accuray machines. During 2021, we will also release a large number of machine learning models for RayStation, which can significantly improve both productivity and treatment outcomes. Another area of focus for 2021 is improved workflows and integration between RayStation and RayCare. This is especially important for clinics that use complex treatment procedures and adaptive treatment techniques, which places high demands on efficient scheduling and optimal resource utilization. While the uncertainties associated with COVID-19 will stay with us for a while, at least until national and regional vaccination programs approach full coverage, we remain optimistic about the RaySearch long-term strategy for comprehensive cancer care. If anything, the need for accelerated digital transformation of the oncology workflow has been amplified by events of the past 12 months. Early in the pandemic, for example, the World Health Organization found that one in three countries in Europe reported partially or completely disrupted cancer services, while some national snapshots indicate that as many as 10% or more of new cancer cases may have gone undiagnosed in the past year. Put simply, cancer centers and their care teams will need very efficient tools if they are to diagnose, treat, and manage the post-COVID search in cancer cases in the best possible way. Going forward, it will be RaySearch's mission to show cancer clinics, large and small, how they can improve their activities through software-driven innovation, a strategy that will ultimately deliver workflow efficiencies while giving more patients access to the best possible cancer care. This concludes my presentation. Peter and I are now ready to answer your questions. Yes. Once again, should you wish to ask a question, you may press star one. Once again, that is star one should you wish to ask a question. The first question is from Hans Boström. Please ask your question. Yes. Hello. My name is Hans Boström with Trinity Delta in London. I have two questions, please. I would be very interested to hear if you could elaborate on how you think cancer diagnosis might change, if at all, because of this pent-up demand, shall we say, for diagnosis once this pandemic is over. Do you have any more explicit thoughts on that? Secondly, could you also tell us how your sales process has been impacted by the pandemic? I see your selling costs are considerably down year-on-year, but it would be interesting to hear how it might potentially sustainably change from the pandemic? Thank you. Thank you for those questions. Regarding the first one, of course, there will be a heavy burden on, first of all, the diagnosis. We are not heavily involved in that part. When it comes to efficiencies, it seems like for our systems that the cancer clinics need to treat more patients than they did before. They need to be able to plan more patients and create treatment plans. They need to be able to take them through the entire workflow to deliver the treatment and to follow up the treatment and so on. In all of these steps, software can really improve and speed up things. For instance, just to give you concrete examples so it doesn't become too abstract. Before you create a treatment plan for the radiotherapy treatment of the cancer, you need to segment the patient's anatomy. You need to define the different structures, including the tumor volume. It can be very tedious, quite a heavy process. It just takes time. That is just one example of tools in our system, RayStation, where we can automate that whole procedure. We have several different algorithms. The last family of algorithms are based on machine learning, and they are extremely rapid. They can be trained on hundreds of patients beforehand that have been contoured in a careful way. Then you can apply these deep learning models to new patients and get the result in seconds. Other aspects is that our way of optimizing the radiotherapy delivery, that is how the beams are configured and computed to deliver the radiation dose. Our way of optimizing those means that with the same quality treatment, the patient can be on the treatment couch, that is in the treatment room, for a shorter period. That means you can treat essentially more patients per hour. These are just two examples. There are many, many. These are aspects of how you can, with the same hardware, same everything, same staff, so forth. By just utilizing sound and good software, you can treat more patients per day. That will become very important after COVID-19 is gone. Regarding the second question, yes, our sales process has been very different during this time. One of the main reasons why you see lower costs is that we spend much less time traveling around the world. We don't participate in the huge trade shows that we used to go to where entire community shows up. They have been canceled during this pandemic. Because those were associated with big costs, we save those. Do I think it's sustainable to work like this? I don't think so. I think to some extent, we will be more efficient in how we will do some less visits to clinics and customers and partners. It won't be 50% or something. There will be a reduction. Maybe some unnecessary trips can be replaced by digital online conversations. Everyone is up to speed in those areas now, everyone is better prepared. We need to meet face-to-face still in the future. There will be reductions, this has only been one year plus that we have been away from our customers. We still have a certain momentum that we have built up over many, many years with relationships and market presence and brand recognition and all of that. Of course, that stays for life, but it doesn't stay forever. We need to participate in the most important trade shows, and we need to visit the customers in the future. I think we will be able to streamline some things and reduce costs, but it won't be at these levels, I don't think. Okay. Does that answer your question? No, that's fine. It's very interesting. Do you have a sense of how much lower your structure, your expenses could be on a percentage basis? Very hard to say, but let's say maybe we could get away with 70% of what we spend today, something on those. Oh. It's very hard to predict. I think we will be able to reduce. We still have to travel. That's a 30% reduction of our historical cost associated with trade fairs and traveling and things like that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you once again. Please press star one should you wish to ask a question. Our next question is from Rain Olesi. Please ask your question. Hi. I have two questions. First would be, again, a follow-up to this COVID impact on sales. In the past, you have mentioned how many on-site demos you have performed. Just to get more tangible feeling on the COVID impact, maybe you could elaborate how many on-site demos you have had in the most recent quarter, and how this compares with the pre-COVID levels. Okay. And- I can answer that first, and you can take the second one after. Good, yeah. Is that okay? On-site demos have been globally very close to zero during this time. One has to remember that our customers are part of hospitals. There are cancer clinics that are part of hospitals that are completely occupied with COVID-19 treatments. For the hospitals, it's, first of all hands on deck to handle the COVID-19 situation. It's also a lot of restrictions because they are terrified that their staff will be infected by COVID-19 from outside visitors. They are, around the world, very strict. There are some exceptions, but overall, the hospitals don't want vendors to come and visit and show their products and so on. We fully respect that. On the other hand, we have had many online demos. There have been a huge surge in online demos, and they have been very much improved during this period. They really worked on. That's going back to the previous question. I think that is actually one change, going forward with existing customers and maybe in some cases, completely new customers. We can today produce a much better show for when it comes to. The demos are very important to us. When customers, RayStation or RayCare, or any of our products, they are essentially hooked. We have to show them the product, and then they become convinced. Now we can do that much better. We did online demos before as well, but we are much, much better at that now. We have built up professional studios where we don't only have this incredibly boring Teams experience or Zoom experience that everyone is tired of by now. We have more of a studio environment which is more alive. The customer can see our presenters walk around in the room and point at the screen, and then we can replace that to fill up the entire screen with only the graphical user interface. It becomes a much more dynamic and live experience. This is something that we will benefit from in the post-corona as well, that we can do more of this. We will travel as well. We can reach many more potential customers through these enhanced online demos. Okay. Thank you. My other question is on the competitive landscape. At least from the investor communication, it seems that recently Elekta and Varian have increased their focus on the software offering. Maybe you could elaborate how this has changed your competitive positioning? Yeah, sure. The landscape is, if you look at treatment planning, we can stay with that, make it simple. We have three competitors, it's Philips, Varian, and Elekta. Philips, obviously, they are going away. They're not investing. That system is not considered really a competitor anymore. Varian, we have always had great respect for Varian because of their size and their market dominance in terms of the machines, the linacs. They have a very good treatment planning system. It's not as good as ours. We still are quite far ahead, but they're pushing very hard to catch us, which is good for the field in the big picture. Elekta, they have ambitions as well. We don't see that yet. The current system is not really a threat when you compare RayStation to Monaco in a competitive situation. It almost never happens that we would lose in such a situation. You're right in that these companies, they focus more on software now. They realize that software is the most important thing in cancer care, actually. All the other things are necessary, of course, but to take a big step forward, it's about software, machine learning, and big data, and all of this. That's a natural evolution, I think. These two companies are, at their core, hardware companies. They're simply not as good in developing software as we are. For sure, they are increasing their efforts. Okay. Just maybe one follow-up with them. Basically, if I look at revenue performance of Varian and Elekta, although they are as well quoting this COVID impact, which is having hit on their sales. At the end of the day, their revenues, I'm not seeing such a significant decline. I'm just wondering, and in my view, they are approaching the same clients as you are in that sense. I'm just wondering whether there's a significant difference in how the equipment manufacturers and you approach the client or, maybe for some reason, the parallel that I'm bringing is not relevant at all? I think it's very hard to compare. They also have huge support contracts for their machines and so on, just running recurring revenues. That has probably a stabilizing effect. We start to see our recurring revenue is growing in size, and it becomes a stabilizing factor for us as well. We start from a lower starting point. Okay. I don't really know how to answer that question, if they are less. We know why we are affected by the pandemic, because our customers are, there are budget freezes, there are different situations, different focus for the clinics right now. They're eager to invest in big software systems when they are dealing with a pandemic. We see changes happening that customers in Europe and United States start to interact much more with us now. They're getting out of this situation. We see there are a lot of signs in that direction. In Asia, we see, Asia is our strongest region right now. They recovered much earlier from COVID than we see a lot of it. In China and Japan, we have seen that has been very strong contributors to our revenue stream. We have really balanced the slow markets in Europe and North America. We see good signs, good discussions now. People are kind of waking up from this COVID sleep in those regions. A lot more discussions are happening now. I think we will start to see good signs going forward this year of improved sales. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Did that answer your question? Are there any other questions? Thank you. Thank you. Okay, thank you once again. Just press star one should you wish to ask a question. Our next one is from Matthew McNeil. Please ask your question. Yeah, just go for it. Hi, thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to ask about an update on R&D. The company has launched a couple new products recently, and just wondering if you can provide any color on the forward outlook for R&D from here? I suppose the question is whether we are going to increase our R&D organization significantly. I think it's substantial today. It's important to remember that RaySearch is, to a large extent, an R&D company that happened to have a decent profit. A lot of our developments that we are doing are really long-term investments. RayStation that we started in 2008, to build in 2008, has been profitable for just a few years, and it's just gaining momentum. RayCare is in its infancy. We started up development in 2012. Now RayCommand and RayIntelligence are on the market. We have very long-term plans. One has to keep that in mind because if you look at the size of the R&D department, which is more than half of the company staff, and probably similar in total cost. Of course, if we didn't have this long-term vision, if we wanted to be profitable, we could be crazy profitable. Our goal is to be extremely profitable in the future. It's softwares that will come as the volumes pick up. I don't think the R&D department needs. It will stay at this level with a slight increase going forward. We have a very good machine now that generates the best products in the world. That's why the top cancer centers in the world want to have our products and want to work with us is because we have the highest quality, by far, highest quality software systems. Just to answer your question, it will not explode. It will stay at these levels, slight increase going forward. Thank you. That's very helpful. Maybe just as a second question, the company established a presence in Australia. Just wondering if you can provide any additional color on the opportunity in that market and maybe if you were to compare that market, does it resemble more something like the U.S., Europe or Asia? Thank you. No, it's not a huge market. We have a presence there already. We have a number of customers there, quite early adopters as well. We have long-time customers in both Australia and New Zealand. We used to have a distributor there, so we have just replaced our distributor with our own presence there, our own company. It is not huge. It's just a few employees. They are, in general, early adopters in both those countries. I see good potential there. They are looking into protons and even carbon ions. Of course, our systems are the systems of choice if you're going to do anything with particles. Of course, it's a much smaller market compared to the U.S., for instance. It's not a huge thing. It's just a natural step for us to go direct in Australia. We have good customers there, and we weren't happy with our distributors. We had good Australians amongst our employees, so it was a very good fit to go direct. That's great. Thanks very much. Thank you. Okay. Thank you once again. Just press star one should you wish to ask a question. I actually think that concludes our conference call. Thanks all for today.
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