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Net sales in the period was MSEK 193 (141) and Net sales for the quarter were MSEK 55 (46).
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The Gross margin for the period was 44% (67%) and Gross margin for the quarter was 40% (66%) mainly due to larger sales of hardware to our partners in Korea within education. Gross profit for the period was MSEK 85 (94) and Gross profit for the quarter was MSEK 22 (30).
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Earnings before depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) for the period was MSEK -99 (-67) and EBITDA for the quarter was MSEK -39 (-9).
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The Result after tax for the period was MSEK -109 (-63) and the Result after tax for the quarter was MSEK -40 (-6).
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Earnings per share before and after dilution for the period was SEK -0.13 (-0.13) and for the quarter SEK -0.04 (-0.01).
- Cash flow during the period was MSEK 8 (-3) and Cash flow for the quarter was MSEK 5 (2). Cash flow from operating activities before changes in working capital for the period was MSEK -100 (-56) and for the quarter MSEK -47 (-6). Cash flow from financing activities during the period was MSEK 289 (114) and for the quarter MSEK 192 (55).
Comments from the CEO
ONE PEN ACROSS ANY SURFACE – 5 BUSINESS AREAS
Revenues in the fourth quarter were 55 MSEK compared to 46 MSEK in Q4 2014. Gross margin was 40% compared to 66% in Q4 2014. Revenues were higher than the expected forecast of 46 MSEK we announced on December 30th due to higher Livescribe sales, included with effect from December 1st, and end of quarter deliveries to partners in Korea. The lower gross margin was due to the product mix in the quarter with larger deliveries to partners within education. Operating expenses, excluding amortization, depreciation, and foreign exchange gains(losses), in the quarter were 61 MSEK compared to 39 MSEK in Q4 2014 and 49 MSEK in Q3 2015. As previously announced the higher operating expenses in 2015 were related to product development with HP, research and testing of new micro dot thin film solutions for large displays, increased travel costs and components related to large display activities and the development of Anoto LiveTM Services. The combined result of these efforts is a broader product portfolio that we are preparing for launch in the coming quarters and a back-end infrastructure for the support of partners and resellers. On top of this Livescribe operating expenses were included for December as well as transaction costs related to the financing and acquisition of Livescribe. Legal fees were also higher in Q4 in particular related to the patent infringement suits Anoto has filed and is planning to file against NeoLAB Corporation and its partners.
The 37 MSEK delivery to a large Japanese Financial Services Company was planned for Q4 of 2015 but due to delays in components delivery and testing the manufacturing schedule was changed till after Chinese New Year. Expected delivery start is now 3rd week of February.
The Technology Licensing Agreement with HP was signed on November 5th. We are very excited and fully committed to this partnership and believe HP is the ideal partner to help realize our vision about a universal digital writing platform that embraces user cases across all industries. Anoto cannot comment on specific product plans and time schedule for product releases other than to confirm that work progresses as planned and we expect our business relationship with HP to generate significant revenues in the coming years.
We completed the financing and acquisition of Livescribe on December 1. The acquisition was another step in consolidating the Anoto ecosystem and to realize synergies in hardware and software development, supply chain and operations, as well as to give Anoto access to additional market channels for online sales and retail distribution.
After careful consideration of what we consider is a significant growth opportunity we have decided to change strategy and step up our efforts within Large Format Displays and to launch a series of Anoto branded products. The first product Anoto Live™ 55" UHD 4K Collaboration Display combines the best of projected capacitive touch with high-precision digital pen input to create the ultimate interactive collaboration experience. The product will be launched at ISE 2016 on February 9th and expected commercial availability is mid-April. Based upon preliminary discussions with potential partners we also see a large opportunity for OEM business within this area.
OUTLOOK
A New Way To Manage And Track Our Business
As Anoto enters 2016 with a significant increase in scale and scope of business, the Company will undergo a structural reorganization in how it manages and tracks its business. Having completed the acquisitions of XMS Penvision and Livescribe as well as the upcoming completion of the announced acquisitions of Destiny Wireless, We-Inspire and Pen Generations, the Company is now poised to move forward in 2016 with direct control over an unprecedented degree of the Anoto value chain and ecosystem. This will allow Anoto to deliver products and offerings, directly and through partnerships, across 5 key business areas in which the Company’s technology delivers significant value to end-customers while also providing considerable advantage over competing offerings.
These 5 business areas, discussed in detail below, are:
- Collaboration Solutions
- Personal Productivity Products
- Documents & Data Capture
- Creativity Solutions
- Learning Solutions
- Collaboration Solutions
Anoto’s Collaboration Solutions (CS) business area is comprised of a combination of Anoto hardware and software products, including Large Format Displays and Interactive Walls, as well as a complement of collaboration software uniquely designed to emphasize the value of combined precision pen input and multi-touch across the range of these large surface products. While the Interactive Wall products have been part of the We-Inspire product catalog, the Large Format Displays are completely new and uniquely utilize Anoto dot pattern film on Ultra High Definition (UHD) 4K displays to provide a state-of-the-art solution for business collaboration applications requiring high-precision pen and multi-touch input capabilities. These products will be brought to market beginning in Q2 of 2016, and positioned as a new family of large-surface interactive solutions for the Business Collaboration market.
The Collaboration Solutions market is very broad in scope and is typically described by analysts and participating businesses as being comprised of multiple categories of hardware and software. Still in its early stages, the CS market has been identified as “high-growth” with CAGR over the next few years estimated to exceed 35%. The diversity of hardware and software technologies comprising the CS market has resulted in a relatively high degree of market fragmentation with no individual players owning the significant share.
The largest segment of the CS market is Unified Communications and Collaborations (UC&C) systems and solutions, which includes a number of larger players, including Cisco, Microsoft and Polycom. The core use case supported by these vendors is Telepresence, including web conferencing, video and real-time chat. UC&C also includes an adjacent segment for A/V equipment, which is comprised of the component pieces of a UC&C system – displays, projectors, screens, etc. Another sizable segment related to CS is Collaboration content storage and sharing, which includes vendors such as Dropbox, Box and SharePoint. This group of products and services helps manage the huge volume of content that gets created prior to, during and after meeting collaborations.
Anoto’s CS solutions will be both complementary to and synergistic with these adjacent UC&C and collaboration content products. This will accommodate a complementary go-to-market approach that will allow Anoto to partner with and ‘draft on’ some of the large players in this market space.
Anoto is targeting a new and unique position in the Business Collaboration Solutions market that entails providing a range of hardware and software products designed to increase both personal productivity and team productivity by extending pen-based writing and drawing experiences from paper across digital devices including tablets, displays and large interactive walls. The Anoto family of interactive surfaces will include Large Format Displays (up to 85”) and large-scale interactive wall-and-projector systems (up to 24 feet) as well as interactive whiteboards (tracked and discussed separately in the Learning Solutions business area). Although there are respectable competitors in each of these individual segments, Anoto is uniquely positioned to establish a prominent position in the large-surface interactive collaboration category.
At its core, multi-surface interactive collaboration entails a shared experience of digital writing and drawing on paper, tablets, laptops, computers, large displays, interactive whiteboards and interactive walls and then sharing that content with other collaborators – either co-located or remote – across and among ALL of these interactive surfaces.
This is a big market play, but one in which Anoto is extremely well positioned in terms of technology, market timing, strategy and with an entirely unique and defensible position. Anoto technology offers significant performance advantages over conventional interactive white boards and multi-touch-only displays that provide only primitive digital writing via finger or stylus input mechanisms. Even more advanced technologies that allow for more precise digital pen inputs have considerable performance shortfalls in terms of performance and accuracy, especially as the display and surface size increases. The competing approaches are simply not capable of providing the level of high-precision pen input control necessary for serious business collaboration on a large surface. This is particularly true for various Creative collaborative interactions, but also for a broad range of Design and Engineering collaborations where precision input is an absolute ‘must have’.
Another strategic differentiator for Anoto in this market is its ability to bring these interactive surfaces to market at a lower cost than many of the competitive products. This is due to the fact that the film that carries the Anoto pattern that is required to produce such large interactive surfaces can be produced at a much lower cost than the interactive technology employed by most other competitive products. Importantly, the cost-performance advantage grows as the size and scale of the device or surface increases.
The set of multi-surface interactive collaboration products is just the first half of the story, though. The other half of the story is an entirely new and complementary software platform that provides even more customer value and competitive differentiation. Anoto has built a new Live Services™ platform designed to host new Anoto collaboration apps as well as a new tool framework for use by the ISV community to pen-enable their apps for use on any and all of Anoto’s large surfaces.
Many popular ISV applications were not designed to work at this large scale, and many were not designed to work with a digital pen. By pen-enabling their apps, ISVs will be able to both integrate with a new set of large format collaboration experiences and tap into a new growth segment within which they can sell their apps. The Live Services platform and collaboration apps strategy is designed to both establish a new stream of recurring software revenues and build a new ecosystem of ISV partners, which will in turn further stimulate demand for Anoto products and further bolster Anoto’s defensible position in the Collaboration Solutions market.
Anoto will bring these new Anoto branded collaboration products to market beginning in Q2 of 2016, through strategic distribution channel relationships across North America and EMEA. These products are expected to begin contributing to quarterly revenue and gross margin growth in Q3 of 2016. However, although there is good revenue upside for these Anoto branded products, Anoto is not yet in a strong position to optimally scale this business from a volume, brand and channels perspective.
Therefore, Anoto will be initiating a multi-faceted product launch campaign beginning in Q1, designed to maximize media coverage of Anoto’s excellent multi-surface interactive collaboration story. This will not only further establish Anoto as an innovator, but will also help create interest and build demand around the category. But once in market, Anoto will undertake a focused business development effort to recruit large global ODM/OEM partners to license Anoto collaboration technology and bring their own branded collaboration products to market. These partner branded collaboration products would likely begin entering the market in early 2017. This technology-licensing model is key to scaling the business and fully exploiting the market opportunity for this particular Anoto technology. It will also significantly help penetrate the market and build share much faster.
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Personal Productivity Products
The Consumer Personal Productivity Products area is comprised of the Livescribe business. The Company completed its acquisition of Livescribe Inc., on December 1, 2015. Livescribe’s sales from that date through December 31 have been included in the Q4 reported results. Since 2007, Livescribe has licensed Anoto’s core technology in the design and manufacturing of its smartpens and markets the pens along with paper products and related accessories that target professionals, students and educators globally.
Livescribe has established channels across most key global consumer markets including the United States, Canada, the EU, Australia & New Zealand, Japan and China. The channels are set-up as a mix of direct-to-consumer (through the company’s online store that currently only operates in the United States), single-tier and multi-tier distribution to both online retailers as well as traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. Livescribe’s retail footprint covers over 2,000 storefronts and includes Best Buy, Amazon, Moleskine, Selfridges, Apple, Office Works, Staples, Softbank and others. Livescribe evaluates its business on revenues (i.e. sales to its channel and partners) but also tracks sell-through very closely as a key performance metric.
Livescribe has partnered with leading note-taking, cloud and collaboration solutions to ensure that the notes generated from Livescribe’s solutions simply and easily integrate with these third-party applications and services. Partnerships with the likes of Evernote, Microsoft, Noteshelf, Moleskine and others allow Livescribe to deliver greater utility to its customer base.
Livescribe’s business follows similar seasonal patterns to consumer products in general, and while December generally represents a larger than average month in terms of sell-through, the traditional Q4 revenues are recognized in November as channel partners stock up in advance of the holiday to ensure adequate inventory to fulfill sell-through.
In 2016 and beyond, the business area will contribute to overall Company growth in a number of ways:
- Continued development of the apps and applications that customers use in conjunction with their Livescribe pens.
- Launching of new products through Livescribe’s established channels
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Geographic expansion and strengthening of secondary markets
- Creative Solutions
Solutions for creative professionals represent a key strategic business area for Anoto. Creative professionals readily see value in the products that Anoto technology enable and are one of the key audience groups that have been actively using digital pen technology in their daily workflow. The Creative Solutions business area will be tied to sales of specialty offerings specifically built for creative professionals including the Blck Ink product and future products targeted to be available later in 2016. Creative professionals’ purchases of other Anoto technologies such as Large Format Displays and we-inspire products will not be tracked separately and will instead be covered in the Collaboration Solutions business area.
Anoto’s activities to-date in the Creative Solutions area have been limited but highly strategic, with the focus being on establishing proof-of-concept installations of the we-inspire systems and the Blck Ink offering. In the US, we-inspire systems are in use at leading movie studios and Blck Ink is being used by 10 of the top Hollywood studios. In 2016 and beyond, Anoto will continue to develop the creative professionals market with offerings that are tailored to the requirements needed to satisfy this demanding audience.
As part of the Company’s efforts in the creative space, Anoto is also pursuing partnerships with relevant ISV’s. Through its Live Services software platform, ISV’s are able to optimize their applications to make the most of Anoto precision pen input across the variety of Anoto Enabled devices and surface. In addition to ISV partnerships, Anoto will be pursuing partnerships with relevant OEM partners that will increase the scope of Anoto Enabled devices and surfaces.
Distribution of the Creative Solutions will flow through the channels being established by other units within Anoto, most notably the Collaboration Solutions group and the Personal Productivity unit. Through its strategic location in Los Angeles, the Anoto Creative unit will continue its business development efforts.
Anoto`s OEM partnership with HP and ongoing product development efforts are primarily targeting professional users of Creative Solutions.
- Documents and Data Capture Solutions
A common denominator for businesses worldwide has been and continues to be Documents and Data Capture solutions. This includes paper documents and digital forms for data capture across a broad range of types, shapes and sizes. A core part of Anoto’s mission has always been to facilitate and enhance the way people create, annotate and interact with documents by using Anoto digital pens and dot paper technology.
With a rapidly expanding base of small businesses worldwide, this mission is as relevant and vibrant today as it was a decade ago. Additionally, there has been a material resurgence in digital writing and drawing due to the recent introduction of new digital pen products by both Microsoft and Apple, which we believe will drive the market for Anoto Document and Data Capture products back into a new growth cycle. To capitalize on these dynamics, Anoto is evolving its Documents and Data Capture Solutions strategy to expand Anoto’s products and solutions focus beyond the enterprise forms business and move down market to reach an entirely new and expanding segment of Small and Medium Business (SMB) users that can benefit greatly from simple but valuable document and data capture solutions.
Anoto has traditionally positioned its Live PDF product to mark-up PDF documents using an Anoto digital pen for personal and team use. Going forward, Anoto will be evolving the Live PDF products for individual use to go up market to better meet the needs of the SMB market. The SMB space is a very large market of diverse companies that form the backbone of the services economy and these businesses have one particularly compelling thing in common – they create a lot of paper documents. Going forward, Anoto’s Documents and Data Capture solutions will begin to offer new functionality for this segment of users, and, importantly, deliver the functionality in a simplified manner. These new solutions will also employ as a new software subscription model designed to drive recurring revenue growth. This will help Anoto turn each digital pen into an on-going software revenue stream.
Anoto will be developing and market testing these new products in the first half of 2016, and will begin bringing them to market in Q3. A key go-to-market enabler for these products will be establishing effective channel structure that is optimized to reach these targeted Small Business users.
- Education Solutions
Anoto’s activities in the Education arena are covered by licensing relationships with partner companies that have developed products for classroom learning as well as at-home “edu-tainment”. Most notably, Anoto’s relationship with Leapfrog has seen millions of units of its Tag products utilizing Anoto technology to help early learners strengthen their reading and writing skills.
In Asia, through it’s partnerships with Pen Generations in South Korea (and its own partnerships with Kyowon and SOLiDEdu) and T-Study in China, Anoto technologies are being implemented in classrooms. Anoto Enabled workbooks from leading educational publishers in both countries allow students’ work to be automatically available to teachers at the front of the classroom.
In North America and EMEA, the Company’s partnership with Polyvision, a Steelcase company, has seen Anoto Enabled interactive whiteboards being deployed into classrooms as well as corporate environments. In February 2016, Polyvision and Anoto announced an update to our partnership whereby Anoto will take on direct ownership of the sales and marketing of its interactive whiteboard kits to EMEA markets. Through Q1 and into Q2 2016, Anoto will be transitioning Polyvision partners and customers to be directly managed by Anoto as well as establishing new relationships.
Starting Q1 with effect from January 1st we will present revenues and activities per business area as outlined above.
Stein Revelsby
CEO, Anoto Group
Anoto Group AB may be required to disclose the information provided herein pursuant to the Securities Markets Act. The information was submitted for publication at 07.20 on February 8, 2016.
A webcast of the Q4 report will be available from 9.00pm on February 8, and a Q&A session via audiocast will be held at 11.00am the same day. For more information, see www.anoto.com/investors.
For more information, see www.anoto.com/investors.
Calendar 2016
Annual report 26 April
Q1 report 13 May
AGM 19 May
For more information, Please contact:
Stein Revelsby, CEO Anoto Group AB, tel. +46 (0)733 45 12 05
Anoto Group AB (publ), org. nr. 556532-3929,
Mobilvägen 10, SE- 223 62 Lund
Tel. +46 46 540 12 00
www.anoto.com
About Anoto Group AB
Anoto is a global leader in digital writing and drawing solutions. Its technology platform and branded products enable high-precision pen or stylus input on nearly any surface --- from capturing and digitizing handwritten notes and business forms on paper to designing, creating and collaborating directly on large interactive displays, whiteboards, and walls up to 24 feet. Anoto, its strategic licensing partners, and developer community offer a broad portfolio of products, applications and services to business, consumer and education markets, including best-in-class digital note-taking, creative solutions, collaborative solutions, classroom learning solutions, and document processing & management. The Anoto Group has over 150 employees and is headquartered in Lund (Sweden), with offices in Norrköping (Sweden), Basingstoke, Guildford and Wetherby (UK), Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston (US) and Tokyo (Japan). Anoto’s Livescribe brand is the leading maker of smartpens, which bring notes, words, & ideas to life by connecting pen & paper to the digital world. Anoto is traded on the Small Cap list of NASDAQ OMX Stockholm under ANOT.
For more information about Anoto or Livescribe, please visit www.anoto.com
Follow Anoto on Twitter at: @anoto
