Neonode Inc (NEON) 2021 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Hello, everyone. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Neonode's Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call.

(Operator Instructions) Thank you. And at this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to David Brunton, Neonode's Head of Corporate Investor Relations. David, please go ahead and start the conference.

Welcome, and thank you for joining us. On today's call, we will review our second quarter 2021 financial results and provide a corporate update. Our update will include details of customer activities, technology developments and other items of interest.

On today's call is our CEO, Urban Forssell; and our new CFO, Fredrik Nihlen. Fredrik joined the company last week and will provide a brief introduction of himself in just a few minutes. He will also present the financial results of the company for the second quarter.

Before turning the call over to Urban, I would like to make the following remarks concerning forward-looking statements. All statements in this conference call, other than historical facts, are forward-looking statements. The words anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, tend, will, guides, confidence, targets, projects and other similar expressions typically are used to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements do not guarantee the future performance that may involve or subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that may affect Neonode's business, financial position and other operating results, which include, but are not limited to, the risk factors and other qualifications contained in Neonode's annual report on 10-K, quarterly reports on 10-Q and other reports filed by Neonode with the SEC, to which your attention is directed. Therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expected or implied by these forward-looking statements. Neonode expressly disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Urban. Urban, please go ahead.

Thank you, David, and also from my side, welcome to this call. Pleasure being here with all of you, and we are ready to present second quarter earnings and also share some updates on our business and our strategies.

Presenters during this call will -- besides Dave, who you already met, and myself, will be Fredrik Nihlen, our new CFO. I will hand the word to Fredrik and let him take a couple of minutes to introduce himself. Thank you, Fredrik.

Thank you, everyone. I'm excited to join Neonode. I have worked within finance since I graduated in '08. I started in auditing and accounting, moving over more and more to controlling, analyzing and reporting. My last 3 positions have been as the leader of the finance department in the companies I worked for, latest as the Finance Director at Nordics in IFS.

IFS develops and delivers enterprise software for customers around the world to manufacture and distribute goods, build and maintain assets and manage service-focused operations, with a turnover of SEK 1.7 billion, about $200 million, the Nordic region stands at 24% of IFS' total net revenue.

Before IFS, I was the group CFO of Cinnober, listed on First North NASDAQ in Stockholm. Cinnober was a Swedish fintech company with state-of-the-art software. Cinnober developed software for the heart of the stock exchange, the trading system and also real-time clearing system with clearing houses. Real-time clearing means real-time trade innovation, trade and position management and risk calculations. NASDAQ acquired Cinnober in 2019. I led the finance integration into NASDAQ and Cinnober was delisted during that time.

Indeed, my last position was as Head of Finance. DIBS was also a fintech company, providing online payment solutions in the early days of e-commerce. When I joined in 2013, DIBS was listed on NASDAQ First North in Stockholm. DIBS was acquired by Nets and delisted and I led the finance integration.

My goal is to transform the finance team in Neonode to be a true business partner and to be a natural part of ongoing business decisions. One prerequisite for this to happen is to have data structured and available, so it can slide in different ways, turn into information, so that decisions can be made on knowledge.

The world is always changing, and that means finance needs to adapt to the change. Therefore, we all always need to develop and strive to be more efficient. There is always a better way. As I said, I'm excited to join Neonode. I think Neonode has great technology and great potential.

Back to you, Urban.

Thank you, Fredrik, and again, welcome to Neonode and to the team. I look forward to working with you here.

As an upfront summary and highlights of what we will present on this call, I want to review the following bullets with you. First one is that it should be clear, and we repeat that we continue to execute on our strategies and build our business pipeline. We will share some positive updates of our business today. And in the company and in the management team, we are encouraged by the progress we are making. Of course, like many of you, we are eager to see the business of Neonode grow, and we are working hard every day to do, but we have some good results to share with you in this call, and you can find more details in the report and in the 10-Q.

Like many others, we are still affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it negatively impacts our business. That should be clear. We have a direct impact in terms of lockdowns and problems in traveling and meeting with customers. We have more indirect that also we are affected, especially for our license business with automotive customers and to some extent, printer customers of the shortage of semiconductors in the world. And in some cases, we also see effects of a general economic downturn.

We see some effects of this. But despite these headwinds, we are quite happy with the progress we have been making during the first, second quarter, and we fight on, and we have our targets clear: to grow the business.

To give you 1 KPI for the second quarter is that we grew our revenues by 127% compared to the corresponding quarter last year. We think it's a good result. Personally, of course, I was slightly more. But under circumstances, we think that the progress is really good, and it proves that our strategies are working and that we are on the right track.

The demand for our contactless touch solutions, which is our main focus and our touch sensor modules, the products where we have embedded our zForce technology into standardized sensing modules that we produce in our own subsidiary in Pronode here in the West Coast of Sweden. The demand for those are also picking up.

Asia is leading the way with customers in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China. But we also see interest and growing interest from customers in Europe and North America, which is very, very positive.

Our license revenues has acquired well after the debt we saw during spring last year when the pandemic worst hit us. Then it was a very, very slow period for both printers and automotive sales. But during the second half of last year and also the first half of this year, it has recovered very well for us. And we see some changes in the product mix. But overall, it's a good recovery, and we are at a good level and now in the second quarter of this year.

These are some of the highlights of the call, and I will now turn the word back to Fredrik, who will take you through some further details on the financials. So over to you, Fredrik.

Thanks, Urban. You can find our second quarter earnings release and 10-Q available for download from the Investors section on our website, neonode.com.

For the second quarter, our total revenues reached $1.7 million. That is an increase of 127% compared to the second quarter of previous year. Revenues from sensor modules increased from low levels of sale with 439%. We can see that sensor modules revenues have a positive trend, especially in APAC, visualized with the blue-collar bars. As we expected, APAC is the first region to embrace our contactless touch technology.

Operating expenses for the second quarter increased to 38% compared to the same period last year and by 9% compared to previous quarter.

During the second quarter of last year, costs are low due to the pandemic. We've got governmental support at the same time as we introduced cost measures, meaning we were very cost conscious.

We are now investing in expertise, that is we are hiring competent people who will help with our continuing journey. The cost level we see in the second quarter this year is more in line with the expected cost level.

Our total gross margin for the second quarter 2021 was 87% compared to 84% for the same quarter of 2020. The increase is related to higher product sales with higher margins, as you can see in the second chart.

In the second chart, you can see a trend of improved margin on our products. The main explanations are: 1, the margin from Q2 2021 is not depressed by lower margin AirBar sales; and 2, we have updated the price list for QCM.

We expect to see an increase in margins coming quarters. Long term, as volumes continue to increase, we would probably see a pressure on the margin, but short and medium-term, we are confident that our margin in the product business will be at least on the levels we saw during the second quarter.

Net cash used in operating activities during the second quarter of 2021 was $1.4 million. Compared to the previous quarter, net cash from operating activities has decreased to 29%. The negative cash flow has actually decreased compared to the previous quarters, which affected due to onetime items. We expect the cash to [last 12%] into next year.

Back to you, Urban.

Thank you, Fredrik. Now for the next part of this call, I want to review with you a little bit more in-depth on our strategies and our business development.

First of all, I'd like to share what is our vision. And we state like that: to transform the way humans interact with machines. At Neonode, this has been at the core of company since its foundation. 20 years ago, Neonode was founded with a focus to develop new innovative smartphones. Since then, we have developed touch solutions for e-readers, printers and other innovations, always with a focus on transforming and improving the interaction between human and machines. We continue to work towards this vision in everything we do every day, every week, every month.

We have a broad technology portfolio, and we work with touch, gesture control, object detection, team analysis using cameras. And since last year, with an increased focus in what we call contactless touch, and I will explain in a minute what we mean by contactless touch.

Our technology and our offerings extend across multiple segments. Our main focus is with elevators and interactive kiosks, but we also continue to work with automotive applications, medical applications, military, avionics, consumer electronics and to some extent, also digital signage, which can see -- be seen as an extension of the interactive kiosk segment.

Our main focus, however, since last year, and continues to be this year and going forward, lies in this center, contactless touch for elevators and kiosks. And this is where I want to go a little bit further into detail now in the presentation.

What is contactless touch? For us, we mean contactless but touch like interaction with a display or with a keypad or a keyboard or a button with finger. You hover your finger in front of the display and you click, you swipe, you scroll, but you do this with finger gestures in mid-air. This is what we mean by contactless touch.

Touch interface is very simple and intuitive, and many of us are very used to interacting with machines to touch. This is an special variation of this, where the interaction takes place in mid-air in front of the display or above the keyboard, not touching it.

And here, our touch sensor modules, originally obviously developed for touch applications, but also intended for gesture sensing is a perfect fit. They offer a simple, intuitive way of creating good user-friendly contactless touch interfaces and applications can be found in a variety of different types of kiosks and elevators and also other applications.

And why is this interesting? We have talked about this in previous earnings calls. And today, I just wanted to share these 2 quotes from 2 market reports. I think most of you have heard stories and read reports about what can be found on touch screens and other devices in public spaces. And it's not perhaps the most pleasant thing to think about. But there is a lot of bacteria, viruses and other things sitting on these screens and keypads. And of course, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the focus on this. But we say that contactless touch is very, very good in general for health and safety. And this is, of course, true for viruses like the COVID virus. But in general, there are many other viruses as well and has been for the last 100 years, toting around over here in the world and also bacteria. And you have all other particles and materials depositing on these displays. And here is where contactless touch really can add customers attraction and add a good user experience and also add to the branding and to the customer using.

And why do we think that we have a right to win here, why Neonode? And why our touch sensor modules? They are simple, intuitive, easy to use. They're also very cost-effective compared to many other solutions. And if you look at cost of ownership and into retrofit, we have very, very strong offering here.

There are, of course, other ways to realize a contactless touch user interface. And it's very clear to me, and I want to be the first to admit that in some applications, for instance, the use of personal devices like your mobile phone will be a good alternative, but we still think that our type of contactless touch interface is for displays, for keypads, for buttons and elevators, they are very natural, simple, easy to use, relatively cheap and easy to install. So we have actually a great opportunity with elevator customers and with kiosk customers. And we can offer a lot of added end user value.

Speaking about elevators, one of our 2 key areas. We continue to progress our business development with partners such as MAD Elevator here from Canada. They have developed products that they call PHANTOM. And it's a new product for them, realizing a contactless touch interface for their elevator control panel. They have developed, tested and have started to roll out this product, and they are gaining more and more positive feedback from these rollouts and the new installs that they are making.

Here is one example from a health care center in Toronto, Canada, where we have very positive feedback and where they have very satisfied, both buying customers and end customers, end users. We have similar stories from our other partners, Dewhurst in the U.K. and FineTek in Korea. And we are also starting to approach elevator OEMs and other players in elevator markets, both in Asia, Europe and North America.

So elevator is and will be one of our main focuses going forward. And we have to-date actually moved forward our position quite considerably compared to last year and even compared to the first quarter this year. So personally, I see that we have a very, very good and strong play in elevators going forward.

Kiosks is perhaps even more interesting for 2 reasons. One, there is around 20 million elevators in the world. But if you would count the number of interactive kiosks of all types, it's almost 40 million, and that number is rapidly growing every year. So the CAGR for interactive kiosks and the adoption of this type of solution is very fast, and it's fast, both in Asia, Europe and North America. So we are super positive about our opportunity in kiosks.

We have worked, for instance, with Japan Aerospace, targeting airports and airlines. And recently, we started a new trial at Narita Airport with SkyTeam, and that involves, for instance, KLM Air France, Korean Air, super happy customers. The first reactions and the first trials from Narita -- and remember, Narita is international airport outside Tokyo, so all the Olympic participants traveled through Narita, and that's why they wanted to have these kiosks there and show them.

We have previously announced and we have already started to roll out on a more massive scale with one major Asian airline. And we are also doing other installations and trials in South Korea, in Middle East, and we are approaching airports also in Europe and North America.

So the transportation sector, perhaps led by airports, airlines, but don't forget, we also have similar at train stations, bus stations, subway stations and so on. You have similar check-in, baggage drop kiosks and ticketing kiosks where our contactless touch technology fits very, very well.

So self-service, kiosks at airports and other transportation hubs is another area where we continue to work and already have -- already seen some great results.

Another segment is quick service restaurants and hospitality in general. Self-ordering kiosks at hamburger restaurants in all over the world, we are working with future restaurants in Japan. There are examples of companies using our touch sensor modules to do contactless touch interfaces or hotel check in and other hospitality applications as well.

If you consider a hamburger restaurant, for instance, I think, and keeping this in mind about the transmission of viruses and bacteria from touch surface on the kiosk, then you sit down and eat your Hamburger and your fries with your bare hands, it's a little bit disgusting. And personally, I have distaste for this now. So I would really appreciate if the hamburger restaurants I frequent, if they would also convert their kiosks to contactless interfaces. It brings a lot of value, I think.

And we will continue to push here with different partners and different customers to grow our business in quick service restaurants and other hospitality applications.

Retail and the checkout terminals is another big play for us. And I'm happy to announce that NEC, the Japanese IT company awarded us with a letter of appreciation last month for good cooperation in a couple of projects that we have been working with them on for retail applications and in particular, self-checkout terminals for supermarkets and similar.

So also retail and self-service kiosks, there is a great play for us. And NEC is just one of the large OEM customers that we are engaged with, and we are happy to work with NEC and to grow our business with them in Japan and also internationally.

As a final example of this exposit of customer activities, I wanted to review with you this case with MiTAC. We have -- in the beginning of the summer, released a press release that MiTAC shows our top sensor modules for Smart AI kiosk. And this is significant for 2 reasons for us. One is that the MiTAC kiosks had a 32 inch screen, and MiTAC used 4 sensor modules per kiosk to realize the contactless interface and to reach the performance they were looking for.

Second is that this is a smart AI kiosk, and we think this is pointing the way to the future for -- obviously, for MiTAC, and they believe strongly in themselves and also for other kiosk manufacturers.

And we, at Neonode, using our camera-based technology to monitor human activity in cars or in other basis, we will certainly continue to look into this and work on smart kiosk applications, combining our contactless touch technology with camera technology. So look out for more news on smart kiosks and technology solutions from Neonode in this area in the future.

Just a few examples. And this is what we mean, that we are continuing to execute on our strategies. And remember, our main focus areas is elevators and kiosks, and kiosks consists of many subsegments, everything from transportation to restaurants and to retail and further segments as well.

It's a great opportunity. We can work both retrofit and new equipment. Also, I'm very eager to share with you that Neonode, we are a value-driven company. Our core values are shown on this slide. One Team, With Purpose, Customer Focus, Make Tomorrow Better. And building on Make Tomorrow Better, we continue relentlessly to execute on the strategies we have and also to try to improve the way we work and everything we do.

So during the last month, during the second quarter and throughout the summer, we have had a special focus on our sales and marketing and engineering activity. And to work to improve how these teams work together and how they work individually.

One result is that we decided during the second quarter to reorganize our sales team into regional responsibilities. And as you know, from the previous earnings call where we described this in some detail, we are now working with one team focusing on sales in the APAC region and another team with sales on the EMEA region and third team with focus on the Americas.

We are already starting to see some really good results from this in terms of increased focus and in bigger funnels in all 3 regions and also bigger sales, as we have reported in this call earlier. And we will continue to work on this and build on this. We are encouraged by the results we have achieved from the reorganization and the recruitments that we have done of new talent and experience to the Neonode team. And this is what motivates me to come to the office every day to see the progress we are making and how much we can achieve together in the different teams.

Another thing I wanted to comment on here is our go-to-market strategy. We continue to get questions from shareholders, from other partners, customers and just interested people. Especially one question is repeated by many is, why have you focused so much on your partner network in the last year? And I wanted to really use this picture and talk a little bit more about this in general about our go-to-market strategy.

First of all, we think that this type of pyramid illustration is very suitable to describe both elevator and the kiosk market. At the top here of these 2 markets, there are like 10 or so really big multinational companies, representing a large fraction of the total market share. For elevators, it's, in fact, 4 companies that make up more than 60% of the market of new elevators. With kiosks, it's again, 5 companies that have dominated in market share if you look globally. But on the other hand, below them, there is just a number of quite sizable. And here, they are represented by the middle segment here, midsized OEMs that have also a very, very big business. And at the bottom, there are many, many small players that work more locally.

The more we work on elevators and kiosks, the more we -- I think that this illustration is suitable to describe these 2 markets. And how do we approach these customers? Yes, we do it with a combination of direct sales with our own sales resources. Because we are a small team relatively, we direct the focus here on the larger accounts and the more strategic accounts. To help us increase the speed of the market penetration, open up doors that are closed to us, for instance, in Asia, because the way the business is typically done in countries like Japan and South Korea. And also, you have to increase coverage and add resources, both in marketing and sales and engineering and technicians to go out and install these solutions in the field. That's why we work with partners.

And also, we try to direct as many customers as possible to our distributors, like Digi-Key and Serial, and we have to manage the sales through them in an automatic way as to save time and money for us and yet push out products.

We are finding that this hybrid go-to-market strategy, combining direct sales and indirect sales with partners is a very effective and suitable for our type of products and our type of business and the customers and the markets we are addressing.

We will continue to build this. There will be regional and national variations, and there will also be some variations between the different sub segments. But overall, this is the model that will continue. We are quite happy with the results we have achieved so far, and we are happy with the projects that we have signed up so far. This is not -- maybe not a lifelong commitment, and maybe we will move on. And why I say this is because I also wanted to share this with you. The sales cycle, typically for us, starts with retrofits. And here is 1 area where we have good use of partners. They can be integrators, tech companies with their own products where they can integrate and use our sensor modules. And in some cases, it can be OEMs also working in the aftermarket themselves.

Some of these integrators and tech companies, we have signed up as value-added resellers. Of course, when they approach their customers, they present themselves as a product company or systems integrators and so on. The good thing is that when they do so, they include our contactless touch technology in their offering and help us then reach new customers.

Even long term, retrofits is where we see the largest potential. It's also quite short sales cycle relatively speaking. But we have to be clear that for every elevator, for every kiosk, there has to be at least 1 person visiting the site and physically installing a device in the elevator on the kiosk. And in all countries in the world, it will be very, very challenging for Neonode to do this all by ourselves. So this is another obvious reason why it's good for us to work with partners to help us penetrate the market and get these solutions out.

What we are starting to see with elevators, in some cases with kiosks, is that OEMS, they get aware about the solution, they see the positive improvement of end user value and satisfaction our solution brings, and then they want to integrate this in the new equipment from the beginning. And this is sort of the second phase when we can address new installs. And then the customers that we need to focus on shifts a little bit away from the small tech companies and some local players into more of the OEMs. On the other hand, sales cycles tend to be longer. And in some cases, also impossible us to go directly to the OEMs. But as mentioned, with elevators and some types of kiosks, we are at the OEM level now in our sales cycle. And just the name drop again, NEC, obviously, NEC is a major OEM company in kiosks, and they are interested and they are installing this upfront, and they are also doing retrofits on their own kiosks in the field.

With the OEMS, we can also take this further. And together with them, develop and realize new innovative functionality. And that's sort of the third phase of the sales cycle. This is typically even longer sales cycle. But then on the other hand, if we have built up momentum in the 2 previous phases, and we have established a good relationship with these OEMS, it will sort of play by itself when we get there.

So taking it together with the other slides that I reviewed with you guys before this and this one, this shows the good benefit and the value of having partners, but also shows that we, in parallel, work with direct sales, targeting especially main OEMs and larger accounts.

So we will continue with this hybrid go-to-market strategy. Partners play an important role, but it's not the only channel we are using to reach customers and to drive sales. We have to understand that it's in different phases in the sales cycle, and it will also be different depending on what customers we are targeting.

And at Neonode, we are well positioned to work with OEMs and larger system integrators. And also, we are very aware of and happy with owning and controlling the technology and IP. So we are building on this, and we are confident that long-term, we will come out as the winners in this. And on the way there, all the partners that we work with can have a good run and a good business. And we already see in some examples where partners have significantly increased their business, thanks to being able to offer our touch sensor modules and contactless touch solutions to their customers.

So it's a win-win. But we are happy with our position. We continue to defend it. We continue to develop it. And simply, we are having a good time. And this is the generic sales cycle that we are working on every day here, every week.

So thank you for your patience and your time. I also wanted to review this and make a few comments on these things that we continue to get questions on from different parties, as I mentioned upfront.

With this overview, we have come close to the end of the presentation. Just wanted to give you some summarizing remarks from my side.

The first is that we see a high and increasing demand for our contactless touch solutions and our touch sensor modules. Of course, we can always hope and ask for more, we ask ourselves what we can do more. But we are very happy with the progress we have made during the second quarter despite headwinds caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and other challenges. We have said since last year that this is a new business for us, and it will not be like something that we can implement and achieve overnight. It's more like a medium or long distance run that we are into. We think that the progress is good and that we have all the confirmations we need to continue to execute on our strategies.

Our main focus continues to be elevators and interactive kiosks, as I have described in the previous slides. Elevators is pretty straightforward. The first and obvious application is to convert the control panels in the elevators. This is the control panel with physical buttons or with a touch display that is common in some modern elevators today. We can convert both to contactless touch operation. We can also convert the so-called hall call buttons or displays if you have outside of each floor. So for a typical elevator installation, we have actually an opportunity to sell multiple touch sensor modules to the customer for the elevator itself and the hall call button. This is pretty straightforward.

In the next -- I mean, the future offerings from Neonode, targeting elevated customers, we will also include more innovations and smart features that makes just the user experience more pleasant, more convenient and fast. So elevators continue to be one of the focus areas.

The other one is interactive kiosks. And interactive kiosks, as mentioned, comes in many shapes and forms, represent terminals, self-service kiosks at airports and restaurants and so on. Always we group in interactive kiosks. It's a very exciting market, good growth numbers. There are around 40 million kiosks, if you count all types in the world installed today. And the growth rate is high single-digit numbers in percent and growing. And we see it -- here in Sweden, we see it in so many places in restaurants and other hospitality and retail applications. But we will have to get used to more and more of these self-service kiosks and Neonode, we are here to make them contactless for better user experience, for a safe and healthy interaction between man and machine.

Overall, we are convinced that we are well positioned to accelerate growth and capitalize on for future opportunities. And encouraged by this, we continue to invest in our human resources, but also in our product development, marketing and sales.

So we are accelerating. And we are also accelerating our business and growth. And this is the current status after the second quarter in 2021. And in the second year of the pandemic, I'm quite happy to be able to share this update on our progress in Neonode at this point.

This brings me to an end of the presentation. I thank you for your attention, and I give the word back to you, Dave.

Thanks, Urban. I now open the call for Q&A from our covering analysts.

(Operator Instructions) We'll take our first question from Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum.

This is Tyler on for Christian. A couple of questions. First, it seems like everything is progressing well here as expected. So I was just wondering if you could maybe give some more color, break out maybe what was better-than-expected or worse than expected over the last 90 days, if that's by end market or geography or even just regarding your pipeline and outlook, that would be great.

Yes. So during the second quarter, we saw actually good growth numbers for both our licensing business, and that is mainly related to automotive customers and printer customers. Actually, we are quite happy, and we are up more than 50% on licensing revenues. So there, we can say that we are back on a good level, and this is a trend that also was present during the first quarter. But this is good news, and we are satisfied with this. We are also working on some new licensing or NRE projects that will, in the longer term, generate new licenses. So our solutions business continues to be one of our focuses that we work on, automotive, military, avionics, medical, this type of customers we are talking about. But even more interesting, I think, is the growth of our products business, which is growing quite nicely, and actually several hundred percent. Like I talked about in the previous earnings call with you guys, we are now seeing that type of growth. And personally, I think that we are up in the beginning of the growth curve for our product space.

So this is what we mean by we are building our pipeline. And so far, Asia is leading the way, and in particular, Japan and South Korea, this is no secret. And this is also what we expected. But we are happy to see that our sales funnel, both in Asia and Europe and North America is filling out with quite interesting leads that we are now working to qualify and push forward into new deals for us. But of course, even though there's a pandemic and many customers and end customers feel like a pressure to come out with like contactless touch interfaces, you have to remember that the OEM customers here that we are working directly or in indirectly with, they are still large Fortune 500 companies, many of them. They won't change their purchasing processes and development processes or launch processes. So things take a little time. And in some cases, in Japan, actually, the projects we are seeing now being rolled out, they started last year in the second quarter or third quarter. And now we are seeing the results on them.

So it's true. Europe, North America is a little bit behind, but the sales funnel is also there, are starting to fill up with a lot of interesting leads that we are now working to qualify. And it's exciting for us, and it's looking very, very promising for the coming months and quarters.

That's great. I appreciate the color. The second question, I understand the focus near-term here is on the kiosks and elevators, and you outlined that very well. So not to distract from that. But I wanted to ask you about your in-car cabin monitoring solutions. Any change/update there? Seems still very interesting, but longer-term opportunity. Maybe just a comment there would be great.

Yes. It's one of the technology areas that I personally find very, very interesting. Here, we are using cameras and camera inputs and combining this with AI software to detect humans, for instance, inside a car, and we can obviously use it also to detect humans inside an elevator. So for me, it's a little bit more generic. But yes, you're right. This is also what we aim.

Our main focus has been driver monitoring and in-cabin monitoring for automotive applications so far. We continue to develop the technology platform and to develop also applications around this for automotive customers. We are involved in a number of interesting discussions. We are invited to participate in some RFQs that we are answering up to right now, but it is a longer process. And this is something that if and when we can win some of these projects, it will then be followed by an interesting development phase of 2, 3 years before the corresponding vehicle models are launched, and then we can start to just wait and see some royalties from this business. But it's a long-term -- more long-term venture that we are doing and the technology development is progressing well. We will also use more kiosk and elevator applications. And it fits very, very well into our technology portfolio.

So there is both a business aspect of this and the product portfolio and technology aspect of this venture that we are doing here with driving in-cabin monitoring.

And we'll take our next question from Jesper Henrikson with Redeye.

Fredrik mentioned that you had updated your pricing list of some products, which had a positive effect on margins. Could you repeat what that was and elaborate a little on this?

Yes. Urban here. I will answer the question on behalf of both me and Fredrik. So obviously, we have spoken in previous earnings calls and other presentations that our main focus is to grow our top line. So we will just grow the revenues from our product sales. That's true. But also, the gross margin is super important for us. And we have continuously monitored this, and we saw, for instance, in the previous quarter, what I think, not satisfactory gross margins on our product sales.

Now it should be clear, we write this in the report, this is a lot due to onetime effects from sales of old AirBar products that we did in the beginning of the year. But during the first, second quarter, like the end of first quarter and beginning of the second quarter, we have implemented repriced lists for our distributors and our customers for the sensor modules, but also Evaluation Kits. That helped us increase the gross margin to a more healthy level, like above 40%, where we are targeting with the current volume.

So actually, on the running business, we have a very, very good gross margin between 40% and 50%. And the average numbers we show in the report include also some sales from the beginning of the year, that little bit drags us down. But now we are on a good level. Of course, we try to almost apply value-based pricing and that applies both for NRE, when we work with certain projects and when we do, for instance, software development for some customers and for the potential modules that if we have an opportunity to increase prices, improve our margin, we will do.

We are also working on the cost side, obviously. We are a product company. We produce the sensor models ourselves. So we have a continuous focus on cost reductions in terms of component cost, manufacturing costs and so on. So that has also helped to some degree.

And going forward, we will have still the main focus on growing the top line, but we will make sure that also the gross margin is on a good level because that gives us in the end, the profit and that will, say, help us improve the cash flow into black figures and positive cash flow, first, obviously, month by month, but then year-on-year. So that's the background. Housekeeping -- and just being focused on our business and our margins.

Great. And you also said that you have moved forward your positions considerably even compared to Q1. I think that was mainly in regards to HMI products. Could you elaborate a little on this?

Yes. This is -- we say contactless touch for elevators and kiosks, that continues to be our main focus. This is also where we measure the most. And there we have the highest activity in our marketing, sales, business development. So here is also where we have now covered larger parts of the sales cycle for us, where we have started to feel that we have, in some cases, penetrated the refocused opportunity and moving into the new -- installed new equipment opportunity with OEM customers that are pooling us along. So that's quite encouraging.

At the same time, if I move from, say, Asia, into Europe and North America, you can see that, yes, they are a little bit behind. But during the second quarter, that we believe to a large extent supported by our move into regional sales organization, where we could focus our resources much more efficiently, we have been able to increase first the sales funnels there and also start to convert some of these opportunities into deals and convert prospects into real customers. But this is an ongoing work, and we are a global team. So I can promise you we work literally 24/7 on this, starting in Asia and then completing in Europe and ending the day in Southern California. So we have a pretty global team. And everyone in the team is working on this around the clock.

Nice. And as a follow-up question on that, you say that you have come basically all the way in the sales cycle, processing retrofit solutions. Could you talk a little bit about how you expect sales in the Retrofit solutions, yes, developed going forward, since we've reached that stage?

I had on one slide, you remember, this pyramid sitting upside down.

Yes.

On the slide, there you have the retrofit opportunity, also long-term will continue to be our main opportunity. And this is because the installed base in both elevators and the relevant types of kiosks is at least around $20 million and plus $20 million. So there's a huge installed base, both on elevators and kiosks. And every year, I mean, realistically, how many of these can we reach? Yes, from a few percent or 5% or something like this. But doing the math, that's a good number. And the lifetime of an elevator is far beyond 25 years, I would say, many type key elevators for, say, 50 years, but of course, with regular refurbishments and upgrades. And every such upgrade, we have a retrofit opportunity.

Perhaps real estate owner or the landlord, they will not replace the whole elevator, but they perhaps replace and update the motors, control electronics and inside the control walls and the control panels inside the elevator, and then we have an opportunity with elevators.

Kiosks, you can check Jesper, a typical kiosk cost everything between $5,000 and $10,000. And if you have -- you are the owner of the hamburger restaurant, that represents a huge investment for you. And if they buy 5 or 10-kiosks for the restaurant, which is common, they not -- they will not replace 1 every year for soon. They will use them for as long as possible. And also for kiosk, we hence have a good retrofit opportunity every year to penetrate and supply a certain portion of the market with our solutions.

Now to install this in every kiosk and every elevator, we need what you can say, boots on the ground. And they need to be in Japan, they need to be in Korea, they need to be in France and Sweden and U.S., Canada. And again, here is where we see a good opportunity for the right partners to come in and build a business. And we have several such examples that have engineering resource and capabilities so that they can develop a good hardware solution, which is mainly mechanical housing, but also that can work on the software application. And then they have technicians, or they work in turn with service providers in different countries and different locations to go out and install this.

One of our partners that I just talked to, just the other day, they worked a lot with airports, and they have started to use the airport technicians to work as installers and upgraders of kiosks. So that's another cannon for us.

All right. And do you see any specific partners or OEMs starting to ramp up their installations?

Yes, several. It's gradual. NEC is one that we can obviously remain, but we are working with a few elevator OEMs and MAD, Dewhurst, FineTek are also OEMS, okay. They are control panel OEMs, but they have started already to roll out and launch -- have their product awareness in the market. But this is coming along, and it's a gradual process. It will not happen overnight, and this is what we mean, again by, we are building our business pipeline.

Good. And then my last question about Dewhurst. Will that initially only target the U.K. market? And if so, what are the chances of a global expansion, and in what time horizon?

I can group Dewhurst together with MAD. Both -- they are interesting companies. They are leaders in control panels and buttons for elevators. They work internationally. MAD is located in headquarters in Canada, but they cover North America and are also selling to Europe. Dewhurst is a U.K. company. They have a big market share in the U.K., but they also sell in other parts of Europe, at least.

Both MAD and Dewhurst, they work both with aftermarket and OEM sales. So we have heard from 1 of the 4 leading elevator OEMs in the world that, yes, they use control panels for new projects from both MAD and Dewhurst. So this type of company is interesting, both as a direct customer to us and as a link into elevator OEMs. And they are -- say, they have this in their catalog. They are doing installs and rolling this out.

FineTek is the third company, very similar. And I can also mention that in China, we have 2 companies. One is Jardine Schindler, and other one is called [Roehrborn]. They are doing installs. And the third Chinese or Hong Kong company is HKPC that have already during the winter starting to roll out and launch their own contactless touch solutions for elevators in Hong Kong and China.

So elevators is happening. And again, this is a gradual rollout. And you can realize, if you talk retrofit in an elevator or even in a new installation, you have to visit every building, and you have to install the elevator or the control panel. So this is the dynamics of this market that we are working in, and we expect that's working. But our module fits very well through these applications. It's simple to use, easy to install, and so far, customer reactions are unanimously positive.

And there are no further questions. I'll turn the call back over to you, Mr. Brunton for any additional closing remarks.

Thank you. We want to thank you all for joining us for our call today. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

Thank you. And this does conclude today's program. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at any time.