Nixu Corporation: CEO’s review for Q1 2020

Nixu Corporation, Press release on April 16 at 9:05 AM EEST

Nixu Corporation announced today that its unaudited revenue for January–March 2020 was EUR 14.0 million, whereas the revenue in the comparison period of Jan–Mar 2019 was EUR 12.6 million. Revenue growth of 11% was fully non-organic. The company also announced its unaudited EBITDA for January–March 2020, which was EUR -365 thousand after restructuring costs. Adjusted EBITDA before one-time restructuring costs of EUR 373 thousand was EUR 8 thousand.

The company has earlier on March 24, 2020 withdrawn its full year financial guidance due to the coronavirus outbreak.

CEO Petri Kairinen:

Since last fall, Nixu has focused on developing its sales work, streamlining its service offering, improving staffing of services and enhancing forecasting with early indicators. In Q1 2020 these measures are beginning to show results: order intake in Q1 slightly exceeded our target and in March the results were clearly positive, both in revenue and EDITBA. However, the overall Q1 results, mainly due to January and February, were still not satisfactory and we failed in gaining organic growth or EBITDA during this period. It is still good to remember that the comparison period of Q1 2019 was a time of remarkable organic growth due to fast start of several projects and partnerships. On the positive side for Q1 2020, the managed security services continued at a good growth rate of 65% compared to previous Q1. Managed security services consisted of 18% of Nixu revenues and altogether continuous services accounted for 38% of the revenue. The continuous service contracts are of course essential during these exceptional times we are now facing with the coronavirus pandemic and the following economic downturn.

The coronavirus pandemic reached Nixu’s main operating markets during March. The company moved quickly into a remote working mode to protect the health and safety of employees. This was quite an easy adjustment due to our regular operating model is based on location-free working. Thus, most of our work has continued normally. So far, the health effects on Nixu employees have been very small. We have also taken additional measures to protect the continuity of our services in the event of a large percentage of our employees falling ill simultaneously.

The financial impact of the corona pandemic and its preventive measures have started to materialize towards the end of March. So far, the effects have been minor. We have seen some project postponements or cancellations, but we have been able to continue signing new agreements with clients as well. Most of Nixu clients are enterprises that are not operating in the most affected consumer services type industries and they are mostly conducting their regular business even while working remote.

The future effects of the pandemic for the business are of course largely unknown. Nixu is preparing for the future with different scenarios and following action plans and triggers for their implementation. Sales pipeline, order intake and expected utilization levels of consultants are the key indicators. We expect the impact on the business to be largest in the project-based businesses whereas large implementation projects will probably continue as is, but signing new ones will be harder. Managed security services such as Cyber Defense Center are most protected, as it is hard for clients to drop their defenses when cyber-threats are only increasing. We are closely watching the estimates of our business in our operating markets. Should the expected revenues and profits fall, goodwill in the balance sheet may be impacted.

Our financial goals during this pandemic are first of all to protect our financial performance by securing revenue streams and reducing costs with phased approach. Additionally, we are negotiating for new financing arrangements to secure sufficient cash reserves. Secondly, we continue to protect and streamline our One Nixu platform in order to continue to implement the growth strategy in accordance with our 2024 growth ambitions. Thirdly, we want to come out of this pandemic stronger and more efficient than we went into it – the work that started during last half to improve operational efficiency is accelerated and has even bigger sense of urgency.

The coronavirus pandemic and following lockdown measures have forced much of the world to suddenly become very much digital. In this new reality, our mission statement of keeping the digital society running is more important than ever. In light of this, we have launched a new portfolio of services expressly chosen to help our enterprise clients adapt to this new situation securely and keep their operations ongoing even when facing cyber-threats.

After the pandemic is over, we believe that the world has fundamentally changed in the way digital work and digital business is viewed even in conservative industries. This may speed up the demand for cybersecurity services as digitalization deserves to be done right. Nixu is determined to be in the right place then to continue its journey as the go-to partner in cybersecurity services of digitalization for enterprises based in Northern Europe and the best place to work for cybersecurity professionals.

Nixu Corporation

Further information:
Petri Kairinen, Chief Executive Officer, Nixu Corporation
Telephone +358 40 832 1832, e-mail: petri.kairinen@nixu.com

Distribution:
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www.nixu.com

Nixu in Brief:
Nixu is a cybersecurity services company on a mission to keep the digital society running. Our passion is to help organizations embrace digitalization securely. Partnering with our clients we provide practical solutions for ensuring business continuity, an easy access to digital services and data protection. We aim to provide the best workplace to our team of over 400 cybersecurity professionals with a hands-on attitude. With Nordic roots we serve enterprise clients worldwide. Nixu shares are listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki stock exchange.
www.nixu.com