BlackBerry Limited (NYSE:BB) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

John Chen: Yes. Well, you or anyone of the people in your firm gone to the Moto Trend event in CES in Vegas this beginning of the year? The reason I asked that question is because nearly every OEM, we should try to get tickets for you guys in the future. Even every OEM is having a SDV plan, Software-Defined Vehicle. So yes, the scope are expanding. We just don’t want to get overly carry away with our estimates, but the scope is definitely expanding. It is truly a timing thing. We, in particular, one case, we’re relying on some really good developer seats that didn’t come in and that was purely a timing issue, because they wanted to step up the program, and there is some very visible public thing, public announcement that they are reorg — OEM — major OEMs are reorganizing some of their efforts and step up some of the car release dates because of software. There are at least a handful of them, because they are all my customer, I prefer not to mention here.

Daniel Chan: Okay. That’s helpful. Thanks for that. And then on the Cybersecurity side, the billings that you won, any color on whether — on how much of those were renewals versus new business? Thank you.

John Chen: Oh, that’s interesting. I don’t have it. We could have Tim follow up with you. I don’t have the breakdown of the $122 million.

Daniel Chan: Okay. Thanks. Just looking for some color on how much of that is just backfilling contracts that have expired versus how many…

John Chen: Look, I would tell you, the biggest one that was the most significant one was an extension of multiple number of years and also expanded the footprint on number of licenses. So, it’s — in that case, it’s the both — is both.

Daniel Chan: Great. Thank you.

John Chen: Sure. Of course.

Operator: The next question comes from Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research. Please go ahead.

John Chen: Hi, Trip.

Steve Rai: Hey, Trip.

Trip Chowdhry: Congratulations. Very good backlog and billing numbers. I have a question, in terms of IVY, you have a very strong machine learning models for Cylance and I was wondering, is there a way using maybe some transfer learning or some other secret sauce that this intellectual horsepower you have in the Cylance machine learning AI products, we could transpose into IVY and if so, that would be great. Any thoughts you may have on that end?

John Chen: Yes, we — like every company, we obviously we are looking at this plan. You — so first off, our threat hunting group, as always, uses the AI, and we recently just offer the threat hunting services to customers. So, in a way that it’s all AI-driven model, it’s like four generations of that and we’ve got billions of — we’ve got literally billions of malware profiles and the experience that we build a model based on the machine learning. So, that’s — so you’ll probably see that being a push. Now, as if other AI capability going into products, we haven’t finalized that, we’re in a — in a business of going through it, in the process of going through it, except I want to kind of — we want to make sure that we don’t generate too much of a review too much of our internal model when we go into the open AI world.

So we’re literally in that kind of internal analysis of it, and we also are waiting for the government. I think the government will have something to say about how the AI are allowed to use and not allowed to use in a product, because we’re very sensitive to governments. We — we’re a big provider of system or software to governments around the world. So, we got to be very careful that we don’t run a file with their rules. So, those are the — I have people working on both, the developing the product as well as understanding the policy.