Qt GROUP AS AN INVESTMENT

Enabling companies to create industry-leading products that users love

+1.5M

developers

+70

client industries

+3,500

commercial customers

We help companies to meet the increasing software market requirements driven by the exponential growth of embedded devices and the rapidly increasing pace of new product releases. Developing mobile and desktop applications has been in the DNA of Qt since the beginning – the first public version of Qt Framework in 1995. Still, we see great potential in the embedded device market: graphical user interfaces (GUI) are coming to billions of everyday devices. Our customers operate in 70 industries, including automotive, medical, industrial automation, and consumer electronics.

As the amount of software in the world increases and gets more complicated through new features and functionalities at each release, so does the demand for quality assurance tools to ensure that the software works accordingly on all devices, platforms, and technologies. It’s estimated that up to 30 percent of software development costs come from testing. To keep up with the increasing pace of new releases, developers and QA engineers are looking to automate as much as possible.

Qt Group’s unique product offering addresses each step of the product development process as an integrated toolchain or as stand-alone tools and framework, whichever suits best. With us, companies can increase productivity in their product development at each step of the process, from UI design and software development to testing and deployment.

Our product offering

Qt Development

From mobile and desktop applications to embedded devices, the Qt Framework and our extensive development tools provide everything necessary for developing and deploying entire product lines. Our customers are able to create applications and devices that are beautiful on the front end and powerful on the back end, with the same codebase for any hardware or OS or even bare metal. Qt’s cross-platform software framework can be used in product development under commercial and open-source licenses.

Design Tools

We bring designs to life with our tools for designers, technical artists, and front-end developers. With our tools, design teams can go beyond traditional mock-ups to create functional UIs, ready to be tested and run on any platform. By closing the gap between designers and developers, collaboration gets better and workflow significantly faster, making it easy to create products that users love.

Qt Quality Assurance

Our quality assurance (QA) tools ensure the quality of all cross-platform desktop, mobile, embedded, and web applications regardless of the platform used. Our quality assurance offering covers dynamic testing and static analysis tools for various purposes, from automated graphical user interface (GUI) testing to managing code coverage and verifying architecture and code style.

Industry trends driving Qt Group’s growth opportunities

There are three major change trends in the software development industry that we foresee having a positive effect on Qt Group’s future:

1. The growing importance of customer experience

A trend that started with the first smartphones: software defines the value of products. Excellent user experience is a significant competitive differentiator and a critical factor in ensuring that a product succeeds in the market.

2. Platform-agnosticism

Modern product lines aim to produce a unified user experience across low-end to high-end products and companion apps, each of which could be built with different hardware and operating systems. Cross-platform software development tools enable companies to reuse the same codebase in all their products, increasing productivity and shortening the time to market.

3. Increasing need for automated testing and quality assurance

As the software development pace accelerates, developers and quality assurance engineers are turning to automated quality assurance and testing tools to discover and fix bugs and suboptimal code early in the process. Release frequencies are increasing, and it’s nearly impossible to meet release deadlines without an automated testing tool. Automated quality assurance saves software development costs from both developers’ time spent on code reviews and time spent on fixing bugs, as it is faster when they are found early. 

Strategy and financial targets

At its meeting on October 26, 2023, the Board of Directors of Qt Group Plc has decided to update the company’s financial targets for the new strategy period until 2027. 

According to the decision of the Board of Directors, the company’s targets for the new strategy period until 2027 are as follows:

  • annual net sales growth of 20–30%, which means that the company will more than double its net sales over the next four years
  • an operating profit margin (EBITA %) of at least 25%

Exchange rate fluctuations will continue to have a significant effect on the company’s reported net sales.

Qt is uniquely positioned in the global embedded software markets, which have tremendous future potential. We can provide our customers with significant added value in all stages of the software development process, from design to software development and testing. Our solutions suit both affordable and high value-added products and enable faster product development and launch for customers. They also reduce risks, deliver cost savings and help our customers create higher-quality products.

We will pursue the targets set for the new strategy period primarily through organic growth by taking advantage of our strong product portfolio and product development, as well as our global sales network. By providing our customers with even higher value-added solutions, we give ourselves the opportunity to capture an even larger share of our customers’ product development budgets.

In addition to pursuing organic growth, we actively seek targeted acquisitions that support our strategy.   

The company’s aim is to refrain from the distribution of dividends until further notice.

Analyst coverage

To our knowledge, the following analysts are covering the Qt Group

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Updated: Nov 17, 2023