Quick Heal Technologies

Stock Opportunities
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I attended their conference call today and here are my two cents.

Even though the company is operating in cybersecurity space, management was focused on increasing sales by hiring a sales team. They kept on pressing in their conf call that once their enterprise product clicks, they will increase spending on their sales team and give them aggressive targets.

Here is the problem with that approach. Selling a software product via sales team is a very 2000 era approach and no longer works in today’s world. A good software product doesn’t need an aggressive sales team for the product to sell. Take for example, Druva. Its a cybersecurity start up started in 2008 and started focusing on building a cloud based cybersecurity product in 2015. Today the start up is valued north of $2 Billion USD. Its one of the leading cybersecurity start ups in the world, built right next door to Quick Heal in Pune.

The management of Quick Heal is stuck in 2000’s era and hasn’t updated itself or its strategies to compete with the changing industry dynamic. Not a single mention of ‘cloud’ was uttered in the entire conference call, even when they are building an enterprise product.

This mentality of management is reflected in the financials as well. Selling and General Administrative budget of the company is as much (and in some years) more than the entire R&D budget.

The company continues to sell its products on CDs (most laptops do not even have a CD Drive anymore) via distributors, in the age of cloud.

Most of this quarters increase came from increased laptop sales (management words, not mine) and 90%+ of their enterprise revenue is from government contracts. With startups like Druva, increasing their presence and getting aggressive about sourcing business in India, I personally think Quick Heal will have a hard time scaling its enterprise product, esp. if management sticks to strategies of the era gone by.

Kudos to them for building a great business esp. after coming from such humble background, but this business is more on the path to become story of yesterday rather than headlines of tomorrow.

Disclosure: My personal opinion, please do your own research. Not Invested, hold no positions.

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The management is saying they will more than triple the revenue in next three years, if this happens along with the current buy backs and the good dividend yield could be game changer. I hope it was not a slip of a tongue.

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No plans for any layoffs, as said by the company, sounds like ethical workplace.
Source: Feb 23 Concall

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Ethics have nothing do with IT business. It is all about future outlook for the company, growth, profits, losses etc. Some employees are let go if they cannot be allocated to running projects in any role, when new projects are not easily found, when the employees have run out of their time and are unable to find any work in the company, and the company cannot keep them on their payroll indefinitely etc. Of course, at the time of firing, the fired employee can argue that the layoff is unethical, that is a different thing.

IT like any other business is run as a business but with a lot of leeway, runway in your parlance, with the kind of cash they have, the broad reach the sector has, and a work environment, a culture which may change from company to company, a particular mindset that employees have, all when combined shows a relative resilience to other sectors, but paradoxically is one of the first to be affected too.

Not from IT, have some positions in the sector.

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Interesting video on impact of better browser

Whatever Happened To Computer Viruses?

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Good insights by PPFAS’s Raunak sir

They have already integrated AI in this, I dont know how much of is it is just for sales, but sounds good.

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The stock is at a sweet spot now - Reasons:

  1. The company has shifted their focus from Retail - traditional antivirus software segment to enterprise segment with the help of Seqrite. Enterprise cybersecurity market is poised to grown in double digits in coming years.
  2. The recent change in the management, new CEO Vishal Salvi is the Ex CISO of Infosys who setup the cybersecurity practice in Infosys.

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Seqrite got some big clients!!

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