SRT Marine Systems plc

Good morning, everybody. My name is Simon Tucker. I'm the CEO of SRT Marine Systems. Welcome to Webcast. So, as usual, some of you will be new and some are old hands at this. Perhaps a little bit fed up with them hearing from me all the time. There's a couple of rules that I like to follow. Number one is, obviously, I'm going to try and not make anybody inside and won't make anybody inside and cannot make anybody inside. And secondly, like it or not, we have obligations to customers who are also watching this webcast either live or at a later date and obviously don't want their maritime security plans and what have you aired in public for their neighbors and what have you. So we have to respect that confidentiality and be aware that it's not just shareholders and the like that are viewing this. So let's start with transceivers. So as you'll know, with our business, we have two divisions. We have a transceivers division and we have a systems division. And our transceivers division makes navigation safety transponders. When we talk about navigation safety, they enable boats to communicate with each other in real time, see where they are, identify each other, avoid collisions, autonomous navigation through infrastructure, avoiding infrastructure and the like. And also now we're moving into VHF radio, which is voice communication. And so that business, we produce a standard set of products. And they're sold through three different sales channels. We have our OEM sales channel. We have our MTRAC, which is our own brand sales channel. And we have DAS, which is digital aids to navigation, which is specifically around aids to navigation on ports and waterways. So transponders that will go onto bridges and buoys and the like. We produce a common set of products which are then customized for each of those channels. For our OEMs, we create a unique product and we sell to them. Most of our OEMs are the big marine electronics brands. They have a whole portfolio of marine electronics products. And we provide them with a specific type of transponder called an AIS transponder. And coming up next year, some of those will then start to take our VHF radio offer, which is called Nexus, and start to integrate that functionality into their MFDs and their navigation suites. So you can imagine now, rather like you're In your car, where your phone is integrated into your navigation display, if you're now on your boat and you're buying a whole suite of navigation equipment from a big marine electronics brand, all of the various functionality will be integrated into that navigation screen. You can touch the screen and speak to other vessels, et cetera. And our Nexus product will enable that. Last year, the OEM business dipped a little bit, and that is directly related to the new build market. So most of the big marine electronics brands sell into new boats. When you buy a new boat, you take a bunch of extras, if you can imagine, and one of those is marine electronics. And obviously, if New boat bills go down a little bit, which they have. So do the sales that we achieve through our OEM sales channel. But we expect that to level out this year and then start to rise again in the next couple of years. We then have our M-Track brand, where we have about 5,000 dealers and distributors all across the world. So a very powerful network that we've now built up. And that increased in volume during the year, and we grew the top line in the revenue, again, with a healthy margin. We have a lot of plans to expand that market. We will start to do some more marketing. Now, focused around our dealers, the power in that, in MTRAC now, is it's a real brand in the marine electronics market. It's a recognized brand for its performance and quality and reliability in customer service, courtesy of our team back at BASE. And we have 5,000 trained, knowledgeable dealers and distributors. Some are tiny guys, maybe based in Malta or in the United States, wherever it might be. And some are very big, big shops and outlets. And so we'll be expanding M-Track. And the big expansion there is not just our AI transponders, which are continuing to grow, but also Nexus. And Nexus is our new VHF DSC AIS combined radio. We launched that in November in Metz, so last month formally. Previously, we had done a soft launch to get some feedback from the market that we could integrate into our testing and preparation of that product. We've delayed the release of that for some time. And the reason we did that is we wanted to get that feedback from the soft launch. We wanted to be cautious about getting this right, getting the functionality smoothed, and to make sure that given the brand over the years that we've built up is not sullied by something that is less than perfect. And so whilst that's cost us time last year and money, this is well invested into what is quite an exceptional product. And what this product is, Nexus, which is being launched as the X100 under Amtrak, is a combination VHF marine AIS radio. But it allows interface into your mobile devices. So rather than being fixed at the helm with a CB-style radio talking to people, you now have digital voice processing on your mobile phone. You can make calls on your smartwatch to other vessels. You can create an intercom, private intercom with people on the vessel itself. So if you want to speak to somebody on the bow while you're at the helm or you're down in the cabin, maybe there's four of you, you can do a group call on your watch all through Nexus. If somebody falls overboard who's connected to Nexus, it will immediately create an alert for everybody and point in the direction where that happened. There's a whole array of functionalities that sit with all of that. But it's all about the convenience of boating. And any of you that are boaters will understand that it's actually pretty difficult to be maintaining everything while you're running around the boat, having a nice time, if you constantly need to be at the helm to do all the communications. So we're really excited by that. It was received. very well when we did our soft launch, and this was confirmed in November. For the first time ever, we built up a forward order book, and we will start shipping in February, and that is a commitment we've made to our dealers. The initial sales focus of that is not to make a big splash to the consumer. This is not how we operate. You can waste a fortune, money, doing all that sort of stuff. We have 5,000 dealers. So we have started a program of educating those 5,000 dealers on the X100. That is where the power of talking to their customers, each of whom have got tens and hundreds of customers, and they can go and talk to those customers in detail about the X100. And that is where the order is coming from. This is the power of the years of building up. that dealer network and our brand, it gives us the market penetration in an instant to launch that product. So our focus is training our dealers and not to distract from our dealers' relationship with their customers initially. This is why you're not seeing the X100 up on the Amtrak website at the moment. There's no need for that. It is all focused on educating those dealers. A big splash at Metz in November. We're now educating them. Testing continues. Pre-production has started. We will ramp up production slowly in the first six months of next year, just to make sure that if there's any further feedback as distribution widens into users, that we can capture that and refine the product before we then incrementally increase production. Typically, a new marine electronics product, transceiver product, will have a life of 10 years. So it's not like there's a rush to market and we must sell tens of thousands of these things in six months and then change it in six months. This investment that we've made in this product is something to be amortized over that period of time and the returns commensurate with that, which we expect to be significant and to grow those revenues over time. So, X100, otherwise known as Nexus, which is the core product, will find its way into the market from February in the MTRAC brand, later on in the year under some of our OEMs. So, we're very excited about that, and that is looking good. Turning to DAS, we nearly doubled our revenues last year in that area with a sort of 80% gross profit margin. Overall, our transceivers business did about 49% gross profit margin. And this is reflective of the complexity of the technology that we've built up and the products that we've built up. And now we're starting to see that growth in the market where digital aids to navigation are starting to be deployed more widely. You've seen, obviously, in the States where a ship hits a bridge, the disaster that can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars that can be happening there. You're now starting to see electronic ACE navigation rolled out, and that is why we're starting to see that growth. It's a slow-maturing market, but we got in there early, which means we've captured the market. We are the de facto product that everybody is specifying from, I don't know, SpaceX's platform that they put out in the ocean for the rockets to land on. That needs to be marked as a shipping hazard. They use our AIS-ATONs to buoys that you'll find in Rotterdam or Trinity House all around the U.K., So we see that continuing to grow very nicely long into the future, and we've got a core technology advantage with that, which is a combination of different things, size, and critically power consumption on those particular products. So our transceivers business we're very pleased with, and that whilst it doesn't have the sort of sets and fireworks of $100 million contracts, we do have this global network, this global brand, and we have the products and the core technology. And this continues to grow into what is, you know, a big marine market. So turning to systems, which is our business where we develop and deliver to customers integrated maritime surveillance systems. So I know everybody wants to talk about contracts or wants me to talk about contracts, but just I want to address a few points. I do read the boards and unbridled optimism and all that jazz. So let's just address some issues because I think that it's hard if you're outside of the business and not in full possession of the facts, and I can't communicate all those facts for the reason that I said earlier, to understand what the situation is. So we started this business about 10 years ago in a vacuum of nobody believing that actually you needed air traffic control type systems for the marine world. It was a sort of forgotten space. And when we started it, everyone sort of fell about laughing and things and nobody would ever do it. And then Bahrain, albeit a small country, implemented the world's first national vessel identification and monitoring system using the system that we had developed. Since then, we have... signed and completed contracts worth well over $50 million. And that market has developed to a stage now where without any marketing at all, countries are coming to us and saying, we want to replicate what we have with our air traffic control system, but in the marine domain. And the marine domain is much more complex, has many more vessels and movements than an aviation space. And this is a long – each customer that comes to us, it is a long-term initiative on their part to build up their systems. They don't just buy a system and that's it, it's done. It's just the same as a business IT system, that they start with something, which is often limited by their budget and also their capacity to move from – very disparate analog systems, you know, man with a pair of binoculars or just man looking at a single radar scope into a digital complex, digital-led system. And where we are today is we have 10 years of R&D and experience under our belt. The SRT MDA system is now an extremely comprehensive, robust, and mature system that we are continuing to involve, adding analytics and augmented reality and various other functionalities. This is a continual thing. But we have the proven technology and the proven ability to deliver these systems today. And that's because we started this project. Odyssey 10 years ago. So what's happened in the last few years is we've built up what we call a validated sales pipeline. These are those countries that have come to us and said, we've taken the strategic decision to establish a national maritime domain awareness system of some type, be it focused on safety or security or fisheries management, environmental sustainability, but we've taken that decision to do that. And we've entered discussions with them as to How do they want to build that up? What does the first project look like? And today, what's happened over the last few years is that BSP has built up and some of those have come out and been converted into contract, be that in the Philippines or Indonesia or Kuwait. And as they've gone into contract, more have come in to that validated sales pipeline. So we have a bunch of prospective opportunities where we haven't validated those yet. We have a bunch that are validated and we expect to turn into contract at some time in the next few years. And then we have a pot that are in contract. And we expect to see that cycle to continue to go over many, many, many years. Each time we get a customer, we expect likely to be having repeat contracts from that customer for multiple decades as they build up their systems. And each time they build up the system, they will need more maintenance and support and data. So there's a raft of sub-agreements that go with that. Normal fare in building these sorts of contracts. big systems, and we have got ourselves into the position as being the leaders because we started so early and we've gone through the pain of developing that technology and experience. A couple of other issues I want to discuss that I think perhaps aren't clear enough are clearly discussed by people. The difference between a performance bond and product financing. Some of our customers, when we sign with them, pay for their own systems from their own money. Most of our customers can do that if they want to. So that is separate to a performance bond. A performance bond is a guarantee that we give via our bank. which typically is about 10% of the contract value, which basically guarantees that we will implement the project as stated. This is extremely low risk, and we've never had a claim on any project bond. We've done this previously. The magnitude of those bonds and the number of the bonds is now increasing because the contracts are getting bigger. Those bonds are typically supported by our balance sheet and the combination of the UK EF Export Credit Guarantee Scheme, which allows that... don't give you additional support if the balance sheet is stretched. And so we avail ourselves and have done that on several occasions with the UKEF. There was a recent example in Kuwait where the timescale was so compressed that it was just too quick for them to do it in that period of time. But in the coming months, it'll be swapped out from the arrangements that we've made to date. So the only reason we didn't use it for there is it was just too quick for UKF to do it. to come up with the goods reality. And our customer, I've noted the sort of comments, we should chibi people along and let them wait and stuff. It's just not how the world works. In this instance, it went super quick. And, you know, we had to react within that timescale. When we talk about project financing, this is where a country will take a loan from another country, again from the UK government, to finance the project. That loan isn't from us to them. It is from the UK government to them. So an example is our Indonesian project. where the UK government is supporting a loan to the Indonesian government. There's normal fare, it happens all the time. Billions of dollars every year are done like this. And they are providing a loan to the Indonesian government in order for them to then pay us for the project that they want. And therefore they repay that loan back over a number of years. Again, Some of the projects that we're doing in the future, that will happen. We will sign a project agreement, which will be contingent on that finance agreement being finalized. But I think what is not understood very often is that you do not sign a project agreement unless the fundamental terms, the agreement has already taken place between the UK government and the end government, typically the Ministry of Finance, for all the terms that they will lend the money and they will borrow the money. That was already agreed. Obviously, the paperwork and everything then takes time afterwards. And we've learned that that can actually take a long time when it's two governments talking to each other. So hopefully that's explained the difference between bonding and between project financing. So let me just talk about the projects specifically that we have. So if we talk about our contract with the Indonesian Coast Guard, we signed that in May 2023, so last year, quite some time ago. The loan agreement between the two countries for the project financing had already been agreed. We signed the contract, so it defines exactly what the project is. And then since then, the two governments have been having their discussions to finalise a loan agreement. During that period of time, the UK has changed its government administration and Indonesia has changed its government administration. And I think that that has slowed down those discussions. But where we are now is the final eyes are being dotted and T's crossed between the two governments prior to activation. And when that activation starts, we will start to implement that, which we expect is pretty soon. You'll have seen some announcements, and I think those of you between the governments and stuff will know that those things are not made lightly. They are complex discussions, I think, between the UK government and the Indonesian government, and it does take a long time because there's lots of people involved and parties involved and what have you, but we are sort of... there with the final bits and pieces. There's no negotiation. It's just completing. I can't actually tell you exactly where it is, but it's not because I don't know. I do know. But it's just dotting of I's and crossing of T's to finalize that, and then the activation will start, and we will start delivering. So I note that people, their angst and everything else, this is a normal process for these sorts of scaled projects. projects and for when you're talking about a finance agreement between two governments we have our kuwait project which started very quickly we signed that last month we started delivering on that very quickly this will take 18 months to two years to complete same sort of time period as indonesia 213 million dollars We have an implementation phase, and then we have a support phase. So the support phase is maintenance of the system, making sure it's all up and running, continuation of training. The lion's share of that revenue is yielded by implementing the system, building the infrastructure, and putting our SRT MDA system onto that. So an extremely ambitious customer. who's in a real hurry, as we found out, the time between the notice of award and signing a contract was four weeks. That's it. So we've already started delivering that. We've got people out there now. And, yeah, that carries on. It is the gold standard of maritime surveillance systems. And we expect that we will have further contracts from the Kuwait government soon. in the not-too-distant future as they seek to expand from surface into other parts of the ocean, near surface as well, so drones, etc. We then have two further Middle Eastern contracts, one of which we have announced that we had our formal notice of award, and then we advised that we would sign that in December, and that is still what we expect to do. And on that particular one, we may also actually start the first deliveries just before Christmas. It just depends whether they want us to start doing that then or just do it in January. The fourth one, and that one is worth $9 million. The fourth one, which is worth about $15 million, we also expect, it seems likely that we will sign the paperwork and complete all the paperwork in December, but we will start shipping in the new year. In fact, I'm certain we will push the customer back and say, no, we need to start. We will start the project in January because we have so much on with Kuwait and this other Middle East one where we need to get going, and also the preparations with Indonesia, which will be likely first shipping in the very early part of next year. So those four projects, two of which are starting now, two of which are starting in the new year, are collectively worth about 320 million pounds. The majority of that comes over during their implementation periods, which vary from sort of two years to one year. So we have a lot of work going on. We did expect some of those to have started earlier of the year. And so we have built up some of our overhead and resources to enable us to have the capacity to do that. So what does that mean? People like in-country engineers. These are big projects. These customers are ambitious, and they require continual engineering support on the ground to make sure these things are implemented. These are enormous projects. You need to hire those people, and it's six months before they become productive. Why does it take six months? We're talking about a super complex system, and they need to be on the ground managing that. That takes a lot of training. So we hired them quite early, with hindsight perhaps a little bit too early, which meant that the overhead built up earlier when the revenue was coming later, hence incurring a loss. On the flip side of that, that now places us in a much better position to be able to accelerate with all these projects. We still will be hiring some more people to fill in some of the gaps, but it does place us in a great position to be able to deliver those projects. Looking forward, beyond that, we have A number of other projects in our validated sales pipeline, some more in the Middle East, some in Africa, and some in Southeast Asia, where we see significant project opportunities over the next one to five years. A couple of them we would... hope, as indicated by the customer, we would have those under contract during the course of next year, possibly also starting next year. So therefore, on top of them, these existing contracts, some of those from existing customers and some adding to our stock of new customers. So on our system side... We have a very busy roadmap ahead of us for the next however many years, certainly under the existing contracts, significant deliveries and revenues around 320 million over the next three years, notwithstanding any conversions from the validated sales pipeline, where we've seen steady conversions over the last couple of years, and now we've reached that point of implementation. So I think I've given everybody hopefully a good feel as to where we are. I've had a few questions, so I'm going to sort of answer those. And also if you've got in front of you, if you're watching this, you can ask some questions live. So some that have come in, one was about satellites and we'd be interested in dealing with certain satellites, companies to build up satellites and things. Years ago, we considered implementing our own satellites. We decided against that. And the reason for that is everybody is putting satellites up. And so there is a wash of commoditized data that we can buy. raw and processed in the SRT MDA system. Our MDA system is designed to be sensor and data agnostic, so that we can work with the customer to say, well, okay, we don't want to get that data or use that sensor, you can use this sensor or use this data. And it enables us to, as each satellite goes up, each time there's new sensors, new data, there's There's intense competition between satellite providers, so the price of the satellite data is coming down, which is a benefit to us and our customers. So the short answer to the question is, we know what's going on in the satellite field. There's a lot going on, a lot of data, which is relatively low resolution compared to terrestrial data. But we're not getting into the satellite business and never will. Sub C. So you'll have seen that Ocean Infinity now has a sizable stake in SRT, which we welcome. That has helped us financially to be able to get this enormous leap into these huge contracts and given us that cloud to be able to do that just like that. But also what's come with that is an operational synergy. They have exceptional expertise in robotics. So you start talking about autonomous vessels, both subsea and on the surface and in the air. And of course, autonomous vessels are now going to become a component of the SRT MDA system. So they're used for remote surveillance, persistent surveillance without humans being on them. So if you can imagine an archipelago in Southeast Asia, or perhaps on the right on the fringes of the borders in the Middle East, you now have very sophisticated autonomous vessels out patrolling for days and weeks on end, feeding back surveillance like a mobile surveillance tower back into the SLT MDA system, which is enabled to then use that data to spot the bad guys in areas of interest. And when they spot the bad guy or they spot an event, they're able to respond and dispatch a manned patrol vessel. So now we immediately have that very tight level of integration with an entity. And so when we form that sort of partnership, engineers can talk completely openly about everything. And you get that really tight integration operationally. We welcome very much Ocean Affinity to join the party. We give them access to markets perhaps that they hadn't access to. So it is a win-win situation all around. And we've already seen the fruits of that in Kuwait. We will work with them over time to extend, you know, we've got a lot of our customers now saying, what can we do in the subsea? It's the coolest level at the moment because there have been some cables cut in the Baltic. But if you take the Middle East, there's huge amounts of subsea infrastructure upon which their economies rely, which they must protect. And we will be in a unique position to be able to do that by delivering these systems and capabilities from Ocean Infinity under the SRT hat within our systems. So we will be able to use that to detect perhaps submarines and things like that coming into territorial waters, coming near sensitive infrastructure, generating alerts, being able to track that. to be able to coordinate surface vessels and the like to then respond etc so it's a logical thing Another question I've had is why has there been a big share price spread? Well, I'm not in control of our share price. The best I can do is try to remind people about business when we go quiet and that we haven't just sort of disappeared down a hole in the Midsomer Norton, that we are actually doing stuff. I think that's reflective, to be honest. My personal opinion is that we have had a long path to get here. If you're risk-averse, you see us in one light. If you're an optimistic fellow or lady, you see us in a different light. And I think that sometimes there's that gap in buying and selling, and there needs to be that spread. I hope that as we start to deliver, and that's reflected in real and substantial revenues, sustainability, and people believe actually what we say about the contracts and the customers and the market and things, that gradually... those people that are immediately skeptical and immediately risk averse will actually see that what we have here with SRT is a business with real foundations built on a market that wants our product, a product that is a proven capability, a proven brand in the market. Customers come to us. We don't really do any marketing on the system side. We don't need to. And gradually that will change, and obviously the spread will go with that. But if I knew what that would do, then perhaps I'd be doing something else. Just looking at questions that... Will Trump's threats of tariffs have an effect on US sales? I don't know. I don't know what he'll do. Does anybody know what he'll do? I think there's a lot of talk to create negotiating positions. What actually happens is a different thing. We had all that kerfuffle with Brexit and stuff and would it affect our business? And we continue to grow in the EU market. In the end, boat owners want to buy the product. And we are pretty much the only game in town with a quality product to trust what price, your safety, what price to have that reliability that everybody associates with SRT and MTRAC. Even if there was a tariff, is that going to affect things much? That's not been the evidence with Brexit, so I'm not too worried about that. And I can't predict what will happen. What I can predict is we will continue to make a quality product that the customer in the market wants. Can you highlight the biggest execution risk related to project implementations? I think the biggest... I had to answer that question. We've done this before. There aren't really any great risks other than timescales. There are the inevitable delays, weather, for example, which prevents us to get to a site on time. There's lots of supplies that all need to converge onto a site to be integrated and for that site to be commissioned. But individually, is it a risk to build a 80-meter surveillance tower or a building? Not really. This is common fare. Is it a risk for a radar to work that we've bought from a reputable supplier for years of Years of manufacturing, not really, but they might deliver instead of seven months, they might deliver on a nine months time scale. Is our technology new and never been proven? No. It's been in active use now for nearly eight years and been continuing to evolve and supported by a massive team at SRT. So I think the only execution risk is just getting the timescales right. And as you'll know, if you've ever been in a project, even, I don't know, if you've redone your bathroom, things don't go according to plan and you have to move around with that. But we have very good project managers in each of these countries that are managing that and a very good support team, which we're building up what we call a PMO office to support that. So what effect do we see AI having on our business? Well, we use AI in our, I think, well, I think the first thing is everything gets labeled as AI at the moment. Often that's nonsense, in our opinion. So, and certainly if you ask some of our data analytic engineers, what actually is AI is actually a small subset of that. What effect do I think it'll have on our business if we're implementing that into our system? We already have quite extensive analytics that will look for areas of interest, vessels of interest, trying to determine is that people smuggling or is that drug smuggling or is that weapon smuggling? And obviously we will continue to improve that by using AI in the system to enable that to learn from the various operators. One of the the unique selling points on our system is the original concept was we're going to mop up all the data and knowledge from users on the boats, from users on the coastline, observers, from the operators. And as they use their intelligence, say, well, actually, I don't think that's drug smuggling. I think that's weapon smuggling. The system will learn why they characterize that boat as a drug smuggler and that boat as a weapon smuggler or why that particular fishing boat He's not illegally phishing. It's okay. And there aren't the false alerts. So I think AI will have a big effect in the value of the system that we're delivering to the customer because it will give them much more precise and higher confidence information, which then enables them to react in a right way and have less false positives. So I think that's how it'll work. We may start to use different forms of AI in coding, but we're talking about quite complicated coding, and I'm not a software engineer, so I'm not exactly sure how that will affect in improving our efficiency of creating our technology. We do use AI to try to shorten time certain things in creating documents and training and things like that. It's quite useful, ChatGPT and stuff to use that. So we are adopting it, but let's not get carried away. The big effect will be in our system where we've already been using it for a number of years. What's that? Okay, so I think I've answered pretty much everything. And our Philippine business carries on as normal. We have a customer there that I just haven't mentioned with BFAR. We've signed our sustainability agreement that carries on. There continues to be some negotiation between the commercial fishing companies and the Philippine government over changing regulations and everything that goes around that. And I think that hopefully that will settle down and sort themselves out. So overall, we're in a really favorable position. We've done some fundraising, which has put us in a much stronger position. It has enabled us to take these contracts. At long last, those contracts are now started to be delivered. We're in a position to do that. It's not to say it's easy, and we still need to sort of build up capacity to do that. So I hope that I've asked everybody's questions. We will have... an ATM on the 23rd of January. As usual, cakes from 9 a.m. and tea and coffee and open day. The idea there is to come and talk to somebody else other than me. Come and talk to our project managers, our engineers. All the people, 130-odd people that actually live and breathe and make this business hum as a great British business, come and meet them. At 11 o'clock, we'll then move to the local hotel and have our AGM, followed by a bit of a lunch, and then everyone can go home. But I do encourage, come to the office and actually see the products, see the people that are behind it, if you're interested in what we're doing with your investment. So thank you very much, and if there are any follow-up questions, you have my email address. Email the company or anybody else in that, and they'll be happy to answer. So thank you very much, and I look forward to some updates in the coming weeks. Cheers.