AAC Clyde Space AB (publ)

AC CloudSpace started 2024 with some really exciting events. Back in January, one of our power subsystems landed on the moon in what was a first for us. And we designed that subsystem and built it in Uppsala. And our teams were really excited about that. For the company in general, it was a great thing to actually see one of our products landing on the moon and operating successfully for our customer. We also demonstrated the operation of our laser communication systems, what was the first for us. It operated at one gigabit per second as expected. And that was a great achievement for our team in Delft. At the same time, our financial performance on this first quarter was very much in accordance with our budget, what was great to see. What was the most exciting thing about the company? Over this first quarter, we announced the successful demonstration of our CubeCat product. The first implementation of that laser communication system called SmallCat was actually flown last year. We have now fully demonstrated the operation of this system at one gigabit per second, downlink the speed that was our target. And that was a great achievement. After the quarter, we actually announced the start of the development of the next generation of that product. So we are now going to take the speeds to up to 10 gigabit per second. This is going to be a new development with support of the Dutch government with our partners FSO in the Netherlands. So we look forward to actually now take our optical communication systems to the next level. On the first quarter, we signed several new contracts. Probably the highlights are around our strategy on constellations and new geographies. We signed a contract to supply 11 kits of satellites for Portuguese company, LusoSpace, that will build those in Portugal. And that is a demonstration that our bet of actually building more of these large numbers of satellites is working. At the same time, we signed the first contracts to build two satellites in our South African company, AC Space Africa, again showing that our strategy of diversifying our geographies is working. So we are very happy to see those two contracts coming through. And of course we look forward to a few more throughout the year. As our business has been growing and becoming a bit more complex, I've decided that actually this was time to make more of a specialist organization across the company. And as such, we have now divided the business in three business lines, one dedicated to products, one dedicated to missions, and one dedicated to data and services. And this is to actually make our delivery to our customers better. We are still one company, we still operate as one strategic organization, but now we can offer to our customers that focus that they desire from the company. And this is an important step in preparing the company for the growth that we forecast for the near future. Our space data as a service business continues to grow and expand. Our first VDS satellite, the MIR-1, was launched a few months ago. So we expect to have a satellite delivering an experimental service later in the summer. At the same time, we continue to commission our hyperspectral imaging satellites, and we are building our first two high resolution, multispectral satellites for our agricultural and forestry service. The first one to be launched later this year, is the first one to be launched at the beginning of next year. And those are part of our expansion satellites. So the first four are now going to be built for that. And over the next few months, we expect to continue to grow our space data as a service offering. Not only we have these satellites in production, we have the ones finishing commissioning, but we're also looking forward to the launch of two more maritime service satellites over on the second half of 2024. The financial performance in quarter one was very much in accordance with our expectation. Our net sales of 71.4 million sec were slightly down year on year, but in line with the last quarter. Our EBITDA was quite higher than expected, given that we got the insurance money for CalP1. But even without that, it would have been positive. And our order backlog continued to grow. And that gives us quite a lot of confidence that we can stay true to our forecast for the year. And so we keep our guidance of net sales between 430 and 500 million sec for the year, and positive EBITDA between five and 10%. Over the next few months, we are very excited to see our first VDAS satellite coming online to finish the commissioning on our hyperspectral satellites. And of course, we look forward to see the launch of Arctic Weather Satellite. Several of our teams worked quite a lot on that mission. It is a revolutionary mission for weather prediction, and we look forward to see the first results later this year.