Aurrigo International plc (AURR.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
May 21, 2025
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Operator
operatorGood morning, and welcome to the Aurrigo International plc Full Year Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question received in the meeting itself. However, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to CEO, David Keene. Good morning to you, sir.
David Keene
executiveGood morning, and thank you. It's great to be here this morning, and thank you for everyone who's attending this presentation. And today, we're going to go through our final results for financial year ending '24 and then some overview of some of the things we've been working on and some forward information in terms of what the future might hold. A little disclaimer, which obviously you can read at your leisure, and moving on. So really opening the presentation with some really important points, which is the strong financial and strategic progress that the company has made since last year in FY '23. So we've got double-digit growth, really driven by a major increase in high-margin Autonomous division operations. We've expanded our customer base and achieved further proof points of technology and vehicles in operations with those customers. We've certainly seen the market prioritizing technology investments to drive efficiencies and growth, and we'll cover that a little bit more in the presentation. And post period end, i.e., into this year of '25, we've seen good momentum and significantly increased numbers of tenders in play, which also I'll talk about. But first, I guess, there's obviously people on the call who will -- on the webinar who will know us quite well, and there's others that don't. So my name is David Keene. I'm actually the Co-Founder and CEO of the company, 42 years' experience in automotive, and lastly, 6 years' experience in aviation, since 2018 when we moved into the aviation market. And I'm also a visiting professor in autonomous vehicles at Coventry University and on various other Boards. We have 2 divisions within the company. We have the original company that I started some 32 years ago, which is the RDM Automotive, which is doing all the automotive technology. And we're a supplier to some of the major vehicle OEMs such as Jaguar Land Rover, Aston Martin, et cetera. And we're really a trusted supplier to those vehicle OEMs and also international Tier 1 suppliers who support them. We've got innovative designs, very high level of management of complex supply chains, the top accredited quality standards, and we're in some very highly technical pieces. And this is really important as we go through this presentation and you understand more about the company that this really provides the bedrock of all of the technology and all of the experience that myself and my staff and my team have that really leads into the other side of the business, which is on the right-hand side, which is the Aurrigo Autonomous and Aviation Technology. And as I said, that was established back in 2018 and is now designing and developing all these autonomous airport baggage and cargo handling vehicles that you've seen. And also, I developed some other products, including people mover for airside and also digital twin modeling, et cetera, and the fleet manager that runs all of this. So it's really the automotive technology that's the bedrock, and then we've transferred that technology and that know-how into the aviation side. So let's talk primarily about aviation, but we will cover a little bit about Automotive. What do we do? We design, engineer and manufacture smart airside solutions for airports, airlines and now ground handlers, and we'll talk about our announcement this morning to the market. And you can see here, this is the front cover of Airside International. We've managed in very short time since we IPO-ed the company to build quite a presence, build our brand and be recognized internationally as effectively disruptive technology, new technology that's coming into the airport, and we've received significant coverage. So what do we have? This is a product overview slide. On the left-hand side, we've got hardware. On the right-hand side, we've got software. Everything that I'm describing in this presentation to you is all designed and developed predominantly here in the U.K. at our headquarters in Coventry but now around the world in our offices and our teams that we've established in Singapore, Canada and America. And the first product is the Auto-DollyTug. You can see a picture of it there. A revolutionary vehicle, which can be driven manually or autonomously. It carries what's called a ULD container. That container has about 30 loose bags fitted to it and is then transferred and loaded into the fuselage of the aircraft. It can carry one of the ULDs, and importantly, it can tow a further 4 of these. But it's super agile. It moves sideways. It can rotate and tank turn 360 degrees. It can alter its deck height. And importantly, it has integrated robot arms, which will enable it to load and unload that container completely automatically. And that is first in the industry and allows us to automatically load and unload a plane basically without human intervention. We have a new product that we've just recently launched, which I'm going to talk about in a second, which is called Auto-Cargo because not only now are we transferring baggage and baggage containers, but we're now moving into the cargo market. And we've successfully developed this product with UPS, which we'll see in a short while. We have a product called Auto-Shuttle that we actually developed and launched in 2018, and that's a 10-seat airside passenger vehicle, not for passengers as in passengers for the aircraft, but for the crew that are flying on that aircraft, engineering employees and generally all airports or airline employee movements. On the right-hand side, we have our software. You can see a picture on the top right. That's our Auto-Sim. This has been developed by us completely in-house. It was originally -- I tasked the team originally to develop something that would allow me to use it as a sales tool really to visualize what the future could look like. But it quickly became clear that we actually had a product here and that really visualizing and simulating an airport with a modeling tool that enabled our customers to see how they would implement not only electric ground handling equipment but autonomous electric and even down to monitoring and looking after and analyzing all the other vehicles that they operate around the airport and then, of course, how do they provide the electric -- the electrification for those, what chargers do they use, and indeed, have they got actually enough grid capacity to completely go over to electrified on all pieces of equipment. And we use Auto-Sim with our clients to use it to build the business case because it also determines how much equipment they need, how many people they need and when they need them. And so Auto-Sim has been built out over the last 4 or 5 years, and it is a very powerful piece of software. And then finally, we have Auto-Connect. This is our cyber-secure and resilient fleet manager platform. Think of Uber. We are picking up containers with our Auto-Dolly, just like Uber picks up a passenger. We're taking it to another location and depositing that container. And all of that transaction and all of that know-how in terms of the right vehicle picking up the right container is all done with the Auto-Connect platform. And that Auto-Connect platform also integrates with the customers' baggage system and optimizes all those vehicle movements. So you can see there, both in the hardware and the software, we have a very end-to-end fully integrated set of hardware and software. And this is what's really exciting our customers. So a little bit more about Auto-Cargo, which we launched this year back in April. It's our largest vehicle to date, and it's the result of a government-backed project through Innovate U.K. and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles between Aurrigo and UPS. And this vehicle will be, at the end of this month, transferring to East Midlands Airport, which is UPS' major hub in the U.K. In fact, it's the second biggest cargo hub in the U.K. That vehicle will be evaluated and operated and not only enables us to enter a large and global cargo market but also, we hope, will mean that we have a ready-made customer in UPS. UPS indeed have been working with us very closely to specify all of the requirements of this vehicle so that it not only operates at their facility in the U.K. but indeed would operate at any facility around the world. So a really exciting time for us in this cargo market. And you can see on the right-hand side the size of the potential markets in both baggage and cargo handling. They are huge markets, and we have first-mover advantage in both of those markets. So quickly on our business model. How do we engage with customers? Well, really, it's a 3-step process. Consultancy at the start using the Auto-Sim allowing us to work with the customer to determine what's the best methods, the best vehicles and the best business outcome for them and to visualize that so they can see it and also enables them to plan their capital expenditure, which could be quite high, and enables them to plan that over a series of investments, making sure that every time they invest in something, they're not then going to rip it up 2 or 3 years later as some new technology evolves that they didn't really understand. The second part is the actual sales or lease and initial deployments and scale-up of our Auto-DollyTug and Auto-Cargo. And we are currently manufacturing those vehicles ourselves, selling them or deploying them ourselves, and we have our own deployment team in all of the locations we have with customers around the world to do that. And then finally, as we scale and we move from 1 vehicle to 5 to 10 and into hundreds of vehicles with customers, our Auto-Connect platform really comes into its own. I described earlier that it's the platform that is cyber-secure and resilient and protects all of those vehicles, but it also provides, we believe, a third platform for revenue. And again, I mentioned the Uber model. When an Uber driver picks up a passenger and moves them from one location to another, that is a time or distance calculated by their platform and charges them instantaneously for that. And we see that we could do that on an airport where we have a fee for moving things around on the airport and is transacted through the Auto-Connect platform. So let's just touch on -- a little bit on Automotive because quite honestly, everything is all very aimed at what we're doing on aviation in terms of the money that we've raised on the market excitement. But of course, Automotive is providing the bedrock of the company at the moment and is also providing significant cash to support the investments. In terms of that, we're obviously an established supplier. We've got a lot of cross-fertilization, as I said, that we can bring into aviation. We've got a long track record, and you can see in the top right-hand corner a fraction of the customers that we currently have and are supplying to their production lines every day. We're not a punch and crunch supplier of washers or bolts or low-level items like that. We have experience in developing quite complex and really quite exciting feature content for customers. And we've been innovative in terms of producing electronic modules, embedded software, wiring harness systems, safety critical systems and indeed complete vehicle engineering, which we do here in Coventry. And this is producing quite robust financials for us, which contribute to the overall group revenue. And you can see on the right-hand side that from FY '20 through our IPO in FY '22, we've steadily grown that business to circa GBP 6 million. So let's have a look at the FY '24 results. On the left-hand side, you can see Autonomous sales. In FY '22, we had a mixture of some of those passenger sales that I talked about and a small amount of aviation. You can see that start to change in FY '23. And indeed, in FY '24, all of our sales in that year were all aviation products and actually no passenger vehicles. That will change a little bit in '25 as some of the passenger vehicles come back and some of our customers start to see the usefulness of that. But you can see we've grown that tremendously. And in fact, revenue compared to FY '23 is 433% up and an increase of 755 on FY '23. So we're going in the right direction. And you can see on the Automotive sales, as I said, we've had a good year in FY '24 and around the GBP 6 million mark. So overall, on our income statement, total revenue was just short of GBP 8.9 million compared to GBP 6.6 million the previous year. Very big gross profit increase during the year, made up really of the fact that we were selling high-value autonomous and aviation sales in that year. And again, through the P&L into the EBITDA and into the net profit and a good set of results there and slightly better on net profit than we were expecting. On the right-hand side, we've got balance sheet. Gross assets have increased as net assets have. And our cash balance at the end of December '24 was just over GBP 3 million. We did a capital raise, which crossed the boundary between December receipts and also some receipted raise in January. And that brought our total raise to GBP 5.3 million at that point. Some R&D capitalization in the period, quite extensive. You obviously realized we're an R&D company, and we also benefit from R&D tax credits which we apply for every year and have been successful in every year actually since I can remember we started recovering those tax credits. We now have 6 of our vehicles which were built in-house were transferred to fixed assets in the year. We currently didn't have them as fixed assets, but we've moved them. In fact, all vehicles that we have built to date and deployed to our customers, we still own all of those vehicles even though the customers in their project costings have paid for those vehicles. Cash generated by Automotive, as you can see, was a very healthy 1.1 -- just over GBP 1.1 million, and cash generated from autonomous activities, GBP 2.1 million. So very good results, increasing from our position in FY '23 and meeting our guidance and slightly better on EBITDA performance and net profit. So our financial strategy is really in 6 areas. One is steady Automotive growth. We're very good at automotive. We've been at it a long time. And scaling that Automotive division just gently but making sure it's highly profitable and highly cash generative is really important. Secondly, driving the aviation sales really to get really material annual growth over the next 3 to 4 years because that's really where the step change with the company is going to come from. Growing the hardware margin as we increase the volume, we're able to purchase better, and we're able to get the margin higher on those vehicles. And of course, as we're able to agree and move from proof-of-concept deployments into where we're going next, which is more into fleet sales, we'll be able to negotiate better commercial terms with upfront payments. And in fact, most of the transactions with customers that we did in FY '24, there was a proportion of those contracts with cash upfront. We're still using our ability to obtain grant funding to supplement cash. And as I said, the project with UPS was a grant-funded program, and there will be more news in FY '25 on where we're going with grant applications. And we've certainly been applying for extensive R&D grants, which we'll give more information on later on in the year. And finally, focus on cash flow breakeven. We always get asked this question, when will you be breakeven and in fact, into positive. And it's a clear focus for the company. I don't have a definitive date for when we will do that. But I can tell you, we're here to make money, and we're here to get the company very focused on being cash flow breakeven as soon as we possibly can. So a bit on operational progress. I haven't mentioned the pictures much in this presentation, but there's a really nice picture of some of the things that we have positively done through last year and into this year, is get our vehicles operating in very severe weather. This is a picture from Singapore where -- from Singapore, where we've actually operated in very heavy rainfall. And in fact, if our vehicles cannot operate in these environmental conditions of heavy rain, snow, high temperatures, cold temperatures, then they're just not fit for purpose. And this is where our automotive skill set comes in to build vehicles that are robust, but also we generate more and more IP. And in fact, the algorithms that we've developed for operating our vehicle in the rain, we think, are unique and very valuable. So let's just have a look at some active customers and partners as examples. I'm going to start on the right-hand side with IAG. We first started with IAG with British Airways back in 2018. And they are still a customer. And also, we have a partnering agreement signed with IAG. We have 2 operations with them currently: one in the U.K. and one in North America. We still are operating heavily with Changi Airport Group. We have a large team at Changi. We have 15 people. I believe by the end of next week, it will be 17 people. We have an office in Terminal 1. We're embedded into their operation. And we have 7 of our vehicles operating at Changi. And we also have a partnering agreement, which when the time is right, will allow us access to 130-plus airports where they are either operating them or owning them or advising them. We have a similar arrangement with Schiphol Group. We have one vehicle at Schiphol Airport, which has been there some time now. And I'm going to go on in the next slide to give you an example of how these partnering agreements actually start to bring benefit to the company. But Schiphol Group have Aviation Solutions as their technology company that is exploiting the technology that they're developing, and they've currently got more than 80 airports where they either operate the airport or they sell or advice technology. I'm very pleased this morning to be able to add the left-hand company, which is Swissport. And in fact, we only announced this morning at 7:00 a.m. the RNS to say that we've signed an agreement -- a partnering agreement with Swissport, initially based at their home airport in Zurich, where we will be providing them Auto-Sim and Auto-DollyTugs during FY '25. And that also gives us access to some 270 airports that they are operating in. And you can see across those -- just those 4 customers there, we've got airports, we've got airlines and now we've got ground handlers. And this has always been my strategy and the company's strategy, to do great deals with partners because those partners can give you access to the airports that you can see on here. And that's really important because we can't do this on our own. So a little bit on Schiphol Group. The problem that we're trying to solve at Schiphol is that it handles about 31,000 pieces of baggage on an average day. It's an interesting airport because if you've ever been there, it's one of Europe's biggest airports, but it's a transitional airport in the fact that the bulk of the people are actually just transitioning through that airport and not actually going to Amsterdam or the surrounding areas. And so they have the issue where some people arrive and then depart the next day. It's called cold storage for the bags. And the amount of baggage in a day that comes in and goes out that they then have to store in locations around the airport, which is not where the main baggage system is, is a tremendous problem for them. And so they want a solution as to how they could automate this cold storage of transit bags. And we are hopefully going to be that solution. The vehicle on the right, which has been doing the cold storage bags transfer, albeit one vehicle, but clearly, this will turn into a fleet of vehicles, we have successfully demonstrated to them that we can operate at Schiphol Airport. And that's been many, many tests. And in fact, those tests are still going and will continue to go through the rest of this year. But the important thing is that Schiphol, as I said in the previous slide, they would like to commercialize and get some benefit from any of the technology that they are working with, and they only do that under certain rules. And one of the rules is that the technology has to be deployed at their own airport, at Schiphol, and that it has to have gone through rigorous testing and to the point at which where they're happy to sign that off. And I can confirm, as we did on the RNS announcement a few weeks ago, that the technology and innovation team at Schiphol signed off our vehicle as being fit for purpose, which has allowed Aviation Solutions, their exploitation arm, to start working with this 80-plus partners now. So we already have the first 20 airports organized, and this is a reference site for us. So not only are we going to be dealing with these 80-plus airport partners, but also we'll be flying those partners in to see this vehicle operating in front of their eyes to prove as well that the technology is working. So this is a really good example of how we've put a vehicle in on proof of concept. We've gone through their testing. We've now got a partnering agreement with them. So we expect 2 things: one, that they will buy vehicles for their own operations at the airport; but two, they will help us to distribute and market and sell vehicles out to the 80-plus partners. So what's happening in the market? Well, the market is growing rapidly in its appreciation of what autonomy and autonomous vehicles can do to improve, particularly efficiency. That market, we have analyzed ourselves internally with some modeling software that we have. And it shows there's about more than 700 airports globally that would benefit from implementing our technology. We haven't made -- since we started doing this, we haven't made a single outbound sales call. We are completely in a market pull position. And we have new people talking to us every week about how they might implement and what the stage is to implement automated vehicles in their airports. And you can see on the right-hand side, we're involved at the top with a new organization called the Baggage Innovation Working Group. This is now up to -- between 130 and 150 members. And if you Google the Baggage Innovation Working Group, and it's free to go on their website and have a look, you can see all of the member companies that are in this group. You have to pay to be in this group, and you'll find the world's biggest airlines, airports and tech companies like us. We come together roughly every 6 weeks in locations around the world. And the #1 topic of that group is how to automate baggage and cargo with autonomous vehicles. The [ Splinter ] group at the bottom is called BOOST. And again, you can look on the website for...
Operator
operatorLadies and gentleman, I believe we've just momentarily lost David. We'll just reconnect him and bring him back into the room.
David Keene
executiveThat was part of their agreement. So you can see that these markets and groups are forming now to -- how to capitalize on autonomous vehicles. And as I said, why do they want to do that? They want to improve their operational efficiency, reduce errors, reduce accidents, reduce crashes by manually driving into aircraft. They've got labor shortages. As I've said many times, we're not here to displace thousands of people. The truth of the matter is that airport travel and air transit is bigger now than it was pre-COVID, and airports and airlines are struggling to keep up. And so to fill the labor shortages, why not bring in some robotics and automation and where people are maybe doing those jobs like moving empty containers around an airport, redeploy those people who are all security cleared, redeploy those people into more value-added jobs and have robots like ours do the jobs of moving some of the baggage and cargo containers around. And of course, the airports are now struggling with environmental regulations that are coming in, stricter emissions and adoption of electric ground support equipment and also directives over manual handling, which is now in Europe. And of course, they're very excited about how do they make improvements by bringing technical advancements in such as AI and machine learning. And of course, that is the root of all of the things that we are working on. So our route to scale is really 4 steps: one, leveraging the people that we already have. We have some fantastic people who have been in automotive a long time. We've now got dedicated teams that are in aviation, and they are cross-fertilizing each other. Use our skills in manufacturing. We've been manufacturing for 32 years for automotive in vehicles. And now we're applying that skill set into manufacturing these new vehicles. And you can see on the right a new render of our manufacturing facility that we're going to have here in Coventry for a new range of these vehicles that we're building, whether they'd be cargo vehicles or whether they'd be baggage vehicles. And when I say manufacturing, this is low investment. We're not talking about employing 3,000 people and having a huge facility. We're going to use our skill set in the way that we've designed the vehicles, which is high-level assemblies from our supply base. So we're not really manufacturing. We're assembling our vehicles. And this is very akin to how JLR or Bentley or Rolls-Royce would build their vehicles, and we're using our skill sets to do that. And then continue to win new customers. I don't think there's any difficulty in winning new customers as we proved this morning with our announcement with Swissport and also continue to listen to what our customers want, and in some cases, what they don't know that they want because we have to listen really carefully about how we might use the technology to unlock some of the things that may be that they haven't been able to unlock before. So those are our route to scale. So summary and outlook to bring us to a conclusion. We're technology specialists. We've been in automotive a long time. We're now using that technology and our experience in aviation. And we're also bringing something that I think is unique. We're bringing a different perspective into aviation. We haven't been in aviation 50 years. We've only been in aviation 6 years, and we're bringing a much more disruptive, cleaner thinking strategy into what could be possible into aviation operations. It's really been a year of growth in 2024, significant growth in revenue over what we've done previously. And hopefully, we will continue to do that. And really, Automotive really underpinning what we're doing on everything else driving good cash. That market opportunity is increasing. You know yourselves when you travel, air traffic is increasing rapidly and is set to double by 2040. And we have now more tenders that are coming through to us, official tenders. So moving from phone calls or e-mails or just meeting people at aviation shows who are interested, moving physically to tenders, which we are responding to. And as I've said, these groups forming now, Baggage Innovation Group, BOOST, these are serious clusters coming together to deliver this. So looking ahead, we've had a good start to 2025, particularly with announcements with Schiphol Group with Aviation Solutions and this morning with Swissport, and we hope for more good news as we go through 2025. We do have our guided revenue weighted to the second half of the year, which was very similar to last year because these tenders and timing of these projects do take time to get through the system, but nonetheless, we are winning them. There's more tenders in play and more appreciation that actually the technology is there and could be implemented. And on outturn, obviously, we're dependent on tenders, but we believe we're still expected to be in line with the Board's expectations. And then finally, you can see a smattering of some of the blue-chip global customers and partners that we have established. And if you looked at that panel when we floated the company in 2022, we only had one automotive -- sorry, we only had one aviation customer. And now we have all of those really good blue-chip customers. So thank you very much for listening to me. And I'll now hand back, and we'll move to a Q&A session. Thank you.
Operator
operator[Operator Instructions] David, we have received a number of questions. So I'll start with the first one here, which reads as follows. What are the biggest operational or regulatory challenges that you anticipate scaling autonomous vehicles in international airports?
David Keene
executiveWell, at the moment -- good question. At the moment, interestingly enough, there are no regulations for autonomous vehicles operating at airports. So I've always said, whether it's automotive or aviation, you should always be in the heart of regulation. Regulation is really important, and you can use regulation a lot to your benefit. So we are directly in discussions with the CAA, the FAA, the Civil Aviation Authority in Singapore to directly talk with them and work out how we would work together with the regulators to establish working practices and regulations. And what that means is that if we're in the heart of that, we can protect our position, knowing that our technology and our vehicles and what we're doing is known by the regulators and can be obviously adopted into the regulation. So it's something that we really encourage, and I talk to those regulators quite a lot.
Operator
operatorThat's great. Thank you very much, David. Turning to the next question. Despite strong revenue growth, what are the main factors delaying breakeven? And what is the anticipated time line to profitability?
David Keene
executiveYes. So I think the situation is that we don't quote any projects that are not profitable unless they are strategic. And when I say strategic, we need to do something to hook somebody in. And even then, we would want to try and make sure that it's cost coverage. The real issue at the moment, of course, is that we're a growing technology company on 3 continents. And the team of people and the overheads that we require to bring these products to market is in advance of the amount of revenue and profit that, that revenue is generating. So it is literally the cycle position that we're in at the moment. And obviously, we want to transfer into more revenue and more profit and reach a position where we cross into breakeven and then into profitability. I can't say right at this minute exactly when that will be, but I can tell you, having run a company for 32 years and being very profitable on automotive, that it is our #1 focus to get to profitability as soon as we can.
Operator
operatorTotally understood. We have another question here that's really around competition and asks, what differentiates you from your competitors?
David Keene
executiveYes. So we do have competition. And actually, I'm pleased about the fact we do have competition because competition always tells you there's a market there. And so that's always a healthy thing. Our competition is really from -- about 3 players only -- 3 to 4 players other than us in the world. All of those players have taken a different approach to us. So they are in the main manufacturers of existing vehicles. So existing tugs that operate in airports today. They've taken their diesel tugs. They've transferred them into an electric tug. And then they've worked with a partner company who has some autonomous capability, and they've done a retrofit solution onto the existing product that they have. So whatever their tug does today, i.e., it drives from one location to another, is exactly what their autonomous tug will do today. So it really doesn't give anyone in the airport the full benefit advantages of having an autonomous solution. So for instance, they cannot carry a container. They cannot load or unload that container automatically. They cannot actually get to the aircraft and dock with the aircraft, which is what our vehicles do. So we're the only vehicle in the world that goes right up to the aircraft and takes the container on and off of the aircraft. We also do that in the baggage haul when we're picking up containers or returning containers to the baggage haul. They can't do that either. And so we set our store out not wanting to be a me-too. I said to everyone when we first looked at this, we're not going to be a me-too supplier. And the reason for that is if we did exactly that strategy, we would fall foul of the fact that they have 50- or 60-year-old brands in the market, very well-known companies, and we just wouldn't be able to compete. So we really took a step back. And really, working with Changi Airport and their technical team was a really big bonus for us because they didn't want to do a me-too product either. They wanted something that would give complete end-to-end autonomy. And so from scratch and with no legacy whatsoever, we built what we've built. And that's why our vehicles can perform much better and provide much better end-to-end solution. And ultimately, that will improve efficiency and lower costs, which is what the airports and airlines are looking for and the ground handlers.
Operator
operatorPerfect. We have another question here. What are the key milestones and success criteria for the 6-month Zurich trial? And what specific outcomes would trigger a broader rollout across Swissport's 270-airport network?
David Keene
executiveYes. So the 6-month program is split into 2 periods. The first period will be an Auto-Sim evaluation of the operations that Swissport are currently doing at Zurich Airport. And within that, so create the baseline of what they're doing today and then run the simulations as to what they could do in the future and also, more importantly, look for quick wins. So there's some quick wins all the way through to some long-term strategic plans that we want to do together. So if, in the first 3 months, we can analyze that and work out where the quick wins are, we can then, in the second 3 months, bring an Auto-DollyTug live onto the apron at Zurich Airport. We can then prove out that those modeled quick wins are actually achievable. That will then be the gateway for us to move forward at Zurich with an expanded operation. But also during that period, we will be able to demonstrate to other areas of the business in different locations around the world that this is how we do the simulation, this is how we implement a vehicle, and then we can start looking at maybe getting those quick wins in those locations as well. So really, those are the trigger points through the period.
Operator
operatorUnderstood. Moving to the next question. All this sounds really positive. However, why after 7 years is someone like BA not place orders for the hardware or software?
David Keene
executiveYes, that's a good question. I think there's a few bits to answer that. The first is that they did try some early incarnations of automated vehicles, not ours but other people's. And to be honest with you, the technology at that time was not fit for purpose. And that set them back -- it actually set quite a number of people back who looked at some of the early ways of maybe automating ramp and airport operations. And so there was a little bit of hesitancy over that period. Then, of course, when we did start to work with BA and IAG in 2018, we made great strides in '18 and '19, and then COVID came in '20 and completely decimated all of the plans that IAG wanted to make. So that didn't actually come out of that period for, well, way into 2022, in fact, even into 2023. So really, it looks like it's been 7 years, but it hasn't been 7 years at all. It's been a much smaller period. And in that time, of course, the technology, whether it's systems, software or sensors, has increased rapidly. And you can see that with some of the advances some of the car people are making in America and so forth in terms of how those vehicles have started to operate in San Francisco and other locations. So I would say we haven't been going at it 7 years, and the technology has now improved. And I think those old failures with systems that couldn't do the job are now passed.
Operator
operatorPerfect. We got another question from the same investor. You said that Changi had 7 vehicles. I thought that their contract was for 4 vehicles. What accounts for the additional numbers?
David Keene
executiveYes. So the 7 vehicles there, we have -- if you go back in time -- so I'll go back. So currently, we're executing what's called Phase 2B. And in Phase 2B, that is for 4 vehicles, which we delivered. But previous to that, we've had additional phases that have been leading up to those 4 vehicles, and they have required vehicles to execute those phases. So Phase 2A came before that and then a previous proof-of-concept program that we did for them. So in total, there are 7 vehicles, 4 of which are running in the Phase 2B program and running as a fleet.
Operator
operatorPerfect. Turning to the next question. How much control do the 4 main partners have over you? And how do you agree pricing with them?
David Keene
executiveWell, I don't think they have what I call control as in the way that might be phrased in that they can sort of dictate what we do and when we do. The reason I say that is because I think in this market with this technology, gone are the days where you've got a customer and a supplier relationship. And this is why we've got partnering agreements because we've got one side of the coin. Our side of the coin is we're experts in the technology and we're developing vehicles that will do the job and work all the time and deliver what they want. On the other side of the coin, they are experts in how airports operate and what they need to do. And if you bring those 2 together, that is a very powerful combination. And in fact, they don't know about the technology or how to do the technology, and we know less than they do about how to implement the technology into the aviation space. So I think that's a perfect combination of how we work together and why we've got those partnering agreements. In terms of what does that partnering agreement look like, I can't really tell you what the financial terms are because obviously, that's confidential. But I can tell you that they are incentivized to help us to bring that technology into other airports around the world.
Operator
operatorThat's great. We have one final question unless any others get submitted. What is your exposure to the U.S.A.? Have you had any idea on how Trump tariffs might affect you? And are you planning to manufacture in the U.S.?
David Keene
executiveYes. So we have a company that we set up in Cincinnati in Ohio, and we have a small team there. And the reason for that was that one of our projects with International Airlines Group, British Airways, is actually at Cincinnati Airport. We have a vehicle there, and it's operating at the airports, and we're doing some very -- slightly different but advanced work there. So for instance, how does an autonomous vehicle cross a live taxiway? That is quite difficult to do and is one of the key milestones that is required to enable those vehicles to operate pretty much in every airport around the world. In terms of going forward, we're going to use that as our American base. We intend to build out more people and more capability in Cincinnati. And we are having discussions as to how we would have an assembly facility in that location to enable us to basically fulfill the North American market, which by the course of having that wouldn't negate anything in terms of any tariffs.
Operator
operatorThat's great, David. As I mentioned, that was the final question. So just before redirecting investors to provide you their feedback, which is particularly important to yourself, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?
David Keene
executiveYes, indeed. Well, again, I'd like to thank everyone who's taken the time to listen to this presentation. I think it's been a very exciting year in 2024. We've certainly made great progress. You can see from the partnerships and the relationships that we have there at a blue-chip level. We have technology that is obviously working and proving itself in locations and the same technology in multiple locations. So it's no different in terms of technology terms. So I think the company is very well equipped to bring this into production. We have the people and we have the knowledge. And at the moment, we also have the funding in place to do that. So I'm really excited about what we can do in 2025 and beyond. And I look forward to talking to you more about this and hopefully sharing some more exciting news as we go along. And thank you for those people who are current shareholders, and for those that you aren't -- who aren't currently, I look forward to potentially getting you on the share register. Thank you.
Operator
operatorDavid, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations? On behalf of the management team of Aurrigo International plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.
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