Clear Blue Technologies International Inc. (CBLU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. This presentation is being recorded for further viewing after the rebinar is completed. My name is Miriam Tuerk. I'm Co-Founder and CEO of Clear Blue Technologies. I'm joined today by Farrukh Anwar, who's our CFO; and Jonathan Van Der Veen, who's Head of our marketing function within the company. Today, we're going to be going over our fiscal 2025 and Q1 2026 earnings results and try to give you as much information as we can from a forward outlook perspective. . With respect to forward outlook perspective, please be aware, always the guidance that's around forward-looking statements. We're giving the best information we have at the time that we have it, but there is nothing that can promise what's going to happen in the future. So please take that under advisement. So just a little bit about Clear Blue. Clear Blue is a world leader in delivering clean, managed wireless power to meet the global need for reliable, low-cost energy for mission-critical infrastructure. Why do I say the word world leader? We don't deliver a large solar infrastructure that feeds into the grid. We deliver off-grid power that is disconnected from the grid for small point-of-use applications satellite systems, WiFi networks, smart city infrastructure, security cameras, street lights, cell phone towers. And when it comes to that, we build the technology, but we also manage and deliver it on an ongoing basis. We've been doing that since Day 1 when we had our first prototype in 2011, and we've been remotely managing and monitoring that -- those systems online with an ongoing service since day 1. As a result of that forward thinking and strategy as a company, we are a leader. We have more than 400 customers. We've deployed more than 15,000 units around the world. we've processed more than 1 trillion cloud transactions. We don't just send a system and say, "You can connect to a WiFi app and download some data into an Excel spreadsheet." We run a communications network that connects to every device we've deployed it comes into a very large cloud system, which we remotely manage, operate and deliver the service on an ongoing basis. Our vision is to become the world's largest virtual renewable power utility, and we are working very hard to make progress on that objective. So 2025 was an eventful year for Clear Blue. We started off in Q1 and early Q2 with major activities to complete the financial restructuring that we started in 2024, and we began a new strategic plan and growth trajectory, which we have called Clear Blue 2.0. The company has 100% focus on delivering positive EBITDA and cash flow. We've made solid progress on this, and the Q1 results show good movement in this direction. While we're not providing any guidance to the market at this time, the team has this milestone as a target in 2026. So when we talk about positive EBITDA and cash flow. We're not just talking about someday in the future. We're talking about we're going to get there soon, and we're working very hard to make it happen this year. With the cost reductions we have achieved, which are now heavily enabled by AI, quarterly revenue of $1.5 million delivers positive EBITDA. As the revenue from our key partnerships, Eutelsat and Cooper drives revenue growth, this target is within reach in the short term in our belief. Of course, increasing revenue starts with increased sales bookings and 2025 was a good year for that. Bookings increased by 122% over 2024 going from a 2024 result of $2.8 million to over $5.2 million in bookings. Bookings translates to purchase orders and cash payment, but revenue is recognized both onetime and over 3 years. And as a result, revenue will always be lower than the bookings in the near term. Thus, revenues lagged behind bookings and grew at a more conservative rate of 18% growth. The biggest milestones for 2025 were not the revenue numbers, but rather the strategic partnerships of Eutelsat and Cooper. Clear Blue began focusing on the satellite market a number of years ago. I can remember talking to the market maybe pre-COVID saying that satellite was moving from very slow speeds and very expensive to high speed and lower cost. And that transition has something -- has been something that we have realized. The Eutelsat partnership is a key result of that. Our new Pico product is specifically designed to meet the needs of satellite applications. The smart power function that comes in that product provides the lowest cost power solution that you could buy anywhere for the application, which allows our satellite vendors to get out to market and get more systems out into the field. But at the same time, it provides very innovative smart power capabilities that no one else in the market has, but clear Blue. As Eutelsat has achieved significant investment and support to more aggressively grow its business, Clear Blue has proven itself to be both a strategic partner and an enabler of their growth. On the Cooper Lighting side, this partnership has been focused on power utilities and transportation departments. We have a number of those customers in late-stage prototype testing and approval. Unlike other lighting projects where the customer will buy a system and deploy a first project, these utilities are looking to standardize on a standard product. And as a result, they do a lot of testing. They ask us to do security certifications and demonstrate performance. And that has taken some time for customers such as Duke Energy. Once these customers come online, though, we are expecting and hoping for a steady stream of deployment with a larger rollout, and that is our target plan for this vertical. Of course, significant focus is on the balance sheet of the company. We were honored and thrilled to have shareholder support to close a private placement of $1.1 million earlier this year and in Q4. Our STDC R&D grant generated another $500,000. And with the new SR&ED tax rules, which allows publicly traded companies to receive the tax refunds for SR&ED like private companies have always been able to do, we expect a large SR&ED refund in Q3. Lastly, AI is a game changer for us. and it must be in order for us to be competitive. So I want to emphasize that the adoption of AI is not just a question of -- a question of reducing expenses, it is also a question of changing the speed at which the company is operating at. You have to move at a much faster pace of execution, and you can do that with AI adoption. So as a result of us adopting AI, we have been able to achieve some additional savings. We'll go into that more later in the presentation, but it's another $900,000 in annual cash reductions on an annualized basis, which will be fully implemented by the end of this year. But the key message of AI is that we're not only leaner, but we're moving faster to grow our business. And of course, my mouse is somewhere all over the page here. Apologies for that. So Clear Blue has a long history in focusing in the ground infrastructure for opportunities that are related to high-growth LEO and GEO constellations. Again, LEO is low earth orbit satellite things like Starlink, and GEO is the more traditional higher up in the constellation satellite services. Both have been radically improving their speed and reducing costs. As of today, because this has been a focus of ours for quite a long time, we actually power over 600 satellite backhaul sites across customers like Eutelsat, ViaSat, Avanti Communications and YahClick. So while there is significant energy in this sector, we started a long time ago and have been slowly building our business and continue to launch off of that. That is why clearly 2.0 should allow us to really have a large trajectory of -- Apologies, in 2026, we have 3 key goals and priorities. One is to focus on space satellite and telecommunications markets. Two is to deepen relationships with large-scale customer partners; and three, is to grow our revenue and at the same time, reduce our cost to achieve pathway toward positive EBITDA. Together, those 3 pillars are our Clear Blue 2.0 strategy and plan. When it comes to the satellite Internet and telecommunications market, demand is rising significantly. Satellite Internet, telecommunications networks, are expanding in remote week grid and fully boxed locations. They also more and more deemed a very critical infrastructure for companies moving forward. In order to meet that critical need, we solve the energy problem. Off-grid virtual power systems can materially cut diesel dependence and grid interconnection risk for remote telecommunications sites, and Clear Blue is well positioned to support and deliver that service on an ongoing basis. Just as a data point, if you take all of the sites that we have operating in Africa, which are solar only, there's more than 600 of them. Last year, we delivered an uptime of greater than 99.5% uptime for those sites. That is an unheard of metric in the market today for telecom operations solar only. Deepening our relationships with large-scale partners is where we're going to get large-scale revenue. And in our telecommunications vertical, we were thrilled to achieve a huge benefit with Eutelsat this last year in getting a milestone contract for 15,000 potential sites for their LEO rollout across Africa. Eutelsat is a merger of the Eutelsat and OneWeb of France and the U.K. They have significant backing and focus as the EU moves to become more independent, have a better security strategy in defense, and there is significant investment going on to help Eutelsat do the rollouts that they want to do to achieve significant market penetration. In addition to the contract for the GEO product, which has started to roll out, we've received 2 orders, one for 100 units and one for 350 units in Q1 and Q2. We also signed a $500,000 development contract with them to develop LEO-based products and services, which is another large-scale opportunity for Eutelsat. On the Cooper side, we've been working with them for quite a while. Our focus in that market is the electrical utilities and the transportation departments. And as I said earlier, those require long-term proof of concept, run them for 3, 4, 5, 6 months, go through security testing, et cetera, et cetera. That activity has been going on since early last year, and we are hopefully going to see some of the revenue from those projects starting to roll online later this year, but for 2027, it should be a material impact on our growth and revenue trajectory. As of today, we have 5 ongoing pilots or relationships with other potential large-scale customers. mostly in the satellite telecommunications market. So obviously, we are going across the market to talk to a number of people. We've seen significant interest in the market from customers and vendors and projects that are looking for the types of capabilities that we have. So balance sheet, balance sheet, balance sheet, generating cash and getting the company to a point where it's cash flow positive, EBITDA positive and we can invest in growth. One thing I want to comment on about this is cost reduction for the sake of cost reduction is not always a great thing. It's really good when it can align with the strategic direction of a company. In the last few years, we had to invest significantly in product development and technology development in order to get the types of products we need specifically for telecom and also for lighting. We developed our Pico product. We acquired the eSite product in Sweden, and then we launched our micro product. And that required a significant amount of R&D investment. We were investing in the future by building those products. One of the things that small companies are -- companies are kind of -- one of the things in the marketplace is that at a certain point in time, a company needs to transition from being technology focused where the majority of the effort in the company is around the development of the product and the technology to a point where the majority of the effort is towards sales, business development partnership and growth. It's not that you get rid of R&D, you have to always do it and be innovative and move forward in that area and we continue to do it. But the cost reductions that we have achieved have been done within a framework of allowing us to achieve our long-term objectives. We have myself, the management team, the employees and the Board have believed in the long-term value of the company and the opportunity to grow the company going forward. And as a result, we've made the decision that we've got to get these products done, we've got to get them out the door. So in 2025, we achieved over $1 million in cost reductions, $1.243 million, which you can see in our Q1 results. And as a result of adopting AI and again, pushing the pedal to the metal, moving much faster as a company, but also streamlining your expenses and reducing the 17 steps you were doing down to 1 or 2 steps automated by AI. And by the way, we have a lot of AI agents in the company working. They have names like [ COCO and SNUIT and Jasper ] and are performing a number of functions. So when I look at the organization of the company, you can almost start to put names below the AI people who are performing certain functions. But as a result of all of this, we are able to reduce our professional fees, our G&A. Even a little bit on the business development side, even -- although we want to grow business development and sales down the road, there are a lot of -- there's a lot of people work, not paperwork, but proposal work, technology analysis work, reporting work, administrative invoicing work that can be streamlined even in the business development area. And so when you put all of that together, we're now running at a point and this will be there by the end of this year. You'll see most of it in Q4 results, a good chunk of it in Q3 results. But we are at a point now where our annual OpEx is $2.5 million. And if you take that together with our almost 50% gross margin, you start to see that we're not that far away from a positive EBITDA and positive cash flow plan. Once we get there, then we -- and we've got everything the engine well oiled and working, then we start to scale on sales. So the cost reduction strategy is also a strategic piece that says we have to transition from technology product operations, building all of the processes and things around it; two, focusing on sales and market -- go-to-market strategies. And so I believe that these cost reductions were not just done in a way to slash and burn but we're done in a way to make the company a stronger and better company to move forward and to get through that transition, which everybody will tell you is very difficult when you have to move from core R&D technology focused to core sales and business driven. Farrukh, I'm going to turn it over to you, would you like to jump in?

Yes, for sure. Thank you so much, Miriam. Hello, everyone. Yes, I can agree to whatever Miriam was saying in regards to AI having gone through the audit this year. And with AI, it helped us so much that we professional charges and fees that we used to give to third-party consultants and whatnot had reduced significantly because we used AI to do most of things. And so that helped us out a lot during the audit. So in terms of these numbers right now, so just wanted to focus on 2025 first, and then we'll focus on Q1. So this slide is basically on 2025. So 2025 was a reset year. We restructured our balance sheet in late 2024 with RE Royalties deal finalizing in mid-2025. So what we focused on in 2025 was building a foundation for growth, and we did that by 2 things. Targeting customers in the satellite sector, primarily Eutelsat as well as establishing our existing relationships within the telecom sector and looking for targeting customers in the telecom sector. As a result, bookings more than doubled by over 120% for the year, and revenue grew by almost 18%. All of this was done while maintaining a high gross margin of almost 49%. So another area that we focused on was rightsizing and reducing costs, as Miriam just pointed out. So we took almost $1.2 million in operating expenses out of the business, resulting in an improvement in adjusted EBITDA. Our adjusted EBITDA is loss narrowed and overall net loss came down significantly. So if have to sum up the year, I would say strong demand, higher healthy margins and dealer cost base, positioning us well for 2026. Next slide, Miriam. So as I just said, 2025 was all about rebuilding the foundation. We expect 2026 to be the payoff year with Q1 2026 being the transition quarter. bookings within the quarter were light, mainly due to timing of the orders, whereby new orders from Eutelsat, iSATs and U.S. Department of Transport contract added close to almost $800,000 in early April. While revenue in this transition quarter was comparable to prior year, our recurring revenue increased by almost 9%. Margin was still healthy. We managed to have healthy margins of almost 52% for the quarter, and we expect the growth to show up in the year as the year progresses. So our operating expenses were down by more than 20% year-over-year with broad-based cost cuts across business development, travel, salaries, and we expect EBITDA -- adjusted EBITDA to improve as our efficiency initiative takes -- take hold. Next slide.

Thank you, Farrukh. Any trajectory is almost always a [ path ] of 2 steps forward and 1 step back. For the last 5 quarters yielded revenues of greater than $1 million. In Q4, there were a number of adjustments that were made on the year as a whole, which resulted in that one step back that [ we all had ]. Q1 2026 achieved $1 million, and our guidance for Q2 is that it will be a similar result. Going into the back half of 2026, we have a number of telecom rollouts, which could begin to move forward. Larger projects always take time to initiate and we have a number of customers targeting those rollouts for the remainder of 2026. The Eutelsat rollout has begun with the first 2 orders of quantity 100 and 350 sites. Additionally, we have 3 new pilot projects with Eutelsat underway for either new products or markets. Our sales funnel shows strength that could drive a very strong back half of 2026. The business is there. They're very reliable, known, quantified items in addition to a much bigger funnel of sales opportunity and development that we have. The question is timing. Timing is always when will they hit. And we do have visibility to them hitting this year. But we'll report them as they actually come in on a cash basis. So to summarize, we've made clear progress in our Clear Blue strategy with fiscal 2025 revenue growth and improve profitability. We're focusing on space satellite and telecom markets, and those markets present significant opportunities for us. We're deepening our existing relationships with large companies that can provide scale in sales initiatives and longer-term engagements. We've achieved $1.2 million of cost reductions in 2025 and another $950,000 reductions in 2026 will help improve profitability. I just want to comment that the $950,000 of cost reductions in 2026 is a cash reduction. There's a part of that is in the OpEx and a part of that is in the R&D capitalization. And so I think the number that hits OpEx is about $700,000, $750,000 of that $950,000. And lastly, focus on sales excellence with cost efficiencies giving pathway to generate positive EBITDA. So that's all we have for today. I want to open it up to questions and answers. Jonathan, if you can curate as you always do in a great way. Could you please send us any questions that we've received from people who are online.

Yes, absolutely. So we just have 1 sitting right now, which is just wondering if we can speak to the delay in sharing the results from 2025.

So it's been very interesting to see what's happened in the marketplace. And this isn't the first time Clear Blues had to delay its audit. I have to say that auditing publicly traded companies under IFRS is not something that's really built for a company that's as small as we are. It requires a lot of work from the auditors, and it requires them to, I think, do an amount of work that is more than the size of the company. So if we were a bigger company, they probably do the same amount of work but they have to do a lot of work. So basically, the reason why we were late this year was just because we needed more time. There were no issues. There were no major problems or items that had to be done. We got a very clean audit report from the auditors and have been all over that. I think the other point is one thing that I have learned as a result of becoming a leaner, meaner machine with AI is if you have a much smaller group of people working for you, we've had a couple of major personal items for some people in our finance team. And so when we lost a person who was one of the 2 or 3 key people we needed for 2 weeks due to personal issues that were quite serious. We just made the decision to say, give us some breathing point now that we've taken the hit. So ideally, we would have been out with the audit, the third or fourth week of May, but I think just because of human issues we needed an extra couple of weeks. I will note that we decided and thought it was important that we get both out at the same time. So when you put that together, we're all clean and ready to go. But there were no mean issues, just a question of more time. I would also comment that it's a brutal, brutal, brutal process, especially when you're late. And so our biggest objective is compel or high water that. It's not going to happen again.

Got you. Awesome. Thank you. Okay. We have another 1 here coming in from Bob. He's saying we expect a large [ spread ] credit in Q3. Do we have kind of like ballpark for that? Or what does that kind of look like?

Right now, it's above $500,000 is where we're at. And so we went through a SR&ED audit, a full audit for our 2023 tax return. We then filed our 2024 and it got approved right away. So we do think and hope that this shred refund will be processed reasonable given that we just went through a quite rigorous audit and passed it without any major issues. So because of the new taxes, you now get the refund that you would get when you were a private company, and the federal portion is a refund. And that's -- as a result of that, the audit should be more than $500,000 this year.

It's a refundable tax credit rather than like historically, public companies used to get just tax credits to be adjusted against future income. With this change in the recent budget, it's a refundable tax credit for the federal portion as well.

Great. Okay, nothing else has come in just yet.

I think there's this one question from Fred. It's have you explored the government fund? So there's this linked to a obtaining government...

We have -- I'll take a look at the one that has been specifically linked to, but we are working with NRC IRAP, which also had the -- the green fund is the new STDC fund. If it's the NRC green fund, that is the rebranding of the old STDC fund. We could apply for -- this green fund again in the future. But given that we just finished the previous one, I think we have to wait a year or 2. We are exploring a number of other options we get federal government support around defense initiatives. We are working towards moving our products into support for mission-critical telecommunications in the defense and security sector. So that is a natural lead-in and segue to the systems that we already have. We've done some pilots and some projects in that area. And we're also working with the Canadian Space Agency on space-related grants and getting some good support there. So we are pursuing non-dilutive, non-debt government grants and refunds. .

Great. Can you elaborate on some of the pilots that you're working on in the space and satellite sector?

Sure. So in the space and satellite sector, where the EU government has come out with a regulation around cybersecurity, and that requires a significant investment for certain industries to have resiliency. So we're working on some pilots around launching our Pico product for a resiliency backup of satellite communications across Europe. . That is a very exciting opportunity for us because we'd like to get into the European market. It's a great market for us to be in. And we're hopeful that, that will come to fruition also working in the Middle East with a security company, satellite services company who is wanting to roll out a full temporary and mobile satellite services with solar and hybrid battery powered systems for satellite. Again, our Pico product is perfect for that, and we are working on that.

Perfect. Thank you. Okay. Speaking to Eutelsat now, they're providing $1 million to $2 million to develop a LEO product. So how much of our existing tech can be used in the new project? And then how big is the TAM versus the GEO market for LEO?

So it's interesting when you get into the discussion around different satellite services. I use the phrase Starlink to refer to LEO-type services. But within the category, there are very different kinds of services and different kinds of -- so it's not just like one product. So the satellite LEO focus for Eutelsat is a different capability and different footprint of the use cases than you would see, for example, for Starlink. Starlink's mostly a retail opportunity. You may have noticed that Eutelsat has done a major purchase initiative to roll out additional satellites, so they're doing a major satellite rollout. Our products are very well suited for it. The base platform, the base technology is perfect for it, tends to be larger power. And so it will be a combination of either our Pico or Nano product. What we have found with Eutelsat is that if we focus on a very specific product and integrate our product with their products, it's not just by this power pack and attach it to it but do a really strong integration of the 2 products then you make significant progress in terms of the efficiencies and the performance of the system. So for our Connect Wi-Fi 15,000 site rollout, what we're actually shipping is an integrated. It's a single box that has both Eutelsat, modems and Clear Blue Power Systems together and we've integrated them from a software and an API and a performance in even an electrical perspective. So there's been a fair amount of work to take our standard product and specifically tune it to the use case for Connect WiFi, which is GEO. We expect to do the same kind of tuning for Eutelsat LEO, which is why there's R&D work to be done. So the short answer is we have the product. We have the technology and engineering it for very exact and optimal efficiencies and performance is what we're doing to really have a big bang for buck.

All right. Awesome. And just an addendum to that one is, what does ASP look like versus our current products?

So I don't know that answer. That's the $64,000 question. The Pico for -- the Pico plus product for GEO is around CAD 1,200 to CAD 1,400 per unit for the initial sale price, which includes the first 3 years of managed service. Leo will be bigger than that. I would say $2,000 plus, it could be higher. I think the one thing I would say is the lower the cost, the larger at the market. So if I can sell 100 at $10,000, I can sell 1,000 at $5,000 and potentially 5,000 at $2,000. So part of what we do is work very hard to get the cost down, so we can get a larger market rollout and penetration. But that's part of the project that we're working on right now is to figure out what's going to be required to optimize the system, what is the performance? How do we tune our product to get the maximum performance benefit from the system.

Awesome. Thank you. Okay, shifting gears a bit. So looking at the lighting side of the business now. So we had success with Toronto in Bloor Street, they're doing the reletting project, and Toronto has said that they are -- they're upgrading their street-lighting over the years? So is this an opportunity that we're exploring and, yes, what other kind of opportunities exist in the lighting side of the business.

Can you still hear me, Jonathan?

Yes, I can -- we lost your presentation, but we can still hear you.

Yes. So the lighting business -- so first of all, it's a really fantastic recurring revenue business. The majority of our recurring revenue is in our lighting business because of our ability to address the bakeries of the North American market. So our energy as a service model and delivery of the services for that segment is something we've been able to be more aggressive on our EAS service model. And so it's delivered significant revenue growth and margin as a result. We have the Nevada Department of Transportation, as an example. We have a 10-year contract to manage those systems on an ongoing basis from an energy as a service. I think the first install for the city of Hamilton was in 2014. And even today, they are paying us an annual fee for the management of the service. So we are looking at -- we are seeing that marketplace evolve. And I think it's getting -- I've talked about this before. I think it's getting to the point where you can see much larger scale standard rollouts. We've had a lot of data center projects, and we're hopeful that we're going to get another data center contract in Q3. And we all kind of look at that and say why why are data centers doing so much solar lighting. And I think the reason is because they are the ones who feel such pain on the energy side, that, that they're doing everything they can from a solar perspective. The price point of a solar street light when we first started this business, we were paying $1,400 for a solar panel and a solar street light was over $15,000. Now we've got them down to even $2,000, $3,000 a [ pole ]. And when you get to that price level, it's something that moves much more quickly. And one of the examples of that is when you see the larger players come into the market. So now you've got utilities who are starting to go mainstream with doing solar street lights. Janice Gross Stein of Munk Debates and the Munk School of International Affairs made the comment last week that one of the biggest impetus to adoption of clean technologies is going to be what's happened in the Middle East with 25% of oil shot in the Strait of Hormuz. And we do think that, that's going to be a major impact. The concept of putting miles and miles of power cables is just why do that when solar street lighting can be so reliable and easily managed.

Awesome. Thank you. Okay, one more here. So have we explored sodium ion battery potential for better colder weather performance versus lithium batteries?

That one is above my pay grade. If you could just let me know who asked that question, Jonathan, after the meeting, I will get an answer from our battery person. We are currently shipping mostly Lithium Ion even in cold weather. For those of us who are Canadian, we know that when it's minus 20 the sunshine. And so at minus 20, when the batteries need to be warmed up a little bit, you've got solar on the solar panel. . There's also a lot to be done on technology. People have this kind of one line of rule that says, "Oh, below 0, you can't charge a lithium battery." That's actually not true. You can. It's just the amount of charging and the way you charge. So when you have a smart power system like Clear Blue has and you can control how you're charging mat battery, you do have the ability to go into cold weather. So lithium-ion does have the ability to support many, not all, but many cold weather situations. We are continuing to work with other opportunities for energy sources and store -- energy storage. One project that we have -- a partnership that we have under development. We've started to work with a German Canadian company called SFC Energy that has a really good fuel cell technology that is of interest to us. And so support for joint initiatives with their fuel cell and our lithium solar products is something that's also under development. This is an example where AI allows us to move more quickly. A project like that. We're doing it with 1/4 of the people in weeks of development testing, research to make us able to support that type of application as compared to taking months because AI allows us to develop the test plans, run the test plans, do the market research, get the technology information, create the documentation, do the certification all at the speed of light. And so getting into these new applications and new markets is heavily being supported by the use of AI across the company. Not to mention the fact that if we need software interfaces to support a smart fuel cell or another battery, our 25 software AI agents can develop it very, very quickly. And it might be more than 25. I'd have to ask [indiscernible] company he has today.

Perfect. Thank you. So that looks like all we have for now.

Okay. Well, thank you, everyone. We'll give you our next update with the Q2 earnings results in late August. I hope that you have a very nice relaxing summer. And I hope that we have a very relaxing summer as we kick in to high gear and move forward with a number of large projects. As we see those results come in, we will, of course, keep the market advised on interesting information.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.

Bye.