Haivision Systems Inc. (H8A.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you, everyone, for joining our webcast today with Haivision Systems. The purpose of today's presentation is to give our audience a better understanding of the business through a presentation and then questions with management. The presentation is going to be led by Mirko Wicha, CEO, who is also joined by Dan Rabinowitz, Chief Financial Officer. If you look to get a copy of today's presentation, simply e-mail me at [email protected]. We'll break for questions at the end of the formal presentation. When we do break, we encourage those questions. And as a reminder, we're only going to take questions through the webinar portal. If you're listening over the telephone, please access the web link sent earlier to ask a question. You can submit a question using the text box within the portal at any time. I'll ask the questions on the air for everyone to hear and Mirko or Dan will answer. I'm not going to reference any names, but simply read the questions asked. And as we have a very large audience today, if I can't get to your question online, and it's not yet been addressed during the call and can be, I'll come back to you by e-mail. I'm not going to read the forward-looking statements, but I do state that they apply, and I reference them on Page 2 of this presentation. With that said, once again, thank you for joining us. Remember, this is fairly informal, and we do encourage questions to help you better understand the business and its growth path. And now I'll turn the call over to Mirko to start his part of the discussion and presentation.

Thank you, Glen. Dan, if you can move the slides. Perfect. So let's get started. It should take about 20 minutes or so, and then we have time for questions. So one could say that the power of real-time live video struck the world about 50 years ago when the U.S. landed on the moon. Since then, really the technological progress of network connectivity from the first TV broadcast to the Internet and more recently, mobile have transformed the world. And beyond the ability to instantaneously share text emails, documents, pictures and data of all types, everyone now relies on real-time and most important thing, live video to ingest information process it to drive decisions and then share the outcome. And this is the ultimate power of network, video and data processing innovations. Now with the prevalence of cloud computing, right, the ubiquitous bandwidth, the emergence of 5G and unlimited data processing, allowing AI at scale, real-time video, which was once considered novelty because of this complexity has now become a day-to-day necessity. Now we call this the real-time video revolution and the Haivision aims to lead it in the enterprise, government and defense markets. Next slide. I mean Earth network stops spinning, right? The mission-critical events are happening everywhere and around the world now. And the value lies and what's happening now and the difference between success and failure often depends on leaders accessing the right information at the right time to make the best possible decisions. Then now is mission-critical for public safety, military, federal and intelligence communities. Real-time situational awareness save lives, support strategic decision-making and makes the world a safer place for all of us. That now is equally critical for customers and shareholders of large enterprises and the technology in the utilities, finance, logistics and aerospace sectors, just to name a few. As threats increase, both physical and cybersecurity monitoring have become vital needs for every major organization. Now here again, not knowing it's not an option. Now also fuels live sports, live events, live news and entertainment. It's now that sets the world heartbeat and drive billions in advertising revenue. The lifeblood of the media entertainment industry. The value is in there now, everybody simply wants it now. The value of video feed decreases over time. At Haivision, we provide mission-critical video solutions designed for the most demanding use cases with latency requirements of less than 100 milliseconds, enabling real-time interactivity. The defense and government first responder segment is among the most demanding. Accessing real-time information in the form of video, data and computer generated imagery is mission-critical. It represents a highly valuable market segment targeted by Haivision. Now latency of a few seconds also serves the needs of enterprise operational centers used in infrastructure, energy, banking and technology corporations to monitor critical assets in real time. This is a global market touching any industry and a core focus for Haivision. Low latency of a few hundred milliseconds up to about 1 second, serves the live sports, news and entertainment industries. Nobody wants to see a goal on TV a few seconds after receiving a social media notification. This market, known as real-time video contribution in the media and entertainment industry is another high-value segment targeted by Haivision. Now beyond a few seconds of latency, video feed serve consumer-grade services such as user-generated content and regular television, where latency typically exceeds 10 seconds, a market which is not a focus for Haivision. To put this in perspective, what we call mission-critical video solutions enables ultra-low latencies in the range of 25 to 80 milliseconds. This is the now, and our platform offering is built to monetize it. Now to monetize the value of the now and deliver the world in real time, Haivision developed 3 platforms acquired we'd like to call the ecosystems, serving the needs of our customers. Our mission customers, encompassing government defense, public safety, aerospace and large enterprises are served with the Haivision Command 360, which is a scalable, secure video wall software, powering command centers and enabling real-time situational awareness. Command 360 aggregates live video, data and applications, supporting rapid decision-making in mission-critical environments and a Haivision Intelligence 360, which combines the Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance which we call ISR solutions with secure, scalable, multisite, live video delivery platform for mission-critical defense, public safety and tactical operations. And then our sports and news customers will serve at the Haivision Live 360 which offers a unique platform combining fixed line and 5G bonded cellular real-time live video contribution to sports and news content producers. The DNA of Haivision solutions are and I've always been reliability, quality, performance and security, whether it's a director in the bustling environment of a live NFL game, commander station and strategic confines of war room or CIO orchestrating a response to a cybersecurity attack. Haivision powers to observe and engage with the world in real time with unparalleled clarity and precision. Because of the nature of what we do to our clients, we refer to this as mission-critical video networking. So let me be a little more specific with a few customer examples. Now within the context of controlling, optimizing and protecting the global enterprise, Haivision Command 360 leads the market in providing real-time video and visualization solutions. And we cater to professionals within organizations that require real-time video information to effectively do their jobs. These installations demand the highest level of system security and 24/7 resilient operational capability together with high-end performance, responsiveness and connectivity. Meta, which was the ex-Facebook, as an example, has turned to Haivision to help in visualizing cybersecurity, network operations, fraud, physical security and critical data center systems. They have actually commissioned over 60 operational centers globally, all connected back to three major global security operations centers, which we call GSOC. The opportunities are just now emerging. Taking the example of financial services, cyber crime has become a serious concern and enterprises are increasingly adopting military command center style approaches to the cybersecurity strategies. This involves establishing centralized, highly sophisticated video operational centers that are designed to monitor, assess and respond in real time to global cyber threats across the entire enterprise as we deliver for JPMorgan, Barclays or Citibank. The government and defense industries, Command 360 is broadly used for real-time crime centers for police departments to joint operation centers that enable coordinated military action. In fact, last year, we've announced a landmark $80 million win with the U.S. Navy to supply advanced video processing and distribution systems for their surface combatant fleet, enhancing situational awareness and leveraging Haivision Command 360 for real-time mission-critical visualization. So our solutions play a pivotal role in decision-making, resource allocation and strategic planning. Now with Intelligence 360 and government defense, where security, performance and reliability and low latency are paramount, we specifically focus on the global ISR deployments. This includes a critical video from sensors and cameras on drones that pilots on the other side of the world rely on and mission-critical video distribution across government campuses and offices within space centers and onboard military or defense platforms. NASA, as an example, is one of our strategic accounts that relies on Haivision to capture video from cameras all over their launch sites, deliver those critical feeds throughout their campuses and display the video along with other mission-critical data within the entire network of their mission control centers. In the enterprise market, we also give the professionals with an organization that require real-time video information to effectively do their jobs like delivering live video to financial traders at RBC, Citibank or the New York Stock Exchange. Haivision has invested significantly in security, certifications and network threat compliances, thus creating a huge barrier to entry for the Live 360. Haivision has been a game changer in the media and entertainment industry, pushing the boundaries of innovative ultra-low latency video network technology for over 20 years. Our Live 360 platform offers a unique solution to manage live contribution workflows. And one of our largest clients, ESPN, leverages our technology for NCAA Sports. Over 600 college venues are wired to stream live events straight back to ESPN's control center in Connecticut. And the large network of Haivision Makito, which is our encoders and SRT technology power through 2,500 events for ESPN every year. Back in 2010, we first teamed up with the NFL to transform live remote interviews. Today, we are involved in many low latency projects like driving the officiating replay systems for all the NFL games. Haivision was also instrumental in making the NFL COVID draft a success 4 years ago. Now private 5G networks and the advanced application of 5G network slicing is unleashing new broadcast production opportunities. The power of our latest 5G bonded cellular technology was demonstrated by last year's first-of-its-kind opening ceremony on the River Seine at the Summer Olympics. And more recently, we announced a huge win with one of our largest -- one of the largest news organization on the planet to supply 5G mobile transmitters to the global team of reporters. Haivision's presence in the live sports and news is everywhere. We're not just part of the scene, we're actually at its very core. Some of the growth drivers. Haivision's 3 platforms, the Command 360, Intelligence 360 and Live 360 are really designed to address critical market trends, driving the need for real-time intelligence, collaboration and live content delivery. Across every industry, organizations are deploying command centers to enable rapid data-driven decision-making. And Command 360 meets this demand by empowering response teams with cross-domain visualization and seamless collaboration tools, ensuring that decision-makers, customers and stakeholders can maintain real-time situational awareness and respond instantly to unfolding events. Now this is a truly global market across all industries. In the defense and security sector, the Intelligence 360 is positioned at the intersection of growing global threats and rapid technological evolution. The rise of artificial intelligence at the edge is transforming ISR operations and Intelligence 360 leverages shift to deliver actionable insights with unparalleled security, compliance and interoperability, overcoming high barriers to entry in mission-critical environments. This is a fast-growing market considering the ongoing global threats. Meanwhile, the Live 360 drives innovation in broadcast and live event production as private 5G networks replace traditional RF systems and remote cloud-based workflows become the new standard. By enabling high-quality live content delivery from anywhere, Live 360 captures the audiences and advertising revenues that combined to make live production the most engaging and valuable form of media. Now as our customer examples demonstrate, Haivision is focused on live and video use cases applied to market segments where our DNA of performance, quality, reliability and security are most important. We don't play in the consumer market or the low-cost prosumer video market segment, which investors rightfully perceive as low value, nor do we play in the video conferencing market, competing with Zoom or Skype or free offerings like Teams. Mission-critical video networking represents the highest value segment of the global video streaming infrastructure market, estimated to be about $40 billion in 2022 and growing at a compound annual growth rate of 16% over the next 10 years. Now out of the $40 billion total addressable market, we estimate our targeted high-value segments were about $10 billion. Our strategy is simply focused on 3 high-value segments: the government defense, enterprise, media and entertainment and leveraging our platform solutions across these high-value market segments is foundational to our business as we maximize technical synergies and credibility while differentiating against single point product providers. Talk about the leadership role. Haivision stands as a global leader in real-time video innovation. I mean 20 years ago, we pioneered ultra-low latency video and redefine the boundaries of real-time communication with our groundbreaking encoding technology, enabling mission-critical applications where every millisecond counts from live production to defense and public safety operations. Haivision is also the inventor of the groundbreaking streaming protocol for secure, reliable transport known as SRT, the most widely adopted open source video streaming protocol in the world, which has transformed the entire industry. SRT has established Haivision as a true pioneer that created a revolution, opened the doors to the highest level of leadership within our clients and forged the path to many strategic partnerships and M&A opportunities. And as 5G reshapes connectivity, Haivision continues to push the envelope on live video performances over 5G networks. Its innovations empower content creators and field operators to deliver pristine real-time video from virtually anywhere, even under challenging network conditions. And finally, Haivision is leading the next transformation through AI-powered video intelligence. By embedding artificial intelligence into its video workflows, we deliver smarter, more efficient live video optimized dynamically for content, performance and mission, driving the next-generation video experiences. Let's talk a little bit about Haivision numbers. I mean today, we have approximately 380 employees throughout the world, and we delivered $130 million in revenue in our previous fiscal year 2024. Since our incorporation in 2004, we have delivered 18 years of positive adjusted EBITDA, which we see as a proof point of the value of our vision. Our strong 70% plus gross margin profile is another testament to our innovative technology and to the solutions we provide for these mission-critical and high demanding use cases. As mentioned earlier, we target the $10 billion high-value segment of the broad video infrastructure market, which is a total TAM about $40 billion. And we believe this is the right segment with significant growth perspective to deliver long-term shareholder value. Over our history, we have done 8 successful acquisitions to serve our growth objectives, and we will continue doing M&A as opportunities arise. I would say today, Haivision is really seen as an innovator, disruptor, prime influencer and a technology leader in the real-time video industry. Now profitable growth has been a guiding principle since I founded Haivision almost 21 years ago. In our 16-plus years as a private company, we actually grew organically at a 22.7% CAGR and have been excellent stewards the capital. As from an initial investment of only $8.25 million in capital, this is in Canadian dollars, we delivered over $80 million in revenue at the time of our IPO in 2020. I can say not many companies can say that, right? Usually, it's the reverse, right? They raised $80 million in capital and maybe deliver $8 million of sales. So very impressive. More importantly, the current market conditions show us how critical it is to keep profitable growth as a core objective of the business to drive long-term shareholder value. Now our acquisition history also included 2 very strategic post-IPO acquisitions to position us as leaders in the command centers and 5G wireless developments, an essential part of our vision for the real-time video revolution. The Cinemassive acquisition led to the creation of our Command 360 platform and a major win with the U.S. Navy. And the Aviwest acquisition led to the creation of our Live 360 platform and a major win with a U.S. Tier 1 news provider to provide mobile transmitters to their field journalists globally. Now consider that 80% of acquisitions fail, we have an impressive track record of accomplishment, and we'll keep leveraging our team's expertise in strategic M&A to expand product offering and grow revenue. I would say our growth revenue will be primarily driven by the demand for increasingly complex command centers worldwide and across all industries, expanding the reach of those command centers to the rest of the world, introducing AI to our products to make them more intelligent and I would say by new possibilities offered by 5G connectivity in the media entertainment as well as the government and defense industries. We have built a sizable business and the investments we have already made in product development and in our sales organization are enabling us to drive operational efficiencies and to accelerate profitability. But together with our projected double-digit revenue growth, 20% EBITDA is right around the corner. This is just the beginning. Haivision has the potential to serve as a platform for growth and reap the benefits of the real-time video revolution. Let's talk a little bit about our people. Our management team has an average of 30-plus years in the video industry, and most of our executive team have worked together for the last 15 years. In fact, I've worked with Peter, our Chief Strategy Officer in my previous life at Discreet and Autodesk and since the very beginning of Haivision. Dan, our CFO, joined us in the early days of Haivision over 15 years ago. In addition to that, 2 years ago, we successfully strengthened our product activities with the arrival of Jean-Marc as our Chief Product Officer, who ran all product strategy at CineMedia. This team is tight and works extremely well together. Our ability to deliver also relies on the engagement and quality of our employees, and we are proud to have assembled a diverse workforce spread across 22 countries, 17 time zones and speaking over 27 languages. I'm also proud to say that over 50% of our employees have been with us for more than 5 years, not an easy thing to say in the tech world, having the right balance to retain expertise while allowing ongoing acquisition of new talents. I've always said it's all about the people and our culture is dear to my heart. It is what built Haivision and makes us special. Thank you for listening.

Super. Thank you, Mirko. And to our audience again, please use the Q&A tab down below to ask the question. We do have quite a few questions in the queue already. So we'll just get going. First question for you guys. Can you just talk a little bit more about what makes your solution set or what within your solution set gives you the competitive advantage that you currently have with your customers? I guess, rehash a little bit about what your moat is from a technical standpoint?

Well, it's a good question. I mean one of the things that people need to also understand, which is maybe not in the presentation is the history of Haivision, right? And when I started Haivision, I actually acquired an interesting technology, which was developed in about 15 years prior to or started to be developed by an engineering firm creating super low latency codecs out of the U.S. in Montreal had an R&D center. And they went up to 11, and then I acquired the technology from them and I started Haivision. So when we start Haivision, we were, by far, the world's leader. We have technology, the best engineers and super low latency encoders, which, by the way, very few people even knew about. When you think about what people talked about was broadcast, even streaming was a thing then and telco, where people put in latency into the broadcast feed. They made sure there was latency. Nobody thought about super, super low latency, low bandwidth. Everybody wanted massive bandwidth as much bandwidth as possible. So nobody really paid attention to that. Our technology was a genesis of what became later the telepresence market, the real immersive rooms that started back in the old days with Teliris and Hewlett Packard and then Cisco jumped into that. And they needed these low latency codecs. So our technology has always from day 1 been something that consumed very little bandwidth, but they needed high-definition as high-quality video at 30 to 60 hertz, okay? So which means it was end-to-end communication, not just a single one way. So when we started Haivision, we were always involved in the most critical demanding use cases, which we started in telemedicine, did remote surgeries, that kind of stuff, stopped from space, underwater and it tested it. Now the interesting thing enough, the whole world in the last 15 or 12 years, I would say, has shifted from the broadcast telco space into low latency, single passing coding and they want information now. And all of a sudden, guess what, everybody is coming into our domain. And as a result, if you look at our expertise and how many man years we have of building these systems, we're in -- I think I stopped counting. I think we're in our 15th or 16th generation of product. There are some people just going to the third or fourth. So that is one reason and the main reason why it's the know-how, the secret sauce, how to build systems. It's not just using the same chip to using the same technology, absolutely not. It's how we build systems. And that's another reason why our gross margins for our proprietary hardware products are the highest in our company. So people keep saying hardware. This is not hardware like traditional broadcast hardware where it's 50% margins. We're in the 80-plus margins because we know how to build it. We know how to build it low cost. We know how to make it small, powerful, dense, and that's what's been driving all of this video revolution. And live is what it's at. It's not the Netflix type of stuff. It's live video, which is becoming the most important piece. I don't know if that helps.

I think it does. All right. Sort of sticking with the same theme. Can you just talk about the competitive marketplace that you, I guess, participate in? Do you have any direct peer-to-peer competitors or just lay out sort of the overall competitive landscape for your business?

Yes. It's a very good question. And I would have to first say that, no, we don't have a direct single competitor. Sometimes it would be nice to have one competitor you could always be competing with. But because we have our 3 different markets, actually, I think I can bring up a slide if you want. Can I share at all?

Sure.

I'll see if I can do this. If not, then I'll talk to it. I just dug up a competitor slide. Share, share, share. Watch me. I'm in Zoom, so it probably won't work. Forget it. All right. So -- but because we have the three markets, we tend to compete with, in general, almost three sets of different competitors. So remember, the control room market, right, the control centers, we're dealing with people like DataPath, Crestron. We're dealing with people like Barco, for example, ActivView, Jupiter. So these are very different type of players that we would then compete with our ISR defense systems with companies that you probably never even hear of, like smaller companies like maybe like Sightline, Cubic, Delta, which build ruggedized military style type of hardware systems and software systems embedded on platforms, whether it's planes, tanks, automobiles, whatever. So that's our ISR and our Intelligence 360 platform. And then we've got the broadcast side, right, the live events, live sports, but we don't deal with the typical harmonics, if you know what I mean, or even the Everts or even the media kind guys. We tend to deal with more of the pure encoding vendors and now the 5G like LiveView, Dejero, TV. So we've got these three interesting dynamics. There are 1 or 2 vendors that move and we see them in a couple of different areas. But we're really the only vendor that is taking a holistic approach on these high-value segments where we focus on super low latency, extreme high-quality performance, but also what we focus on the most is security. And when you look at all these other players, very few of them actually understand security to the level that we do. Yes, they might play. I mean, the military guys, yes, their stuff is secure. But we have that across all of our product lines. So there's really -- you can't really pigeonhole us into one. I can give you -- I wish I could share my slide, but I can get that to you, Glen, and you can send it out just to give you an idea of where we play.

Super. I guess I had a number of questions around this topic. So I'm just going to generalize it for you. And if we've got follow-on questions, we'll address it. But it really deals with the transition that you guys have gone through and sort of the flat growth over the last couple of years. Can you just discuss that decision to go through that transition? What sort of led to it and what that means for you coming out of that transition?

Dan, do you want to take that one or...

Sure. So there were principally 2 transitions that we've gone through over the last 3 years. The first decision was for us to get out of the managed service business. The managed services business tended to focus on the house of worship market. And we had a pretty impressive list of clients like Joel Osteen, Jimmy Swaggart, what have you. But that was a different market for us. We were really reselling bandwidth alongside our managed service. And as the price of bandwidth was going down, we were running faster just to maintain revenue levels and the profitability was being decreased. You attach to that, that there were certain companies that were focused solely on the house of worship market. It just didn't fit our mission-critical direction that we were going down, and we decided to pull out of it. And so that was about $10 million of revenue that we decided just to walk away from. And so year-over-year comparisons appear to look as though we were sort of stalled. But what was really happening is that we were getting rid of the least profitable part of our business in favor of the mission-critical, more focused, more profitable part of our business. The second transition was really related to our Cinemassive acquisition. When we acquired that company, they were pretty much a systems integrator where they were providing bespoke solutions to their customers. And those bespoke solutions oftentimes included screens, racks, cabling, brackets and what have you. And it became clear to us that not only was it less profitable of a business because we could not charge the same profit margin for things that were commonly off-the-shelf products like screens. But it also added a whole level of complexity to our business in terms of the amount of inventory we needed to hold. It increased the conversion from sales to cash. And it was also a little bit conflicting with our existing channels that we were known for in our legacy business. So we pulled out of that business and that cost us between $6 million and $10 million in incremental revenue as well as we were migrating away from that business into becoming more of a proprietary manufacturer. Now we believe that those transitions are both complete. We believe that the year-over-year comparisons at this point are fair and clean. And so we no longer have to sort of explain the -- what appeared to be a stall in revenue. In fact, we've been able to exceed our revenue without these third-party components and without our managed services revenue in the last few quarters. Without those third-party components, we were still exceeding the revenues of prior periods. And we're beginning to see our profitability improve as we finish those transitions. So that really is why we decided to go down that path.

As unmanned autonomous vehicles, drones are increasingly deployed in the U.S. military, is there a direct link between the increased deployments of these vehicles and the opportunities for Haivision?

Well, it's a big question because it's a pretty vast, massive market, right? It depends on the size of these vehicles, size of the drones, for example, and where we would play. Now we have two different views of this. If you look at the what we call platforms, right, which could be a bird, balloon, whatever, right, tank, for the larger platforms, we actually have physical equipment on because these people need the physical equipment, they need the performance. And of course, the weight is not an issue. We play very well. That's our ISR bread and butter. We are the world leaders there. As like little drones, people -- handheld drones, we're not on that platform. People put a little chips on them. Where we play as this multiplies is in the aggregation of all the video and the ISR data where our ecosystem, our Intelligence 360 ecosystem and our Kraken transcoders. Kraken is our software real-time low-latency defense transcoding system that is basically adopted as a standard in the U.S. military and other friendly force, where it aggregates all of this data from everywhere which sometimes can be half garbage, sometimes can be okay, but it puts it into one area, massages it and sends it to the command control centers in a meaningful manner. That, I believe, is a much faster growth market, where we can control that ecosystem, and that's where we're positioning the Kraken -- our Kraken AI development where they need intelligence on the data. So it's really going to be about data manipulation, data handling. We're not going to be competing in handheld drone hardware. That's not our play. Our play is the ecosystem and all the platforms and the visualization systems and the command centers, which is, I believe, the biggest growth in the world. And this is not just defense military, by the way. Think of how many police stations there are in the world in every country, it's massive. And all of these emergency response first responders, whether it's police, fire, security, border security, they all need to have a command control center and they need to be portable, they need to be deployable, they need to be effective. So that's kind of where I see as the biggest -- by far, the biggest market.

Dan, a follow-up to the previous question. Can you explain the timing of the transitions and why profitability hasn't improved while you got out of money losing businesses?

Well, I'm not sure I completely agree with that construct. Last year, we did have significant profitability. We did demonstrate adjusted EBITDA at higher levels than we had in the past. This year represented a year of a little bit of investment. We have a whole slew of new products coming out of the oven to support our growth for 2026 and beyond. So we believe that we have gone through the trough in terms of revenue. We have now been seeing the uptake in our pipeline. We're seeing the uptick in our revenue, and we're seeing that our OpEx is remaining pretty flat. And thus, we're going to be able to exploit that going forward, show operational efficiency and demonstrate even higher levels of profitability in '26 and beyond.

To what extent do auxiliary offerings such as services, software and maintenance contribute to Haivision's overall revenue mix and margin profile compared to pure hardware sales?

If you were to look at the split of our revenues across hardware, software and maintenance and support, our maintenance and support generally represents about 20% of our revenue. It's actually a little higher these days. And we've been seeing significant growth in our support maintenance and support agreements because it's a bit of an annuity business for us. We keep increasing the number of people who are under maintenance and support contracts. Our hardware business still is a predominant business. It's about 50% of our revenue. But I dare say that our hardware revenue has some of the highest margins in our portfolio of products, which kind of speaks to what is the value of the hardware? Is it really the hardware? Or is it really the intelligence that we have on the hardware, the software, the firmware that we have on the software? I dare say that the value and even our hardware products is more in the software side of that hardware product that enables us to demand those higher margins. And then our software -- application software, which we install on Dell servers in many cases, tends to be about 30% of our revenue and tends to be more at the average of our overall revenue going forward. Now we are also seeing that people are tending to buy virtual machines. They tend to be buying software-only options. And so that is an opportunity for us to enhance our gross margins going forward if that business continues to grow. Over the long term, we expect hardware, software and then maintenance and support and services to represent about 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 of our revenue going forward. At least that's our long-term goal. I'm not exactly sure when we might get there, but we are certainly investing significantly on the software side and maintenance and support in the interest of growing that side of the business.

And I would just add to that, Glen, is also that in what we do in the markets we play, you have to have hardware. You will never replace it with software only. So there's going to be a component of hardware. And we think 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 is a very good mix because people need high-performance hardware technologies in all things we do for mission-critical aspects. If you can do it in software, that's probably not our market, right? So we believe that's the future. It's always going to be there. 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 is actually -- is our goal.

Okay. A number of questions around AI, obviously. I'll ask one specific question and then maybe you could color on the back end of it in terms of the overall I guess, opportunity or play of AI in your market. Can you talk about how advances in large-scale models -- sorry, advances in large language models and edge AI are impacting your customers and what that means for demand for your products?

Well, I mean, let's be clear. We are not in the business of building large models. We never will be as we're not an AI model company. So that's off our table. What we deal with is partners that build models for specific industries. Now let's take the easiest one in defense, military, right, obviously, because we think the first place where it's obvious is in the ISR field, which we are the leader in. And interestingly enough, all of those players know Haivision and all the players work with Haivision already. And what's happened in the past is that people need multiple different systems to accomplish a task. So they need to get this massive parallel NVIDIA processing system, just to be able to run their own model, just to be able to apply AI onto the model. But what the problem is that they also need is they need that live video that's coming in from ISR feeds and at the same time, apply that AI model. And they can't do it in one box. They can't do it with 3 different -- it's not easily done with three different devices. What our opportunity is that we are on the edge. We are the standard guys at the edge where all of our Makito, our Kraken are today. They've been for years. So we are now teaming up with these model providers like the Palantir as an example, pick one, there's a bunch of them, where our customers need those solutions. And for that, actually, we developed the Kraken AI, the KX1 product that we launched earlier this year, where it's our own developed hardware platform with NVIDIA technology built inside with our Kraken software inside that will be able to house these large models, have enough processing power and interactively run the Kraken at the same time. So you got 3, 4 feeds, AI feeds coming in from any sensor and apply AI technology with the models in real time. That's a game changer. So that's our ability to already show the technology. Those are the early adopters. So it's going to start shrinking. It's going to get better over time. But that's where we see a huge potential. ISR is obvious. But we're also seeing it in sports and live sports, where in the 5G stuff, they really have problems with networks, private 5G and they need to start adopting some AI technologies of the video feeds. So we're now working also with some providers on working on helping with AI modeling within our embedded 5G technology.

Super. Can you talk about what is the typical length of a contract in Government, Intelligence, Entertainment and Sports divisions?

Well, that's an interesting question. We are the seller of hardware, software and services. And so these are periodic sales. Now if you're asking what the sales cycle might be, the sales cycle could be as few as a couple of weeks, as long as a year or 2, depending on what area of the business we're talking of. If you're talking about command centers, the sales cycle might be a little bit longer. If you're talking about ISR needs, the sales period can be much shorter. Now we do have longer-term contracts as it relates to our maintenance support agreements. Those can span a year, 2 years, 3 years, even 5 years at times. We do have long-term rental agreements that are typically 1, 2, 3 years in length. And we do have an emerging cloud business, and those are generally 1-year contracts as well. But those are still small parts of our business. Overall, we are selling hardware and we are selling software.

And if you look at it, we're a lot of project-based business, too, right? So we're dealing with a lot of customers, repeat customers. In fact, I think over 70% of our business last year was with the same players as a year before. So we have a lot of repeat customers. And I think a good example I gave in my talk was NFL. We've been with them for 15 years, right? So we keep adding and adding, they keep coming back for more stuff. So it tends to be a lot of repeat business. They come with new ideas. We comp the new products, they incorporate them. We've got some very long-term clients. So when a tech refresh comes, we're there, in fact, with the Air Force, I think we replaced a very significant drone program already 4 times ourselves. We replaced ourselves 4 times over 20 years. So it just kind of cool.

Actually, on this probably, there was a specific question on it, so I'll just ask it now. You currently have a 75% retention rate. I guess of the remaining 25%, why would a client leave and where would they go?

I think we have to revisit that statistic a tiny bit here. What we're saying is that 75% of our revenue in any given year is the result -- is coming from a customer that we sold for in the past. So that could be a refresh. It could be additional equipment for that same customer. It could be a new use case for that existing customer. It's not a churn number. It doesn't mean that we're losing customers. Our business is somewhat project-based. If you have a video workflow that you need to address, you'll come to a company like Haivision will help put together a bespoke package of products that will serve your needs, but you may not have to revisit that use case for 3, 4, 5 years until the technology develops or whether the use case might change. So it's not a churn number. That's not what it is. What we're trying to suggest by that number is that we have a lot of visibility in where our revenue comes from in any given period of time. We have comfort in our forecast because we know that a large percentage of our revenue is coming from existing customers that we've worked with in the past. It's not like we have to start from 0 every year and build a pipeline. We kind of know where revenue can come from.

It's almost like think of it as -- we actually call it programmatic business, right, where we deal with programs, even though we don't hold the contract with the government, ironically, with the Navy, we do now. It's a multiyear $80 million monster. But traditionally, we deal with the General Dynamics, the Lockheed or whoever, Boeings, Airbuses, where they have contracts. And we know that if they win a program, that's a multiyear program and we are the technology provider. We kind of know the forecast. We know what's going to happen. A good example is State Department, the U.S., we won 3 years ago. We had to outfit, I think it's 182 embassies across the world for the U.S. That's a 5-year program. So we know what their build is. We share with. So we already know the forecast. Every year, we're going to install 2030 or whatever. But we have multiple programs like that. We did that for the Predator program for a lot of years, the U.S. Navy for many years. Now we've got the third Navy contract for the entire video of every ship. Before it was just a video dissemination, people watching video like CNN, right, or whatever. Now it's a combatant fleet video, which is pretty cool. So we own all the video. But these are multi, multi, multiyear big, big contracts. And all the other ones we don't actually hold, but we know all of them. We deal with the end user, and we know the forecast. And we have a pretty good predictability of how much is coming from here. So I used to say like I'd say about 65% to 70% of my revenue, I have a good feel where it's coming from a year in advance, which is actually very healthy because it's really the other 35%, you got to find that's new. But that's okay because we're always got new business.

Perfect. Fantastic. And you actually led into the next question, Mirko, which is great. So I have like 3 or 4 different questions all around your Navy contract. And maybe I guess some of them are asking different specifics. So what I'm going to ask you to do is sort of combine everything into one. Maybe you could remind the audience about that large contract that you won and maybe the economics and timing around it.

So Dan, I'll let you take that one. Since you are responsible for that, handling it.

So it is a 5-year $80 million contract. Now because we call it the 5-year contract does not mean that there's no opportunity beyond it. In fact, Mirko already alluded to the fact that we've been dealing with the Navy for over a decade. And generally, these contracts extend for additional 5-year periods beyond it. So we really think of this as a 15-year contract that's given -- let out in 5-year intervals. But the first year of the contract is what we call a base year contract, where we were creating the infrastructure, fulfilling the Navy's need for infrastructure to support the deployment of these systems on all of their boats. This means we are equipping labs, we were getting documentation in place. We were teaching people about the system and so on and so forth. That first year base year contract has now been renegotiated, and we are now in the first year of a production contract, where we actually are delivering product to be installed on ships. This is the first year of a production contract, and it is an increase in revenue from the prior year, but it's still just the first year of a production contract. The second year, the third year and the fourth year of production is where we see this thing scaling, where we might be seeing double the revenue from the Navy than we are seeing in 2026. I'm not -- I don't want to give specific revenues related to the base year or the first year of production for obvious security reasons. But it is scaling and we are meeting the needs of the Navy timely, and we're looking forward to being able to produce bigger numbers in years going out.

Super. Question here on what percentage of the sales are government entities versus the general public? And I'll add on to it because there are a couple of other questions around this. You have a pie chart in the presentation that breaks out different segments of revenue. Maybe comment on where you expect the growth -- future growth to come from? Is it in the same proportion? Is it going to be disproportionate? And how you see that pie chart sort of evolving over time?

Yes. I think let me start with -- and then you can fill in the pieces here, right? First of all, we are not a direct seller of our products. We sell through channel partners. So if the question is, how much do we sell to governments, I think it's fair to say we don't sell to governments with the exception of the U.S. Navy. That's a direct contract that we hold. Now that doesn't mean that we're not selling to end users that are governments. That is likely the result, but we're not technically selling to the government per se. If you were to ask the question about how do we divide our revenues between broadcast and entertainment and media, defense and enterprise, it's about 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. Now interestingly enough, we are seeing huge growth drivers in all 3 of these markets. And so depending on what year it is and depending on what we're seeing, we might see one of these areas growing more aggressively than others. Mirko and I are very buoyant on the control room market. We see that need and that need does serve both enterprise customers and defense customers that is -- will continue to be a buoyant market for the foreseeable future. But now we're beginning to see that 5G is wind in our sales as it relates to our broadcast business. There's a monumental shift in the way that video is being contributed within stadiums and within other sort of venues. And we're going to be the beneficiary of that with our cellular bonded technology, the 5G technology that we got as part of our Aviwest transaction. So at this juncture, we believe all of our markets are growing commensurately. And it's one of a few times where we're hitting on all 3 pistons at the same time. So it's quite an opportunity for us.

Super. Can you talk a little bit about the geographic distribution of your customers? Are they mostly out of the U.S., Europe? Whatever color you could share, that would be helpful.

Well, I can -- let's start with saying that as a Canadian company, we don't do a lot of revenue in Canada. Maybe 1% of our revenue is located in Canada, 99% of it is outside of Canada. The majority of that revenue is in the United States. It is our largest market by far. But our international markets have been growing, and they've been growing pretty nicely. So they're 25%, 30% of our business these days. And we expect it to grow quicker, faster than what we might see in the United States. Part of that is because it's a smaller base of revenue that we can grow against than in the United States. But the United States is still a primary focus of us. It's where the big players are, and that's where we intend to play as well.

Can you talk a little bit about your R&D spend and how you see that, I guess, that mix changing in the years to come?

Well, I've been often quoted by saying that our R&D doesn't necessarily grow commensurately with revenue. Now it may grow commensurate with the number of products that we have because the complexity of the business grows. But generally speaking, we don't see R&D growing in the short term very aggressively. Now if you're asking where our mix is in terms of how we are deploying these R&D resources, we are moving to resourcing against where the revenue is coming from. So 2/3 of our revenue is mission-oriented and 1/3 is broadcast oriented. That's likely how we will be shifting our resources internally to accommodate the need. We want to align our R&D spend and for that matter, our sales spend against where the revenue is coming from.

Okay. I'm going to combine a couple of questions here as well. First, I'll read the question and then sort of add on to it. Can you create a bridge around how you might double revenue organically? How long it will take? And is there some big fundamental change in the end market that will change the historic organic revenue growth of the company and allow things to accelerate? And then on top of that, we had a few questions related to guidance. So whatever you share publicly, maybe now is a good time to share as part of that answer.

That's -- there's a lot of stuff in that.

Sorry.

Well, I'd say that we -- the guidance that we're giving thus far is that we do believe that we're back to our double-digit revenue growth. In our remarks, we mentioned that what our CAGR had been from the history from the beginning of time going forward. We are at that point in time where we're seeing all things hit the way we expected, right? Product is coming out. The markets are -- they have opportunity for -- there's growth in the markets because of how technology is changing and the focus of these markets in control, in 5G, what have you. So we're looking at this double-digit revenue growth for the foreseeable future and we expect that to continue to happen. I think that the two monumental shifts that we're seeing from our customers is the need for these control rooms to manage their internal systems, networks, physical assets, people assets, what have you, and the shift from RF to 5G in many of these venues. These are both wind in our sales that I think will continue for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure I'm smart enough to think beyond the next couple of years, but we see these kind of step functions happen every 2, 3, 4 years in our industry.

Yes. And I would just add to that. I mean, we're actually already investing in salespeople, boots on the ground internationally because to prepare for this growth, when we did the acquisitions, the 2 acquisitions 3, 4 years ago, one was a French acquisition, the other one was a U.S. acquisition. And we made clear that its cross-selling capability is amazing because the 5G technology, we need to bring to the U.S., which we've done that because we won a massive deal, which is great news, which I'm not allowed to say the name of the company, but -- and then the -- and the control room market was predominantly U.S., which we're taking a huge effort to move it internationally. We're still there in the early stages. That's going to take quite a while, but we're quadrupling our staff to handle these large control room markets outside of the U.S. So that's where I see a massive growth. Like once we see these multinationals, and we're seeing it now like JPMorgan is a good example, right? Citibank, Bank of America, you name them. I mean they're all our customers. They're expanding globally. And once they start with one system, it's just like it just multiplies. So -- but these are long-term multiyear projects like Facebook was the largest customer of Cinemassive for many, many years. They got 60 rooms already, right? And they're going to be adding more. So we've got these -- we've got I would say, the strategy to really get the people in place, get everybody trained, get the partners, the channel partners trained, which is even more of a challenge. And then you're going to see the scale. So I think by the time we hit '27, '28, '29, that's why we're very confident on our growth, double-digit growth for the foreseeable future. This is a big, big, big market. Now the other side of it, the ISR defense, unfortunately, the whole world is a mess. There's conflicts everywhere. I don't think that's going to stop anytime soon. So people always will be buying that kind of technology. So that's -- that will always be a reasonably good, robust market. But I think the control market is going to be much bigger. And the 5G revolution is going to take over public safety. It's going to take -- it's already taken over sports and news, and that's a big market as well. So to Dan's point, it's nice to see that all 3 pistons have the potential to really pump hard. And that's why we're very, very buoyant on double-digit growth. We've taken care of the operational efficiency. We've taken care of all the ugly business out. We dropped that revenue out of our quivers and boom now we're moving going forward. So it's -- and operational expenses are being remained flat. So guess what? Double revenue, OpEx flat, it's pure bottom line. So we're marching very quick to 20-plus percent EBITDA. And that's why we're very buoyant on the next 2, 3, 4 years of where we're going to go.

Perfect. I'm doing a time check. We're top of the hour, but I think there's 2 questions left that we should address. So I'll just quickly go through them, and then I'll ask you for closing remarks. And if anybody needs to drop off right now, there will be a replay of this presentation. So can you talk a little bit about your M&A strategy? You're obviously a company that's grown through acquisition. If there's future M&A that you're looking at, can you talk about the type of products you want to add, geography, type of customers, et cetera?

Okay. Yes. Well, M&A is still going to be part of our strategy going forward. As our remarks alluded to, we've done 8 acquisitions. They've all been successful, and it's a good opportunity for us to be able to increase our growth rate. We do not have any M&A opportunities in front of us right now that we're actively pursuing. We still talk to everyone on -- in the space as the inventors of SRT, everyone comes to talk to us about technology. We have a very good ear to the ground. And if an opportunity arises, we'll certainly go after it. One of the complexities that we have is that we do have a line of credit that's a $35 million line of credit that's expandable to $60 million. We do have cash, but those resources in and of themselves limit the amount of acquisitions we can do and certainly limits the amount we can pay for acquisitions. If the stock becomes a little bit more buoyant and we now have currency in the stock, we may be able to pursue even larger acquisitions, even transformative acquisitions. And we are also talking to possibilities of transformational M&A activities that could change the trajectory of the business. But really, there's nothing on the horizon. I can't suggest that we have visibility to something that's going to result in an LOI anytime in the next 6 months, 12 months.

But let's not forget that we remain opportunistic. And unfortunately, because we know that our stock is so undervalued, it's kind of tough to acquire somebody at a higher valuation than we are. That's not going to work. So we're kind of handcuffed a little bit. But we're always looking at opportunities. And there are some, but I think the days of picking up a little tiny player is out, like to Dan's point, we want to do something transformational, right, whether team up with a partner just as our size or even bigger or whatever is to create a much larger company that could be in the play. And I think that might be a way to go. But the most important thing is right now is, well, for us, we know we're undervalued, and that's how we keep buying our shares. But if we have a buoyant stock, that will open up the avenues for us to actually do potential acquisitions.

Perfect. And with that in mind, actually, you guys led into the next question. Can you just talk about your capital markets profile right now, your cash, your debt levels and use of cash and working capital needs?

Well, just to set the stage, we've got -- as of last quarter, I think we have about $10 million in cash. We also have a $35 million line of credit that we have some money out against it. So we have capacity. From a working capital standpoint, remember, most of our OpEx is really people oriented. And so our OpEx is really focused on things like keeping our networks, keeping our storage, keeping our data centers that support all 380 of our employees current, secure and what have you. And so our CapEx in any given point in time is about $1.5 million, $1.6 million. It's not very big for a company that's doing $130 million in revenue last year. Now from a working capital standpoint, there's really only two components of working capital that we have to be aware of. One is receivables and inventory. And the rule of thumb that I've always sort of set out there is that for every $10 million of incremental revenue, I may need $2 million of incremental working capital to be able to support that. But those are temporary supports because receivables tend to be larger at quarter end and then we collect the cash and what have you. So it's really not a big capital need. If the real question is how much of our EBITDA translates into cash generation, the number has been about 75% Below the EBITDA line, we have CapEx, and we have differences in payments for debt. And our payments and debt is very nominal. It's about $250,000 a quarter. It's just not that big of a deal. Now you're not seeing the cash generation recently because we've been actively acquiring shares in the market. Since we put these NCIBs in place, we've acquired about 1.7 million shares. We spent just under $8 million to do so. And we'll continue to acquire shares as long as we believe those shares are undervalued in the marketplace. So although it's not apparent that we're cash generating, we are generating significant cash and I consider ourselves to be fairly capital efficient.

Perfect. Guys, great presentation. Maybe some closing remarks, and then we'll end the call.

I'm not sure we have any closing remarks. I think we said it all. Thanks for listening. And I think we're about to close our Q4. I mean we've got 2 weeks left or 3 weeks left in our whole year, and we're already kind of into our fiscal 2026, which we are pretty buoyant on. And that's kind of why we're talking about the guidance. We -- by the way, we had to talk about the guidance. I don't know if that was. But we did tell the Street on our last earnings call, we don't do quarterly guidance anymore, just given our type of business and the large government contracts and things moving left to right. But I think we said we're doing double-digit revenue growth. We're going to see significant growth on our EBITDA. We're going to do the mid-teens of EBITDA for next year, and we're going to definitely be hitting $150 million of revenue for next year, which, by the way, starts in 3 weeks. So I think that's the only guidance that we've gave and that's what we're sticking with. So we feel pretty confident that we'll have double-digit revenue growth, double-digit EBITDA, which is not a bad start to 2026.

Super. Thank you, Mirko. Thank you, Dan. Thank you to our audience, and this concludes this presentation.

Thank you.