RocketDNA Ltd. (RKT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone.

Good morning. Welcome to the call of RocketDNA to talk about our recent business update and announcement to the ASX regarding xBot. My name is Glen Zurcher I'm supporting the company with Investor Relations and will be your host for today. We have a very strong turnout. So it's great to see. Thank you very much for joining the call and the level of engagement. Our agenda for today will be to run through a number of topics with you that we've preprepared as well as a short preamble by Chairman, David Morton, followed by a Q&A. So with that, I'll just hand over to David to kick things off. David, welcome to the call.

Thank you, Glen, and welcome all. I will -- just to set a couple of ground rules here. We are covered by ASX Listing Rules. We will not be talking to any numbers today, but I would remind you that the quarterly update is due out in only a couple of weeks and we will have an opportunity to talk to some numbers after that has been released to the market. Today is more about trying to create an environment where you understand what's going on in terms of operations, and the execution of our strategy and all the things that are going on in the business -- just trying to provide a better platform for you to be better informed. And going forward, we would anticipate this being a regular part of our communication to investors. And on that note, I'm going to hand over to Chris Clark, the CEO, who I know who's been working extraordinarily hard over the last few months. Chris, over to you.

Thank you, David, and welcome to all our investors and stakeholders as well. We're very excited at this point of the business in sort of how RKT has developed over the recent sort of years. We really appreciate all the feedback and all the questions that have been submitted. And we're really excited to discuss probably some of the themes with you that maybe we've not traditionally been able to sort of get out in traditional sort of announcements just to give a little bit of context. So we've sort of enlisted Glen's help just to help us facilitate today and to manage some of the questions as well, but feel free as well to publish any questions in the chat bars as well. And if we have some time today we'll sort of get to it. We've got a strict sort of 1 hour that we need to finish up everything by. We've got another customer sales pitch straight after this one. So the work never stops that we're very grateful for that as well. Glen, should I kick off with you?

Glen, you're on mute.

Thank you. Just to let everyone know, we've received some questions that were submitted, and that's helped us prepare the discussion themes for today. that will run for about 20 or so minutes, and then we'll move into a Q&A. The idea is that we provide the contextual background to a number of themes that we know that you are all interested in. But of course, the questions will be welcome as well following that.

So we're going to start off with the business model and the addressable market and the industry opportunity. So I think you all would have seen that the usage of drones seems to be increasing exponentially every week, every month you hear of a new use to drones. And we have a couple of examples of how our own drones are being used differently once they've got on-site as a way of providing concrete examples of the growth in our target market.

Yes, that's right, David. We're, and I think RocketDNA is very well positioned to really take on a very fair -- say chunk of this particular market as well. Our traditional legacy in our stronghold within the basis, traditional within the mining industry. We're really up to the sort of point we've seen a lot of usage of drone technology specifically what they call the geospatial remote sensing space. And in the mining, just to give you some sort of context and we sort of spoke about this before, but BHP has sort of -- is employed at about 600 drone pilots. We've got other sort of Tier 1 providers that operate over 400 drones within their own sort of capacity. And really, this is the sort of only sort of a glimpse into the segment of the market that we look to tackle and to take on to. And really, what we're providing is a sort of a quick innovative pitch is we're looking with our new xBots solution in automating a lot of these workflows and adding on our sort of know-how and experience into taking this on. So just to give a sort of a broad understanding of how the business model works and how we sort of make our money and how we look to take on these opportunities. If we take a step back, RocketDNA's business model can be, and revenues can be generated from 3 different layers. I sort of mean sort of vision it as a cake, if you will, where sort of at the bottom layer, you've got a hardware segment, which either is sold or leased to the customer. Then in the middle layer, you've got the operations or the sort of the labor perspective. And then on the third layer is the software and the insights layer. Now all of these are crucially important. They're all going to be stitched together, and that's what makes RocketDNA very unique is that we speak to all of these different layers and able to deliver a full-end solution to the customers. And these 3 layers all wrapped within a regulatory approvals and a commercial model that is easily digestible and able to easily onboard from these mining companies. What you're finding in our market is traditionally world customers may own 400 drones, it's actually not their goal to own the drones. What the customers are really looking for is a data output or an insight or an actual report that they can get from it. And you're finding that the vast majority of the reports, especially within the mining industry are targeted around surveying, which is a key production metric around the volume metrics. And this really allows mining companies to understand what are they digging out of the ground and what can they report and produce. So when we're -- when you're using drones, it's not only allowing mining companies to sort of complete this workflow very quickly, but also a lot safely as well. And when we started the business originally 12 years ago, our focus was all about operating drones on a one-to-one basis. We'd train up a -- it's a very young pilot, put them out on site, sign up these long-term contracts and really just operate permanently from sites. And what we've sort of seen since then as the market sort of evolved, a lot of customers sort of envisioning that they can do it themselves. And we've been sort of taking that feedback on and about 18 months ago, decided we needed to come to the market with the new product that could speak to a lot of the dangers and let's say, nuances -- and the problem here is that customers are experiencing, but then they've drone operational areas. And what we're seeing is that when we developed this our new xBot autonomous product, it's been very well received. And combine that with the third layer tier cake being a software inside product, whether it be a Australia's solution or even our own tools that we use to deliver the data answers. It's offering the entire solution which makes a very big difference to those customers as well. Sort of speaking to the -- what the -- sort of -- look coming to the second point of the business. And what's an incredibly large moat around us is the real true importance of the CASA approvals that we have, I think while anyone can go and apply for CASA approvals, I think it's really important to state that this is what RocketDNA does. This is our business and our specialty. We've got this very eclectic mix of mining engineers, SOFAS, geospatial experts, software engineers and aviators. And all of these personalities and skills together is what allows us to really be able to communicate and work with the regulators on achieving these very complex approvals, while BVLOS can be achieved on very specific applications, drones or areas, RocketDNA has been able to achieve approvals for very large swales of areas within Australia and Africa as well and makes us a global leader in this space, being not only a leader with large amounts of Beyond Visual Line of Sight operating hours and experience, but now being only one of the very few global operators with what they call remote operations approvals or what we'd like to refer to as the drone in the box and approvals. And this allows you then to place an operator in a remote operations center generally within a city and then deploy them across the -- deploy the actual units do they collect the data remotely via -- and operate them via a high-speed generally the sort of a styling connection. This took an incredibly quite a long time in terms of working with the regulator around this. We probably went through about 12 iterations of the -- of our safety case that was presented to CASA because, it's very easy when you're designing these kind of systems for their approvals to overengineer the solutions. You can -- I've seen some operators throw radar systems at this very advanced avoid and detect. Regulators love these, the more sort of safety systems that you can throw at this. You know the more they love it. But we also really understood that we needed to build a solution that was -- that was going to be fit to purpose and cost-effective for the client because while it's as important getting the actual approvals for the system, we realize that you've got an end user at the end of the day that you're going to sort of look at the system and compare apples for apples and really look at the cost of this and say, right, well, at an obvious level, how do I redeploy people on-site and use autonomous systems. And that was always while keeping safety in mind and always being our primary goal. We realized there had to be a commercial model towards this. And so it was working with the regulator and saying, how do we not overhype the engineering sort of hardware portion of it. So in other words, keeping costs as low as possible while still providing a very effective and redundant system that can be deployed to the market and require minimal sort of interference and sort of checks in terms of the hardware and really provide that reliability that's required. So that was really our sort of our focus when developing this. And so it was -- became a combination between the operational workflows as well as the hardware and the overall safety systems that we built around this and able to get the approvals. And this has really been one of our key things when we're approaching a lot of these large Tier 1, Tier 2 clients. They know as well that for them to now go and operate this system themselves, similar to how, what they're doing now in what I sort of call the Phase 1 of drone technology, which is this one-to-one relationship for them now to go and operate a drone on a box concept, it's probably going to take them about a 2-year process. There are consultants out there, people who sort of mislead customers and say, we'll get this to you in 3 months. Look, we are experts in this and it took us nearly 2 years, so I think a lot of customers are open to that and sort of at that strategic juncture to decide do we need to hire all these experts and aviation professionals and do this ourselves or should we just be outsourcing to the professionals whose business is to provide remote operations, taking into account that the customers all they want is they just want the data output. And what we're finding is a very warm response where customers, once they realize the sort of the timing of the approvals involved, they -- and looking at our pricing points, which we're offering to the market, it's a no-brainer for them. So we're finding a very warm reception to, I mean, to the sales, we -- it's easily able to get meetings. We got -- the constraint is definitely not on the business development side. in that sense why we sort of wanted to really sort of discuss where the business is and look at the nuances and I guess how well sort of check to the rest of the model and the manufacturing, and understanding this business model is more than, it's more than just buying something, take off the shelf and flying the next day. There's a lot of components that go into building this kind of product line and obviously readjusting the company slightly to target towards this. And that's really an exciting phase of where the business is at. Turning to the sales model. This is something that inherently is really kind of part of our DNA. We've always been from day 0 in about long-term contracts and really focusing on those applications that always are going to address those long-term pain points within the customers. So you'll see rather in the recent sort of Calidus announcement, for example, that they took on a 3-year deal leasing the equipment, which will provide a dedicated amount of services. We got other clients which are -- which we're very open to -- which in terms of them purchasing equipment and operating on an ad hoc basis. So we're very flexible in terms of how we sort of position and offer the actual overall solutions. But again, speaking to the approvals and the eventual operations, that second layer of the cake, as mentioned, we're the only ones with those approvals. So we're the ones that will operate it continually and service these units for the clients into the long term. I think it's always about when you're bringing a new product is fishing technology and considering the mining market, which is inherently always cautious of adopting new technology. They never want to be the first to try these new things. So we've really got to be probably quite aware and quite optimistic about how quickly these mining companies have started to take on and start trialing and purchasing this new technology because we were very conscious of, again, not reinventing the wheel. We wanted to focus on a pain point. There was preexisting budgets that were already there. And we were merely instead of making a human drive out hours to a site to capture data and come back. We were totally commoditizing that and automating that process while being able to be very flexible and modular with the clients' needs because what you're finding is some clients want the full solution. That's generally what you're seeing in the Tier 2s and in the case of the Calidus announcement. From beginning to end, they wanted a full-service solution. All 3 layers of the cake from the hardware supply, leasing, maintenance to the operations, remote operations of the equipment and then the actual production of the reporting and the volumetrics. We can do it all. But some of the larger, more mature customers already have got some of these systems, and we can integrate very easily and provide that automated data flow into that. So that flexibility and that overall commercial sales model has been very welcomed by the market at large. And actually, I think what really allows us to look at this is in terms of the other industries. So it's -- well mining has been our primary focus, again, leading on our network and our legacy markets, we've had a lot of inquiries from other industries who are considering different use cases and applications and for this as well. The export manufacturing is a really unique part of the business. So really up until this point, we've been pure system integrators. And with the production of the xBot units, it's a lot more than just buying a piece of a drone equipment and then again operating on site. You're bringing together about 30 separate different components that have been individually sort of tested and trialed to withstand these very remote harsh term environment. As an example, the very first version of the xBot that we put out through the summer, it went through, it really went through the apocalypse that it had its temperatures were reaching above 45 degrees. There was hundreds of mills of rains that came over the December where the units, the sort of the baseline skin was covered in water sort of in a sort of a flash flood event. And so we were just waiting for the locus next. And -- but it's totally withstood the sort of the test of time throughout. That environment is continuing to operate every single day through that. So we're very, very proud of the system that we've assembled and built and -- which has been not our traditional sort of experience and skill base, but being able to put this all together and build the confidence in assembling these units. And with the support of the market going to market to raise money to build these particular units, we're very confident and as we're putting these out there that they're not coming back. And we mean that in a positive way, that as customers actually realize and see units in action and they're getting the data in the palm of their hands as the live sort of stream data and the 360 panels and all the really relevant information is available instantaneously, really makes customers start thinking about that third layer of the cake, which is right what are the kind of applications can we start doing, and I'll expand on that a little bit later when we get to the AI section as well. But really coming back to the xBot manufacturing. This is a unique piece of IP that we've built and customized for our solution. It's really been built both ready to work within a mine spec environment within regulatory electrical standards as well. And so we're very excited about the actual product and the scalability of it, not only being able to be deployed at scale within Australia, but even having inquiries from overseas and places like the U.S. where they really appreciate the quality of the product as well and looking to take these into their jurisdictions. I think something that is probably not also spoken enough about is really our partnerships and supplier relationships. These are relationships, which have been developed over very, very many years being in the space and procuring a large amount of drones ourselves and really sort of investing into our suppliers has made a really big impact into how we get access to certain levels of technology at certain times, allowing us to really be first to market and understanding the limitations of some of the equipment that we received, which really just flows through the rest of the culture of the company and how we position and sell these products. I think every customer, especially in the mining industry knows there's no such thing is a perfect product. And so as long as they understand the limitations and we know how to communicate those and work within them to build a solution that solves a particular data problem is what they appreciate. So also giving the feedback to the suppliers, getting these early-stage trials of equipment has really been great. So that's allowed us to get ahead with some of the approvals as well in testing this equipment, and we're really sort of leaning on this. So having a partner, for example, such as DJI has been a really great boost to the business. Culturally, I think for everyone, we, it's important to know we are agnostic, and we can integrate multiple types of systems within our xBot solution. but DJI is really committed to the drone-box concept at a very high strategic level. They're sort of looking and sort of building capacity to produce 25,000 of these a year into the global market. So it's a really big investment and a big push by a very large billion-dollar company into where they see the future of drone technology going. And as DJI is sort of owning 80% of the drone market globally, it's -- you really want to sort of always make sure you're on the sort of the coattails with them keeping in advance and adding our experience knowledge because, again, while DJI competitors really great hardware that is robust and reliable. You still need the regulatory approvals. You still need the operations and the after-sales support around these units to make them work. And that's when where RocketDNA comes into its own. So building on these relationships, looking at ways continue to see where the market is going, what are the problem, the pain points. And again, bringing in the software element, we looking at the website, a lot of the tools that we're using is reliant on Australia's partnership and relationship as well, specifically within the mining industry. They've got a lot of strong options there available for our customers. Speaking to the cash position and the EBITDA aspirations of the business. And I think, it's no secret that as a micro cap, we are focused on that profitability trigger. I think we wanted to communicate to the market and that we're -- that this is our #1 goal is to obviously is reaching to the profitability trigger, and we really do believe that there's enough probably information out there for a lot of stakeholders to be able to calculate the path to that, taking into account our existing business as the first point. I think a lot of people realize like, well, there's a lot of focus on our autonomous products. We still have got this very strong legacy part of the business, where, again, that which has got the our pilots are operating on-site within these long-term contracts for these large mining companies. That is our main bread and butter of the business. And through all of that, while maintaining that business, we've been very on a shoestring budget, been able to develop an autonomous product within the current existing team and capacity without having to bring on really large overheads to really listen to the market and produce a product in a very short space of time and to get it through regulatory approvals, that, again, we believe, has hit the right timing in terms of the answers to what the customers want. And hence, why we went to market. And what we didn't want to do was sacrifice the other cash balance that we had available within the legacy business because that is within its own right, a very successful and very strong growing business, but we also wanted to invest in the growth of the business that allowed us to really look at where the future expansion and the opportunities are going to get into. I think us trying to compete on price and try to tackle, let's say, a large customer like a BHP and just trying to offer a like-for-like in terms of labor higher and just compete on price wasn't going to be a sustainable solution. We wanted to build an innovative product that was going to stand the test of time and maintain our already strong margin profile that we built for this business within a long-term contract environment. So yes, I think if you're looking at this business from an analyst perspective, it's really a great strong business. You're looking at these current contracts or current ARs and strong TCVs of just around the sort of the $5 million mark. You're adding on the growth that we're -- just in that business alone, you can sort of look at the trajectory of the revenues over the last year. We sort of put out our last investor deck, that gives you an indication of the sustained growth within that. There's no xBot sales up until the loss sort of that the reporting that we put out or that the xBot sales haven't come into effect yet, so you really can see the organic growth within that. And then start adding in the xBot sales, which we started to communicate to the market. and combine all of this with a very strong cash balance that we've proven time after time, even in the product development that we can operate off a very low cash burn rate to develop, build, maintain and bring these products to market. So as a management team, we're very proud of how we optimized our working capital to achieve this. And I think sort of the next quarterly, we'll sort of continue to provide a lot more feedback into the hard work in which we've done. So taking this all together, we took the chance to raise the money in December, which is really around focusing around this new strategy of the business while maintaining the existing business. So never sort of impeding on that end of it and really sort of preparing for the future. So we're very excited for this next year. and really understanding that it's not going to take much for us to obviously get to where we need to be, but understanding that the vast potentials and opportunities within the total addressable markets is theoretically in the hundreds, if not thousands of units, and that's locally in Australia alone, not even the world and not even considering again where DJI is a manufacturer is expecting us to be a $25,000 a year. So it's -- we're only just scraping the surface into the size of this industry. Another very interesting concept and team that tends to come up is how we apply AI within our product range. So this is spent to that third level cake and maintaining sort of the consistent margins and how we approach customers. So we're always going again, offering all 3 solutions is what the customers are looking for. So you've got to be in the experts in all 3 of this. And AI is what enables you to finally close the loo on being a fully automated solution because while you're able to fly and operate a drone pretty autonomously, the promoter operator since you can sit on their hands and kind of like driving a Tesla can watch the drone and action, collect the data again, the client once an actual valuable output, we're reporting to that actual flight. So using AI and AI tools, it really becomes synonymous in what we do. And I think it's really important at this sort of stage to understanding where the market is at, where the maturity and acceptance of AI. So where you're looking at the where you're looking at the actual, let's say, the consumer end of the AI market and so the prevalence of ChatGPT. I think that's opened up a lot of people's so eyes into what is possible and sort of the level of language and conversations that can be achieved through using AI. But what we're also -- what we -- and what's that sort of -- how is that sort of excited and sort of how that's been transformed into the commercial realm has also been really great. We've -- what we started to have conversations around is very application-specific scenarios and our customers want to use AI. So -- and we'll sort of break that down probably to sort of to 2 strands, the levels of AI that we're involved does have a network, AI functionality within its drilling blast mode predictions or sort of a forecasting of fragmentation and piles analysis. But what we've really seen is that when we're taking customers and we're presenting these very complex AI algorithms, customers may sometimes struggle to validate in their minds how they're going to be able to prove that the data is accurate or not. So the, it's a really -- it takes a couple of extra steps for those customers who have the capacity to do as more complex AI models. So what we've done is that incorporating our autonomous data collection xBot solution, as we're right now focused on providing very transactional AI tools, which may do single elements before it gets into, let's say, the trend analysis. And I'll give a really great example of a water leak detection. We build up our own tool, which uses a water leak computer vision algorithm that is able to use the xBot to fly along a pipeline and actually look for damp soil along the pipeline, and then report that actual GPS coordinate with the corresponding image back to the maintenance crews as well. What this does in terms of solving a problem for the client, especially for some of these large Tier 1s is it removes people who are -- who's their daily task driving 15, 20 kilometers a day from conducting these water pipeline inspections. So this is one of those, let's say, individual applications that you're sort of building on top of an xBot, right? You deploy an xBot out to site, it's probably spending about 60% of its day conducting, let's say, survey volumetrics. And then for the rest of the time, it's doing these very nuanced applications kind of like how you sort of view sort of an app store on an iPhone is once you've got the hardware on site, the ability to not expand the number of hardware units to cover the entire site but the applications involved that you can build on top of that in consultation with the customer is just as powerful and adds a level of stickiness that really attracts the customer to continue adding on to our revenue streams and portfolios. So using the xBot water leaks is only application that we've developed in specific use case within mining, but there's many others from corrosion detection and even using some of our legacy models, which is focused around plant counting and animal accounting and detection is where we're beginning this sort of journey with customers. And also partnering with other software providers as well, we've looked at applications, for example, with conveyor inspections as well. And what you're seeing is again, to the point is you deploy an xBot, it can fulfill multiple sort of variable roles and provide 10x of value in how these units are already adopted and so the cost/benefit that it has for the clients at large. So it's really about a walk -- a pro walk and scenario with some customers, depending on the maturity of integrating these solutions. Talking about our go-to-market and sales pipeline and the verticals. Sort of as mentioned below, it's a -- it's really, we're really bullish and really seeing the actual overall market trend towards this. It's customers who've probably gone out and bought their own DJI unit or the ones that are now coming to us to ask, look, this is something we want to implement. Now we're seeing other mines implement this. This is something that we want to get working on our mine sites, can you help us? And can we go quickly, and this is what is our unique sort of positioning is that we're able to respond immediately to these kind of inquiries and really speak at that level with the confidence of understanding the accuracies and the limitations of the equipment in making sure that we can solve particular problems. We've also obviously taken the time to try and make this a very low risk. So we are on a bit of a race course out here. The, we've taken the time to really understand and make this a low-risk option for our clients, understanding again that it's a new technology. Even though it does not reinvent the wheel, that brief first unit, it takes a while to sell it to them. And maybe just to give you a bit of context around this. when you're going to a new mining customer, you're going through all the electrical requirements, the safety requirements, the IT, the cybersecurity. This is all, just -- and we haven't even probably touched on the customer acceptance testing, the data validation. There's probably about 6 to 8 different departments that you've got to engage with before you get your very first unit on site. And this is where I think we really wanted to sort of take the time to explain that where we've spent most of our time again, as a team sort of running this very lean is and again to sell. This is where the first unit is the hardest to sell. But once you get the first unit out there, they're very keen to take more on board to cover the rest of the operating areas as well. And what we've then seen upon that is, again, all these very unique proposals to again, solve very different kinds of use cases. Some clients given, like as Grade 5, has asked us to start doing not security flights as well to detect wild dogs that are, they come in to the property, generally attracted by the rubbish dumps as well, and this obviously proposed is a risk for their staff on site. So they want to be tracking this and using the thermal sensors and monitoring this as well. The -- and so this is again how the sort of grows in terms of our sales pipeline. You -- it's all about a land grab strategy for us. It's about putting these units out there one at a time. The first one is expanding on the hardware, expanding on the software applications and really taking advantage of that exponential growth and scalability in that solution. So making money on very many different verticals and able. And then we haven't even probably even touched the other verticals or other industries in which we've provided proposals and feedback too as well. We're seeing a lot of inquiries coming out of the critical asset and infrastructure space, construction arenas as well as within the oil and gas verticals as well. And these are -- our customers are very keen to trial, test, deploy this technology to replace and automate a lot of the inspection workflows where they're sending our people into methane exposed areas, into dangerous highly risk sort of areas or sometimes even just environments, which are just very far and remote away. And that was again the case with Calidus was just taking the hours to access a very remote site and send people out there to capture some data and then come back and now an xBot will conduct all that work. So we're always going to be, again, in bringing sort of applying first principles and how we approach this and sell these products. I'm always a big fan of sort of tooths paste strategy. Any time you got to build a product that's used more than once a day is a good product to have, and this is where we're speaking to while maintaining our current business growth and capabilities within that and then expanding on our autonomous products as well.

Chris, you talked about other verticals, and it might be worthwhile. As you know, we're talking to insurance companies, ports, but one of the biggest growth areas for Australia and the world is solar and renewables. Maybe just give that example of where the ground picks up on the thermal output on the solar energy farms because I think I see that as being a huge growth area for us over time.

Yes. I think that's right, David. It's we're the experts in the multitude of the sensors and then understanding the customers' pain points and how we can automate that. So whether that's in detecting people, vehicles, anomalies on solar panels and how that all is quantified and then feeds back to the customer in a very easy to digest report where each error detection is geo-referenced. So it's got a GPS coordinate, and it allows the customer to not only quantify but also stop producing a trend analysis. Essentially, you're building a really great dashboard over time. And this allows them to make very effective decisions into way to apply their resources and even how to prioritize their work and their maintenance responses as well. So in the case of corrosion detection, you may detect corrosion, but how do you then prioritize it to say, is there something we need to replace now or in 3 months' time? And what you're seeing, especially in the critical asset space is especially with interest rates where they are at the moment, a lot of these large asset management companies which have traditionally gone to market to raise debt to replace these assets are taking a more, a lot more rigorous condition monitoring approach towards maintaining the assets now. So rather than replacing at specific intervals. They're rather conducting more frequent inspections of the assets to determine when they need to replace it. So these are the kind of levels of conversations that we're having with these key critical customers in solving their problems. And I think all of that can really be said probably on this point is we've got a lot of opportunities, but what we want to make sure that we're always doing is we're focusing on where we can add and needed value and reach our profitability aspirations as soon as possible, so to prove them to the market that this is a long-term product and long-term business and with real scalability opportunities in front of it. And that generally speaks to within our -- in our mining space. But we're not turning away -- there's other discussions when in as they happen. Good. I think I'll hand over to Glen as well, I think, Glen, do we have any other questions there?

Sure. [Operator Instructions] I'll just kick off with some questions that have been pre-submitted, perhaps we'll start with trying to provide a little bit of color around the first batch of 6 xBots. And specifically, perhaps you could help our audience understand that the difference between trials, paid trials, unpaid trials and that there is actually quite a variety of methods being used to get those first exports on-site and to impress upon our customers.

Yes, it's a great one, Glen. We -- I think it's always just important when you're bringing a new product to market, is going to be sort of a section of your target audience that's going to be very fast first-time adopters. And there's going to be some that require a little bit more convincing. So in other words, they've got the pain points. But typically, in the mining environment, it's very low-risk sort of mindset and some only bringing our product, but you're bringing an entire safety project management solution to how this is deployed, maintain it in the long term because you got to be able to give the customer the confidence that this can actually replace and optimize a lot of the operational workflows because the one thing you don't want to do is operate is to interrupt the operations on site. So the way in which we market this to some particular especially strategic customers is that we offer them a trial of the solution as well. So deploying it with them. The customer is committed from their side and that they have to prepare the site. So they don't get everything for free. And they're able to really -- they've got to preset up the sites and make sure that they're allocating the capacity and the resources to validate that data. And generally, what we're seeing is that by the end of the trial period, it very quickly moves into a commercial discussion. So we're well performing trials is, I think, is part of a lot of standard or proof of concepts is a very well known part of any kind of technology sale, especially into enterprise and B2B customer markets. We're very convinced that as more units get out there to become a trusting of the concept that in terms of the sales cycles, that'll happen a lot quicker.

Great. So moving on, perhaps we could just come back to the DJI Dock 2. The work that you've done that differentiates it from the first solution. And any sort of testing and things like that, that investors would be keen to understand.

Yes. It's, so again, it's been to our relationship with DJI and our ability to access the technology in advance. We look in the 2 different kind of solutions, what you're seeing, and we sort of marketed on our websites as either in spec bot or a survey bot. So we've been very intentful in how we communicate to the market on what these units are designed and what they can do, which again is intentional because of the original sort of systems, we built a Swiss army knives, and were very expensive. And here, we wanted to be very application-specific. And rather than just have 1 unit to try and cover a site, you got multiple units. And it seems to be the very exact same thinking of how DJI is proposing their systems. It's the world and the design of these systems is going to be eventually towards a fleet of them where you're going to be having swarms of drones operating on these industrial and mining sites across the country, just autonomously collecting data on a continuous basis and just providing those sort of near realtime data feeds into the system. So we're sort of we're fully ready for that evolution within the industry and yes and fully on board and ready to take advantage.

Okay. So concerning competitors, who are you sort of seeing come up in this space? And is Rocket sort of positioned as the first mover? Or does it depend on the verticals?

Yes. So to reiterate, we're not the first to the market in this kind of this technology, but what we have done that's unique to everyone else is actually produce and provide a scalable solution in -- that's not only -- we've got the regulatory approvals, but also has got the commercial model designed to speak to these very specific applications. So when you're looking at our traditional competitor base, our largest competition was actually the customers themselves, again, operating the drones. And so we're going to be that's our initial target with these autonomous products is to focus exactly on those 400 drones or the 600 drone pilots that all train up in these large Tier 1s. We're going straight for that market and providing a lot more compelling offering than for them to do it themselves and to rather have autonomous drone systems because no longer again, do you need people to fly in and out. You don't need to pay, with 1 system, you can probably cover 2 people's capacity. We're capturing and you can reallocate those resources to other tasks. So it really makes an obvious selling points to the customers when they see this. So our traditional customer base is really focused there. There are other providers, which are very other hardware focused or like say, they do consulting services, but Rocket is very uniquely positioned in that we're offering the full cake. We can customize it if a customer who wants 2 layers of the cake, but we can offer the full 3 layers of the cake, and that's very unique in the market.

Okay. So concerning the cost structure of the business, we have touched on that already a little bit with regard to the aspirational EBITDA. But could you walk us through the scalability of the business when operating at the current cost structure?

Yes. So the business is has always been very intentional build to be very variable in terms of how it brings on its cost. So we're always focused on really strong margins in how we price and bring these products to market. So we feel like there's more than enough fat on the bone to play around with. And then we only activate the costs or the operators when we actually have a customer contract. It was really just a unique scenario of raising the money in December that we decided to raise the capital to take advantage of the customers and to essentially sort of pre-run and run some of these sort of trials and essentially get ahead on the marketing of the units because that was just the gap that was missing is that the customers have to see this in action for them to believe it. So from a scalability perspective, where we're seeing this evolving is really breaking that one-to-one relationship between the pilot and the pilots and the drone and scaling them between a single operator to multi-drone operations. which will really then already then not only improve like the cost structure and the over-offer but the margins as well.

Okay. So we've moved through those questions. Now we are coming up towards the hour, and we will need to complete the call. If it's okay with you, Chris, I'll just wrap up and then hand over back to you for a final comment. Is that fine? Okay. So look, thank you very much for joining the call. We have our next reporting event not too far away, which is the March quarterly report due at the end of this month. And then we have also the AGM in the back end of May on the front of the 24th of May. So obviously, I would appreciate your support on those events. We'll try and run another call after the March quarterly comes out. So that's 2, 3 weeks away. And I'll hand back over to Chris and or/David for final comments.

Yes. Thanks, Glen. I think what we want to do is obviously say thank you and appreciate all the shareholders who have been with us we understand it has felt like a very long journey for a lot of you. And as a management team, we feel it more like this is, I say this has been with me from the beginning. So I take this very personally. And as David says, put in this is we live and breathe this business, and the management team are fully committed to getting us through to the other side. And we really look forward to communicating with you a lot more sort of frequent basis. We quite sort of enjoyed this format as well and sort of breaking down the nuances and what makes this company very unique. So with that, we just say stay tuned and thanks again for your support.

Just on the end of that, Glen, I noticed your comment about the tender. We obviously can't comment on open tenders. They're very sensitive. Last thing we want to do is to get ourselves in a position where somebody makes inappropriate comment, and then we find out that it's not done the right thing. So that's why we're not touching the tender question. From my point of view, having been on board with the company now for 12 months, I've had a really good chance to get my head under the hood. When I joined, we were very close to breakeven. I've put a reasonable amount of my own money at risk now within the company if you like, a boat of faith and both confidence I know how skinny we run things. I know how tight we are on cost base. As I said, the market -- accessible market for us continues to exponentially grow. I'm very confident in the future of the company. And we look forward to talking to the numbers after the quarterly report. And thank you for your time on this call today. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.