SRT Marine Systems plc (SRT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

funding partners, which we've had for 10 years, which are delivering these sales, it is about maintaining our margin for our products. And to be honest, when you do that, there's a lot of angst, obviously, your electronics association as everything keeps going down. But with inflation, this has now reversed. And putting up those prices, including on all retrospective orders, enables us to defend our margin so we can -- we have continued to generate the profit margin. But also to be able to buy those components in the market and be a reliable supplier to our customer. And we started to do that at the beginning of this financial year, and we've now started to be able to catch up on production. And what was interesting is, I would say, almost nothing, maybe 1% or 2% at most of our order book said, I'm not paying that higher price. Most of those then came back. And what that demonstrated to me despite the angst of that I had before we actually went out to our customers, and as I said, everything is going up by that price is the quality of our product and the demand for our SRT transceivers in the market. And so -- and the good news for our customers is that they're able to get the supply that they need, albeit not at the old prices, now at the new prices. But the typical AIS transponder buyer has got a big boat, really a few hundred dollars is affordable. They may not want to buy it. It's unfortunate, but it is the way of the world at the moment with the components. We will review our pricing every 3 months. If and when component prices start to come down again, and I say again, they're not going to go back to what they were. This is the new norm, then we will adjust our prices accordingly. But we are maintaining our margin and that is because of the quality of our product in the market. And that's a big thanks to our development team that we've maintained and built up over many, many years. All that heritage is then embedded in our products. So in the year ahead, we think that we will see some good growth on our transceivers business. We see demand across the commercial markets where there are long forgotten mandates. Somebody asked me a question about the U.S. being a big market. The mandate is there. It's been generating sales in the commercial market as a result of that for the last 6 or 7 years. I think I said at the time, they're not very good at enforcing these things. It's a slow burn, but we continue to generate that business from that. There's the Solas mandate from 2002 continues to generate demand for Class As and our waterways. And then you have the leisure market and people are going further afield and their boats and I an integral part of safety. So as they upgrade their navigation suite, where they buy a new boat, AIS is pretty standard, and we are the lead in that market. So we see that growth will just continue. The other area that we're really developing is gas, which is our digital AIS navigation systems. We were the first to develop an AIS on transponder many, many years ago and put that out in the market. And we are now with our DAS systems getting closer to the market. So what does that mean we're selling directly to ports, we're selling them kits, so they can install them. And that is really the same pattern as our vessel transceivers business where we are engaging at all levels in the supply chain. So a DAS kit, for example, we have a new kit coming out later this year, express kit which comes with brackets and cables and everything. And literally, if you're sort of competent with a screwdriver, you can go and install that on a boy yourself as a port authority. Now it's high-margin stuff. There's also environmental monitoring, all of that stuff, and we see good growth coming from that segment as well. So in the year ahead, we have very good expectations of growth. Those of you that will see the research note put out by our broker will see that it assumes some growth but I think we will exceed that and we maintain our focus on margin, recognizing the reality of component pricing and we're not willing to absorb that and sell things at a loss and all that sort of stuff. So on the development side, we have NEXUS. NEXUS is our foray movement into marine voice communications, AIS' data-only communications. It is a VHF AIS combination radio. That's not a new idea in itself. Other people who have these sorts of things in the market and have struggled to do it well. We think that when NEXUS comes to the market, it is a pretty game-changing product developed from the perspective of the convenience of the customer. So it has a lot of integrated technology that enables the user not giving too much way to access functionality in a new way, integrated amongst our existing systems and a seamless -- completely seamless way. And because of the way it's integrated, you can make much better use of all the things like digital selective calling and the linkage between that and AIS targets and voice communication and text, all sorts of stuff. And it basically becomes that communication hub. We've now been developing that for nearly 18 months and we're shortly going into type approval testing with the product and we expect to start shipping that during the first half of 2023. That's calendar half of 2023. This is a key product for us. It's a new pillar to our transceivers business. It has an entirely new architecture and technology architecture. Again, we're making use of our development team, which is a rarity in the world today, people that are able to develop these type of highly integrated, what we call software-defined radios. And so it's an impressive, highly integrated piece of electronics that will differentiate us in the market and deliver a new level of functionality to people. So we're excited about that, but we're also very cautious. And so we're doing an awful lot of testing, it will be perfect coming out of the gate. And so we're not rushing it at all, but we've made very good progress during the year. And as I say, we will bring that to market in 2023. The other side -- the other bits that we've developed around DAS, where we've been bringing out more integrated kits and that means changing some of the transponders so that they're easier to install. I'll give you 1 example. Our Express unit, which is derivative of our identifier, which is like a white tube, previously needed to have a power box to connect to the power on the boy, now you don't -- you just literally have a cable directly to the power source. It sounds like a nuance, but you have to change the electronics inside to be able to do that and cope with the different voltages and protections and things like that. So that has been updated. So transceivers all on track, very happy with that. A little bit irritated that we couldn't deliver everything that was in demand last year. We're now catching up with that and growth on top of that. And I would like to thank Louise, who runs that business within SRT as well as the rest of the team with the supply chain, Gary, who's has to face the component thing every day, and Mike and customer support, who's -- I mean, to help customers with all their various integration requirements and all that sort of stuff and the eyes and girls in the warehouse and stuff. So that's our transceivers business. Any questions about that, please use your little text box and text me. So on systems. So during the year, really last year, was about reengagement with the customer. We had this -- COVID everything just stopped governments thought it was an existential threat, and they just stopped all new projects and deviated their money towards vaccinations as was right. That has now passed. And last year, we saw them then start the agencies being -- so those agencies being fisheries and Coast Guard being allowed to then engage on these projects again. So you have to restart all the paperwork and what have you. But before I get into the new stuff, let's talk about the existing stuff. So our IMEMS contract with BFAR is going very well. We did not complete any revenue milestones during the year. We completed a lot of project milestones. And really, that was about building up the infrastructure. This is a complex system, which is designed to support very large fisheries monitoring in the future. So there's 132 case stations. There are 17 monitoring offices. There's 2 big data centers already over 100 terabytes of data accumulated into there, which they can apply our analytics to provide all sorts of insight and 5,000 transponders on boats. It's not an easy project to implement because of the connectivity and all the moving parts, rooms being ready, power being there, connectivity, all that sort of stuff. But our delivery team has done a good job of doing that, particularly Dean, who lives in country. And it's pushing that on a day-to-day basis with our local partner. We will complete some revenue milestones this financial year as the project then comes to an end. And all of that underpinning infrastructure suddenly comes online in the firm of a screen that enables them to then monitor their fish and vessels and what have you at -- in 1 of the regional offices. The 2 command main monitoring centers are fully up and running. I would say a few weeks ago for the inauguration. All the heads of all the various other services to which this will ultimately link turned up. And so I'm proud to say that Philippine fisheries monitoring stuff is being run on the SRT-MDA system. So that will continue. We expect there to be further expansions of that system and therefore, further contracts. This is their first base of digitizing their fisheries monitoring. The new President of the Philippines has a mission to improve food security. And a big part of that is about fisheries management. They want to import less by wasting less during the process in the Philippines and export more at a higher value, and that comes from fish tracing right the way through the supply chain and what this system does is enable the fisherman boat to be tracked, wherever they might be every 12 minutes, no other system in the world can achieve that. And be able to electronically record their catch as they put around on their boats, wherever they might be, either just offshore or right the way out into the Western Pacific fisheries. They have tablets and phones where they are keying in what they're catching and that is automatically transmitted back to BFAR's system. And they have inspectors on the port who also have tablets linked to the system that are able to then look at that boat as it comes in and see what the first man is recorded and where they fish, et cetera, to make sure that and it's automatically we'll tell them whether that was caught compliant with the particular license that boat has. So all of that is now coming on stream. So I'm very happy and proud about that. That has taken 3 years to build up a lot of training and engagement with the customer. And now we're talking about where they take that, bearing in mind that they have nearly 300,000 registered fishing boats in the Philippines, half of which are motorized and other half of which are very, very small artisanal boats. So in January, we signed a new contract with a new Coast Guard customer worth about GBP 40 million. And at the time, I think we explained in the RNS that this will be implemented in 3 cereal phases. We -- the first step in that project was for the customer to come and inspect the equipment in the U.K., which they did. We were able to do that because we had bought equipment the year before. So we weren't subject to worries about component shortages and all the rest of it. So they came in March once all the arrangements and Visa and all this sort of business have been sorted out. A whole week of inspecting the hundreds and hundreds of bits of equipment that constitute this particular part of the Phase 1, that was then shipped to the country. It was then inspected again in the country and prior to installation. And actually, that delivery point is then an invoice milestone, revenue milestone according to the contract. And so therefore, we have started now invoicing that customer and receiving payments. On the actual project, we're now really progressing quite quickly with the installation of the coast network, the data center and the first consoles and the command center. And actually, we believe and been requested by the customer instead of doing this serially over 2.5 years, we would -- they would like to do this all in parallel once the first phase is completed. And so this potentially results in a significant acceleration of that particular project such that most of this will be completed during the current financial year, which is not what we currently forecast. So it's not definite yet, but that seems to be the -- what they want to do, having seen the initial performance of the project. So that will carry on. And -- in a similar vein to BFAR, we're now engaged on the sales side on they're now saying, well, what -- how do we expand the system thereafter? How do we improve that system, adding radars and cameras and stuff. So it's exactly the same as all our contracts. Once they have their first digital monitoring system, the next step is, okay, now what can I add to it? What can I add to it? And it's a very clear road map that we can offer to them on how to grow the system, either in scale because even if you take Philippines 132 co-stations does not give you full coastal coverage you probably need 600 of those and then you need to build up more transponders, et cetera, or it might be additional functionality and capability that they want. Before I move on to new prospects, I just want to talk about our development efforts. So this is a sophisticated system. And those of you who've been with us for a long time remember, nearly 8 years ago, we decided we spotted what we thought was a macro trend, which is the digitization of the marine domain and people want to understand that. And people want to sit in front of screens and to get all sorts of intelligence so they can make fact-based decisions. And there's a few satellite websites around there and stuff, which is very interesting commercially. But this is not government professional level. It'd be a little bit like running heater on flight tracker as opposed to from nets. And so we set out to develop a truly integrated national scale system, a system that can handle 200,000 targets simultaneously, conduct sophisticated behavioral analytics on each of those vessels and proximity alerts so how are they interacting with each other in order for the authorities to be able to be automatically alerted where are the hotspots, where are the problems and then within that system to be able to take action. This has been a long task, but the benefit that we have is we started from the white piece of paper, we did not evolve this from a very small singular system we -- from the outset, we wanted to build that level of system. And we've continued to invest in that and building up additional functionality, particularly around the analytics is a very complicated thing when you're applying it to hundreds of thousands of vessels simultaneously. And during the year, we -- well, the previous year, we established an analytics lab, and we've really started to innovate in those analytics. The analytics are combining environmental information with the vessel information, cyber information, all sorts of stuff and they're customizable because our customers want the data, and they want to you cut, slice and dice and look at it in the way that they want. And so we've continued to add functionality to the system. We also have an eye to adding functionality that will require the customer in the end to want to buy additional sensor systems or information systems from satellites. It's -- the functionality comes first rather than the data, if you can see what I mean. And so this is our model going forward, and this is working in the discussions with all our customers. And so that will continue. And obviously, last year, that meant continued heavy investment but with no revenue milestones. So the systems business essentially did not deliver any revenue during last year, although we were paid pretty substantial amounts of cash as per our cash payment schedule with those customers. This year will be quite different, where there are revenue milestones from our men contract and from our new Coast Guard contract. And as I said, if that accelerates potentially a lot more than we had anticipated. Moving on to new contracts. I share your frustration I probably am more frustrated than all of you, and all of SRT is frustrated that it takes long for these contracts to convert. What I would say is these are governments. This is a big national strategy. They're complex projects, and it takes time for them to be planned, budget secured and procurement processes to be gone through. It's not an excuse, it's just a fact. What I can say is that on 5 of our validated pipeline with a lot of money, they are now in their contracting process. We are a passenger on that process. There's nothing we can do to speed that up, but we are in the late stages of that. And we do think that in the very not too distant future, we will start to see those contracts actually signing and actually starting our product management team that helps with all the documentation that needs to be prepared for that is flat out. We're doing that. And specifically, we have -- there are 4 in Asia and there's 1 in the Middle East where we seem to be at the very final stages of their procurement process. It didn't help with COVID that everything stopped and timed out. We have to restart those approval processes. The agencies applying to their ministries, but that all started last year. And we have very close relationships with those customers and a good, very good visibility, that's all I'm going to say about that at the moment because really, the proof is in the pudding, which hopefully will deliver in the not too distant future. So in summary, we have our transceivers business where we have market pricing because of the quality of the product and our brand and our sales channels, we've increased our pricing to accommodate the increase in the component costs in order to maintain the production of reliable supply. There's no shortage of demand across the market there. So I expect to see very nice growth there. Year after, we have NEXUS, which is a game-changing product in our opinion, in the market, which we've had a good response to our soft launch where we tested people's opinions to that, and we'll bring that to market. On our systems side, we have 2 active contracts, 1 in the Philippines, 1 in another country with the Coast Guard. We will continue to deliver those. We will have revenue milestones already in the first half and in the second half of all of those. And 1 of those looks to be substantially accelerating at the request of the customer. And we have, of our validated sales pipeline, 5 contracts where we expect to see finally over the line and generating substantial revenues for us. But what I would also say is there's more coming down the line is from existing customers. They want to continue to expand. We get a lot of inquiries. And I would say, I obviously see the comments about our validated sales pipeline. I mean for us, it is a real tool we can acquire small over plays in Africa, South America. Everybody is interested in getting maritime domain awareness and building surveillance systems. And a lot of these agencies of people with nothing better to do than to make inquiries, and it'd be very easy for our small sales team to be constantly going to see the next Chinese stone. And what we do is we use our validate sales pipeline to govern that. so that the sales team are focused just on those. And even within that, there are a few that we then focus on. So for example, the 5 that I'm talking about, which is about that up to about GBP 200 million. We are spending 80% of our -- 80% on those. So hopefully, that gives everybody a good feel as to where we are. I'm going to look at some questions that people have asked.

So I was asked to explain our fish catch system. Basically, it uses mobile phones. So it's an app that sits on a mobile phone, which connects from Bluetooth to our transponders. And the idea behind that actual you don't have to give some special expensive handset to the fisherman. They can use any sort of handset with the app. It's convenient. And the -- they're electronically key and like calculator, what they're catching, they can even take a picture of the fish in the future. Some of the bigger fish will actually have a little plastic QR codes. They can scan that QR code and that fish can be tracked right the way through supply chain. And in theory, you could scan your QR code in Tescos and see the boat the court it and where it was caught, won it was caught and everything else. So that functionality is embedded within our system. And of course, that gives what they call traceability and veracity of the fish that enables a much higher price to be achieved in the market because of that quality and compliance regulations and what have you. And so -- and on the other side of that enables them to control their fishing. So that's how that works. I was also asked to talk about what happens when we start to make money and build up cash? Would we do share buybacks and things. No decision or discussions we've made on that. I'm not all up for quantification about that sort of thing right now. We are focused on closing these sales, building this business. We've spent all these years developing these products to get us into this situation so that we can deliver this, and we have the #1 product in our systems and our transceivers business, and we have the sales channels. When we have that see the fruits of that hopefully, starting this year, then we can have that nice discussion. I'm just going to have a look here what else I've been asked. So I'm asking -- I'm not going to name any names, a lot of questions, which are good. Can any of our devices emit signals under water and that's 1 of [indiscernible] reefs and what have you? No. So radio signals don't travel underwater, sound does, so no. One of the things in the future on our systems side that Coast Guard are looking at is subsea. So at the moment, it's surfaced, but what they're looking at is near surface, drones and subsea submarines, swimmers and things like that. At the moment, we're just on the surface. But from JVs from our software perspective, it's just a case of having the right sensors, you would have a sonar sensor under water things. You can have radars and what's called ADSB, which is AIS for planes on towers, which are enabling you to detect drones and low flying aircraft. So you have that that full 360 view on along your coast line. And that is the next evolution of this. In returns for detecting reefs and stuff, interestingly, we have a project coming up in some of the waterways where they want to use an 8 on 8 navigation transponder, which would be surface mount because it needs to transmit, but attached to depth measuring instruments because of silting up and what they want to do is to be able to monitor where is the silting up happening so they can go and dredge that stop beaching and things like that. So we have a project like that and 1 project in the Middle East, they're talking about nearly 700 tons because they're constantly dredging. They need to know where to send the dredge otherwise, they just have a time schedule of dredging. And this is all about the sort of digitization of the marine domain and making sure that you send the right assets, the right place at the right -- at the right time. Okay. So current cash burn. Well, the cash burn is we spend cash about GBP 700,000 a month on our overheads. We have a contribution -- profit contribution GBP 300,000, GBP 400,000 a month from our transceivers business at the moment, but that is growing. And then obviously, you have the lumpy the payments and things from our systems business. So this -- and then we have the purchasing of the equipment, which then you buy it and then you need then sell it and you get paid for it and what have you. So it's up and down. So this year, I would hope that there is no cash burn and it's cash positive. I've got a question here about how much of our price has gone up. I think I've I've answered that. In terms of contracts that we run our systems contracts, unfortunately, we are committed to those prices. You make a proposal 2 years ago and it takes them 2 years to process it. You can't just adjust those prices. But we do -- we did have and do have contingency in there, which is more than sufficient to cover that. And also, we've done pretty well on the exchange rate side of things as well and continue to do that. I think that's it. I was asked that -- for the first 5 minutes, I was on mute apparently. So my apologies for that bit irritating. I think what I said in the first 5 minutes because I'm not going to make anybody inside and that if I can't -- a lot of the information that we have is confidential. I appreciate that you'd like to have a lot more information about the pending contracts. So I can't give you that for obvious reasons. But I think I covered everything on our -- on this call, subsequent to that. So everybody is up to date. All right. So if you have any other further questions, please e-mail us. I don't feel you just need to e-mail me. There are other directors in the company. There's Richard, Finance Director; Peniket, COO, Jean-Francois, our Product Management Director and, of course, all the NEDs. We have our AGM on the 21st of September and open date and [indiscernible] will be back in force -- so we -- I do encourage you to come and have come down and join us. All the products will be there. All the various other members of the team will be there. And hopefully, we'll have some nice news to be talking about then as well. So do stay in touch, and thank you very much for your forbearance and patience and chat very soon. Thank you very much.