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

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our webcast. I'm Simon Tucker, CEO of SRT Marine plc. So those of you that have not seen any of these webcasts, I'll just put out the ground rules. Number one, I'm not going to make anybody inside. And number two, we respect highly our customers' confidentiality. So whilst you'll -- some of you may find that frustrating that I won't discuss the intricacies of certain contracts, these system contracts are national security with sovereigns, and therefore, we have to respect that. So we put out our results, and we've reinitiated forecasts. So a good year, and we can see finally what we have been waiting on for some time, the effect of our systems business on the company. And as a result of that, revenues were GBP 77 million and a PBT of around GBP 4.5 million mark. What's more interesting is now we have the underpinning of our forecast entirely by existing contracts going forward. And in the new financial year that we're now in, we will see revenues grow substantially by 50%, but more importantly, we'll start to see that come through on to the bottom line with more than a doubling of profits. So let's just talk about the business that we're in again for those that are new to this. We're in the maritime domain awareness business. And that means different things to different people. If you're a coast guard, that means security, it means understanding if there is illegal activity going on and detecting that. If you're a fisheries, it means managing the fisheries vessels, but also the aquatic environment and making sure that areas aren't overfished. And actually, the fishermen go to the places where the fish are, so that they're also productive. So it's not a sort of a stick approach. It's a mutual benefit approach. And if you're on a boat, it means safety. You don't want to collide. You don't want to hit a rock. You want to have navigation safety. And if you're a waterway authority, it tends to be about the efficiency of using those waterways. We're moving into autonomous shipping as in the same way that you're -- that we're talking about on land. And so that encompasses maritime domain awareness, and that is the business that we're in. And we target those markets using two divisions. We have a transceivers division, which is targeting vessels and waterway navigation. And we have a systems division that is targeting maritime domain awareness for coast guards and fisheries. So this is what we're -- how we're structured and this is what we're doing. And the growth in the business now is really driven by the growth in the demand for maritime domain awareness. It's a macro trend around the world. It's something that we saw 10, 15 years ago by chance because of our nascent AIS business. And we took a bet, frankly, that the market for maritime domain awareness would develop rapidly, which it has done. And it's still right at the beginning of its growth curve. Most of the marine domains are not properly understood. There's no real meaningful surveillance. So we're right at the beginning of that macro trend, which is then driving demand into our business. The benefit of having had that first-mover advantage in those 10 painful years of investing in the technology and the products is that we have the product today. We have the customer references today. And we have the ability to deliver and the knowledge to deliver the products and the systems today. And all of that has been accumulated over many years. It's been a hard path. Lots of dead ends and it's hard to develop real technology with meaningful functionality. It's not a sort of app for that when you're talking about secure sovereign systems or if you're talking about a complex RF transceiver, which is transmitting and receiving all in real time. So what you're seeing today is a manifest of that initial strategic decision and that relentless investment in the technology of the products, the market and our capability and all that learnings, which is now embodied in our company where we now have over 150 people. We have thousands of customers around the world. We have 5 sovereign customers for our systems business and growing. And we have GBP 1.4 billion visible pipeline that we're working on in our systems business. So sort of overnight success after 10 years, and probably a lot of you are painfully aware of that. So let's just talk about the individual businesses. So on our transceivers business, last year was flat. We grew the distribution. The revenue and the profits from that business were about flat, and that's reflective of the general market at the moment where you'll see new boat builds have fallen off. People aren't buying new boats and what have you. But we have made increasing distribution on that business. We've achieved profitability on that business. And we have laid the groundwork for this year, where we've seen a number of new mandates come in. So for example, Hamburg Port requires everybody to have an AIS transponder. The Seychelles requires everybody now to have an AIS transponder. Montenegro, a few weeks ago, required everybody to have a transponder. That alone, there elicited an immediate order of nearly 270 units. So we're seeing that sort of growth in different areas around the market for the current year. NEXUS, which is -- takes us into a new communications market has been an enormous project. And we're now in the sort of final throes of that. And we've delayed the release of that to sometime in the first financial half of this year. And I'm not going to be drawn as to whether that's June or December. And the reason for that is we'll launch it when it's right. And this is a complex product that integrates with mobile devices. And the whole idea behind that is that if you look at boating today, people have a supercomputer in their hand, which is the mobile phone or tablet. And all the navigation apps and everything are merged onto that. Well, therefore, you also need your marine communications merged on to that. But you expect a seamless experience to the level that you expect with your iPhone or your car or whatever it is that you've been used to. And we need to achieve that within a boating network environment. And if it's anything less than perfect, you're going to move from your car to your boat and the latency, for example, instead of it being 1 millisecond, might be 2 milliseconds, that's noticeable, and that's not what we want. We want this product to be perfect. It's a safety product as well. And so we won't do that until that smoothing of that functionality is perfect. The product itself has passed all its regulatory approvals. It's type approval, what we call type approvals and stuff. It's gone through all the preproduction. It's ready for production. We have the marketing ready, but we're smoothing that functionality, and our product management team are -- have a clear instructions to be noncompromising on that. So we will wait until that is ready. I don't think it's very far away, but we'll wait until that's ready. That then takes us into a new segment of the market, it takes us into voice communications as we expand our transceivers business. It will initially be launched through our em-trak brand, where we have 5,000 dealers. And so through a simple e-mail, we immediately launched that out into the market. We also think it will have some other applications in our systems business because of the combination of tracking and communication. And so that transponder there will sort of will have a leg, if you like, into our systems business where we seek to link the two with functionality. I think that the transceivers business around our DAS division has huge potential, and we've seen that grow this year. We've expanded the sales team. We have a new person who's recently joined us. It's come from a background in what are called aids to navigation and is now driving that forward. We have a lot of opportunity there. We have a big project that's just going ahead in Germany along their waterways, where they're digitizing those. So our transceivers business as well as being a really interesting eyes and ears into the global maritime domain awareness market, which is not to be forgotten, and I'll come back to in a minute, is also producing some very nice business and has that steady growth as maritime safety and autonomous shipping comes forward. But just coming back to the eyes and the ears. With 5,000 dealers, and us being the dominant player in AIS, if there's any surveillance project anywhere in the world, one of our dealers will hear about that. And then they immediately inquire to us and say, we've heard about this, are you interested. This gives us a very early start and knowledge and visibility on what countries are doing because these dealers are embedded anywhere from Vietnam to Brazil to Chile to Slovenia, all these different places. So it serves a very interesting, often forgotten service to the overall business. So then turning to our systems business. Of course, that's the sexy one in a way because it's big contracts and all the rest of it. But it's a different business to our transceivers business. We deliver integrated maritime surveillance systems. And our USP here is we had the vision that people wanted the equivalent of air traffic control for boats. And therefore, they wanted an integrated view of their whole country and to have persistent surveillance. So the first step in that is you need to be able to integrate hundreds and thousands of sensors of lots of different types in lots of different locations. Whether that's on a USV, a subsea vessel, a UAV, which is an airplane or a tower or a satellite, you need to suck in all that data and you need to integrate that together into a single operating environment. But if you're operating at that scale, now you're seeing hundreds of thousands of targets, so now you need powerful analytics to look at each and every one of those targets and the proximity to each other and by their behavior, determine who are they? What are they? Are they a threat? Are they doing something suspicious? And that is a very difficult thing to do. And then what you need to do is to visualize that to the operator in such a way that they understand that back to this maritime domain awareness. And then once they've decided and the system has told them what we think it's doing, I don't know, illegal fishing, then it gives them a series of actions what to do about it, do I write a report? Do I send a notification to my local patrol boat to go and investigate? And that's a very difficult thing to do. And that's why it's taken us all those years to develop that system, the SRT-MDA system, which is built around our software GeoVS in order to be able to do that. And today, we have that system in multiple countries. We have 5 sovereign customers. And the way we see the world is that when we have a country as a -- when we have a project in a country, we see that we have the country as a project and as a customer. And that customer is over time going to build up their maritime -- their civil defense maritime platform and integrate fisheries, coast guard, customs and excise, the boat owners themselves through apps all into this single platform. So the first project is normally the kickoff project, wherever that might be. And then after that, just the same as your IT system in an office, you will start to grow that and add to that. And they're often starting from a very low base. So every time we have a new customer, we expect to have those repeat contracts over many, many, many, many years, probably decades as they build up the system, and they own their own data, they own their own system, their control of their own system which is provided by SRT. So we have 5 of these now going, GBP 330 million worth. Our forecast assumes that those will be delivered over the next 3 years. Our forecast we put in the market assumes no new contracts are signed whatsoever. I'm not going to give a running commentary on each individual project because they're confidential with these sovereigns. But we expect those contracts in reality to be delivered over the next probably nearer to 2 years than 3 years. And alongside that, we have a validated sales pipeline that today is worth about GBP 1.4 billion. They range in project sizes from $2 million to $330 million. And there's 3 or 4 of those, which are looking promising for the next 12 months and those range between 2 million and probably the largest is 263 million. And the way that -- and that's where it starts to get interesting for our business because they produce a net margin, and the marginal cost to deliver those by establishing a project team in country is relatively small because we have the central support function that is supporting the delivery of those projects. So each time that we sign a new contract, the net margin of that project mostly falls to the bottom line. And that is how the business model has always been designed to get to because it's leveraging that massive capital expenditure that we've incurred over the last 10 years in building up our technology to deliver that to that particular customer. So this year, in our systems business is about executing on what we've got. I'm very focused with my delivery team, the product management team and our system dev team to deliver those projects to a very high standard to our customers who are extremely demanding, both in time and quality. And then in parallel that, our business development team are developing those validated sales pipeline opportunities, and we expect some of those to convert, at which point we'll adjust our forecast in the market. I think it's good to remind everybody here that SRT now is a company of over 150 people. We're very well established. We have teams of people, we have some depth now. People can actually go on holiday and be left alone or perhaps be sick for a day or so, and it's not a big old stress. We have been growing the numbers of people because what we're doing is huge, and we want to make sure that's properly supported and executed. So although you sort of see me quite a lot, there's a lot of people that are sitting behind this, people like Neil Peniket, Richard Hurd, other people you haven't heard about, people like Matthew Clarke in Product Management, Phil Pittaway in our project support teams, our project managers that are in country, people like Ben and Phil, there's a whole range of people in our business that are managing the departments and enabling that to progress at pace and at an increasing pace. So I think that's about all I've got to say.

I'm going to have a quick look at see who's asked questions. If any questions, I have this little screen here. Obviously, you asked questions, I'm not going to say who it is. My first question is now that we're cash positive, generating money, what do we intend to do with it? I don't have a decision on that at the moment. That's a new position to be in. I think we're going to strengthen our balance sheet for the time being. Obviously, on the horizon may well be dividends, things or share buybacks. But no decision or discussion has been made on that. At the moment, we're totally focused on delivering first-class projects to our customers. In the year-end trading update, we mentioned moving forward with new product developments at leveraging our global commercial and leisure marine distribution networks. I can elaborate a little bit. So once NEXUS is out, we're already in parallel with that developing some new transponders. We can plan to update some of our aids to navigation transponders. The leisure -- the global commercial and leisure market is huge. There's 30 million boats. They all need safety and communication devices. So -- and we have 5,000 dealers to sell that through. So there's a lot to do there. I've got here. Cavendish is forecasting an operating margin from new services contracts seems lower from past contracts. Is this a function of the size of the new contracts? I think it's more a case of being conservative on what we're saying rather than any change in the margins. I think some of the services contracts as well. We've left out data services for the time being for that to be upside. And we've just put in the maintenance side, which is obviously a lower margin. So watch this space on that. Is business in the U.K. increasing to a large extent? No. We've started to get some interest and engage in European countries that I think the new defense spend, the requirement for, I think I've said this for some time, Europe hasn't really had the jeopardy until now. So we now had quite a few inquiries from various countries in Europe who are seeking that sort of umbrella maritime domain awareness program, but I wouldn't say that we have nothing in our VSP right now in regards to that. So that's to come. The last one here was how much management time is dedicated to pursuing MDA market? This is going to sound terribly arrogant. We don't really have to pursue very much. We get people coming to us and I'm of the opinion that if you've not made that decision yourself that you need maritime domain awareness, the fact that one of our sales team turns up with a brochure and says, you should have this isn't going to elicit that sort of change in thinking, the customer has to have had that change of thinking themselves. We have to answer that question, as I've just said, we have started to see inquiries from European NATO countries. And I would imagine we will have some business in the -- I don't know whether it's in the near term, but in the next few years. Because our role in that, you can have the drones and various sensors out there, but something has to bring that all together and make sense of it, and that's what we do. And that's our USP and really nobody else does it to that in the way that we do it or to the extent that we do it. So I think I've covered everything there. It's short and sweet. Thank you for those that have hung in there. I think we've got an exciting year ahead of us, some more new contracts and delivery of these. I'll try and do a webcast every 3 to 4 months. I think you will have seen that we intend to do our results in November and the AGM in early December, is the sort of approximate date and we'll do a press release at a later date. Please do come down to the AGM. It's really an investor's open day, and you can meet everybody in the business. I'm also going to try and do an investor's open day prior to that because a number of people have mentioned that it's really useful to come down and kick the tires and see the systems and the products and talk to people. So we are going to try and do that perhaps just after the end of the summer as well. So thank you very much, everybody, and watch this space and speak soon. Bye-bye.