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

Good morning, everybody. I'm Simon Tucker, CEO of SRT. Thanks for joining our webcast today. As usual, the rules are that I'm not going to make anybody insider and try and give you an insight into the business that you may be considering investing in and/or already invested in. I'm going to start with our financial results for the year ending June. Well, clearly, we're steaming along, GBP 116 million worth of revenue, a 47% increase and a doubling of profits to GBP 10 million and ending the period with GBP 57 million in gross cash. I don't think there's much to talk about there. Our results -- our full audited results will come out in due course. What I really want to talk about today is the future of SRT. Those of you that have been an investor for a while will know that in 2014, we had this idea that wouldn't it be great if countries could monitor and track all their boats. Bahrain took a landmark decision to implement a first-ever national vessel identification and tracking system, at the time, a revolutionary idea. That idea is then snowballed through as countries have seen the power and the value of having knowledge about what is going on in their sovereign territories. To the point today, right at the bleeding edge, we have Kuwait, where we're implementing a world-first AI-powered intelligent maritime surveillance system that will give enormous capability to Kuwait, Coast Guard and the authorities to monitor their marine domain, making it more secure, safer and more sustainable. What's next? What is next is something that we're calling the STS strategy. Now this is something that I mentioned on my last webcast, and it's not something that's sort of just been dreamed up. This is something that has come through the evolution of our validated sales pipeline, which are requirements and requests from our customers. What we have seen is that our customers that are sovereigns have a project. Their project is a multi-decade project to build up their sovereign independent surveillance and intelligence capabilities so they can run, monitor and secure and sustain their own sovereign territory. That project is realized through a series of contracts where they add on additional bits of system capabilities, technology and what have you. What we've seen is that they love the idea of this single integrated platform, which gives the ability to integrate multiple national agencies all into a single platform and everybody is sharing that data. They're able to use it in their own particular way, but that data can be shared and used for the national interest. You have this project, which is going for decades and a series of contracts. What we have seen is that this integration piece is far beyond just the marine domain. Yes, if you take the marine domain, countries will want to expand more surveillance towers, more USVs, more UAVs, extending into subsea. But their borders are not just maritime, they're also land and they're also near air. We've seen the proliferation of drones. We saw this clearly in our VSP, which now sits at more than GBP 1.8 billion and is continuing to grow. We see pull from the market for us to exceptionally grow our business. That kicked off this idea of an STS strategy to expand our business and scale it much more quickly than we've seen in the last few years to encompass all sovereign territory areas. So sea, subsea, land, near air, all integrated into a single system. We have spent the last 6 months, analyzing that, discussing with our customers, planning how we would evolve our existing system, maritime-based system, predominantly surface very quickly in the next couple of years into what we are calling an STS system where it doesn't really matter whether it's a boat a car, a drone or a person. That system is tracking that, evaluating that, characterizing that and providing that information as a tool to the sovereign that is operating the system. We now have a plan in place, which is called our STS strategy, which sees it very viable from our current VSP. So assuming no further growth in that VSP, our target is really to get to a GBP 500 million revenue business within 3 to 5 years, generating GBP 100 million bottom line. We're talking about going from our MDA business, which really started in 2014 and has really grown particularly in the last few years and now meeting the market pull in developing an STS system over the next 2 years, expanding our sovereign partnerships. What that means is today, we have 5. We will have more sovereign partnerships as they embark on their projects and a series of contracts which will come as those countries build up their capability and capacity over many years in a series of contracts. Just looking at our VSP, I know I'm repeating myself, we see that as a target that we want to get to of about GBP 500 million revenue we think is realistic within 3 to 5 years and a bottom line of GBP 100 million. There are no guarantees in these things, but this is what we see just from our VSP, just from our existing opportunities that we've seen already but we're already seeing those new opportunities coming down the line, which we will see gradually then come into our VSP. You're going to start to see a change in SRT, starting with the website later this year, which will speak much more about technology module surveillance modules, which are aimed at land borders, maritime borders, onboard systems, more sophisticated USV and UAV offers, which generate us recurring revenue as well as providing our customers with the underpinning infrastructure upon which they can install those technologies. It's not a -- each customer is not a one and done. Each customer has this long-term project to build up this national integrated surveillance piece, and they will do that in a series of contracts depending on their budget availability, the ability to transform themselves into what we call an intelligence-led operations doctrine where they are tasking assets according to the intelligence provided by the system. What do I mean by that is you may have an extended land border, people having a picnic, there are people wandering around and stuff. Who is the threat? How do you deploy and what is that threat? Therefore, what asset do you deploy? Can you deploy an unmanned autonomous vehicle as we're now doing in Kuwait and soon to be doing elsewhere to confront and deter, or does that actually have to be a manned response? This enables much greater efficiency and effectiveness on surveillance. All of this is being driven by this macro trend of countries wanting to have their own independent tool that they can use in their own way to give them that insight to enable them to protect their sovereign territories, to protect their populations. This is key to socioeconomic growth, food security such as in fisheries, economic prosperity, such as building ports perhaps in Africa and other places. They obviously need to have a security envelope, tourism. All these things feed into why they want to have this capability. SRT, because of our decision in 2014, where we thought wouldn't it be interesting if a country could sit in a single control room and see all their vessels all in one go. From that seed of having this integrated system and building over a long period, albeit 10 years, we are now in a market-leading position in the world. We have references. We're actually doing it. It's not just a brochure. It's being deployed. It's been working for years. That is now enabling sovereigns around the world to see that working to talk to other sovereigns one-to-one to understand the benefits and then start to formulate how their own projects will develop. For SRT in the next 3 to 5 years, we're putting our foot on the gas. We're changing up 2 or 3 gears, putting our foot on the gas, evolving our MDA product into a full, what we're calling an STS project, which is within our STS strategy. That strategy is a 10-year strategy to deliver this sovereign territory surveillance system to as many countries as we possibly can. Over the last 6 months, we formulated a detailed internal plan, financials, what we need to do with our organization, et cetera. We've communicated that to our people, and we've already started that, and we're a couple of months into that plan. The objective is rapid scaling to take advantage of the opportunity that we see globally and the demand, the growing demand from countries around the world. It's a pretty exciting period. I'm not going to bore everybody with all the projects that we're doing at the moment. We've got 5 active sovereign partnerships, and you can see from our results. We're delivering successfully. We're being paid by the customer because they value what we're doing. They need what we're doing, they want what we're doing. With these very strong long-term relationships with these sovereigns, and we expect to grow those and grow the number of contracts and capabilities for each of them over the years. That's what's happening in our systems business. On our transceivers business, which we now call Nav Safety, we are going through a similar exercise of looking at what is -- what do we want to do with that for the next 10 years. We've dominated the AIS market, but digital navigation, digital autonomy is coming to maritime navigation commercially. Where do we fit within that? We've got some very specific skill sets, which are very useful. We have 5,000 dealers and distributors around the world, and we have a very powerful brand. Where do we fit with that? We're working through that strategy today. We have em-trak, which is targeting predominantly the leisure and commercial markets. Then we have DAS, which is looking at navigation aids. What we're doing is refining that strategy. For example, in navigation aids, we're looking at perhaps not just having an AIS transponder on the buoy, but actually have an AIS transponder that incorporates a light because you'll typically see a buoy that has a light, it has an AIS transponder and has some sensors. How about having that all into a single unit? Just to give you an idea of the scale of the market, there are such a things called what are called 3-mile lanterns, you can see them at 3 miles. 50,000 of those are sold each and every year. There is a tendency to go now towards digitizing that. We think that we can dominate that market potentially by integrating our AIS AtoN technology into a lantern that we've also manufactured to be cost reduced and it's very easy to just put onto those buoys. We're going through that process over the coming months to work that through. Similarly, with em-trak, it's a very diverse market. We have great access to that. I think that the real opportunity there is in the commercial market, and we have dominant products in our Class A and Class B, which we can evolve and cost reduce. We also have our X100, which we've been shipping since January. We've had some very good feedback, useful feedback from the market. We're continuing to evolve that functionality. We shipped now nearly 500 of those. We're purposely going slow because we want to get that feedback from the customers. We feel that, that product also has application in the commercial market as well. Our product portfolio in em-trak enables us to address the 8 million commercial vessels that are out there worldwide, most of whom are gradually being subjected to regulation. There's a huge market there. We're doing the same as we did with our systems business, and we've developed our STS strategy for the next 10 years and a 5-year detailed financial plan. Then on our Nav Safety business, doing exactly the same, and I'll be able to talk in more detail about that in -- probably in a couple of months' time. All of that is driving the scaling -- rapid scaling of SRT from where we've gone GBP 30 million valuation business to a GBP 200 million valuation business to a plus GBP 1 billion valuation business, driven by the results that we hope to achieve. I'm going to just look at the questions that have been posed and try and answer these.

If we've got any questions, gosh, it's quite a lot. I've talked about X100. The rollout has gone well. I said at the time that we would do that slowly in the first 6 months, get that feedback, how we can smooth functionality, what's missing? We've not had any disasters at all. We've had really good feedback. It's shown us where there's some really interesting market segments where we can focus our -- some of our marketing efforts. We're very happy with that. Has the situation in the Middle East changed what customers are asking to SRT to provide? No, not really. I think there's a -- I can understand there's a tendency to think, oh my gosh, this is happening here, suddenly, it's in the news, suddenly, they need to buy something. This is a long-term macro trend. We are in the civil defense business. Yes, some of the changes are very good for defense businesses. But long-term, all these countries want to have robust civil defense systems. Drones coming over boarder is not a new thing, in fact. I suppose what it has changed is the importance of having effective independent civil defense systems. I just think that it was always on the horizon what was coming. It's just come a little bit closer with a little bit more urgency and where we see even more greater opportunities. How confident we make a land-based system? Completely confident. It will require us to grow and evolve our development team because of the scale of what we're talking about. We expect to have our first STS system deployment January 2028 at the latest. You've got to remember there's 10 years of accumulated development and IPR and system work that we've already done that we can leverage. All of that plus the knowledge that we've had enables us to basically apply analytics instead of just to a boat, but also to a car or a person. Are they cratching down because they're laying an IED or are they crutching down to tie their shoelaces, probably quite a difference as to how you respond. What will it do to the addressable market? Well, we've seen in the Maritime business, our first project was $5 million and the most recent one is $261 million. We see some -- I don't think there is a sort of formula where every project will always be bigger. I think as each customer has a project, we're going to see a plethora of contracts from each customer. Some might be for $5 million because they want, I don't know, something small or they might want to do a massive chunk of something. The beauty of our system is it's modular. Why are we still in AIM? I don't know. It's comfy, I suppose. I don't know. I think it's a valid question. We'll see where that goes. We're aware that people are quite critical of AIM. Does it stop people buy shares? I don't know. E-mail us with your suggestions, to be honest, but it is a topic at the Board. I've answered that one about. Next is, I've answered that one. This is mostly all about the Middle East. Relationships, third-party suppliers. We have a range of relationships with third-party suppliers. We pick and choose the bits that we can't develop internally or we can't define, deliver internally ourselves. We look at where we're delivering value, and that is typically around the technology and the integration piece. We're never going to make radars. We have a very good relationship with the radar manufacturer. We're very happy with them and we want to deepen that. We have a very good relationship with camera manufacturers. We want to deepen that. We're very happy with that. How much of a hit to margins expect on the Middle East contract and for what benefit? I'm not going to go into details on a specific contract. There is a hit to the margin as we had discussed, but that's made up elsewhere, and there was a conscious decision to do that because it provides us with a just sort of unbelievable reference for the future, and it was the right thing to do in a sovereign partnership given the business that we see coming forward. This is the thing about a sovereign partnership is that you're working. We're thinking about this customer that we're going to have contracts with them for 20 years as a mutual trust. We're very happy with the decisions there. As you can see, it hasn't affected the overall financial performance of the business. We're relatively new to delivering on larger contracts. How has the fast ramp-up gone? Have there been any lessons? There are lessons learned every day. We're a very honest organization internally and open. It's just lessons all the time. The fundamental lesson is we've got our core structure right. We've -- as you'll see from our hiring, hired an awful lot of people, new people with specific capabilities, and that's really made a difference. bringing in the right expertise. I think that in reality, we've been doing this for 10 years. We have a model that we apply. It's not perfect. We have process continual improvement. But we're pretty good at it, and we do hard stuff, and we do it well. That doesn't mean it's not without problems, but we solve them, and that's why our sovereign partnership program works because the customer also knows that we'll solve them. Foreign party dealing with immigration crisis involves being able to monitor all boat movements in the channel surprises doesn't already exist? Yes, we can provide it. It's no problem. I think it does exist to some degree. You've got to remember the channel is tiny compared to most of the marine domains. I don't want to get into that discussion here. I have a view on it on whether monitoring a boat will actually stop a boat. How will this foot on the gas be funded, internal cash flow? Yes, we're profitable. We're generating cash. We're expecting to continue to be profitable as per the market expectations. We're not going to update any of those market expectations until such time as new contracts come in. We've got the T-shirt in the past where we've tried to forecast that a particular contract will be signed on a particular day, et cetera. Then that's been delayed 3 months or something. We're going to continue in the flow of once we sign these things, then we will put that out. Are we exploring solid-state battery options? No, not specifically. We don't see that as a particular USP at all. All our systems have all sorts of power systems, and they're engineered with our local subcontractors to be very robust and resilient. They involve gensets. They involve actually lead acid battery stuff, which is far more reliable and robust, particularly in high temperatures and things. How large is our moat? Well, if you're asking me, it's pretty big. We have very deep customer relationships. They trust us to deliver a product. They've got our product. They've had it for years. It works. It does what it says on the tin. They're able to engage with our teams and have open and honest discussions about what they want for their project to expand, which then feeds into our product road map. I think there's a number of moats around our business, and it's all predicated on that sovereign partnership program that we have that they're trusting us to deliver them the integrated system that will fulfill their operational requirements. I think I've answered everybody's questions here. Hopefully, I've given everybody a good overview of where we're going. We're now going to really start to scale rapidly with our STS strategy, a program that has been operationally now worked out and has started and what our target for that is over the next 3 to 5 years. Similarly for that, we're doing that with our Nav Safety business. An exciting period for the business for all the people that are working in the business as well, all sort of 180, 190 people as we have today. For those of you that have supported us to get to this stage through that second phase of having our MDA system and now moving forward into our STS system. 2 more questions. I'm not going to answer that one, whether it's before tax. Can future contracts be structured with improved customer prepayments? No. Governments contract in their standard way, they will pay for what's been delivered. There's no such thing as advanced payments at all. I just want to be clear on that. Any government in a proper contract will pay for what's been delivered. The way our contracts are structured is that a lot of the deliveries, because the customers are very keen to actually start getting the benefit of the technology are quite software heavy and margin. We do get that capital pretty quickly back. Therefore, there's actually very little working capital required, but there is some working capital required to kick off these projects, just the reality of the situation. If we ever wanted a prepayment, and I'm sure everybody has heard of prepayments, you have to put the cash equivalent up in an escrow account. There's not really much point. We don't do this. Can we buy the T-shirt? Yes, you can. E-mail [ Thea Thinwood ], which I think is what we pay for. Anyway, thank you very much. If you've got any further questions, I think you have my e-mail. You also have the e-mail of Neil Peniket, Dave Radford-Wilson, who's our new Delivery Director; Richard Hurd, CFO; Neil Peniket, COO; Jean-Francois, who's our Chief Future Technology Officer. Do feel free to contact anybody in the business and ask your questions and of course, come down and visit us. Thank you very much, and thanks for listening. Take care. Bye-bye.