Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is Yousef Husseini from EFG Hermes Research on behalf of Omar Meher. Thank you so much for joining us on today's call covering Presight's Full Year 2024 Results, hosted by Thomas Pramotedham, Group CEO, Ram Meyoor, Group CFO, and Dr. Adel Alsharji, Group COO. Thomas will give an update on the strategic highlights during the period. Ram will then cover the financial performance during the period, followed by an outlook. We will then open the floor for Q and A. For your reference, the investor presentation is available in the Investors section of the company's website at www.presight.ai. Please note that the contents of this call may contain forward-looking statements, which should be considered in conjunction with the disclaimer included in the presentation. Over to you, Thomas. Please go ahead. Thank you.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I must say that 2024 has been a transformational year for Presight, both operationally and financially. Top line, we have secured AED 3.6 billion of new orders, both from existing clients. It is a testament to the work that we are doing, as well as clients across the GCC, Africa, and Western Asia. We have formed new strategic alliances, joint ventures, and technology partnerships, including with global leaders such as Intel and Dell, and even Microsoft, to further enhance our technology portfolio and really to accelerate AI adoption across the Global South. AIQ, which you are familiar with, acquired a majority stake last summer, is creating significant value for all stakeholders, is leading innovation in the energy sector globally, and is well positioned to continue to play a pivotal role in the global energy transition.
We reaped the results of our ongoing investment in the generative AI-centric offerings. We had groundbreaking enterprise launches. We enabled the rapid deployment of generative AI technology across all sectors. We launched the first agentic AI solution for the entire energy value chain through AIQ, and also an adaptive smart infrastructure platform. In the year, we've scaled our internal capabilities to meet future demand. We've attracted data scientists, engineers from around the world, who now comprise about 80% of our workforce. We have also steadily increased our headcount of Emirati talent. Many of you are familiar with our board. The composition of the board has strengthened from five to seven in the past year, with the appointment of His Excellency Dr. Sultan Al Jaber as Chairman, and bringing unrivaled leadership, guidance, and experience across the AI technology and energy sectors. Our operational execution during the fourth quarter was outstanding.
With 70% of full-year order intake coming in the last quarter, we ended the year with an AED 3 billion backlog, which puts us in good state to drive future growth forward. We further embedded ourselves as the trusted AI and digital transformation partner across key state-owned enterprises within the UAE, as well as international sovereigns and large utilities such as SOCAR in Azerbaijan and Ecopetrol in Colombia. In October, during GITEX Global, the world's largest technology event, we launched and showcased our advanced big data analytics and AI capability on a global scale. It was a forum for us where we signed a number of additional technology partnerships that will continue to accelerate the adoption of applied AI across the region.
At the same time, we launched cutting-edge AI and applied AI products and solutions, including ENERGYai, which now sets a new standard in efficiency, sustainability, and innovation for the energy sector. We continue to invest in the broader AI ecosystem, launching the UAE's first sovereign enterprise data marketplace platform and a unique UAE-first AI startup accelerator program. If I were to unpack the year for you in the new domestic and international contracts, domestically in the UAE, we signed two new multi-year contracts with domestic sovereign entities, in line with Abu Dhabi's new strategy, digital strategy, to establish a fully AI-native government by 2027.
Following on the contract we won from ADNOC in November 2024 and a successful proof of concept confirming the scalability of ENERGYai across the entire energy value chain, AIQ signed a further three-year agreement with ADNOC to deploy ENERGYai across its entire upstream value chain. This agreement, enhancing efficiency, sustainability, and safety while augmenting human expertise, sets a new global standard for the energy sector. From operational optimization to sustainable resource management, it is projected to generate over $1 billion in value for ADNOC, increasing seismic interpretation efficiencies by over 80%, reducing carbon intensity by 10%, and significantly improving advanced reservoir monitoring and enhancing data quality through anonymity detection. ENERGYai will be key in supporting ADNOC's ambition to become the world's most AI-enabled energy company.
Internationally, in line with UAE's commitment to promote sustainable solutions globally, our joint venture with IntelliGrid signed a $480 million preliminary agreement with SOCAR, Azerbaijan's national oil and gas company, to implement a state-of-the-art smart gas grid management system across the Azeri Gas Service Area in Azerbaijan. IntelliGrid was established in 2014 to deliver innovative solutions for smart grid and energy management systems by combining the expertise in energy, technology, and AI. This 13-year partnership with SOCAR will leverage advanced metering and cutting-edge AI-driven solutions to drive resilience, efficiency, and sustainability across Azerbaijan's energy infrastructure. It will leverage data analytics for predictive maintenance and real-time monitoring to enable precise consumption tracking, leak detection, optimized gas flow, leading to an improved energy usage and definitely lower emissions.
On new agreements and partnerships, we have deepened our relationship as an AI and digital transformation partner with key state-owned enterprises in the UAE. It encompasses our relationship with Etihad Rail to accelerate its digital transformation, including smart transportation and logistics solutions using generative AI. We signed with AD Ports Group's digital cluster, Maqta Gateway, to collaborate exclusively on the development and commercialization of AI-powered digital solutions in ports and maritime markets. Masdar, a key enabler of the UAE's vision as a global leader in sustainability. We have a partnership with them to develop a bespoke global AI-based asset management platform to support its ambition to digitize its operations worldwide and drive efficient use of its assets. Nawah Energy Company, an operations and maintenance subsidiary of the Emirates Nuclear Energy , signed an agreement with us to explore the use of generative AI to enhance operational safety and organization efficiency.
Last but not least, the ITC the Integrated Transport Center for the implementation of smart city solutions in Abu Dhabi signed an agreement with us to enhance the quality of urban living and infrastructure management. AIQ, in its final quarter, signed eight MOUs, including those with Ecopetrol, Colombia's national oil company, to support its clean energy development, with Kent to investigate AI innovations in autonomous operations, with Schlumberger SLB to create a suite of powerful and specialized tools for enhanced subsurface characterization, and with Baker Hughes and CoVar to enhance drilling performance with ADNOC.
On the international front, two key MOUs were signed, one in Vietnam with Viettel AI, a leading AI research center in Vietnam as part of Viettel itself, to enhance the development of applied AI and digital transformation initiatives, including the development of large language models supporting the Vietnamese language, as well as AI-powered solutions for enterprises and smart cities. In Colombia, with the Ministry of Science and Technology and Innovation, we have an agreement to collaborate with them on the research on technological development and innovation in the space of artificial intelligence, smart cities, energy, and climate. We continue to broaden our relationship with U.S.-based video intelligence leader, ISS, with a new commercial framework, which will now put ISS to deploy Presight's AI-driven data analytics solution across its portfolio within the North and South America's organizations.
We've also commenced the initial phase of deployment of a sovereign cloud and a national analytics platform in Angola, as well as a public sector digital healthcare assessment in the Republic of Jordan. Specific to broadening our portfolio of best-in-class AI-driven products and solutions, we signed an MOU with Swiss AI, a part of the think tank of ETH Zurich, to use advanced big data analytics and AI capabilities to transform cities into smarter and more efficient sustainable environments. IDEMIA, the leader in smart digital ID, collaborated with us too, in the field of secure identity solutions, AI, and data analytics solutions across the MENA region. Finally, with Rich Digital Base out of Abu Dhabi, we signed an agreement to deliver advanced digital solutions by combining AI, IoT analytics, cognitive technologies, and smart city innovations. Presight's global collaborations extensively.
This year, we've created an AI and big data analytics ecosystem of excellence through partnerships that have added, that will continue to add value to the work we do, and joint ventures that are accretive to us in value, but will and will continue to foster growth and bring positive impact across the world in the work that Presight is doing. In the realm of innovation and product development, during the fourth quarter, we launched Presight's Intelli platform. We launched this at GITEX in October. This is a domain-agnostic, scalable, and adaptive platform that can deliver unparalleled real-time intelligence over public infrastructure, including those of smart cities, airports, ports, manufacturing, and energy utilities.
The Presight Report Optimizer, an extension of our Enterprise AI Suite, which we launched last year, is a no-code report generator that uses generative AI and large language models to enable users to retrieve, organize, and analyze data across a wide range of public data and enterprise data sources without the need for any level of programming. Of course, in collaboration with G42, Microsoft, and ADNOC, AIQ launched ENERGYai, the world's first of its kind, an agentic AI solution, and I'll unpack that a little in a little bit more soon. When we spoke about our Enterprise AI Suite in the past few calls, this was launched in July 2024. We signed the first commercial contract for Vitruvian, an on-premise AI enterprise AI project with a government entity in Abu Dhabi during Q3.
We're now conducting proof of concept engagement across a number of government and private sector entities in the financial, energy, utilities, and education sectors. We've also piloted successfully an AI-powered presenter that summarizes and delivers insights from PowerPoint, Word, and PDF documents, and soon this will be available in the Azure marketplace as a digital product. We've often been asked about the competitive advantage of our Enterprise Suite compared to the other agents or co-pilots. Clearly, for Vitruvian, our AI platform, its on-premise deployment and domain-specific knowledge, learning from trusted organization data rather than general-purpose data analytics, are key advantages over ChatGPT in delivering precise and secure outcomes. Its enterprise capabilities can now even be deployed in air-gapped environments for those that require the highest level of security. It is large language model agnostic.
We've used Llama, Mistral, J, GPT-4, among others, and it offers full control over the system and platform compared to other chatbots. It's easily customizable. It integrates with our other products for enriched insights. For Presight Connect, UAE's first hosted cloud-based AI assistant, its advantage relative to other AI agents and co-pilot lies in the breadth of its enterprise application and domain-specific assistant creation. It has superlative speed to market, its rapid AI solution deployment with minimum reliance on data science resources. The workflow associated with it is highly customizable, with predictive models tailored to specific enterprise needs. It has strong integration capabilities for multi-source data analysis and streamlined workflows. Moving on to really unpack for you ENERGYai, it's truly a trailblazing and global first.
The ENERGYai, the world's first of its kind, agentic AI solution for the entire energy value chain was first launched by His Excellency Dr. Sultan Al Jaber at ADIPEC in November 2024. It was developed in collaboration with G42 and Microsoft. It uses agentic AI technology that spans the entire upstream value chain. It integrated advanced AI agents with over 80 years of ADNOC's knowledge and petabytes of geological and reservoir data. It has a 70 billion parameter large language model to enable engineers to talk to the solution and maximize individual productivity. ENERGYai brings a new level of efficiency and precision to critical tasks from seismic analysis to geological modeling and real-time process monitoring, reducing time for critical processes from months to days, minimizing costs and emissions in the process.
Built on an open surface data universe framework, OSDU, it leverages sovereign Microsoft Azure Cloud and OpenAI models. ENERGYai offers advanced integration capabilities while its intuitive natural language dashboard empowers data analysts and engineers to derive actionable insights easily and effectively. ADNOC and AIQ recently completed and published the 90-day proof of concept trial of ENERGYai using data sourced from only 15% of ADNOC's onshore and offshore wells. The results of the trial included a 70% accuracy improvement in certain aspects of seismic interpretation. It benefited in reservoir monitoring and improvement of the reliability and usability of operational data inputs through detecting errors, standardizing formats, and refining data sets. It operates on top of a dedicated high-performance computer infrastructure to ensure secure, efficient data processing and strong customization capabilities to evolving operation needs.
ENERGYai is well placed to be the foundation of Energy GPT for ADNOC with scalability across its entire energy value chain. The first operational scalable version of ENERGYai is expected to be completed in mid-2025. This version will include four fully operational AI agents covering tasks within subsurface operations and will be test-deployed across a number of upstream assets. We plan to scale its application to thousands of additional wells. Agentic AI is widely recognized by experts as the future of AI development and integration. Here in the UAE, we're not just predicting the future; we're creating it with applied intelligence. With the rollout of a number of exciting new products over the past year, this slide gives you an overview of the current platform of trusted AI and big data analytics solutions that we now have.
As we move from a product-specific operation to a platform-driven operation, from predictive analytics design to help UAE manage the impact of the COVID pandemic in 2020, to now a comprehensive suite of national and enterprise-level mission-critical solutions across five critical sectors. Powered by over 100 industrial-grade machine learning and deep learning AI models trained on petabytes of data, they can now be deployed on-premise or on Microsoft Azure, sovereign in the UAE, giving clients the control, security, and access they need to drive positive changes. Lastly, during Q4, Presight launched DataHub, UAE's first sovereign enterprise data marketplace platform and our first AI startup accelerator program. DataHub enables organizations of any size to create data products, exchange, manage data securely and efficiently, and extract actionable insights from data. It is a cloud-native platform that is deployed in the UAE on Microsoft Azure, ensuring data sovereignty and security.
This is also a base platform where further AI work can be developed on top of it. Our newly launched UAE AI Accelerator is unique. It's focused on market-ready startups across the MENA region, Southeast, and Central Asia. It's a three-month program. Participants will be provided with expertise and mentorship, access to cloud computing, data centers, and high-performance computing services, as well as customer and partner networking opportunities across the wider G42 ecosystem. We believe this is going to be a good source of product and IP opportunities and value creation for Presight. The accelerator is unique because Presight offers access to markets, and I think the access to the global markets that we operate in will be a big driver and a big draw to what the accelerator can bring.
Right now, I'm going to hand this over to Ram to take you through the financial performance, and then we can take questions later. Over to you, Ram.
Thank you, Thomas, and good afternoon, everyone. Thomas mentioned at the outset that 2024 has been a transformational year for Presight, and this can be clearly seen in our financial performance, with strong growth in full-year revenues and profits, with key metrics all ahead of the market expectations. To help contextualize this, our revenue growth rate in 2024 was approximately 1.5x that of 2023. Our growth in gross profit was approximately twice the level of revenue, and our EBITDA grew ahead of the strong revenue performance, despite 2024 being a year of reinvestment and growth and building up our structural capabilities.
Our profitability was also impressive in a global context, despite 2024 being the first year of corporation tax in the UAE. To remind everybody, our tax was more than 9% in 2024. Our profit conversion to tax to cash was excellent, with a clear focus on proactive management of working capital, which enabled us to sustain our strong balance sheet liquidity year on year, despite deploying AED 81.3 billion into mergers and acquisitions going predominantly to AIQ. Our acquisition of a major stake in AIQ is creating strong incremental value with growth in revenue and net income in seven months post-transaction, up 74% and 40% respectively compared to the full 12 months of 2023.
As you have already seen, our order book has increased by AED 3.6 billion during the year, which contributed to a year-end backlog of AED 2.99 billion and represents a strong platform on which to generate future revenues and cash flows. It is worth noting that both these numbers exclude the preliminary agreement with SOCAR that we signed or announced in November 2024, and which we expect to conclude in Q1 of this year. Including this agreement into our backlog calculations, our pro forma backlog swells to AED 4.76 billion. Now, for the financial highlights of Q4, for our fourth quarter, we saw record levels of growth in both revenue and gross profits. Revenue growth alone was double the 23% growth in the same period of 2023. Our EBITDA grew over 32%, notwithstanding more than a third of our full-year organic operating cost accrued in the final quarter.
Our post-tax profit grew a high single digit compared to a base with no corporation tax. If we normalize the Q4 number for tax growth, it would have been closer to 20% year on year. I touched on the strong stewardship of AIQ post-acquisition. AIQ generated outstanding levels of growth in Q4, with all key metrics growing between two to five times the previous quarter. Our diversification strategy is also bearing fruit. Revenue from international markets increased sixfold in the final quarter, and for the full year, it comprised 23% of total revenues. Now, finally, the proportion of multi-year contracts is also another key metric that we track, and our revenue mix continued to increase, reaching almost 100% in Q4. As we have mentioned previously, multi-year contracts provide a strong foundation for future revenue and cash flow growth and increase of revenue visibility as well.
Now, it is clear from the above that we had a superlative final quarter. This, however, is not uncommon in our industry, driven predominantly by client budget cycles and typical deployment cycles, with a slide here showing a similar distribution over the previous two years. There is typically an acceleration of deployment as the year comes to a close. Now, turning to the consolidated headline figures for the 12 months, which include seven months' contribution from AIQ acquisition. Group revenue, full-year revenue increased 24.3% year on year, which was ahead of market expectations, with AIQ contributing about 1/5 of those revenues. Q4 revenue increased 46.2% year on year, with the strongest rate of any quarterly growth to date, reflecting a positive organic growth of a robust base and a very strong performance from AIQ, generating more than twice the level of revenue in quarter three.
Group earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization. Full-year EBITDA increased by 25.2%, more than 10% ahead of the market expectations. Notably, this rate of growth was ahead of strong revenue performance despite a heavy period of investment in internal capabilities, reflecting a favorable deployment mix across our existing contracts and a strong Q4 from AIQ, where EBITDA increased approximately fivefold quarter on quarter. Full-year EBITDA margin of 28.7% was maintained in line with last year, notwithstanding a step change in the growth outside of our domestic market, with Q4 margin well ahead of the previous three quarters of 2024. Group net profit, full-year profit before tax, increased by 18% year on year, with AIQ contributing 29.6% to the full-year outcome. Growth was stronger in Q4, up 19.7% year on year, with AIQ contributing 42.1% to the Q4 outcome.
The Q4 pre-tax margin was 34.5% despite a AED 111 million adverse swing in organic operating cost year on year. Full-year profit after tax increased by 7.4% year on year, ahead of market expectations. 2024 was a maiden year of tax in the UAE, so if we adjust for this to draw a more meaningful comparison, growth would have been around 18%. Q4 was again stronger, with growth of 8.9% or almost 20% normalizing for the tax, and a net margin of 31.4%, with AIQ contributing 42.1% to the outcome. Now, moving to the cash metrics, our cash generation has also been very, very strong. You will see from the slide here, a significant improvement in cash conversion over the past two years was underpinned by effective working capital management, strong collections on various customer contracts.
Our balance sheet remained debt-free, with cash of AED 1.94 billion at the end of the year, which is in line with the prior year balance, despite an outflow of AED 1.28 billion to acquire AIQ in the year 2024, and we maintained a significant amount of flexibility to fund future organic and inorganic growth. Looking at some of the key performance indicators that we track, revenue quality, as mentioned already, we closed the year with a very healthy backlog of AED 2.99 billion, which was a significant increase from the AED 1.58 billion in September and reflected good renewals on existing client contracts, as well as new wins in Q4. Now, if we include the preliminary agreement with SOCAR announced in November 2024, our pro forma backlog is AED 4.76 billion, approximately a threefold increase on the backlog at the end of year 2023.
We saw a higher proportion of multi-year contracts within the revenue mix, both on a full-year basis as well as on a Q4 basis. Multi-year contracts, together with the backlog, are a very good indicator of future revenue and cash flow growth potentials. Looking at the geographical split of the business, we have seen good growth outside of our domestic market, with international revenue comprising 23% of the total revenues for the full year, as compared to 8.1% in the year 2023. The respective figures for the fourth quarter were 37.1%, as compared to 8.2% in quarter four of 2023, a sixfold increase year on year. Before closing remarks, I wanted to touch on our expectations for 2025 and beyond. The strong 2024 performance, combined with the growth in backlog, a higher proportion of multi-year contracts, has provided increased confidence in the medium-term outlook.
Accordingly, we are raising our medium-term guidance and now anticipate compound annual growth over the next three years to be as follows: group revenue growth of 19%-25%, group EBITDA growth of 16%-21%, and group post-tax profit growth of 6%-11% after applying an increase in the rate of corporation tax from 9% to 15%, in line with the assessment of Pillar Two tax legislation. Now, I will hand back to Thomas for closing remarks before we open up the line for Q and A. Thank you.
Thank you, Ram. As you have seen, 2024 was truly an outstanding execution year for us across all fronts, from our international expansion to new orders, strengthening our portfolio of products and solutions, and value accretive for M&A.
Financially, every key metric exceeded market expectations, and we ended the year with a robust backlog, a pristine balance sheet, both of which will be a strong source of our future growth. The results today speak for themselves, but this is just the beginning with you. There's so much more we can do and will achieve to create perpetual impact globally across the use of responsible and ethical use of AI. We thank you for spending the time with us, and I'd like to open the discussion now for any Q and A that you might have.
Thank you, Thomas and Ram. The floor is now open for any questions. If you'd like to ask a question, you can either use the raise hand function to ask it verbally, or if you prefer to send a written question, you can send it via the chat, and I'll read it out.
We'll just give it a minute here until some of the questions start coming in. Thank you. Okay, our first question comes from the line of Ahmed Es'haqi. Ahmed, you should be able to unmute yourself now. Go ahead and you're audible. Please go ahead.
Am I audible?
Yes, we can hear you loud and clear, Ahmed.
Okay, so it's Ahmed Es'haqi from SICO Bahrain. Congratulations on the results. I had one question about the backlog. Does this backlog include AIQ's portion of the backlog, or is it just Presight?
It includes AIQ as well.
What portion of the, let's say, assuming AIQ's backlog isn't included in this backlog, was there any growth or decline in the backlog?
This is the first seven months of consolidation from AIQ, so there's no material comparison to the prior years.
In terms of dimensioning, you can assume about 25%-30% of the contribution of the backlog from AIQ, and without getting into any specific contract sizes and things like that.
Okay, and are you still targeting 30% of revenues from outside the UAE, or are you raising the target? Any guidance?
I'll comment on if Thomas has any follow-up comments on that. I'd appreciate that as well. Essentially, in the medium term, we expect the international revenue to start contributing more and more. It'll go to north of 30% over the medium term, and at a steady state towards the end of this medium-term period, it'll be in the range of 40%-50% of the overall revenue streams.
Just add on to that.
When we closed this year, international revenue grew from, I think, 8.5% the year before to 23%, about 3.5x growth. It's really the actualization of, if you've been following us, the actualization of the international relationship that we've built over the past 24 months. We're getting the contract scored. We expect that to continue to grow. The target that we have reported to all of you over the time is to try to get to a 40/60 balance, 40% international, 60% domestic. That continues to be the goal as we continue to diversify the markets we're in. Many of you will know we set up our office in Kazakhstan. We continue to kick off the projects in Jordan. We're likely to deepen that space. In Africa, we continue to expand the project. These are areas where we're looking at it.
On the question on AIQ and its backlog, the design of the acquisition and diversification of the energy sector pulls not just AIQ, but also IntelliGrid. Where we see, as we reported before, energy should become the second largest sector in the Presight revenue composition. The way we're looking at it is energy would be about one-third of the business. About 30% of the business will come from energy. When you take a view of our audit book, profits, contribution, we expect from the sector, not just AIQ, to be about 30% as we continue to grow in scale.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
That's it from my side, yeah.
Thank you, Ahmed. Our next question comes from the line of Evgenii Annenkov. You should be able to unmute yourself now. Genii, go ahead. Yes, you're audible now. Please go ahead.
Audible now?
Yes, can hear you.
Great. Hi, team. It's Evgeii from Jefferies. Thank you for the presentation and congratulations with a very solid quarter. I have two questions, please. My first question is on the growth trajectory into 2025. Is it fair to assume that given the fact that you will have extra five months of M&A impact, your 2025 revenue growth will remain above the high end of the new guidance, maybe above 25%? Or you might want to emphasize some specific mix deployment that might make for this growth to be within the range or below the range? If you can give more color, please, on standalone growth, AIQ in 2024, it was down - 2%. Should we see material improvement into 2025? My second question is on your cash pile. Cash flow generation has been pressing.
Do you consider right now any M&A deals, or it's just a possibility, or are you considering something right now? Thank you.
Okay, thanks, everybody. I'll go ahead and give initial comments, and Thomas, of course, if you have any additional comments, please feel free. The guidance currently, we have improved it from the prior 17%-23% to now 19%-25%, basically two percentage points in the midpoint of the guidance. Yes, we would land up, we expect to be towards the higher end of this guidance. Of course, we would revisit the guidance as and when some of the contracts that we are now anticipating in Q1 starts to form up. We would revisit it. I would say the guidance does have some headroom to show more robust growth. Insofar as the organic growth, yes, there was a 1.5% drop from year on year.
As you can appreciate, many of our revenue streams are also coming from international contracts. It is basically a timing issue where a couple of key contracts that we were anticipating in Q3, Q4 have now moved into 2025. We hope it is merely a timing issue. These are not loss as such. We continue to feel very strong about 2025, and that is one of the reasons we went ahead and increased our guidance. There is nothing structurally or fundamentally wrong or incorrect in this picture. It is just a question of a timing issue. In so far as the cash pile itself, M&A is always on top of our minds. We hope to deploy our cash prudently across R and D, M&As, as well as international expansion. We are continuing to look for acquisitions and business combinations which bring in synergies of products and synergies of customer markets.
As you can already see, one evidence of that is our investment in AIQ and the returns it's already accruing to our top line as well as bottom line. Thomas, if you have any other comments or follow-ups?
Yeah, just to get a different perspective. The shorter answer Ram's unpacked it for is, yes, we expect the business outside the energy to grow positively because of the large users coming internationally. More importantly, the M&A aspect of it. We're not just looking at deal flow. The accelerator program, which we will continue to report to you and to the market, it's an arm to look at not just us doing balance sheet investment, but to really look at IP opportunities that can improve and be accretive to the Presight solutions.
A big part of it, when you look at it, is not just us investing in the technology. It's also us the ability to deploy these technologies into the several national programs that we have in the UAE as well as internationally. Right? The cash war chest that we have, one, is for being able to respond to strong M&A opportunities, especially now with the upturn of generative AI companies. Two, continue to invest and develop technology that we can deploy and technology that can be consumed and monetized in the UAE and immediately on the national platforms that we have. This applies across the four sectors that are in smart cities, energy, financial services, and the government sector. That answers the question.
Yeah, thank you, Thomas and Ram. Sorry, very quick follow-up on your guidance.
From which period do you start applying new 15% tax rate in your guidance?
It is from 2023 to 2027.
You expect it to move to 15% from now as soon as 2025 or maybe from next year?
Ram, the question is on the corporate tax rate. Yes, it is 2025. We have provision for 15%.
As soon as Q1 2025, right?
That is correct.
Great. Thank you.
We do not have any more verbal questions at this time, so I will jump to the chat. If you do have another question, anybody else has a question they want to ask verbally, please go ahead and raise your hand. Actually, just as I said that, a couple of people. Okay. First, we have Saleh Al-Amro. Please go ahead. You should be able to unmute now, Saleh, from your end. Yes, you are unmuted. Go ahead, Saleh.
Team and Presight team for this presentation. I have two questions. The first one regarding ENERGYai product you have. Is there any plan to target and to market this product to other companies similar to ADNOC in the region? Is it in the pipeline or not? What's the cost of operating such a model? This is my first question. The second one is the partnership and new agreements that you have. In AIQ, you have more than eight MOUs. In the other international relationship and technology partnership, this hasn't been materialized yet. However, what is your view if the majority of those agreements and partnerships materialized in the coming two, three years?
Let me take this. The first question, ENERGYai will be marketed. It is the intent and aspiration of AIQ to take that model and market to the other NOCs.
Typically, where are we targeting? We're targeting not IOC, but medium-sized NOCs, which is therefore the conversations with Ecopetrol, with Pertamina, an existing arrangement is in place with Petronas. The ability to take the base model, not at North Data, but the base model and the know-how of agentic AI to apply across the entire value chain. We're talking about upstream, midstream, downstream workflow is something that AIQ is going to package. In fact, one of the closest conversations that we'll bring to is probably SOCAR because of the existing relationship. The answer is yes, the model is meant to take up. The operating cost of the model, I think that's a question of how long a piece of string is going to be.
Maybe the other way I'll bring it for you is we expect that computation power and computation costs and GPU costs will continue to decrease over time. You've seen now with open models, the models will become more efficient. Where the unique selling point and the high value margin is, it's the high value understanding and methodology and approach of creating workstream-based agents that is going to have the highest yield. That is what AIQ will take forward. The relationships that have been formed through AIQ, particularly with the other NOCs, it's about, of course, selling to that RoboWell, Automation, AI360, ENERGYai. The work with Kent, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes is a collaboration where we sell with and sell through. We expect those to materialize over the next 24 months.
What you're going to see in AIQ with a broadened international portfolio, like Presight with international technology brands in the oil and gas sector. Schlumberger, Baker Hughes, Kent, Cognite are the companies that they work with very closely to create creative solutions and products that will help them serve ADNOC in the UAE market, but also serve the international market. When you combine the two, if you look at every market, Presight has a presence. Kazakhstan, we have the sovereign joint venture with Samruk-Kazyna, which runs the national oil and gas company with SOCAR. I work in Colombia with Ecopetrol now. We continue to expand out in Indonesia, which is Pertamina, in Malaysia, which is Petronas. Every one of the countries that Presight has a relationship will be extended to AIQ for them to bridge the energy conversation. Thank you.
Saleh, do you have any follow-up or you're good?
Yes, thank you for that, yeah. Yes, just one follow-up. On the current GPU cost level, since you're operating this model only with ADNOC, would scaling it up with other players reduce the cost or just the development of the model itself and the technical and infrastructure of it would be the thing who will bring the cost level to a much profitable level? If we're talking margins or profitability, can you just shed some light on the ENERGYai product profitability?
I can't give you the specifics. ENERGYai's profitability would be akin to software margins. Right? GPU is an infrastructure. In ADNOC, we consume sovereign GPU that ADNOC has. In other countries, they may consume GPU as a service that's available on Azure. It's available on other GPU cloud as a service.
That cost will continue to decrease. That cost often is also borne by the client. Right? It could be infrastructure that they have. Where it is accretive to us is that we can take a template of the know-how of ENERGYai's framework and replicate that. Imagine what we have created. It is a base, Microsoft Excel, with the understanding of what macros formula we need to consume. That is the base template. The data is where it needs to be curated from the in-country NOC, the in-country national oil and gas companies. That is where you feed. The biggest part of the margin is the fact that we have created a template. We know how to work it. The good part of it is that several parts of the ADNOC operations are similar to other countries. Right?
When you have that profile, that's where you really make strong software margins. Infrastructure is not really a place where you make money because GPU as a service over the next 24 months-36 months, we know, will continue to be commoditized as the world continues to build more AI infrastructure. I hope that answers the question, sir.
Yeah.
Okay. Thank you, Saleh. Next question, we have a follow-up from Ahmed Es'haqi. Ahmed, you should be able to unmute yourself now. Yes, go ahead, please.
Hi. A follow-up from my side. From the projects or the contracts that were renewed, what was your success rate? One more question. About the Abu Dhabi digital strategy, what kind of opportunities are you expecting? Do you think that the backlog and the contracts you will get are expected to be more than at least the previous two years?
Yeah.
On the contract, I think I'm happy. I believe we're happy to report there's 100% renewal of the federal contracts that we have. If you have been following, Abu Dhabi announced the large investment into creating an AI-native government through 2027 to 2030. What's going to be accretive to us is the work we're doing with ADAA, which is the Abu Dhabi Accounting Authority, with UAE Accounting Authority. We have now worked with the Department of Government Enablement, DGE, which is the main driver of the digital strategy for Abu Dhabi. We have current work in DMT, the Department of Municipality and Transportation. We work in MOE and also the Ministry of Human Resource. The broad scope, they allow us to scale up multiple applications to drive digital transformation. DGE will become a very strong partner.
I hope to report with clarity what DGE projects are in place. If you look at the pattern of how Presight operates at a federal government space, you would see that we will become national platforms in several of the key ministries. With that, it is a continuous path for us to onsale and expand AI solutions for the support of the digital native AI-native government strategy that His Highness Sheikh Khaled has actually announced. You would see more AI applications in the UAE government, that is for sure.
Thank you. All the best.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ahmed. Our next question comes from Jin. Jin, if you could give us your full name, and you should be able to unmute yourself now and ask your question. Thanks.
Thanks for the call. Hi. Can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you, Jin. Please go ahead.
Okay.
Great. I have three questions. Firstly, on the same topic of this government digital transformation plan. The announced number was AED 13 billion. I'm just wondering if you have done any visibility on how much of that AED 13 billion you can capture, and is it embedded in your revenue growth targets as well? The second question is on lower cost of these models, like let's say a DeepS eek. Does it lower your, call it, fees for your services as well over time? The third question is just on geopolitical tensions and whether you have any concerns of whether G42 can continue to get the required chips that they need to provide the necessary infrastructure. Thank you.
Okay. First question, we would love to get all of the AED 13.6 billion that's been announced.
If I put some color to it, what's been published, in the past 18 months, the Abu Dhabi government curated about 220, an excess of 220 use cases where AI transformation can support. We are party to a good handful of them. What's going to happen is you would see we'll go from a use case IOC, an initial operating capability that we'll select for one or two of the agencies, and then transform that into a full capability that the government would use. One example you would see, for instance, when we won the DMT project, which we showcased during the October GITEX, digital twin AI capabilities for urban livability, they now become a pivot. The Presight platform in DMT becomes a platform that other agencies want to adopt when it comes to geospatial, big data analytics AI. We see this coming up.
This is how we will grab the budget setup. Most of the budget will be operated through DGE. Your second question was on the DeepS eek. The way we look at DeepS eek, I've been informing the market, look at it not at deep seek. Look at it at the availability of open-source models that are more efficient today, and then how it impacts us. When we built ENERGYai, we had to use 33 different models to right-size what's available, from the Llama models to Mistral, JSON, what else that's available. DeepS eek and its related models that have been released, as an open-source model, it gives us more options. It gives us more options to decide which model is efficient. The value that we sell, we're selling AI applications. We don't sell cost-plus. We sell value-add.
If I can create ENERGYai with more accurative, specialized algorithms designed for the upstream operations, we get to charge more. Right? The availability of open models that are efficient is good news for us. It's good news for the entire developers' community because that's going to drive AI adoption. It's going to make AI accessible. The third question you have is on geopolitics. I can't really comment on that, but the way to look at it is GPU as a service is available not just in G42. Microsoft makes it available. In fact, DeepSeek, it's a model available on Microsoft Azure now. It's available on Google and several others. The client's choice to use GPUs, unless they require complete sovereignty that needs to be in the UAE, then it just really depends on what high-performance cluster UAE can put up.
The availability of GPU as a service through Azure, through the other hyperscalers, continues to expand as they build regions. Microsoft announced last year they spent $80 billion on building AI infrastructure. Any clients that build AI applications can sit on Azure. Right? We do not believe that the geopolitics impact us directly because we are an AI application company. We are agnostic to infrastructure. We are agnostic to models. We design domain-specific AI solutions like what you have seen and what we have reported. Hope that answers all three questions.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thanks, Jin.
We have one last question here. Would you be okay with taking one last one, Thomas? I am conscious of time. We are past the hour, but completely yours.
Sure, sure. Of course. [crosstalk]. We are delighted that everyone's still interested.
Yeah. We will take one more from Saleh before we close up. Go ahead, Saleh.
You should be able to unmute yourself now.
Thank you. Just for me to understand, the models you have, you do not need a data center or infrastructure to operate them. It is only like an add-on or a model or coding or a program you can give to others to operate on their infrastructure. There is no cost of infrastructure from your side to operate that. I am talking about other products, not the platform that has already been there in the last maybe two or three years.
Yeah. A quick question to that. Right? The way we describe it is this: when we develop AI solutions, it is agnostic to the platform that we operate in. One, if the client has its own infrastructure, then we deploy the model and, of course, the solution onto the infrastructure.
If a client doesn't have the infrastructure, then we serve it out as part of a full package. Right? The question goes like, can I serve the model as a software as a service? Presight Connect, it's a software as a service served on UAE sovereign GPU clusters. We have customers who say, "Hey, I'm a federal or I'm a large organization that I would like on-premise deployment." Right? When it's on-premise, two things happen. One, does the client already have an on-premise setup? If so, we deploy into it. The AI models are closed-sourced, trained on organization data, and deployed out to the client. If the client says, "Oh, I don't have any infrastructure," it gives us the ability and opportunity to create AI in a box essentially. Right?
We could put AI in a large high-performance cluster and then sell it as a whole. Then when we do that, you would see that it is similar to how we have sold infrastructure applications and then sold the entire thing as a turnkey project. I know it's not a straightforward answer, but it actually describes the different models that we have that are consistent to how we have done national cloud and then national analytics platform and then government-based services. This is the model, and this is how we're seeing the industry will go towards.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for that.
Thank you so much, Thomas and Ram. I'll hand back the line to you, Thomas, maybe just in case you have any closing remarks here before we end the call.
All right.
I think first and foremost, thank you, everyone, for spending the past hour with us. Thank you for your interest. This is the second year through the listing. We're excited about the results we have achieved for certainty. I think the result and the metrics is really an indication of where applied AI solutions is making its mark. It's an indication that the focus we have on the global south market is returning value. The large international projects have a much longer sales cycle. We are blessed that we are riding on top of the UAE platform. We're protected in many ways with our digital transformation agreements with different governments. We believe that this is the trend. We believe that AI will become more accessible and affordable. It will bridge the digital divide.
We are going to continue to focus on how we can apply not just the new generative AI, but foundation AI, big data analytics, what we are doing across the sectors that we feel is going to continue to drive growth. Digital transformation, the more efficient models are going to be critical to that. When you continue to work and monitor our growth, I think where you will pay attention is the new clients that come on board, the different use cases that we will publish out, and of course, the growth in the energy sector and our continuous R&D and product development. We think it is transformative 2024. We are very optimistic about 2025. Therefore, the improved guidance. We thank you for your interest, and we hope that we continue to speak to you every quarter. Thank you for your time.
Ram, if you want to wrap up any closing points.
No, I think you covered it all. I think we finished a strong 2024. We are set very nicely for 2025. There is a lot of excitement and anticipation as we unlock the value for our shareholders in this year. Again, thank you, everybody, for your time. I appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Thomas and Ram. Thank you, everyone, for joining the call. This now concludes the conference call. Have a nice evening. Thank you.
All right. Thank you all.
Thank you.