Welcome to the Calnex Solutions plc investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand over to Tommy Cook, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining. Sorry we're a few minutes late. We're just having some technical issues here. I'm sorry. We're probably going to switch our cameras off, but hopefully you'll be able to hear us and see the slides, and we'll go through the results for you. First of all, let's just remind everyone who Calnex is, or if you're new to Calnex, give you an update who we are. Calnex Solutions designs, produces, and markets test instrumentations for the network synchronization, monitoring, and emulation markets. Basically, anybody that's using a network, whether it's telecoms, enterprise, defense, data centers, we provide test solutions into that area. We're now just entering our third decade, so we're going to 20 years. Through that period, we've actually shipped product to over 700 sites around the world in 68 countries.
You can see with the graphic in the bottom right-hand corner, when you look at the whole life cycle of developing new network equipment, the bits that we focus on is that design validation conformance test and the maintenance monitoring part. These are very much where the high value, where customers need equipment that's aligned to the latest standards, the latest requirement. It's low volume, high value equipment is what we provide. In terms of where we started as a company, we very much started in the telecom space, which is obviously in the 5G phase at the moment. We always sold to different sectors as enterprise, so it's always been a multi-sector environment. In recent years, as you'll see through the presentation, that is developing even further.
We now sell into data centers, because in some ways a data center in my world feels like a network in a building. We also sell into things like the satellite networks, in terms of evaluating them, and more and more into federal and government type, military type applications. It's the same equipment, but different groups of people using it. It provides an opportunity for us. What are our key strengths? Our strengths are that we have now established, been in the market for 20 years. We have a reputation for continually delivering high value, quality products with a high customer base. We have a high level of repeat business, where customers buy equipment from us and then continue to come back and buy upgrades to that equipment or additional pieces of equipment. We've, over the recent period, tried to diversify our business.
We have a global footprint, you can see there, but also from an end markets as well. We've continued to try, when the last few years telecoms has been a bit more subdued market, take the opportunity to expand into other sectors, into the digital infrastructure and government defense sectors. We have a strong revenue profile with a robust balance sheet. Today we are operating, as you'll hear later on, end markets are very large and high growing, fast growing markets. That's where we believe that would provide opportunities for us to grow in the future. We continue to invest to accelerate that growth in terms of into our new products, but also in our infrastructure to be better aligned to maximize these opportunities. What's happened in the last year?
Last year, we're pleased to say that our revenues are up 19% to just under GBP 23 million. Our profit also increased substantially, and we continue to have a strong cash base in terms of closing cash level. We will increase the dividend this year from GBP 0.62 to GBP 0.68. Our strategy really has continued to play out, the three pillars that we have. Basically innovating into the telecoms space, and we did that through a new product, Paragon neo-S, that came out just at the very beginning of the last financial year. The 800 Gb, the leading edge capability, and that drove a lot of the business that we got from that sector last year. We've already started investing to the next generation, the 1.6 Tb, which is the leading edge technology today, and we'll have that available and shipping next year.
Of course, a lot of the focus internally has been in terms of trying to expand our footprint into the digital infrastructure and government defense sector. In the government defense sector, what we're finding is our products are well suited to the need. We haven't really had a lot of feedback requiring enhancements to our products. It's really been about go to market. We hired key people last year to focus on getting into that, especially in North America, and to understand how to get involved in some of these large projects and absolutely make sure that our products are considered for inclusion in these projects. We've made good progress. We've always felt it was going to be an 18 - 24-month initiative to get a strong foothold there. We're a year into that, and we feel that we are on track.
Still a long way to go, but made good build of knowledge and build our understanding of how to get involved in these projects and how to sell into these big projects that are happening. On the digital infrastructure, that's really about understanding what's happening, the impact of AI on the whole data center, cloud computing infrastructure, where it is, the acceleration of the size of it, the change in architecture to move some to the edge and how as well as central, is an area we've been focused on to really understand where the opportunities are. I'll talk later on how we feel we have identified places where there's opportunity for us that we look to maximize or look to start to realize later this year and into next year. The third strand is really partnerships, strategic partnerships.
We've done acquisitions in the past, but in the last year, it's been more about using partnerships to strengthen our go-to-market. We started working with VIAVI in terms of the wireless group, and if you're familiar with us, in the past, we used to work with Spirent, which provided a route to market for us or a channel partner facility. Now that that part of Spirent is with VIAVI, we're in discussions with them at the moment to allow us to continue to build on the relationship we had before and give us a stronger footprint by using where they're strong in the market space. A lot of change happening in our sales footprint, but a lot of positive change that we believe will be in a strong position for FY 2027.
If I look at what some of the key things that we've changed in the last, in FY 2026, as I said, the NEA network emulation products, we've had really good engagement with a number of key players, and through that, we've identified where we can strengthen our position. It's not from a change in product a lot of time. It's really about focused sales collateral that we can present our products to our key customers in a way that they fully understand how they can see the benefit and the value and maximize the value, which then obviously encourages them to spend.
We've also had a large repeat order from a hyperscaler that we've been working with for a few years, and that's significant in terms of what's happened, and also for our product program, which again, I'll talk about later, because I guess a product that we've been selling the other Sentry, we're going to start and work on a new version of that which will bring additional value in FY 2028. We continue to work on our products to tailor them to what our customers need, ever-evolving needs. Of course, the sync products is where as a company we started, but remains really important in terms of our base plate, and we continue to see opportunities to grow that in the future. The other part of the strategy and the action in the last year has been into that U.S. federal defense sector.
As I said, we have started to see, we've had some key wins. We've got a growing sales funnel. It's a challenging go-to-market. It's completely different than our other market. You really have to kind of get to know where all these programs are and deal with them one at a time. There's not a kind of simple website you can broadcast to everyone. It is a long road, but it's a valuable road for us and a road that we believe we can continue to strengthen moving forward, and we made really great progress in FY 2026. At this point, I'll hand over to Ashleigh, and she'll give you an update on the financials.
Thanks, Tommy. Before I take you through the next slide, which is the revenue model, I thought I'd just briefly remind you of how our two revenue streams work, and this will hopefully give some background for anybody that's new to Calnex as well. We have two revenue streams. The first one we call bundled hardware and software, which is the biggest one, and then the second one is our software support program revenues and warranties. A typical customer will come to us to purchase one of our hardware products, and that will have a number of software options included at the time of purchase. That's invoiced as one bundled sale, and they can come back for upgrades or additional options that are added to the existing hardware through the provision of a license key over the life cycle of that product with that customer.
We can sell the software sales and upgrades as standalone sales as well. Bundled hardware and software sales pricing can obviously differ for each order as it just depends on the makeup of the hardware product being purchased, and then the options are chosen at that time from the list of numerous options that we provide. Each customer obviously can purchase different combinations, just depending on what they need at that point in time. As a result of that variability, the average revenue earned per bundle can just vary from order to order, creating a mix effect. That revenue is recognized when we dispatch it to the customer or when we deliver the software license key, if it's a standalone software option.
As you can see from here, that is the black block in the top left graph here, and that takes up the majority of our revenues. Then each of our products comes with a standard warranty period, which can also be extended for an extra fee. We also sell software support programs alongside that, and this makes up our second revenue stream, the gray block. This revenue is recognized over the life of the product, and different customers can take different lengths of contract out with us for support. Those that last longer than a year, contract-wise, the revenue for that is spread over that life of the contract, and anything in year is deferred on the balance sheet and released over that relevant number of years. Coming to that graph there in the top left.
In previous years, prior to the years that are shown on this chart here, we did have several years where the trend was 90% hardware and software, and 10% software support revenues. Over the past couple of years, the software support revenues took up closer to 20% of our revenues. A lot of that was to do with the fact that our hardware and software revenues had taken a dip just while CapEx budgets had been less available out in the marketplace. As you can see in FY 2026, that ratio is closer to 83% and 17% for support revenues, and that's as a result of the growth in the hardware and software sales in the year. Our goal is really to keep that support revenue at that 15%-20% range going forward as we grow revenues in general for the business.
Just moving across to the top of the slide here to the middle chart. As you'll also know, if you're not new to Calnex, our revenues are generated across a global customer base and partner network, and we have three geographic divisions. That's the Americas, North Asia, and rest of world. Rest of world covers EMEA, India, Southeast Asia, and Australasia as well. The global spread obviously helps us mitigate the risk for us, but as well as giving us opportunities to understand new end market dynamics from a global perspective as well. There's more information on the regional and product line revenues and the trends coming from that in a couple of slides' time. As you'll remember from our previous presentations, our sales were previously predominantly derived from telecoms customers in the past, where the end application was within a telecoms network.
We previously showed metrics from up to last year that split our orders into telecoms and cloud computing market customers, and that cloud computing bucket of customers included hyperscaler, data center customers, enterprise, and government and defense, to name a few. We've decided this year going forward to give a more granular split, as you can see from the top right graph here, on our end market customer base, just given the growth in our more diversified end customer base or end customer use case outside of the traditional telecom sector. At the top right here, you can see we've split our analysis into government and defense; digital infrastructure, which is still the cloud computing, data centers, enterprise, et cetera; and telecoms. You can see that in FY 2026, the split of our orders in the year was 21% government and defense, 49% digital infrastructure, and 30% telecoms.
We've seen an increase in customers from the digital infrastructure sector over the years, which is partly driven, there are new customers in there, but it's partly driven by equipment vendors who initially developed products for use in telecom applications, now selling the same products into other data network applications where the same technology is implemented. Those new applications are becoming the primary market opportunity for our customer's product, which is contributing to the kind of move in the metrics here in this graph between telecoms and digital infrastructure. It's not as if we've lost the customers that are in that telecoms block. Some of them have actually moved into the digital infrastructure categorization in this chart here. Moving on to the bottom of the slide here, you've got two pie charts that are kind of interlinking in terms of the drivers.
The bottom left one I'll start with. Over the last three-year rolling period to March 2026, our top 10 customers contributed 51% of total orders. In addition to that, our top 10 customers as a group, have a average length of relationship with us of 13 years, which just demonstrates that repeat nature of business and strong customer relationship that we have with them. We have, for those of you that don't know, and this is related to the next pie chart, we have a high level of repeat custom from our customer base as well as new customers coming in.
We see customers coming back to order from us frequently, from a repeat perspective, as they buy different bits of kit for testing different things or different sites, to add into different sites or want to add new kit as they grow their labs, their testing requirements. They might want to add new software options because they've already bought the hardware and years have gone by, or they want to upgrade, or they want to move on to our newer products as they get released. That repeat revenue demand is quite an important metric to us. We would call ourselves a repeat revenue company as opposed to a recurring revenue company, and that's a metric that we measure across the whole business as well as just our top 10.
You can see here, the repeat revenue orders usually are in that 70% - 80% mark, and that hasn't changed for this year compared to previous years. Just moving on to the next slide here, just as a bit of a summary before I take you into the regional splits in the P&L and cash flows. As Tommy mentioned earlier, FY 2026 revenues, growth of 19% on the prior year. The improved profitability is being driven by that increase in revenues, obviously, and the maintenance of our gross margins. Gross margin has gone up one percentage point. It does tend to move up and down by one to two percentage points just depending on mix because we are a low volume, high value business. Maintenance of strong gross margins.
Our fixed cost base in this situation has acted in a positive way, so the positive operational gearing we get from that fixed cost base and the increased revenues has driven that improved profitability. You can see that from the underlying EBITDA margins and the PBT margin, but the underlying EBITDA margin is sitting there at 8%, up from 6% last year. PBT of GBP 1.2 million compared to GBP 0.7 million in the previous year, been driven by those factors. The balance sheet remains strong. We ended the year with cash of GBP 9.3 million. That was versus GBP 10.9 million at the start of the year. However, Q4 was quite a high volume trading quarter for us. Due to the timing and phasing of our Q4 shipments, the trade receivables balance was higher than normal at the year-end.
Most of that cash was collected by Thursday last week and continues to be collected ahead of the calendar month-end. At 21st of May, before we published our results, the cash was up to GBP 11.2 million, and that's as a result of these debtors being collected. Just on a regional split perspective, just give you a little bit more flavor there. Rest of World, and you'll remember this from previous presentations, Rest of World is one of the regions that has the most broad mix of end customers and sectors, and it's always effectively been like that for us, and that just helps to manage trading risk within any single sector. Revenues, you'll see, grew by 48% in that region year-on-year, largely due to a repeat order from a major hyperscaler customer.
Even when you strip that back, underlying revenues also grew in the region, and that was driven by a couple of things. Growth in telecom sector opportunities in EMEA and digital infrastructure sector deals across both EMEA and India. Americas, although when you look at the reported numbers, the revenues have declined by 8%. If you adjust from a reporting perspective, the hyperscaler customer was reported within our Rest of World region internally. If you adjust for the fact that we understand a large amount of the units that we sold to the hyperscaler will be deployed in the U.S., if you adjust for that, underlying performance is broadly stable year-on-year in the Americas region.
The Americas region did contribute most of the increase in government and defense orders for the group as a result of our targeted hire strategy at the end of last year and the start of this year, to support the expansion of the U.S. federal customer base over there. Revenues in North Asia have grown 8%, despite China remaining a challenging environment for us. That was coming from growth in digital infrastructure as cloud computing and data centers demand increases and in telecoms as well. From a product line perspective, Lab Sync, that revenue grew in the year. That was from increased trading across the Americas from the government and defense sector and in the Rest of World region, particularly in EMEA, in the telecom sector. Network Sync is our Sentry product. That is the product that feeds into the data center or the hyperscaler orders.
The hyperscaler order is sitting in there. That obviously grew in the year as a healthy order. NEA is our emulation product range that can be split into SNE and NE-ONE. The SNE experienced revenue growth, and particularly within government and defense in Americas and across all sectors in the rest of the world. NE-ONE saw very slight growth in orders. We would like to see that growth increase in future years so we do continue our focus on returning that product to increase growth in FY 2027. Just on the P&L, I've covered revenue already and mentioned gross margin as well, so you see that here. Headcount did increase slightly as a result of the targeted hires that we've talked about predominantly in the global sales and marketing teams just enhance our team to support the growth in the diversified markets.
The administration cost increase is being driven by a couple of things, predominantly by the sales and marketing team increases and hires over the year. Channel enhancement activities, things like contract negotiations and things like that have had been quite a lot of them this year as well. Also the effect of our year-end profit share accruals that were in this year's numbers and not in last year's numbers because the targets for our bonus and profit share accruals weren't met last year. R&D amortization, that continues to follow the same trends as in previous years. The majority of our R&D spend is capitalized on our balance sheet and amortized to the P&L over five years. The increase in this amortization line here is very formulaic based on that profile. If R&D CapEx spend has increased in previous years, that then drives the amortization.
That's obviously to support the growth in our product ranges and to support our roadmap. Mentioned profit before tax of GBP 1.2 million, and the drivers around that from an operational gearing perspective. Effective tax rate reported is 41%. There are prior period adjustment drivers within there, predominantly due to our change in accounting policy around our RDEC income. The underlying rate there is closer to the standard 25%. Just onto the cash flow. Mentioned cash at the year-end was GBP 9.3 million. We have received some significant level of cash coming in since the year-end. Just as a summary on the actual cash flow itself, net cash inflow from operating activities, taking into account that trade receivables increase at the year-end, was higher than last year at GBP 5.5 million. The driver there is very much trading in the year compared to last year.
Investment in R&D, GBP 6.3 million, compared to previous GBP 4.9 million of last year. The increase there is very much not. There has been some inflationary increases for people costs and some graduate hires. The increase in spend there is a one-off spend in the year for access to, or a spend on an early access fee to gain access to new silicon technology for our development program for the 1.6 Tb Paragon project. Dividends you'll see the cash spend has been in line with last year. Just to wrap up before I hand back over to Tommy. Revenue growth, maintenance of strong growth margins, and that positive operational leverage in our fixed cost base has driven our profitability in the year. FY 2026 R&D investment increases for the early access scheme are being driven by the early access scheme fee.
FY 2027, we'll see further investment in R&D from a cash perspective, and that's to further our product roadmap to leverage opportunities in the AI and data center markets, as well as the 1.6 Tb project as well. Targeted investment in our global sales and marketing teams that we made this year to diversify our customer base is starting to gain traction, as you can see from the market splits. Again, strong balance sheet remains that underpins our continued targeted investments in key product development, and it supports our accelerated growth ambitions from FY 2028. Back over to you, Tommy.
Okay, thanks, Ashleigh. Just the last section here before we take some questions. Just a quick update on our outlook and our strategy that we're playing out in FY 2027. Just to remind you, our product program, there's three main tranches of product or platforms that we have. All our products are platforms, or we call them platforms, and we continue to add enhancement to them and increase the value we can deliver. We've got the two on the left, which are really about that synchronization, transferring very high accuracy time through networks. The ones in the Lab Sync are in an R&D environment, and then we've got a Network Sync, one for both telecoms, one for data center, where it's monitoring managing time once it's deployed. On the right, we've got our network emulation products.
All of these products, we continually add capability to them, and that's how we get that repeat business as both customers buying new products, but also buying upgrades to the products. You can see from a summary picture here in the last year, we've had some fairly big releases in terms of new platforms. The 800 Gb came out at the very start of the financial year, and in the middle of the year, we came out with the first 400 Gb network emulation available on the market to target that digital infrastructure. The line across the bottom is really trying to show with the colored dots on it, is really showing that we continue to release minor enhancements to all our platforms. This is adding new functionality, customer-driven enhancements, slight changes to the standards that we need to keep up.
It's a continuous investment in terms of keeping the products relevant and valuable to our customers. As we look into 2027, there are actually three fairly major developments going on. First of all, for our Sentry product, which we sell to the hyperscalers, and that's for monitoring in a data center. That product's been sold for about three years, and really what we've learned through that success, that we're building a version two of that, which will add key functionality that makes it more attractive into that environment. That project's underway at the moment, and it's just due to get released in H2. We would expect to start to see revenue from that by the end of the year.
That will also allow us in FY 2028 to really go to a number of other data center companies and see whether we can repeat the success that we've had to date with that with a wider base. If I jump to the right-hand one, we've also already mentioned that we're already underway with the 1.6 Tb neo-S. That's to prove high accuracy time in the R&D environment. As Ashleigh said, we got access to key technology that we needed early in the year, so the project's underway, and that will release at the second half of FY 2028. Very high complexity project, but a high value product as well. That can again build on our success of being the market leader in that sector.
That sells both to the telecoms, but because a lot of the data center people now are using equipment, they're using the very high-speed interfaces, then we'd expect to sell that into the companies that are making equipment for deploying into the data centers as well. Then the third very important one is this middle one. As we all know, AI is completely changing the way the data centers are having to scale, and the way they're going to have to change their architecture to meet the needs of that, both for running models and training models, but then once it's run the models, it's to run with the real world. How inference happens, that's when the models interact with the real world situation. As we know, potentially there's a lot of discussion about edge networks and actually moving storage out to the edge of the network.
What we've done is really taken a step back because to really understand where there's opportunities for us in the middle of this, because it seems to be moving so fast, you really need to focus in and understand the value. What we found with our first product at 400 Gb is that we needed to enhance it to get that full bandwidth. What we've really done is looked at how do we get to these very high bandwidths. Although there's NIC cards available that run at 400 Gb, we don't just run at 400 Gb, we have to manipulate all the traffic at 400 Gb, and that really means that we have to wait until the next gen, the second generation cards come out. We're just releasing at the moment what we call our aggregated solution.
Our Ignite platform uses FPGA technology, so it gives us full control and ability to manipulate all the packets in there. The aggregated uses a switch along with the product so that the switch can select traffic, passes it down to the Ignite, we manipulate it and pass it back to the switch. That's a bespoke switch that we're working with a supplier for that, and we'll supply it as an aggregated switch and product together. Six months later, we're going to come out with our native version, which means we don't need the switch anymore, and you can go in straight into the card and manipulate it.
The key thing is this gives us the ability to talk to customers about a roadmap to the higher rates, because everybody wants to talk about 400 Gb, we know they want to start talking about 800 Gb, and very soon they'll want to talk about 1.6 Tb. We can use the products we have in an aggregated format to offer the higher rates, and then as soon as we can get the technology to come out with the native. We're just really presenting that to customers at the moment. We'd hope to get sales in the next period from that. That'll allow us to really engage deeply with customers and try and understand where is the long-term testing's going to be and how can we build platforms that can sustainably deliver value, keeping up with our customers and delivering products.
That's really quite exciting from our point of view and going forward and really trying to build on what's happening, as we all know, is a huge amount of change happening there, huge investment, and make sure we can find an opportunity that we can sustainably deliver value from. It's not only just about products, it's about the way we go to market. As we've mentioned, there's been a huge investment in FY 2026, and that will continue in FY 2027. In the middle of FY 2026, we brought in a new VP of Sales, and we've also brought in some other key hires, a sales operations person, a new partner manager as well. Really it's about making more systematic the way that we go to market. The fact we've got a lot more partners now that we keep them all. We communicate sustainably and consistently with everybody.
Also within our sales and our marketing groups, we've changed the structure in there. A year ago, we put a new VP of Sales in there, a VP of Product Management and Markets. That again was to really take a step forward in the way that we do business and the way we manage all our partners. There's a lot of change happening inside. We've got the new VIAVI partnership coming on. We're using new PRM tools and new approaches to make sure we can maximize the potential from the sales channel opportunities yes both with VIAVI and all the other sales partners we've got. To wrap up, we feel positive going into the next year. We've got a strong balance sheet.
We've got an exciting roadmap there, and again, we've already started to diversify our market footprint that we plan to continue to work on in the year ahead. In 2027, as I talked about, there's a lot of platforms to continue. The fact we've got three new platforms is slightly unusual, as well as minor releases happening. We've got a lot of things happening to build as we go towards 2028. We definitely continue to try and diversify into the all other digital infrastructure and the government defense space, but also keeping close contact to the telecom space, because telecoms will remain really important to us both from a business point of view, but a lot of the technology innovation happens in that space and that feeds into the other sectors.
There's a lot of synergies between all these sectors, and it makes sense that we look to stay strong across all these areas. As we go forward, because of the new platforms we'll have coming out in 2027 or early into 2028, we expect to see stronger growth or accelerated growth as we move into FY 2028 and beyond. At that point, I'll hand back to Lily.
That's great. Thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via our investor dashboard. Guys, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Ashleigh, if I could just hand back to you just to run through the Q&A, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Sure. Thanks, Lily. I can see a couple of questions for financials here, so I'll kick off and hand back to Tommy, and a couple questions to them. David has asked, "Growth margins have remained at circa 75%, but the operating margin at EBIT level was only 5% in FY 2026." When can we expect to see operating margins return to the 20% + levels achieved in FY 2021 to FY 2023? Absolutely, in terms of that operational gearing I was talking about earlier, that has worked against us in the years up to now, just given the dip in the subdued telco market. As part of the diversification strategies that Our goal is to start getting that 5% level working up the way.
In terms of the guidance that's out in the market just now for FY 2027 and 2028, our aim is to notch that up, not necessarily up to those levels yet, because we have to be quite prudent in terms of our growth strategies around diversified markets at the moment. Our aim would be to get those profit margins heading in that direction. We obviously are working with different markets now than we were before, so there's different drivers. The goal is to try and get those margins up into the double digits again in future years. In terms of, sorry, the next question here. It was a pre-submitted question.
It doesn't say who it's from, but the pre-submitted question says, "What percentage of your current revenue mix is driven by recurring software licensing seats versus one-off hardware instrumentation sales, and how do you plan to scale the SaaS model to hyperscalers by 2030?" Hopefully, what we talked about prior in my bit of the presentation here helps answer that. We don't actually have a recurring SaaS model within our revenue model. We've got more of a repeat revenue model as that point of sale and software licensing profile goes through our revenues. We do look at SaaS options to bring in SaaS models with new products or new opportunities. The types of customers that we have within our traditional market space don't really work with SaaS models. We are open to looking at that going forward if the opportunity arises, and it works for the customer.
Up until now, it hasn't quite worked for the customer in our customer base. At this moment in time, we don't have a SaaS model in place. Hopefully, that answers your question there. There was another pre-submitted question that says, "How is your Sentry product sales performing this year? Any new deployments or repeat orders from your existing hyperscaler clients like Meta, and do these sales include an ongoing software monitoring subscription?" Hopefully, that question has been answered by what we presented in the presentation. There isn't an ongoing software monitoring subscription included in that, but hopefully the rest of the question has been answered by what we've talked about already.
There was another one of the pre-submitted ones is, "Following the global go-to-market partnership signed with VIAVI Solutions, can you update us on the early sales pipeline? Are you seeing immediate traction within VIAVI's enterprise hyperscale client base, or are these long validation sales cycles that will only reflect into FY 2027 and FY 2028 order book?" The VIAVI thing is kind of slightly complicated. There's kind of two parts to it. There's the part that we signed last year with the wireless group, where they are taking our product and selling it. That is, we're starting to see a build up of sales pipeline and one or two early orders. Really, I think that will come through this year because now we have the VIAVI team trained. They are taking it to customers and starting to gain good traction.
Of course, the VIAVI relationship has got another element to it because as you may know, if you know us, we worked with Spirent for many years, and part of Spirent was sold to, most of it went to Keysight, but then they spun it apart to VIAVI, and the bit that got spun out to VIAVI was the bit that we'd been working with in Spirent. We've continued the relationship at a kind of low key up until now because once it was clear it was going to them, then it made sense that we tried to work together, and we're just currently re-engaging the contract there with them, and we'd expect to see that pushing later this year. Again, we know that the Spirent VIAVI guys well.
We know where they've got strong relationships. We'd hope to see that both into the enterprise hyperscale and even into the government and defense sector as well. Again, we would like to hope that as we go through this year, you'll see a larger proportion of our business coming through VIAVI. Remember, they're a sales channel for us, so they don't control anything other than the sales channel. We will potentially push some business through them that we could take to other partners if we chose. Obviously, you need to manage partners and make sure they've got significant business that makes sense for them to be committed for our products as well. Another pre-submitted was, "Tommy, you mentioned engagement with hyperscalers and DC customers.
Can you be specific where Calnex Solutions are deployed today across lab deployment, pre-deployment validation, production, manufacturing, and live network operation, and how has that mix shifted over the last couple of years? We kind of sell into everything. We talk about the large hyperscaler order. That is because our Sentry product is part of the template build-out that they do when they expand their data center capacity. You could call that into their production environment, and that has been successful for us there, and we want to try and repeat that success. We actually sell all our products into their R&D space. Their R&D teams, I think, use our Lab Sync products and all our emulator products for a number of different applications, and we continue to see these sales there.
It's really into that lab deployment and the kind of pre-deployment validation is the key area where we get opportunities with these guys, and we continue to look to develop these as we move forward. Ashleigh, have you got another one?
Sure. There's a couple of related questions here. I'll try to just cover them off in one go. James has asked, "Your results release mentions a targeted step change in FY 2028 revenue." "How should investors interpret or range bound quantify that?" Jeffrey has asked, "How fast do you think revenue can grow in FY 2027, and how about fiscal 2028?" There's a related question after that that I'll cover after this. In terms of the guidance that is out in the marketplace just now, for FY 2027, we've mentioned FY 2027 as our year of investment. When we talk about investment, we talk about R&D investment in terms of the products that Tommy was talking about there in that slide that showed you those three products that we're working on in FY 2027. That will drive that revenue growth in FY 2028.
In terms of growth metrics, FY 2027, just because we're still working with this in discovering our diversified end markets, we've kept quite a prudent growth metric in for FY 2027 in the low single digits. In FY 2028, that should start to increase into the low double digits for that year, all driven by the impact of the things that we're doing in FY 2027 from an R&D perspective, but also from the platform that we've built from a diversification go-to-market side of things from what we did this year as well. Dean has also then asked, "What trends are you seeing in terms of orders booked and pipeline?" If you take what I just said into account, what we're seeing right now from a tracking perspective, things are tracking as we would expect for this time of year into this new FY 2027 year.
We are starting to see the trends, the diversification trends within the pipeline, you can also see them as well. Quite a varied and diversified opportunity pipeline there as well. Hopefully that answers those three questions in-
Okay
together.
I've got a couple here I can take, Ashleigh. The first one to me, it says, "As hyperscale scale to 800 Gb and 1.6 Tb architectures, can you give examples of network and timing failure modes that your systems detect or validate that would not typically be caught by a broader optical protocol or system-level test platforms from other vendors?" First of all, a lot of the Lab Sync, it's really a standards conformance test first and foremost. It's to prove that the equipment meets the tight standards. Time's an interesting thing because when it goes wrong, you don't know it's going wrong. It's like how do you know your watch is wrong? Well, only when you compare it to somebody else's watch you know it. You can get all sorts of strange failures happening in networks.
Where we've seen deployments like in the hyperscalers, what we are doing is monitoring the time. We are not distributing the time or verifying that the time is being distributed correctly across the network, because we know that if the time goes off, they're going to get data errors, things are going to go wrong, and that's going to slow down or reduce the overall capacity and bandwidth that they can process. It is really important if you're using time, that you have a way of, first of all, proving that it delivers the time accuracy that you expect, and that each and every piece of equipment that comes along and gets added in is added in aligned to the standards, or you could find the whole system has drifted off and is actually not delivering the accuracy that you're relying on.
Then once it's there, having a monitor in place to ensure that at any point in time, the time doesn't just drift off. As I said, mostly time doesn't just stop, it drifts off. Of course, you don't know that it's drifted off. That's where the monitoring systems come in, and they're essential for the continuous use within the environment. Another question that was pre-submitted here on a different topic altogether. "Regarding the global expansion of low Earth orbit satellite constellations like Starlink, the gateways for these network functions, as high bandwidth edge data centers require strict PTP synchronization. Are Calnex products like Sentry and your SNE emulation tools actively being sold into the satellite ground station market? How large is this opportunity in the next three to five years?" I wouldn't say Sentry's being sold at the moment.
We're definitely selling our emulation tools into there in terms of being able to emulate the satellites moving across the sky. The fact that the delay is constantly changing, and then a sawtooth type pattern as the satellite moves away, the delay is obviously constantly getting longer, and then as it disappears over the horizon and the system jumps to use another satellite, then you get a sudden shift like a sawtooth type pattern. That's where it's being used to prove and verify applications that are running over satellites to ensure that that changing in delay profiles doesn't cause any problem to the actual application. We're probably selling more of our Lab Sync products at the moment into there, where, again, it's about proving that each piece of equipment is operating correctly before it's deployed.
So far, we haven't seen a lot of opportunity for the monitoring going on, but it's interesting as that goes forward, it may become an opportunity for us. Again, it does look like it's a growth opportunity. It doesn't feel explosive at the moment for us because, again, we are involved more in the R&D stage than in the deployment stage.
Obviously, as more and more services start going through the satellites, and satellites are more and more used to provide that connectivity across the world, there definitely feels an opportunity that we should be expecting to see growth in that market over the next one, two, let alone three, four years. One from Stephen here: "What do you look for in the telecom space to assess whether CapEx is beginning to be deployed again, and what is the situation currently?" What we've always looked for, Stephen, is what's happening at the front end of the food chain. We're kind of at the back end of the food chain, which is maybe not the best place to be, but I guess it's the operator starting to start major build-out and expansion of the networks. That really has always been the driver at the front end.
As we've seen a few years ago, when the cost of debt went up, they slowed all that down, so therefore, the equipment vendors slowed down the program, and we were kind of sitting behind them. We are actually starting to see It's interesting, in the last year, we monitor the top 20 customers, all our top customers, and I would say in the last year, there's been an increase in what we would call traditional telecoms people re-enter in our top 10. They didn't disappear completely. They moved into be more our top 20, but they have slowly started to increase the spend and kind of edge themselves back up again. We are seeing the situation easing slightly there. I think in a lot of things like edge networks, how is edge computing going to be deployed?
How is it going to be? Who's going to put it there? Obviously, the data center people probably want it at the edge of the network, but they don't have real estate, obviously, the telecoms guys have got the towers, they've got real estate at the edge. It's going to be interesting over the next year to see what happens there. As you've probably seen last year, NVIDIA invested GBP 1 billion into Nokia, we felt that was all about knowing that this edge computing is coming along. There's going to be new pieces of equipment put at the edge, potentially, it's going to be the network operators that put them there. Now, is that a joint ownership with the data center guys? Are they going to lease the equipment?
This is all the kind of change that we like to see happening because change like that means there's going to be different approaches taken, different architectures, and hopefully that creates opportunity for us going forward. Ashleigh, have you got a question you can jump on here?
I think the next one from Julian is more for you, Tommy.
Okay
about data centers.
Let me pick this one up from Julian. In 12 - 18 months, what proportion of your revenue do you anticipate to come from CPO and data centers? That's a good question. I'd expect it to grow, Julian, which is probably not as much detail as you're hoping. I think there's a lot of our growth opportunities are going to come from that area, and it's quite hard to see because it's a fast-evolving market at the moment to kind of pin it down to exactly what's going to happen. A lot of our internal In terms of the telecom space, we stay in contact with our key customers, but in terms of investigation work, it's more into that data in a digital infrastructure that we've been doing a lot of investigation. We definitely would hope to see that grow.
I think when we get our new Sentry V2 out, we'd like to see that going into more customers, continue to build on the success we've had already with a few customers, but hopefully take that to some more customers. We are seeing the whole way that people are testing applications that are running on data centers changing and evolving, and hopefully that will continue to give us growth opportunities moving forward. I think we're just about at the end of our time, and I think we've done all the questions.
That's great. Thank you for answering all those questions you have from investors. Of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Tommy, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
Okay. Yeah. Well, first of all, once again, thank you very much, everyone, for taking the time to listen today. As we enter our third decade as a company, there's kind of three things I would say have been absolutely the same every single year in the first two decades, and they'll probably be the same in the fourth decade. That is that there's challenge, there's opportunity, and there's change. There's no shortage of all three as we go into this third decade. There's always things changing in the world that create challenge. From a change point of view, we might be 20 years old, but we're not finished in terms of trying to make ourself more effective at go-to-market.
There's a lot of things happening in the back office in terms of changing utilization of AI technology to make us more effective at going to market. Most important is there is plenty of opportunity, and I think hopefully I've expressed with the new platforms that we've got, that we believe there is a lot of opportunities starting to appear out there, and it's really up to us to go after it and make sure that we can realize it in the next few years ahead and make sure we've got a strong start to our third decade. Thanks very much again today for joining.
That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.