Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the MTI Wireless Edge Limited full-year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged; they can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just 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 will publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you'd give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to CEO Moni Borovitz.
Moni, good afternoon, sir.
Good afternoon, Jake. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining the result presentation. I'll start by giving a brief reminder about the markets that we play in and what pushes our company. The biggest division is wireless controllers for water management. As we all know, water scarcity and global warming are pushing the need to manage water more efficiently, and this is what we do. Our second activity is in the antenna business. We focus today on commercial antenna business for 5G backhaul. We all consume much more data on our mobile and computers, and the network has a capacity issue at the backbone of the network, and this is where we come in. The third segment of the business is the defense business, where we do both antenna for military use, and in our special consulting and distribution business, we are focused on the defense business.
As you all are aware, defense budgets are increasing all over the world, and we start to feel it and see it in our business. If I will address the implication of the recent conflicts in the last 18 months in our region in the Middle East, I can see that we now see the need to restock equipment as most of the equipment was used. We see a large order for restocking. We also see a trend; usually, when we compete in the military antenna business, we compete with divisions within the defense companies. If I take, for instance, Raytheon or Cobham, they have their own antenna division, and we compete with them on a military antenna basis.
What we have experienced in the last year is that defense companies in Israel, some of them do have their own antenna divisions, have started to require us to produce for them the antenna, giving us the production file, and we did the production. The reason is that they were overloaded with work, and they wanted to release some of the capacity. We were, of course, very happy to start with that. We already received several orders from several different system houses, and right now we are in bidding for several more quotations. I believe that this is a one-way ticket. I think that once they see the capability and they are happy with our production, they will leave it with us, and this will generate another source of revenue for us.
In the water management business, we are responsible for irrigating most of the agricultural field in the southern part of Israel. As you know, it was hardly damaged in the attack. A lot of equipment was either destroyed or stalled, and we need to replace it. Only now it is more safe to get there and replace the unit, so we expect some nice orders from this area as well. Last but not least, in our distribution business, we have a division that is doing 24/7 support for our government, installing different types of communication systems. As you can imagine, most of the communication systems were hit during the war, both in the south and the northern part of Israel. We just started to fix some of them, and there is a lot of work going forward.
If I'll focus about 2024 and see what were the key events in the business, I think that overall the results were very resilient. We were able to maintain the revenue in a very difficult environment and continue to focus on the earning per share and generating the cash. The defense business is growing very fast, as I explained, and this is the main reason for the big backlog that we have reported so far. I can say also that the number of opportunities ahead of us that we already quoted is significantly larger than in the past. In the water management business, we introduced some new solutions. Some of them are ours, and I will elaborate about it later on. In the 5G backhaul, we started to see some ramp-up.
We doubled our revenue in this segment in 2024, and we are very happy with the way it continues. Also, with our automatic beam steering antenna solution, and I remind that in this case what we do is we rotate the feed of the antenna in order to reestablish the link if it loses. We see some nice progress, and I will elaborate it. Focusing on the water management business, just as a reminder, we are a master distributor of Motorola. We sell their controllers worldwide. Most of the IP is coming from the software on our side, and at the end of the day, the idea is to save water. In this area, we also have a recurring revenue model that is coming from service and maintenance that we give to municipalities in the places where we have our own subsidiaries, mainly in Israel, Australia, and South Africa.
If I focus about the key advances that we did in 2024, it's first of all that the increased pricing of the service to municipalities that I have spoken about in the past kicked in. We already see that the revenue from service is 25% of Mottech's business. It should continue and grow because some of the pricing increases were incremental year- on- year, so we should expect more growth in 2025. Another very nice vertical market that we entered into is what we call management of fountains. There is one city in Israel that had over 40 fountains, each managed locally, and they wanted a full control solution, so we offered them an end-to-end encrypted solution for cyber safety. The reason that they needed it is that it's considered as a public pool in Israel because they want to maintain the level of the fresh water.
Israel is a hot country. Many times, the kids are getting into the fountains. We completed the project in 2024. We engaged at the end of 2024 with another city in Israel, and we are now in the process of implementing it. There is a third city that we are now in the final discussion about receiving another solution to be offered. The nice thing about it is that the following year, the second year after installation, they go also into service and maintenance agreements, so it will contribute to the service and maintenance. It is a fairly nice amount. It is tens of thousands of dollars for each municipality for the service. I believe that after we can do three, four, or five systems in Israel, we can take it elsewhere in the world, wherever we operate.
In 2024, selling of equipment in Israel was a bit slow given the circumstances, and it's understandable. Also in Europe, especially in Italy, we had a slow year. We have a lot of bids in Italy. It was only delays, nothing that we have lost, and we expect this to recover in the near-term future. As you can see in the picture, you can see the new controller that we have launched. This is our controller. It is a low-level entry type of controller that allows us to go to the small farms and offer our solution to the farmers in the lower end. When they grow up and increase the demand, we can use the Motorola one. We see that as an important step in increasing the technology that Mottech offers and the entire offering for the customers.
Going into the antenna business, the star of 2024 for us. First of all, we had an excellent year, 16% growth in revenue and 56% growth in operational profit. We do antenna for both military and commercial use. In military, we do everything from airborne, manpack to armored, all the way down to submarine antennas. We do it with different technologies. It can be communication, jamming, anti-jamming, beamforming, and other solutions. In commercial, we play in three markets. The most important one right now for us is the 5G backhaul, but we have two legacy ones. One is the fixed broadband access, which is connecting homes and offices into the internet, and the second one is RFID, radio frequency identification.
If I focus on the two growth engines of the company, the military antenna and the 5G, first of all, it was an excellent year for the 5G, doubling the revenue, and it became the biggest commercial part of the antenna. We are very well positioned, working with all key OEMs in the market. Our ABS automatic beam steering antenna solution moved from trial with the customer to trial with the end customers, with the cellular provider. The first response that we see is that they are very happy with the solution, so we just now need to wait and see when they start full deployment. If you remember, we mentioned it quite some time that we have a manufacturing facility in India since 2008.
This gave us a big opportunity in the Indian market for 5G backhaul, which is now pushing very strongly and was the key part of the growth of the 5G in 2024. We are very well positioned there. We have a very good relation with both the radio manufacturer and some of the cellular operators, and we see good business, although it is still very sporadic. Orders come and then they disappear for a few months, and then they come again. On the military side of the business, we have seen a very nice increase already in 2023, and it continued in 2024. It is because of the increase of defense budget and the higher level of technology that we offer to the customer. I mentioned about the build-to-print, the production that we do for the antenna division of defense companies.
We also are doing quite well in the international markets, mostly in Europe, where we sell to different defense companies in Europe. In Israel, as I said, we see a lot of demand right now. We got a very significant order in 2024. It was about $2 million for production, and we were happy with it. Immediately in the beginning of 2025, we received an order for the same product for another $4 million. It shows that this is part of a very advanced system that has a demand, and we are very happy with the progress here. Moving to the distribution and special consulting services, I would say that we had a mixed year. In the traditional part of distribution, where we buy and sell components into the Israeli market, everything was as expected, and the business was doing well.
I remind you that here we are the biggest one in Israel and have the biggest offering to the customers. On the operation with PSK, we had some problems. Again, PSK is offering two kinds of services. One is the 24/7 support for our government, which is doing well and will continue to do well as there is a lot of work. Where we did suffer is in the shelter buildup, as you can see the picture to the right. We had a miscalculation on one of the projects that was very harmful, and at the same time, some of the projects that we expected were delayed or canceled because of the war. What we decided to do is that in August, we changed a little bit the business model.
We laid off about 25% of the employees in this area of PSK, and we will work more on a consulting basis, subcontractors, in order to give us the flexibility. I can say that currently the backlog that PSK has for this year is larger than the revenue we had in 2024. We have some very interesting quotes on shelter buildups outside in the market that we are expecting to receive really any day or in the next coming weeks. As the number of quotations is fairly large, I'm quite confident that we will win at least some of them. At the end of the day, MTI is focused on innovation. We are not trying to compete on the last cent, but we are trying to bring added value.
You can see on the right the list of the added value that we just brought to the market in the last few years. Some of it is patented technologies. I think that our unique position is that we are not only using the in-house R&D, but we also get support from the principal we represent, whether it's Motorola in the water irrigation business or other in the distribution business. We are also getting paid for some of the R&D from the customer, but we always try to keep the IP to ourselves. We are very strong in offering new technologies. Regarding ESG, I think that this year is the best time to focus on our employees and what we did for them. As you can imagine, the environment in Israel was very tough.
Nevertheless, we were able to nearly double the time invested in education, learning, and giving them more capabilities. It starts with Eran, who is going to be the next General Manager of the antenna division. He was sent to a strategic management course in Tel Aviv University, going all the way down to all of the technicians that did a lot of hours of technical studies in order to make the company more professional. M&As, as you can imagine, in the first nine months of the year, we did nothing to even look at M&As. We were only focused on stabilizing the business. At the same time, when we saw that Mottech in China is not operating well and it is just bleeding more and more, we decided to cut off and we closed the company. All the costs were already incurred in 2024.
Since September, we returned to look for a few M&A possibilities. I always say that it will be on a better safe than sorry mode. We look thoroughly, we check a lot, we are not jumping into acquisition. The key criteria is that it's going to be a profit-enhancing acquisition. Once we have something that is mature enough, we will, of course, announce. If we go back a little bit to the numbers and what we have did, I have spoken about the double of the revenue in 2024 in the 5G backhaul. Defense is about 42% of the entire revenue, which is more or less the same as last year. We had a strong performance with all divisions being profitable, even though we had some loss in PSK, which is part of the distribution division.
We have a very loyal customer base, as you can see on the left. People like to work with us for a very long period of time. The business is very diversified, both between the different markets that we play, but also globally. If you look at the global pie, you can see that Asia rose a little bit. It's because of the business in India right now. If you take Israel, Israel, about one-third from what we do there is an indirect export. At the end, we are always focused on the earning per share growth, and as you can see, we continue to grow. If we look at the financials, it looks like more or less a flat year, but I think that digging into the numbers, you can see some encouragement. I will start with the antenna business.
As I said, the business model is working. Our long-term business model is that on any incremental dollar of revenue, we should expect 20% operational profit. We showed it in the antennas that we grew revenue by 16% and operational profit grew by 56%. If I look at Mottech, Mottech had very good results. The gross margin has improved. The main reason is the increase in services. Also, the operational profit came to a record high. This is again due to the growth in the operational, in the gross margin, sorry. Where we did have the problem is the PSK, and without it, the results would have looked much better. The company, for a long time, is focused on shareholders' return. My family owns about one-third of the company, so we have interests aligned with shareholders. We have the buyback program in place.
We used most of the money in the fund so far, and we own in the buyback about 2.3 million shares. We continue with the dividend policy. We believe that good businesses that generate cash should pay dividends, so we increased it again by 6% this year, and this will be paid in April. If I may summarize, I think that the business has a very strong positioning. We have three good internal growth engines. It's the defense budgets, it's the demand for 5G antenna, and the need to manage water more efficiently. We entered 2025 with a very strong position with a big backlog, much bigger than last year, over $25 million of backlog for 2025 and a little more for 2026. Also, the pipeline of opportunities that we see ahead of us is much bigger.
We will continue to search for acquisition, but as I mentioned, in a better than safe than sorry mode, and we have a strong balance sheet to help us do it. With this, I'll be happy to start and answer any question you may have.
Perfect. Moni, if I may just jump back in there, and thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while Moni takes a few moments just to review those questions that have come in already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your investor dashboard.
Moni, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this afternoon. Thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. Moni, at this point, sir, if I may just hand back to you to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. If I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you.
Okay, sure. The first question was how extensively is Mottech being marketed worldwide. I think we are pretty well positioned. We have our own subsidiaries in South Africa, Australia, and Canada. We have a marketing office in the US that is operating via 13 different value-added resellers that focus on selling our products.
We have a guy in Italy that's responsible for the Italian market, and we have in many other countries value-added resellers that we support them, and they support the local market. There is no limitation to how much marketing you can put on the table, but I think that we are positioned quite well. Second question is what rate of withholding tax will be applied to the dividend paid to U.K. shareholders in April 2025. I assume that it will be somewhere between 20% to 23%. It's really a difficult calculation that is based on where we put the profit from, and we will finalize it in the next few days. The next question is how much do you spend on R&D in total? How much is paid for by the customer?
This really varies from year to year and project to project, but I would say, first of all, that we expense all the R&D. We do not capitalize any R&D that we invest. On top of that, I think that there is probably about between $500,000-$1,250,000 every year that is being paid by the customer for different projects we do. I have another question. You mentioned a healthy order backlog driven by increased government defense spending. Can you provide more details on the size and visibility of this order? Yes. As I mentioned, and we mentioned it also in the RNS, the order backlog at the moment is above $25 million for this year, with some more left for next year.
We see a lot of opportunities, much bigger number, but again, these are not our contract yet, and we will win some, we will lose some. Overall, we see very good prospects ahead of us. I think that we have answered all the questions.
Absolutely. Moni, if I may just jump back in there, thank you very much indeed for addressing all of those questions that came in this afternoon. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we will make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. Moni, perhaps before really now, just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.
Yes.
Thank you, everyone, for joining the call today. We are in a good position, I believe, for 2025 onwards, and we have a very good internal growth engine, and I hope that we materialize it.
Perfect, Moni. That's great. Thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of MTI Wireless Edge Limited, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all.