Good morning, everybody.
Good morning.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the annual general meeting of SRT Marine Systems PLC. I'm going to sit down because I can't see the screen at the moment, so I need to get a little bit closer to it with my new glasses, if that's okay. It's now shortly after 11, and as a quorum is present, I declare the meeting duly constituted and open. Let me begin by introducing my fellow directors, some of whom are not in the room at the moment. I think Neil Peniket, our Chief Operating Officer, has gone back for some items. Jean-François Bonnin, Richard Hurd, and obviously our CEO. In the room also, we have Simon Rogers and Simon Barrell. Over there. Thank you.
Following the formalities of the AGM, I shall hand over to our CEO, Simon Tucker, who will provide an update on our marine business and answer any questions you may have. I'll turn to the formal business of the meeting, if I may now. The notice of the AGM can be found on the back of your annual report and accounts starting on page 46. With your permission, I'd like to take the notice as read. Thank you. Resolution one, the annual accounts. First item of business before you is to receive the accounts and the report of the directors for the year end March 31st, 2022. Before I put the resolution to the meeting, Resolution one to the meeting. Do any of the shareholders have any questions regarding the annual accounts? Okay. Thank you.
I now propose that the annual accounts for the year end of 31st of March, 2022, together with the reports of the directors and the report of the auditors be received. All t hose in favor?
Thank you. I've got proxy votes, which were 41 for, two against, three withheld, and two discretionary, being 8,955,000 shares for, 4,000 shares against, and 17,000 shares withheld, with 14,000 shares discretionary. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried. Resolution two is the reappointment of auditors. It deals with the appointment of auditors, and I now propose that Nexia Smith & Williamson Audit Limited be reappointed as auditors. All those in favor?
Against? Okay, thank you. Proxy votes were 39 for, seven against, three withheld, and one discretionary, being 8,895,000 shares for and 55,000 against, 22,000 withheld, and 17,335 were discretionary. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried. Resolution three is auditors remuneration. Resolution three relates to the auditors remuneration. I now propose that directors will be authorized to determine the remuneration of Nexia Smith & Williamson Audit Limited. All those in favor? Thank you. Against? Okay. Proxy votes were 43 for, three against, and two withheld. One discretionary being 8,943,838 shares for, 16,966 against, and 16,596 withheld, and 13,596 discretionary. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried.
Resolution four is the election of Jean-François Bonnin. Following the announcement of his appointment in February, Jean-François Bonnin stands for election. The directors and nomination committee has considered his reappointment and recommends election to the shareholders. All those in favor? Thank you. Against? Thank you. Proxy votes were 39 for, six against, two withheld, and two discretionary, being 8,849,306 shares for, 29,520 against, and 86,835 shares were withheld with a discretionary share load of 25,335 . Thank you. I declare the resolution carried. Thank you, Jean-François. Resolution five is the reelection of Richard Hurd. Richard also being eligible seeks reelection. Directors and nomination committee has considered his reappointment and recommends reelection to the shareholders. All those in favor? Against?
Thank you. Proxy votes were 41 for, five against, and two withheld. Being 8,910,114 shares for, and 24,000 shares against, 22,000 withheld, and 34,500 discretionary shares. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried. Re-election, Resolution six is the reelection of Simon Barrell, this gentleman just here. Also being eligible for reelection, the directors and nomination committee has considered his reappointment and recommends reelection to the shareholders. All those in favor? Against? Thank you. Proxy votes were 40 for, five against, three withheld, and two discretionary, being 8,852,370 shares for, 26,434 against, and withheld was 77,500, with discretionary being 34,596. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried.
Resolution seven deals with directors' authority to allot shares to a nominal value of 60,226, being approximately 30% of the issued share capital. While the directors have no current plans to make use of this authority, this will give the directors flexibility to act in the best interest of the shareholders when opportunities arise when issuing new shares. I now propose that the resolution, which is set out in full in the notice of the meeting, is approved. All those in favor? And against? Thank you. Proxy votes were 39 for, seven against, three withheld, and one discretionary. Being 8,791,282 shares for, 157,734 shares against, and 23,645 shares withheld. There were 18,335 discretionary.
Thank you, I declare the resolution carried. Special Resolution eight is the disapplication of pre-emption rights. This special resolution authorizes directors to issue shares up to approximately 10% of the company's issued share capital without offering them to shareholders first. This gives the directors flexibility to take advantage of business opportunities as they arise. I now propose that this special resolution, which is set out in full in the notice of the meeting, be approved. All those in favor? And against? Thank you. Proxy votes were 36 for, eight against, three withheld, and three discretionary. Being 8,688,530 shares for, 236,310 shares against, there were 23,645 shares withheld, and discretionary were 42,511.
Thank you, I declare the special resolution carried. That concludes the formalities of today's AGM. I would now like to hand over to our Chief Executive Officer, Simon Tucker, who has a presentation on an amazing new screen, on our marine business, and he'll answer any questions you may have. Thank you.
Thanks, Kevin. Okay. Fewer than usual, so try and make it a little bit more interactive. If you've got questions as I'm wittering along, put your hands up. There's also a bunch of questions coming from people that are watching, so it's being filmed. None of you will be seen by this. I think there's sort of 20 or 30 people watching as well. Welcome, and I'll answer the questions as I when I get to the end, unless anybody else has got some questions here. Some of you will have seen all of this and heard all about it, but there are a couple of newbies watching and in the audience. Our business is about solving this problem of global maritime domain awareness.
I think we assume when you see the pictures in National Geographic that everybody knows what's going on in the marine domain. The surprising thing is, actually it's mostly unknown, completely unknown. We're bringing technology together and intelligence that enables authorities, be they fisheries or coast guards or infrastructure owners, to know what's actually going on. Why is that important, so they can manage fisheries, so they can have sustainable fisheries, sustainable food at a price people can afford, and also security. We've seen around the world the implications that if you know, resources aren't protected and things, prices go up. In different parts of the world, like in Southeast Asia, you have a new balance of power forming.
In the Middle East, a long-standing conflict or indirect conflict proceeding, and it takes place across the Gulf and the Red Sea, and they want to know what's going on. We're delivering the technologies and the systems enabled to do that. We're right at the beginning of this macro trend of digitization. You know, in the forties or whatever, you had the radar, and it was just a blip. Today, people want to know exactly what that is. Is that a threat? Do I need to send a patrol boat? Do I need to go and intercept that? Is that person fishing in the wrong spot?
There's this right at the start of this long trend of countries wanting to get to that marine domain and the technologies available to achieve that, and we're bringing them all together and delivering that as turnkey system solutions.So, the f inancial summary. Well, needless to say, it's not been a great couple of years, last year. COVID stopped everything in its tracks, particularly our systems business. You can see we really had no systems business for two years. Governments were diverted from any expenditure that wasn't related to surviving COVID. As important as maritime surveillance is, that wasn't on the top of their list. Our transceivers business continued.
Right at the beginning, we thought, "My gosh, that's also gonna stop." Actually, people sought out to go on their boats to different places because it was safe. They could sit on the boat. It was their own little private island. We saw that, and that continued. We then came out of COVID, and we started to see the re-beginning of our systems business. Now this is the forecast that our brokers have put in the market. You can see that, you know, our systems business and our transceivers business, and the effect now that we expect to see from our systems business in terms of revenue for next year. For this year rather.
We will update the market more for next year with a further forecast when more contracts are coming, 'cause what we don't want to do is to put out forecasts as we've done in the past, which are not underpinned by contracts. You can see there with our balance sheet, we did a fundraise earlier this year, which gave us plenty of cash. We do have debt, which we borrowed from our LGB & Co., which is our loan note program, and that's proved to be very valuable for us. It's kind of like a flexible loan program. You issue a loan note, you then repay that back over a period of time. Some of you may indeed be holders of those loan notes through LGB & Co.
For us, that's been a really good method of financing without coming to get equity, and we can get project financing for that. Going forward, I think some of you were talking to Richard, we're getting more inventive. As we become known in the market as a serious business in our systems business, we've got a number of banks that have come to us and said, "Look, we want to, if you need project financing, we're interested in doing that." I think we're in a pretty good position. This year obviously is the proverbial hockey stick. I wouldn't be showing you this and talking about it if we weren't confident about it, and I'll talk to you about it a little bit further as to where this is going to come from.
We are an established business. Hopefully, you know, those that come to this event sees that, you know, it's not a sort of srt.com type thing and an app for that, and just been developed in a few moments. What you see around the system that we're selling, the transceivers that we're selling, is a result of years and years of accumulated experience and development. Our transceiver product range is, you know, we make something like 400 or 500 different lines of transceivers. The SRT MDA system is now on release 11. It is a comprehensive integrated surveillance system. These are material products that have benefited from millions of investment over the years, and so, you know, it is a solid product base that we're building on.
Now we're entering this rapid period of growth, and that's been long awaited. I know the joke is about, you know, for years I've been saying it's imminent, so I'm not gonna use that word today, other than just there. The market we're addressing is a multi-billion-dollar market. It's not just the transceiver market, it's any country that has a coastline, that has interest in the marine space, and that's pretty much every country. Most countries have nothing, and now they want to have that. They've seen that with air traffic control, and I always look at it as a comparison with air traffic control, whereas a few years ago it was okay not to see the aircraft. In the 60s, it was just the military that did the air traffic control.
Somebody said, "Well, actually most of the planes are commercial." Today it's a multi-billion-dollar market for 38,000 commercial aircraft, and we're talking about 26 million boats. This is a big market right at the beginning, and I think we have first mover advantage, and we have proven reliable product. We have reference customers in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South America. We have all the leading maritime agencies from the US Coast Guard to Trinity House to the RNLI, all choosing to buy our transponders. The growth, while this is something that is coming from a combination of things on our transceivers, it's established product in the market, people know when you buy an SRT transponder, it works.
If you're gonna buy a safety transponder, what's the number one thing you want it to do, is you want it to work reliably. We're known for that, and we now have 1,100 dealers around the world that are now selling that. On our systems side of that, we have in both the Middle East and Southeast Asia, key reference customers, and we have local partners in place that have been trained up. We've done all the groundwork as you'll those of you who have spoken to other members of the sales team that are present at the ATM, know that, we're now reaching that point where these things start to fall in, rather than one every few years, maybe, several a year. Let's talk about that market.
On our systems side, the key target for our system is fisheries and coast guards. Why fisheries? Fisheries increasingly is a regulated environment. They want to conserve fish. You know, we saw in the North Sea years ago, it fished out till there were no cod. Then they started to manage the fisheries properly. Fish have come back, and it's now sustainable. The rest of the world has that same issue from the Middle East to Southeast Asia to South America to Africa. It needs to be managed, it has to be managed, and it is a thing that is being pushed by lots of regulation from the EU to the FAO, and it all comes down to they need to monitor how where they fish, when they fish, what they catch, what they land. Coast guards, search and rescue, but also security.
I think for years in Europe, we thought, "You know, you don't need maritime security. It's all nice and safe." We've seen, unfortunately, with Russia invading Ukraine, there's a change. Actually, if you go to the Middle East, there's always been this proxy war going on between the Saudi bloc and the Iranian bloc. In Asia, everybody has known for the last 15 years that you know, the sleeping dragon is no longer asleep and is coming up and wants to exercise its influence in the area. Coast guards, there's a new set of maritime security concerns, and the first thing comes from having intelligence about what's going on so you can act. On navigation, on our transceivers business, safety of navigation, efficiency of navigation. We talk about autonomous cars. You now talk about autonomous vessels.
You talk about, if you look at gas, for example, in Europe now, all the pipelines are closed coming in from Russia. Well, now they're having to bring much more gas in onto ports, but we don't have pipelines going across Europe. Actually, it's all distributed through waterways. You've got 15,000 inland waterway vessels that need to be navigated, and you want it to be autonomous, so now you need digital transponders. Safety of navigation. Also the environment. Safety of navigation leads into safety for the environment, stopping oil slicks and all those sorts of things. These are the drivers for our market. The size of it is dramatic. You know, there's eight million commercial boats, 18 million leisure boats. You got millions of kilometers of EEZ.
I mean, the Philippines has about 7,500 islands and 2.5 million square kilometers of EEZ, over which there are about 300,000 boats going out every day fishing. Today, 2,000 of those are tracked and monitored. You're right at the beginning of that process. As I said, the market comparator for me there is how air traffic control in a few decades has turned into a huge market, but at a fraction of the number of things being tracked.
Leading technologies and products, I think it's good to remind everybody that, you know, all these years of investment where we some years we've made a profit, some years we've made a loss as that market has grown, has served to get us into the position today where we have the world's leading products, both on our transceivers and on our systems side. This doesn't happen in five minutes. You know, 40, 50 people working constantly have developed the SRT- MDA system from a small purchase eight, nine years ago into now the world's only truly integrated maritime domain awareness system, which is deployed in multiple countries and is truly working with the expertise behind it to deliver it.
On our transceivers business, a whole range of transceivers and the new transceiver NEXUS here, and the handheld and the base unit that is coming out next year, which gives us, you know, the latest voice and data maritime communication products. Again, all proven, going through existing dealers, the ability to make it, all the infrastructure that goes behind that. There's not only that market, there's also the products are there today as well. Our revenues, we get revenues from selling hardware. In the transceivers, we sell a transceiver, and thanks very much. We might see them in five years time when they upgrade or change.
On our system side, we sell hardware, we sell radars and cameras and AIS devices, but we also license our software, which we spent years developing, which sits on that hardware. Of course, when you look at a system, you've got terrestrial, so coast stations on the coastline, but increasingly you've got satellites. Beyond the horizon, the only way to see that is satellite. We buy satellite data because we have the customer and we have the system, and they want to buy the whole group with us. They don't want to just buy this and then buy the data separately. They want their own system, which then comes with a package of data that we guarantee works with our system. We supply increasing amounts of satellite data to these customers.
Every time they're buying a system, there's a menu of options, what we call an S-MDA data plan, and they can buy RF, AIS, SAR, LiDAR, which is light detection, a whole range of different things. Support services. It's a little bit smaller because our model is based on them continuing to build like Lego, build their system. It's not like in Europe where the support, you know, you sell a system and you charge 20% support. It's just not the way it works with the governments in Middle East and Asia. There are support services and maintenance contracts and things like that that do follow. The main long-term revenue, repeat revenue that we have is they keep upgrading their systems, as we'll talk about later. The recurring revenue comes from that data sales.
We see that will increase with each system that we sell.
Simon?
Yes.
How big are the data sales at the moment?
What would you say with Philippines?
I think it was. Actually you've just got.
Great. Thanks.
And so, to give you an idea, next year with one of the projects we just mentioned, there's what we call a sustainability agreement, and that will be about $2.5 million a year for 10 years. That will start when the end of the implementation period, which is four years, comes to an end in December.
$2.5 million y ear for a decade?
Yes.
Right.
Yes. That's the frame of the agreement. Yep. Yep. So, two divisions. We divide our systems up into two. To be clear, sometimes systems buy from the transceivers division. Our Middle Eastern project systems is buying 10,000 transceivers. They're quite different. You know, in transceivers, they're developing a physical transceiver. We're manufacturing it and shipping it around the world to different dealers and things like that. Our system side, the real IPR is around the software and the system design. I talk about transceivers division. It's based around AIS. For those of you who don't know about AIS, we didn't invent AIS. AIS is what they call an international communication standard. It was developed by the IMO to stop big ships colliding.
People realized, rather like with flight tracker, that which was based on ADS-B, which stops aircraft colliding with each other. It was realized that actually you could also use that, you could receive those transmissions and track them, put them on a map. That's how AIS developed into a tracking tool. It's raison d'être was not that. It's a sophisticated mesh network data communication standard. The key thing is it enables vessel-to-vessel communication, but also vessel to shore, also vessel to satellite, also vessel to buoy. It doesn't have to rely on a network. In the marine space, that's very important because you haven't always just got a tower sitting there that can distribute all the transmissions. Its purpose now and its uses, it varies from traffic control.
It's the primary system that is now used for traffic control in ports and waterways. Environment monitoring, so AIS DAS, as we call it, that sits on buoys, it connects to sensors, and because it can communicate directly with the vessel, this vessel here, as it's coming perhaps into port, or this vessel here coming into port, might want to know what the current is like here. Well, if there's an AIS transponder on a buoy here, which has a sensor about the tides and the currents, in real-time, the skipper of this ship here knows exactly what to expect when he comes around the corner.
Equally, at the same time, the command, the monitoring center also knows and can perhaps issue an alert to other vessels in the area for that weather. Environment monitoring is becoming an increasingly big market, and we pioneered a particular type of transponder called an AIS AtoN, and now we're systemizing that into a DAS offer and taking that out to the market to port owners, waterway operators, infrastructure owners, and the like. I think even Elon Musk's satellite company bought a couple of them to go on the barge that the rockets landed on and stuff to keep everybody away and stuff, which I thought was quite cool. We couldn't PR that, but anyway. It was like two, so it wasn't very exciting, but anyway.
Navigation safety is an obvious one, and obviously autonomous shipping, which I think is something that is gonna come much more prevalent in the future. There's lots of opportunity there far and away beyond when we first started with AIS, which was, well, it's just gonna be mandated on a few commercial vessels and a few leisure vessels might have it. That is reflected in that steady growth in our transceivers business. Future growth, we have our current range, which is selling well. We will update the market on the third of October with how we've done in the first half. There's a clear forecast that's been provided by finnCap, which is about GBP 11 million for this year for our transceivers business. I'd like to think we'd beat that.
The challenge with our transceivers business at the moment is component supply. It's horrendously unreliable, and at the same time, you have to go into the gray market to then buy the components that don't turn up on time. Just to give you a flavor, you know, you'll order a component, which you'd normally expect to have a three-month lead time, and at the point of order, they say, "Well, it's gonna be nine months." You say, "Okay." Well, you try to find it in the gray market. You can't find it in the gray market. You have to wait nine months. A week before it's supposed to arrive on that ninth month, the supplier says, "Well, actually, it's gonna be another four months." This is what's happening in the market today.
You go back into the gray market to try and buy it, and you find some guy with proper wholesalers in the gray market who knows that that particular component is not available and says, "Well, I know you normally pay $10 for it, but today's price is $150." Real story on the magnitude of that. By the way, you need to decide in 20 minutes and send a PO and pay for it. What a component that would previously gonna cost you $10,000, you suddenly got to fork out $150,000 in order to make your product. This is what's carrying on. Our cost of our transceivers has doubled from the standard, what it used to be to what it is today.
It's a pain to get all the components. We can't make enough for the demand. At the end of the period, we end up with a residual order book that will be filled in the next month. We're always behind. We're trying, doing our best to catch up. I think that our team has done a great job with that. We've built a reputation for still being able to supply, as you'll see when we talk about the revenues in a few weeks' time. We've managed to continue production. We continue to manage to maintain production. We've proven our pricing power. Since January, we've put the price up twice, in total 50% to our customers.
The first time, okay, everyone expected it was gonna go up. The second, which was 20%. The second time was 30%. I, for one, had a sleepless night before we told all the customers, "All your orders and all your order book ripped up. Everything's gone up 50%, another 30%." I think almost nobody canceled their order. People got upset. Of course they did. Ranted and raved and everything else. You know, the reality was this is the new norm. I don't think, to be fair, I mean, we were talking about this yesterday, it's a year before this then start, maybe starts to get better, but nobody knows. I was listening on the radio this morning, you know, China, different parts of China are in lockdown again.
You know, 'cause a cat had COVID, so the whole city of 20 million goes into lockdown. We're managing the situation, and we're maintaining our margins, but it's a struggle. There's no shortage of demand, and I think it shows the strength of our brand and the knowledge of the quality of our product in the market. We've got a new product coming, which is called NEXUS. The family has two items. It has a base unit, which is this one here, and a handheld. They're entirely independent products if you want, or they can be linked. The big thing about NEXUS, two big things, is one is integrates voice and data communication, so AIS and VHF DSC radio into a single box. Number one. The second thing is it integrates with all your mobile devices.
Rather than sitting in your lovely, fantastic new Sea Ray boat with glass navigation screens and everything else, if you go onto those boats, everyone's walking around with an iPad, and they have their navigation app, and they're using their phone. Then they go to talk, and they pick up some CB 1970s , you know, Smokey and the Bandit CB radio thing to talk to the harbor radio or to the other boat. Now, you'll be able to use your mobile phone, which you're using anyway to look at the restaurant that you wanna go to or the weather or whatever it is, and you can listen to the VHF radio when you're down in the cabin or on the bow or on the stern or wherever you are.
It's all about delivering convenience, and that level of convenience and seamless integration has never been done. Of course, that sounds easy, but to actually do that with a marine radio is tricky. On top of that, from that then comes a whole raft of different functionality that includes Man Overboard. You can link multiple mobile phones to that unit, including kids, their smartwatches and stuff. If they fall overboard, there's an alert. It'll point where they fell overboard, how far away they are. You can talk to them through a private intercom. Come on, come back and get your hamburger or whatever. It's actually all about the convenience, 'cause the reality is most boats of any size will all have a VHF radio, and AIS is starting to become pervasive.
Now you can get all of that in a single box and integrate it with the thing that you want to use, which is your mobile phone, not having to carry around all sorts of different things and then be away from the radio. It's truly innovative. It's a big project, and a lot of it is new for us. Previously, you know, we've just done the transceivers. I keep forgetting I've got a pointer. We've just done the transceivers, which are complicated enough as it is, but now you have all the GUI. How is that functionality gonna work? It's got to work really smoothly, beautifully done, beautifully implemented, and, you know, a project that we thought was gonna take two years is probably gonna take another six months longer than that, and we'll bring that to market the middle of next year.
Probably a six-month delay from where we would want it to be. That doesn't affect our revenue projections 'cause we haven't put anything in that for this year. We have to be right. Not just right, but perfect as it comes out of the box. As perfect as anything can be that contains software, and nothing's ever completely perfect when it comes out of the box 'cause it's a new foray, and it takes us into a much bigger market, which is the VHF voice communication market. Our transceivers business, which is run by Louise and her team, will finally get past that GBP 10 million mark, which I think I sort of said was imminent quite some years ago, and be on a trajectory of really quite some growth.
The headwind at the moment, we've got that tailwind, and the headwind at the moment is just trying to get those components and try and make enough. That will ease over time, and we've proven that we can increase our prices to maintain our margins. That's not abusing our customers, 'cause our customers are very valuable to us, and we're completely open with them. You know, they will recognize that we need to make a margin to have that investment, so they have the best product in the market. They don't like it, but they recognize that. Please don't forget the transceivers market, 'cause the transceivers business, I know, you know, the systems business always has these huge, sexy figures, but the transceivers business is growing relentlessly and generating great profits and turning into a very valuable business.
Probably equivalent to what our company's capitalized at today on its own, leaving aside the systems business. On the systems business, as I said, we have two prime customers. We have coast guards, and we have fishing agencies. A coast guard needs to deal with search and rescue, and they need to deal with civil defense. Civil defense, smuggling, and that might be drugs, people, or weapons. You know, I was in Indonesia the other day, and their concern is weapons smuggling from the Philippines. Then you go to the Philippines, their concern is weapons smuggling from Indonesia because You have Al-Qaeda in different places, and you can't go to these, some of these places in those countries. It's a serious problem you don't think about. People smuggling is a massive problem.
Modern slavery and stuff are a huge problem because they bring them over, and they go onto the fishing boats, and they go off, and then when they're done, they chuck them overboard. The coast guards really want to solve that, but they can't do that if they don't know what's going on in the maritime domain. If you're in a maritime domain with 3 million sq km , which is Indonesia more or less, and thousands of islands, you need a system that says, "There's the problem." 'Cause they've only got 100 boats to respond, and they need to send that boat to the right location. They can't just be milling around randomly, which is what happens at the moment.
Equally on fisheries, a good example is the Philippines, where they now have a new president, President Marcos, and he really wants to make a difference. I mean, don't believe all the media about his mom with his shoes and all the rest. That's another generation. He really wants to make a difference, and his thing is about national security, and that national security includes food security. In the Philippines, something like 50%-60% of the protein comes from fish, at 40 kilograms per year an average person eats. But the fishing catch is going down. Then when it gets to the dock, half of it is wasted in the supply chain. At the same time, they're trying to export the valuable fish 'cause they need to earn money.
They found out that Japan gets four times the price and can sell much more fish than they can. Why? Because it's documented properly. What they wanna do is have, expand their fishing program to all their fishing boats, 250,000 of them, so they can control that supply chain, reduce waste, so they can have sustainable food supply, but at the same time identify the fish they can export and increase their exports, which are already $1 billion a year. Even if they increase it by 20% a year, that's an extra $200 million a year into their economy, which is supporting nearly two m illion people just earning their livelihood. This is the markets that we're selling in, selling into, and today they have very little. Almost nothing.
It's only now that the technologies and stuff, that their ideas have formed as to what they want, and we, by a little bit of luck, having decided to get into that eight, nine years ago, come along and say, "Here's a system. And by the way, you can go and talk to Bahrain, who'll tell you it's fantastic." What does our system do? What makes it different? It's not a web-based system. Lots of people sell web-based stuff. You can go and look at Flight Tracker, and you can go and look at marinetraffic.com and all sorts of things. This is a professional system. The parallel I would say is, you know, if you were flying out of Heathrow, would you be happy that the flight control was being monitored by Flight Tracker? I wouldn't be getting on that plane.
You want it to know that it's NATS, the National Air Traffic Services. It's the same in the marine domain, and marine traffic is nice 'cause it's kind of interesting. We all sit you know, on the beach and spot the latest Russian oligarch's or no longer somebody else's boat now, and see who owns it and what the name is and stuff. This system integrates everything. You've got all the sensors that are sitting around it. It fuses all those sensors into a single system, which is accessible by multiple operators. It uses augmented reality to try and visualize all that data.
Rather than the typical Western thing where we just put, you know, lists of data, we're now starting to think, "How can we visualize that data in a way that delivers what's called maritime domain awareness and situational awareness?" I still remember when I first started my first business, my dad's an accountant, and I asked him to do the counting, and he produced the trial ledger. I was like, "What the hell is that?" It was just loads of lists. "Well, that's what you need, Simon." I said, "Well, no. I just want a pie chart to tell me how many of the cigarettes, how many Benson & Hedges we've sold." "No, no, it's all there. You just need to go through it." Traditional systems is just lists and lists and lists. We still do that a little bit.
It's far more informative, like on your phones, if things are visualized, you immediately get it. We're applying this augmented reality, which is a complex thing to do. We have target information systems, so when they've understood what's going on visually, they can actually see all the detail on the target, vessel name, ownership, where it's gone, perhaps all its history of alerts, its license situation, whatever it might be. We have an AI analytics system. Since Jeff has arrived, we've now started our own analytics lab, and then we're looking at how we can use that data intelligently and look at behavioral analytics, the behavior of the vessel on its own, in proximity to its environment, and in proximity to each other to determine, is that people smuggling?
Is that drug smuggling? Is it weapon smuggling? Or has he just got kids on the donut on the back going round and round and round in circles or something? To do that on a mass scale, to do that simultaneously on 200,000 vessels, and then distill all that down and create an alert so that the Coast Guard or the fisheries know that out of your 250,000 vessels, these are the problems. Then some system that enables you to deal with it. Do I send them a ticket? Do I send a report to the guys sitting in the gunboat down in the port?
You need to go and deal with that, smuggling, or it's a search and rescue, and it's a ferry with 100 people, so all the boats need to go and chuck the boat, guns overboard and take a lot of life jackets. It's a full end-to-end system, and I'm proud to say we have that today. Development carries on because you've got to continue to improve and augment those functionalities, but today we have that complete system. We deliver that as a turnkey system solution. When our customer comes to us, they say, "I want a maritime domain awareness system," or they've read somewhere, they want a C4ISR. I can never say. Is it C4ISR? C4ISR. A new one, C5ISR. They just sort of, you know, five must be better than the four, but they don't know what the fifth bit is.
They don't know what they want. You start that process. We've recently had a call yesterday with a country that they don't know what they want. Well, they do, but they don't. Now you start on that process. It'll probably appear in our VSP in 18 months, two years' time, and probably one year after that, maybe we'll have that contract. Happily, there's quite a few that have started three years ago and a little bit further down the line. The functionality is multi-sensor fusion. Not an easy thing to do when you're talking about coast stations and satellites, each of which may have multiple sensors on them. We talk about platforms. A coast station is a platform. A patrol vessel is a platform. A satellite is a platform. Human intelligence is a platform.
It's the data that you can get from it, and they have all sorts of different sensors. A patrol vessel in a drone may have an AIS and a camera, an RF and various things. Might the coast stations. All of that comes together and is fused within a single system and made available to all the connected operators, and that enables them to track and identify the analytics applied to the data, enable them to spot things that are going wrong, and then you've got integrated command and control that enables them to do something about it. That's full end-to-end solution, and all of that has been developed and conceived over the last eight, nine years to where it is today, where that is really the only fully integrated, proven system in the world today for maritime domain awareness.
A key point here is it's fully autonomous. Countries, nations do not want a web application, a web-delivered service that they pay a subscription for their national security, hosted on a Google server in California. You can't imagine that, you know, if GCHQ said, "Well, actually, we're just gonna put it all on a server somewhere over in all our national security and our military control systems, somewhere in Canada or something." You can't imagine that. They want an autonomous system. In particular, in the changing geopolitics now, the fact that we have promoted this has really played into that because, you know, globalization has changed into regionalization and even localization at some degree.
All the countries I'm going to, that we go and talk to are all saying, and they've always said this all along, but it's even more so, you know, "We want to have our core systems without an off switch from abroad." In fact, one of our customers got really quite hung up about, you know, "Is there a backdoor? How are you gonna get into it?" You know who I'm talking about. You know, they. You have to make an appointment to get into the data center to do support. There's no remote access, no concept of any of that. Not interested in any of that. That's a big thing we designed from the outset, that it would be autonomous.
I always like to remind me, this is a bit of an ego thing, that because people say, "When are you gonna sign the next contract?" Well, we have signed contracts. Not quick enough, I grant you, and we'll talk about that in a minute. We do have a lot of references around the world. We have Bahrain. This is another customer in the Middle East. This is out in Southeast Asia, where we've installed transponders on fishing boats. These are towers that we have built, so towers and utility cabinets. This is the data center, and this is the GeoVS hub systems before they ended up in that data center. I think it's well to remember that it's not just about having the technology.
You actually have to be able to turn up in country and do it and deal with the connectivity issues, deal with the cultural issues. We can't go there as a Western country and say, "Well, this is the way we do it." You know, it's their game, their rules. We have to do it their way, and the system has to work for them. Again, that's another USP for us that we can turn up and do that with our local partners who are capable of building towers in far-flung places on an island which is flooded most of the time and hit by typhoons and all that sort of stuff, and has no connectivity or variable connectivity. Or, actually, you can't actually go there because Al-Qaeda is hanging out there.
I think there's also that ability to deliver these systems and products in the real world and all that knowledge that is fed back into having the system. None of this happens in five minutes. It's an accumulated experience. We're still learning. We will still have. We were only discussing yesterday, Francois. I mean, you know when you think you've got them pinned down, and suddenly they surprise you. You know, you're constantly learning about all these countries. They do things differently. Increasingly differently, they do it their way.
We have today GBP 70 million worth of contracts underway, one of which is nearly finished, which is BFAR, and the other one, which is with a Middle Eastern country, which we're at the beginning of, but we're, we've made really good progress, and we've done the first installations of. Actually, we've just sent, I think today, the acceptance report for the coverage of a particular area for a milestone to be accepted. Did I hear correctly it was 900 pages, thereabout, the final report?
Total pack is 900 pages.
Yeah, for one milestone. Which is a revenue milestone and a payment milestone, and they've started paying. We then have the existing VSP, which we review internally every board meeting, but we don't. You know, if every time it changed, we did an RNS and everything else, then it would be pretty complicated. We verify that with our lawyers and our Nomad. This is not something that Simon dreams up on the whiteboard and just says, "Oh, that's a nice figure. We'll just stick that out." We have to justify that and verify with the lawyers. We have to do that with our Nomad before anything is released. Of course, beyond all of that, there's other opportunities which haven't made it to the VSP. These are the projects that we really are focusing on.
What I think is in the next five years is that we will see these convert and some follow-on contracts will then come in that we're already having visibility of. Even our Middle Eastern, current Middle Eastern project that we signed earlier, on the sales side, we're now discussing the upgrade to that, which is a sort of $100 million ticket. Similarly, in Southeast Asia, because of the new President of the Philippines, it's clear that they want to significantly expand their fisheries program to cover all their other vessels. There's more stuff coming down the pipeline. For the first five years, we can expect this. I think in the next, and then in five years after that, there's gonna be more coming into that.
I think after probably 10 years, we might start to see South America and Africa get their act together. You know, we've dabbled in Africa, we've dabbled in South America. They don't have any money. They're not particularly organized at the moment. What we have decided, we make no sales effort there at all. We get inquiries, and we will respond to that. We have a small one which is pending here in Nigeria, actually. But the focus of all our efforts is Middle East, Southeast Asia. There's a real need, they've got real money, and we're engaged with all the right customers. This diagram here, which I've attempted to update just to give everybody an idea of what's going on. The gray bit is what's in the finnCap forecast. Obviously the.
We're talking about this is our current financial year, and this is where we are today with the green line. In that forecast was, for this year, this financial year, most of the rest of our existing Philippine contract with BFAR. We're on track to do that and sign off those milestones. We've got some revenue milestones that we're signing off. We then have our recently signed Middle Eastern contract, which we signed in January, and we had assumed that this would be spread over three financial years. In phases one, two, and then the third one is a, was a smaller phase in terms of time because it's a data center.
What that customer has now said to us is what they want to do is in January, calendar year January, they want to start phases II and III, and they want phases 2 and 3 finished by December next year. What that means is that revenue is being brought forward and actually will be brought so that it's forward before the end of December. But because of the way it's structured, the monitoring system part of that contract is probably about 75%-80% of the revenue. Is that fair if you take the transponders out? You have a big increase in revenue because of that being brought forward. That's not confirmed yet, but they've told us that's what they're doing, and that's what we're gearing up for.
The possibility here is this is likely to go quicker. I think what I've always said with all these projects is, once the buggers get to the point that they signed and started, and they start to see how great it is, and they've now seen this week, the rain, they get super excited, as you were saying to me this morning. They suddenly want, "Come on, let's go, let's go." They want more and more and more, and they start to then bring it forward. We then have another Coast Guard project here that we expected, we hoped would've been indicated, be in the first half. What we hadn't appreciated was the change in government. What the change in government causes is that the political establishment changes, and it takes them a number of months to actually replace them.
While they're being replaced, nothing new gets signed off. They're now pretty much at the end of that process this week, and so we expect during the next quarter, financial quarter, that they will then come out, be tendered, and hopefully we will win them and we will start. That's a red arrow, because originally we had hoped that that would be around the end of the first half, but now we think that'll be during the third quarter. I was there. I've been there about four times in the last six weeks or so to do various reviews and what have you on the documentation, so we're pretty confident of that. This one here, G3, is also linked with this one here, with G5.
They both move back from where we originally had them when we announced this. Is that clear? Yeah. I'll assume it's clear unless there's shouting and screaming anyway. The other one that's moved here is a Middle Eastern contract in another country where the Coast Guard has approved it, the Ministry of Interior has approved it, and now it's gone to the royal family, who are the guys with the checkbook, for approval. We're waiting for that decision. The Coast Guard itself is expectant. Again, I think, James, you spoke to the person that sits within the Coast Guard apropos something else, and they said exactly the same thing. The key message here is we're passengers on these processes here.
We've won the spec war, we hope, and that's from two and a half years of presenting our system, explaining the system in detail, all of that groundwork that we do with sales, in order to get them to say, "Well, actually an integrated maritime domain awareness system looks like the SRT system." They specify it with functionality and capabilities that others can't do. That's what we seek to do. That's why the R&D part and the development of the system, which I went on about earlier, is so important. That sophisticated functionality, 'cause it makes it very, very difficult for anybody else to really achieve, as well as having those references. The other ones that we have here are this one here. Actually, that is a budget that has been approved for next year for this customer here.
They haven't even started contracting their first phases, but their plan is to then expand, have the next phase of the system already next year, and they've had that budget approved while it's in there. We expect there to be a tender for that. Of course, having won these, we're then in a driving position for these. Actually, this particular customer, this customer and this customer, are the same customer. You'll see a succession of these going forward and across over to the Gulf Coast as they build up their system. They don't just, you know, design a system which is gonna cost them $1 billion to do and then go and get $1 billion and borrow it. It's sliced and diced because it's gonna take them years to build up.
They just don't have that sort of money in day one. This one here is Indonesia. I don't think I have to be shy about that because everybody sees the green book. This project has gone from the blue book to the green book. It's been approved. It's with the Coast Guard there. Francois has spent most of his life going to Indonesia for the last couple of years, including through COVID, which means, you know, 10 days quarantine, sitting in a little hotel room and all that sort of stuff. Thank you for doing that. We are now getting to the stage where they're preparing to commence the tender. They say to us, they expect to start that maybe November.
Once they start that, I think it's a 28-45 day process to do that. Seemingly December time, we would know whether we've won that or not. It will be a tender. There's a selection of companies that have all been going for this that have been selected, and we are one of them. We believe we're in the lead with that because of the references and the integration that we've got. Once that is signed, it will then be financed, and we have an agreement with UKEF and a bank who will then provide the loans to the Indonesian government to pay us, which makes it very nice and self-financing for ourselves. That takes three to six months to arrange. I don't think we will see any revenue from that until the next financial year, which is why it's there. Yes.
On that one, Simon, can you comment on who else is bidding for this sort of thing?
I'd rather not, but they're the usual big systems integrators. Yeah.
Excuse me.
Airbus and people like that.
Yeah, you just sound very confident about being pole position for that tender. Why?
Francois?
We've been going.
Only 'cause it's his project, he's dealing with it, and I you know.
We've been going back and forth quite a bit. We've specified our system. They like our system better than the other guys, at least that's what they allow us to believe. Our system works. It is a true integration, which is what they're really looking for. You have to understand, Indonesia is a very large country, dozens of islands, most of them with nobody on them. It's quite significant to install towers and sensors and power and have internet connection, so it's a very large system. From you know, all the meetings that we had, all the presentations, all the demos that we've done, they feel confident that our system is what they really need, so.
I'll just add to that. It's some of the other competitors you'll see will roll in five or six posse of people, do a presentation and leave. Our method is we keep going back pretty much every month. You stay there for a week, and you know, they say they're gonna meet you on a Tuesday. You're there, and then they say, "Oh, well, actually," or, "I'm sorry." Well, they don't even say I'm sorry, they just don't show up. You wait until Thursday. It's not. I mean, it's just their culture 'cause they're busy doing other stuff, operational stuff. You go back and you wait and you earn their respect, and you take the time to get them to understand. If they understand your system, they feel comfortable with it.
Then, of course, when they start to write the specifications, they're writing your system. That comes from being. This is where the VSP comes in. We could be very busy. I mean, you could spend a lot of time in Bangladesh and South America and all sorts of places. The VSP serves to focus our attention. Yes, we can expand our resources at a later date when these have grown. In the meantime, we just need to focus in on these. I think it's all of that groundwork that puts us in that strong position. I think the other confidence comes from, there are so many people involved in this. You talk to different agencies in the country.
We have UKEF going to talk to them separately from us, and they come back and confirm, "Well, actually, the customer said, you know, they love the SRT system, and that's what they want." There's still the procurement process to go through. I think, like I said to somebody else, the individual agencies you deal with aren't empowered to contract with anybody. 'Cause you have all this, you know, anti-corruption stuff and structures and stuff. All they can do is say, "I want that system," and then it gets handed to the procurement agency that does the procurement. It's just like anything, like selling a BMW or whatever. The advertising is to try to persuade that you say you describe a BMW car as opposed to a Škoda or Audi.
These ones we have in the orange, we have a very high confidence now of the timing and visibility. Both on our confidence of getting them and the timing of when they're likely to be. Actually, I would say internally, and we had a management meeting yesterday, the discussion wasn't about if and when. It was like, how do we do this all at the same time? Because actually, each of these countries don't care about the other country. Even within the Philippines, the PCG doesn't care about BFAR. When we get contract, they want everybody from SRT there delivering their system. Similarly in Indonesia, we experienced this last weekend. We had to be there last week. We had people in Middle East. We had people in Philippines.
We had to do a special demo for some special people. You were somewhere else. I was somewhere else. Jeff, I'm available on a Saturday. I think Sunday you were on the plane. Your poor family left behind. There for two days, did the job and back. You know, that's the reality.
How do you do it all at the same time?
Just like that. We have a plan. In an ideal world, we know what we need. We've got the skeletal structure to do it, and the last couple of years has enabled us to develop the system more, so it can be built up more and delivered more as a sort of pre-built system. To think about how we're gonna do our delivery, train up some of our local partners more, have a better idea of how we're going to do that with our delivery team. There's no getting away from the fact that we need more people in our delivery team, four or five new people. Do we do that now? Should I have done that in January?
Probably if I was a big corporate, I should have done that in January and hired them and trained them up, and we'd have all of them and everything else. You'd have a noticeably higher overhead. We don't take the capital that's given to us for granted. That's why we've done all this with, in my opinion, very low amount of capital. I know people bleep when we raise money, but actually, for what we're doing and what we're going for, it's pretty small amounts of capital that we've invested. We have a plan where we'll manage that, and then we will backfill with the people. We think we're in a good position to be able to do that. It doesn't mean that it's gonna be easy because we took the decision to wait.
Now we're more confident. We've started to look to find the people, and it's hard to find the right people. Because at SRT, you're expected to travel alone. I mean, I think of Mike. How long has he been out of the country? Nine weeks or something you were saying?
Yeah. Something like that. Yeah, it's something, yeah, nine or 10 weeks. He's not due back until the end of October.
People are prepared. We find the people that are prepared to do that, which is great, but it's hard to find people like that. How many people are prepared to leave their family for all those period of time, disappear on a weekend, you know, from their family? Not a lot. I think we're really lucky to have that mix of people, and it's hard to find those people. I think with the committed people that we've got, and we've started a business transformation process internally to make sure that we pay attention to our people and really look after those people who have a career path within SRT now. It's getting to be a bigger company. I suppose we're growing up. We value them because it's big sacrifices to do all that sort of stuff. Yep.
Can you say anything on staff retention?
It's tricky.
Staff.
It's tricky, I think. We have reasonable staff retention in key roles. Some of the less key roles, it just comes down to, well, they can be paid more for an easier job. The hardest thing is finding the right people. There's no getting away from that. Particularly for the scale of, you know, the opportunities and stuff. The strategy overall has been to keep the overhead as a minimum, to make sure we've got the structure. We've got the product development structure, the delivery structure, the sales structure.
We could easily do with more salespeople and more demo people and more delivery people, but we have the structure, and we now know who we need to find, and we've started to find them because of the confidence we have now on this. You know, the foot won't go off the gas, rightly or wrongly, until these are in. The result of that is it'll be a bit stressy. I mean, just to give you an idea, right? This line here. Actually, it's this one and this one, right? It's. They're four separate projects that will be tendered. The government see them as four projects, although they all link together.
Each one of those tenders is the preparation of about 600- or 700-page document, which also involves notarization, legalization of documents, all sorts of stuff. You've got to produce an original, which has to, every page has to be stamped and signed, 600 pages of it. You've got to have 5 further copies of it, times four. You know, just the administrative role for that, if you went to an Airbus or something, you'd have a team of 10 people doing that. Yeah, Richard. He does it. You know, it's great. We all get stuck in and do it. The time will come as we get past that, as we become that bigger company, and then we can start to have those people. We recognize that by starting this transformational process and thinking about the structure of the business.
As we did, actually, you've probably forgotten, five or six years ago, when we formed the delivery team and we started to actually get these, what I call, you know, the box system of responsibilities. Now we need to restructure on the basis that, you know, this year we expect to do GBP 55 million-GBP 56 million worth of revenue, and next year could be, you know, a lot more than that. You won't believe it till it's done, so see that wry smile. Then we have other stuff under here, I'm not gonna talk about them specifically, that are moving ahead. These have got a red cross on them here. This Coast Guard project has actually been amalgamated into a bigger Coast Guard project here.
We haven't changed the value of this yet because we'll republish the VSP later on because we need to validate it. This is now aggregated into here, and the actual value has gone up. This was purely this was originally gonna be just an AIS system, and this was gonna be an integrated partial radar camera system. It's now all been integrated. This
Can I just stop you?
Yes.
Do I therefore assume, using the numbers that you have, that G8 was a small-ish sum, 12?
I'll take 12.
Is to be added, so that becomes 112?
What I'm saying is, no, it's not as binary as that.
Oh
Leave the figures aside for a minute. This project was gonna be what's called an AIS only project.
Yes.
This was gonna be a partial radar and camera project.
Yeah.
They've said, "We wanna do it all at once, actually.
Yes.
Then they've expanded the scope of this project according to the meetings in the last couple of weeks. The value is much higher.
Much higher?
Much higher.
Much higher. I'm not changing this VSP because I need to. The value's here 'cause we need to validate it with our lawyers and brokers. That's why the figures you see here are not changing. I'm just explaining that separate project has now gone to here. I should probably put a red line going to there, would have been sensible about it, but you never think about that at the time. I thought a red cross was risky enough. Something negative.
The question would be total sum.
It's a lot more.
It's a lot more.
It's a lot more.
Mm-hmm.
Because it's a bigger project.
Yeah.
This is the Port Authority. This is a project that if you ask the salesperson concerned in Nigeria, "No, no, it's coming," I'm not so sure. Because they're not engaged, we're gonna take that out. This is a waterway project, and this has been delayed. We now expect that at some point in this half year. Actually, that really should be perhaps a little bit higher. Then down here, uncertain timing and confidence. This is an extension to one of our existing systems. This one here are two small projects that we were looking at in a separate country that.
Well, it's bang on. What isn't included in here is some other stuff that has now started to appear on the horizon from existing customers, like the Philippines want to significantly expand their fisheries based on the current system that has been supplied as part of President Bongbong's food security. The additional stuff that we see now in the Middle East as well. Our focus is this. When we talk about this financial year, and we talk about, you know, our target of GBP 56 million, where do we think that's coming from? Well, we've got the transceivers business, which we think is gonna do about GBP 11 million-GBP 12 million for the year.
We have our systems business where with the acceleration of this, which we hope to be confirmed later on this year, starting in January, would generate about GBP 35 million worth of revenue this financial year. You're at about 47. We're only about GBP 8 million shy of getting our 56 that we've put out in the market, that finnCap has put out in the market, and we expect that to come from any one of these rather easily. These, of course, then also enable us to then accurately forecast 2023, 2024, possibly further on from that. We'll see, once we get to that stage. Forecast-wise, we're, we feel in a pretty confident and comfortable position, whereas for the first time ever, the vast majority is under contract.
Just talking about these contract dynamics and the way the revenues flow, most of the projects are split into these main silos. Well, all the projects are split into these main silos. Not all of them have transceivers, by the way. In fact, most of the large ones don't have transceivers, which we're not unhappy about 'cause putting transceivers in is the hardest thing. The first thing is the monitoring system, and typically what happens is everything is divided into effectively three milestones. The first milestone is the delivery of the equipment, of the thing, equipment and the software. We have it piled on the desk, on the floor, and we get paid an amount, maybe 40% of the value of that particular assembly of equipment and software.
We need to install it, which is what we've been doing, which is what James was, we were referring to this 900-page report, and then we prove that it's working, and then you get paid 50%. The same happens with coast stations. The reason that's a little bit longer is perhaps there's some infrastructure involved, some third-party equipment like a radar or camera, maybe has a 6-month lead time, whereas here it's Dell systems and the GeoVS software. Transceivers is much longer 'cause we have to order the components, and in the current situation, as you know, nine to 12 months to get the components, and then you've got to manufacture them, et cetera. Finally, when everything's together, you have this final milestone, which is when they accept that the system is fully delivered. You have delivered your contractual obligations.
Now along the way, they start taking data, and typically they start taking data when the first TV screen gets switched on. The first time the telly gets switched on, everyone gets super excited. Actually, part of the art of delivery is to switch the TV on to test it without telling them the TV's on, 'cause immediately they want to see the system working and stuff. We've had this, and they get in the way and it's a pain. That then normally is, "Right, well, I want the satellite data." Now you start supplying the satellite data, even though it's not the monitoring system isn't fully commissioned till here. On the milestones, the revenue milestones, this is the way it's broken up. Obviously, there's lots of little project milestones in between.
We've just done a load of training over here. It's a project milestone. There's a factory acceptance, and then there's SAT, site acceptance of the equipment. Well, the FAT is a revenue milestone, but the SAT is not a revenue milestone. It's a project milestone. That's why sometimes, you know, you'll see a period of time, particularly when we've got only a couple of contracts overlapping, you'll have a six-month period with no revenue milestones. It doesn't mean that you've not been delivering all the little bits along the way. In the end, our revenue recognition is when they sign the acceptance form. In this particular instance in the Middle East, somebody has to review that 900-page document and then sign that off. Then you've completed that milestone.
The structure of this means that this is where a lot of the profit is because it's software heavy. Actually, the magic in the system is our software and system design. These things are more commodity. This is where the margin is. It actually becomes, I wouldn't say self-financing, but it becomes, you know, front-weighted on the profit, and that enables us to then access things like more innovative financing with UKEF and our bank. What we expect with customers, we see a customer as an account. Once you get the first contract, which typically takes 12-24 months to implement, you would then expect a gap. Rarely is it coterminous, and there'll be another contract to add something to it. Maybe they wanna add some more coast stations.
Maybe they wanna add some more transceivers. Maybe they wanna add some more command centers. Each time they add more to it, they're gonna need more satellite data. Our model is, let's get the customer, the first contract, and once they're starting to use our system, like with anybody, you know, that's like the Windows operating system. We give it away free and then sell all the apps and everything else that go on it. Once you're into Apple, you can't get away from it. That is the same with our model, albeit it doesn't happen quite as quick. Yeah.
You say with the Philippines 10-year contract for data.
Sustainability, yeah.
Yeah. GBP 2.5 million per annum. What sort of margin have you got on that?
I'd rather not say publicly. It's good margin. Yeah. The data's great margin. Yeah. It's a product we call the S-MDA, so the Satellite Maritime Domain Awareness product, and we tailor that to each customer. We buy from multiple satellite systems, and the strength that we have is that, you know, there's new satellites going up all the time. The data landscape and availability landscape is massive. It's hugely competitive, and we can pick and choose 'cause we own the customer, and the customer looks to us to provide that data into the system. Outlook. On the transceivers for H2, we expect to achieve a good year-on-year growth. I don't think we will achieve the full potential that it could be, and that's 'cause we can't make enough. We can't get the components.
That's not through want of trying. We're buying in the gray market. We're deploying lots of capital to do that. But, you know, in reality, I just don't think we're gonna be able to fill our full potential, but we're still gonna see very good year-on-year growth. We have a solid order book and H2 demand indicators for that, and you'll see, you know, the first half's been really good. On the systems side, we've talked about this acceleration of the existing project, which we've been informed will happen, but has not been confirmed as happening. We expect some new contracts in Asia and the Middle East, as we've discussed, and they will then start delivering. There is always this risk of timing. We are passive. These near-term contracts, we have done the work. We've won the specification. I chuckle when I see.
I chuckle now. I used to get irritated when I see people say, "Oh, you know, why aren't they closing the contracts?" I mean, just naive comments, frankly. You know, you can't go to these governments and say, "Come on, sign up." You know, it just doesn't happen. You are a passenger. I think one of you in the audience are in procurement and government. It doesn't happen like that. You follow the process. They follow their process, and they will not be rushed, and they follow their process. If something gets in the way, they stop, and then they restart, and that's just the way it is. What I would say is that it means that in all the projects we've had and all the governments where people have said, "Oh, well, are you gonna get paid?
Are you gonna do this, that and the other?" We get paid. They're real contracts with real governments. It's not messing around and people taking shortcuts and all the rest of it. For these ones here, we are a passenger. All we can do is make sure, you know, like yesterday, suddenly we had to produce three letters, and we did within an hour. Even though we asked them last week, "Is there anything else you need?" They said, "No." We have very good visibility of that, and that's just the, I suppose, the cross that we have to bear for going for having made that decision 10 years ago to go for these sorts of levels of contracts and not just be a bit player supplying the system integrated with the transceivers, for those of you that have been a shareholder that long.
Next year, we will continue to grow our transceivers, organic growth, the launch of our DAS range, which starts in November, and Nexus. I think Nexus is really gonna be an interesting product. It's around the $1,500 mark. It's going into a very big market. You know, this can easily make a significant difference to the transceivers business, which by then the core business might be at GBP 15 million a year and then could add, could easily double that. While we're all thinking about the sexy systems business, remember that transceivers business is on path to become a very valuable company within our business. On systems, there's gonna be follow-on contracts from these and new contracts coming. I think the outlook is.
It'd be surprising if I stood up here and said the outlook was crap. It you know it's pretty positive. Hopefully, by you guys talking to some of the other people around who've been exposed to that, you know, you can get the detail that you need to feel a bit happier about that. I'm just gonna have a look at this on my little laptop, other questions. I think that's it. There's just one question here. Can I please explain how the sales pipeline is validated? We have to. First of all, I have to justify it to Richard, which is no mean feat. We then need to present all the evidence to our Nomad and our lawyers before that figure goes out and of course the board.
It's not just a sort of randomly selected thing. Summary, I'm not gonna repeat all of that. Questions? Man here in the front. I don't know that we need the mic actually. Oh, we do need the mic. Yeah, for the thing. Sorry.
On the systems side, all the business is Middle East and Asia. What is the Western world using already? Can we compete there?
The man here from the French Navy would probably know more about what the Western world is using. I think they have more of a militaristic approach with drones and stuff, but.
Context. You have context with the.
In Europe you have Frontex, which is the EU managing body for the borders. They have developed their own system, so they have completely started from scratch. The French Navy is using Airbus. That's another system. The reality is, in most of the European country, you don't have a coast guard function. It's just a coast guard function. It's not really an agency. You take the example of France, for example, there is no coast guard. It's a mix of navy, police, and it's just the one man deciding if there is an issue, it's the navy which is going out or. That's a bit of perhaps a difference.
Most of the time they have developed their own system. That's the reality. They are just building on what they have developed. It's more like they have contracted with development companies to build and just they are just paying for the development, but they own their systems.
Something like Frontex, would that be a competitor for us? Would they be selling, trying to sell to the?
No. No, they have developed their own system. There is one solution that they have developed for West Africa, which is the YARIS platform. It's just a way to integrate them, integrate different countries with the same maritime feature. It's something that they are providing for free with training because it's EU pushing to Africa. They are doing the same in Indian Ocean, but really the Africa side of Indian Ocean, and that's it.
Okay. Next question.
Thank you. There are two points I would like to refer to, if I may.
Of course.
One is what I will always refer to as the bread and butter business, and since I've been coming to an AGM here for a few years now, that being the transceivers business. I genuinely believe, notwithstanding the problems of supply chain currently, that there is even greater room for expansion with the coming of NEXUS than we've so far achieved. I also say that, and you yourself have used the phrase, the sexy, I'll add lumpy business, and with no disrespect, even though I'm sure we're much nearer big contracts than we've ever been before, I've heard the same story now for a number of years. I'm actually looking for solid delivery. I say that about the lumpy business, but I genuinely believe not that the transceivers business has underperformed.
In fact, it's propped the business up for two years in revenue terms. I have some doubts that we would be here at all, but for it. Certainly we might be here in rather trying circumstances. I genuinely believe there is a cultural tendency, I'll put it like that, to concentrate management resource, whatever, on one part of the business which is not necessarily, I hope I'm wrong, but you see where I'm coming from.
Yeah.
I think potentially.
Yeah.
I'm driving that point hard. The second point is, I am only by now interested in actual delivery. I recognize the argument about being passengers on a boat, although the phraseology is new this year, but the story is very similar. At some point, one has got to actually produce the goods. At the moment, they. I am sure they will come. I'm confident that they will. I'm just cautioning that I'm expecting them to do so.
I think the point you're making, so thank you for making that point, is, you know, are we spending too much time looking at the wishing wheel for projects that aren't gonna happen and all that sort of stuff?
In some ways, yeah.
We're ignoring some jewels in the corner. I don't believe we are. I mean, we're very focused on transceivers. We make sure that I mean, Louise runs the transceivers division sales-wise. We have a dedicated supply chain team who do nothing but live and breathe transceivers and components. Yesterday's management meeting was pretty much mostly about the transceivers. We spent hours staring at NEXUS as to whether we thought the button was the right shade of gray and the texturing and things. I don't think there's any lack of attention, I assure you. Would you say?
Well, we have a dedicated transceiver development team and a dedicated transceiver technical support team.
Yeah.
I can assure you there's no loss of focus on the transceivers business within the management team at all. We really love and care for the transceiver business, and it means-
Yeah.
A lot to us.
Yeah. Absolutely.
I can assure you that is definitely not the case on that point.
That's reassuring, particularly having in mind, unless I misconstrued, that the transceivers business in terms of the capitalization of the company is at the point as you described it, which means to say that the lumpier business is carried on top of that.
Capital free, one might describe.
Kind of.
I'm very refreshed to hear that, and I'm basically urging that onwards.
Yep. Be assured, I mean, our plans are we're gonna do a big expansion in the U.S. I mean, NEXUS is a huge investment for us, our whole transceivers team. I think the other thing to say about the transceivers business, it's our secret eyes and ears into the market, also for our systems business. Every single maritime domain awareness program in the world will have AIS in it.
Yeah.
We will hear from that one of our dealers.
Yeah.
We see an opportunity in our systems business. That's why we split them, so there is that clear focus. You know, Francois doesn't care about selling transceivers, and Louise doesn't care about selling systems.
Yeah.
They just care about that.
Yeah.
We're very clear on that. I take your point about the you know the systems business. You're all about delivery. I would remind you that we did sign a contract in January, only in January, with you know the major buyer in the Middle East. You know in the end the proof will be when we sign the other ones, but they are certainly a little bit more elephant hunty than the sparrow hunting of the transponders. Yeah. Yes?
Thank you. We had a little bit of a conversation prior to the AGM on the AtoN and how that's progressing. I know you've hired a marketing manager to deal with that. Just wondering if you could put a bit more color on how that's going and what opportunities might be there.
Yep. We call it DAS. We've been in the AtoN business for some time. We developed an AIS AtoN years ago, firstly for L3, again, acting as a sort of supplier to an OEM. We decided to have our own product and take that to the market. That enabled us to learn about the market, and what we realized that the complicated bit is the bit that we sell, but we get the smallest share of the pie. Because in the end, the end customer wants the overall system solution. We developed this concept called DAS earlier this year, and we soft launched it just to see whether people, whether ports with their own engineers would be interested in buying an engineered solution.
Suddenly we got inquiries from Manama in the Middle East, Panama Canal, Suez. All these people are now seeking to digitize their waterways and stuff, and they want a simple, a bit more of a Pot Noodle solution, which enables us to increase our margin. Our first proper product launch will be in November, which will be DAS Express. We're now doing the product marketing. We've as a business, we're much more focused on the product marketing. When you're just a transceivers business, you just say, "There's the transponder and there's the IEC spec. There's the data sheet. Good luck to you." When you've actually got a product that is closer to the customer, you need to have, "And this is its features and functions," and think about how the customer gets access to those features and functions.
John, who you referred to, who we hired to push that forward, has been working to get all of that together, and then we will really go for it in November. We have built up, I wouldn't say it's an order book, but a VSP of its own, which now we need to convert with the product, and we're doing some changes to the product which will all be launched in November. I've always thought that, you know, this digitization of maritime navigation is not just about having a thing on a boat, it's also having the thing on all the waterways that enable them to navigate. You know, with tens of thousands of buoys around the place, I think there's a big opportunity there for us.
We're being, you know, pretty dour with our forecasts on that for the moment until we see what really happens.
Yeah.
Any other questions? Go for it.
Just a couple of questions.
Sure.
The dreaded government procurement, sort of in answering my own question, as you get used to procurement systems, particularly with, say, BFAR or somewhere else, in that procurement system and its trust from both sides, do you hope that the process will become smoother and more quantifiable given it's government procurement, but there should be an improvement in time?
I don't think the process will improve because the process is the process, and they don't need to trust us. They just have their procurement process. I think it's more we now understand. In the Philippines, we know the process. In Indonesia, we don't know the process.
Yeah.
In the Middle East, in the particular country in January, we now know their process. It doesn't necessarily mean you know the timescales between the individual processes.
There's the follow-on contracts.
Yeah, for the follow-on contracts, we know. For example, in that particular country, there are some follow-on contracts that are smaller ones, like about $1.8 million. There's a couple of those. We know that once the agency is applied to the MOI, it then needs to go to the Ministry of Economic Planning, and each of those steps takes a couple of months. We know that. You learn that in each of the countries, yes.
Just a second question. On the transceiver business or section, what you didn't mention is sales teams. As NEXUS comes through and possibly DAS, are there plans to increase those sales teams? Do you think it'll be cost-effective or?
Well, I think the danger is it's easy to say we're gonna go and hire somebody to drive around and see dealers. A dealer might sell only $a few thousand on their own each year. It's a nice idea, but in reality, you don't want them driving around. You spend more money doing that. We've got 1,100 dealers around the world. We just push out the product to the dealers, so you can do that remotely. Then we go to certain exhibitions like METS and things like that, where you recruit them, and you re-engage with them. We are gonna hire a U.S.-based salesperson 'cause we've barely got penetration in the United States and 'cause we focused around Europe, and we can really expand on that.
We're looking to do that, but also have a social media campaign around our website. We almost spend as a business generating these sorts of revenues. We've like no marketing at all. We've done well to get to that stage, and now we'll start to invest in that. I don't see that we would hire loads of salespeople, 'cause I don't think you'd see the return on that at all. We don't need to do that. Okay, I think that's it. Lunchtime. All right. Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Great.
Thank you.
Thanks for everybody.