Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining the SRT Marine Systems webcast. I'm Simon Tucker. I'm the CEO of the company, for those of you that don't know me and perhaps have recently joined SRT as a shareholder. For those of you who have not seen this before, we do these live webcasts perhaps a little bit too infrequently, and hopefully in the future it will become a little bit more regular as I have things to say, perhaps once every three months. The idea of it is to give you an insight into your company that you own shares in, or that you're thinking about owning shares in and give you an opportunity to ask me direct questions. It's completely unscripted. I do have a couple of notes, but that's kinda it.
To remind myself and prompt myself, that's it. It is unscripted. I will see your questions. I will answer all questions. We do have sensible commercial limitations. Obviously, some of our product developments and stuff, we're not gonna reveal all. I'm sure there are other people that'll be viewing this when it's recorded online, if they're not doing so already. Also to protect some of our customers, particularly our systems customers are very sensitive, and you know, their regional allies and/or adversaries will also be interested in what they're doing, and we're not gonna be part of revealing that. I know that sounds slightly overdramatic, but that is the situation. Forgive me if I'm not being as detailed as you might like.
I know from some of the boards that the expectation is to reveal all, but that's simply not possible. Let's talk about business and what's going on. We have, at SRT, two divisions. We have a transponders division, transceivers division, and we have our systems division. Both operate entirely separately, separate development teams, separate sales teams, separate sales channels. In some instances, our systems business becomes a customer of our transponders business and is within SRT, they place an order on transponders for the transponders that they need. Transceivers then go and manufacture those and deliver those into the systems division that then delivers them as part of the particular project. If we talk about transceivers. The transceivers business itself has three divisions which operate, again, entirely separately from each other from a sales perspective.
We have our OEM and module division, and that is where we're providing solutions to marine electronics companies that want to have their own AIS transponders, and we deliver those own labeled as that marine electronics company's own brand. If you went into a shop or if you went onto a ship and saw one of those, you would not know that it came from SRT. It can be simply just a label, or it can be completely new plastics and everything.
The reason the customer is coming to us for that solution is that AIS is actually quite a complicated radio system, and marine electronics is a very broad set of products and therefore, the trend now is you buy from the specialists in that area, and we are the global specialists in AIS. That is our OEM and module business. We have our DAS business, which is digital aids to navigation. These are special transponders that go on buoys on infrastructure, and they help with navigation, environment monitoring, which is really starting to grow. It's a very specialist area all about infrastructure and autonomous navigation. Separate to that, we have our own brand of transceivers called em-trak.
We sell that through a network of distributors, and we also sell direct on our website. That's directly to boat owners. They all stem from a core set of products, but they all operate in their own individual markets. Let's talk about last year and what we've been doing and what we're gonna be doing next year. Last year we didn't achieve the revenue that we wanted to and could've with our transceivers business, and the primary reason for that, the sole reason for that is component shortages. What happens in electronics is, and I'll show you. In the end, what we want to do is to sell one of these. This is a typical AIS transponder. This is actually an em-trak one.
What sits inside that is that which is an AIS module that we have developed, and that's a very fancy piece of radio electronics. On that little PCB board, as we call it, is about 140 different components sourced from about 40 different suppliers all around the world. We contract out our manufacturing as Apple does and most people do to a manufacturer in Southern Ireland, a company called Flextronics, which is the world's second largest electronics manufacturer. Huge buying power. When we say we want 10 of these, they will then go and buy all those components that sits on here, and they will then all arrive in various periods of time. Each component has different lead times, et cetera.
It's quite a complicated process in reality, building and manufacturing electronics once you've developed the product. You rely on, when you're planning your production, the component supplier telling you when those components are gonna come in. What's been happening in the last two years is that's become increasingly unreliable, to the extent that in some instances today, when you order a component that was previously on a six-month lead time, which would have been the maximum, we're now being told it's anywhere between 12-24 months, but we can't guarantee.
Components that we ordered six months ago, and we were expecting in this week, we get told on Friday, "Actually, they're not coming in, this week, probably another three months." You've planned all the production, and you have every component except for the one that is coming in. That means you can't make those products. The way we manage that is you go into what's called the gray market. There are, t here's this whole raft of businesses in the world that buy components on the assumption that people will have forecasted incorrectly, and therefore you need to top up, and you go and buy those bits, and they charge you a small premium for that. That's normal business. We've been gradually doing more and more and more of that.
Everybody else is doing the same thing, and so the amount of components in the gray market that's available is less and less and less. This is a constant struggle. It has always been this struggle in electronics. Apple will suffer from this, everybody will, but the extent of it has become much greater. The result for us during the year has been that we haven't been able to make the number of transponders that we needed to make to match demand. As a result of that, at the end of the year, we had a very big order book of people waiting to buy. The lucky thing for us is that the demand for SRT products is strong. People want to buy our products. Why?
Because we're just known for the performance and the quality of the product. They're not going anywhere. There is nowhere to go because this is a global problem. It doesn't necessarily mean that we want to abuse that position. What are we doing about it? What we started to do is to buy more aggressively in the gray market. Previously we'd had a cap. Now we're being more aggressive about that and looking to buy these components in the gray market to bring that production, increase our production towards what our target would be. I don't think we will be able to meet our target because the growth in demand is pretty strong for the transponders in the marine world.
I think over the next six to 12 months, the situation will normalize. That's been the big challenge for us in the last year, which is why revenues, frustratingly, on the transponders was lower than we think could have been. In the year ahead, we expect to see that problem alleviating and us being able to quite quickly then catch up with production to fill the order book. 'Cause as you can imagine, you know, as the order book is going down and we're fulfilling that, there's more piling in on a daily basis. That's been our big challenge last year.
Going forward into this year, we will expect to see growth in our em-trak, in our OEM module, and in our DAS business, particularly in our DAS business, where we're doing some small development projects to refine our core DAS offer. At the moment, we just have the transponder, but our offer will expand a little bit to make it easier for port authorities and infrastructure authorities to install those directly themselves. We have a dedicated salesperson on that division, as well. The big development, new product development in our transceivers business is NEXUS. I've obviously read the boards and what have you, and seen the various interpretations of what we're doing. What I'm not gonna do today is to reveal everything about NEXUS.
We are in discussions with several OEMs. Em-track will also be launching a version of that at the end of the year, and this will start shipping in the beginning of 2023. The key thing about NEXUS, obviously, is that it brings together AIS and VHF, so that's data communications and voice communications. That in itself isn't a new thing, but doing it in a very low cost, highly integrated digital manner is a new thing. That enables you to have a very small, low cost product. The other big trend in the marine world is integration within an ecosystem. If you go and look at people using their boats and stuff, most of them are using their mobile phones and their tablets. They have these big glass chart plotters and things.
One of the key aspects, which I'm not gonna reveal too much about NEXUS, is it enables voice and data to be seamlessly integrated into all of that ecosystem. That is particularly relevant to our OEMs that want to offer their customers a completely integrated maritime navigation environment. NEXUS is uniquely designed and architected to do that. In electronics, you can't just sort of tweak stuff. We've got used to sort of talking about apps for that and these sorts of things. You can't just sort of tweak electronic product. You have to architect it and design it and build it from scratch to do that. This product does that.
Just to give you an idea, and this actually isn't what it's gonna look like, this is an early prototype, just to give you a size. We are at prototype stage now. I'm not gonna show you that one. This is approximately what the size of the product is versus a standard AIS transponder. This is a full VHF DSC radio with AIS receive and transmit. It's a Class B that sits inside this. The reason we're doing this is that AIS is a growing market, and we think that over the next 10 years, all those boats that have radar will naturally also end up having an AIS transponder. It's become a standard fit now pretty much when people buy new boats. VHF radio is even more pervasive.
For the slightly larger boats, it makes perfect sense to have a single device that sits on your boat and has AIS and voice. Also the technologies are complementary. By looking at a target on your screen, you can select that and make a VHF call directly. That's called DSC, digital selective calling, directly to that target rather than like you know an old-fashioned CB radio just trying to hail that. We're very confident on NEXUS being a market disruptive, very different product that enables our OEMs to realize many, many different functionalities that are of benefit to their users. For us, a big product that will drive our revenues and profits considerably in the years to come.
We're already planning production. We've already started buying the components for that, because of the extended lead times. We start slow, as we always do, as we did with AtoN, as we've done with every product, because, you know, as we'll talk about, every forecast is wrong. No customer, no dealer ever says, "Well, I'm definitely gonna buy 500 a month," and place that order. They'll say, "Well, I'll buy a few, and I'll see what the demand is and things." Our approach is a conservative one, and we progress slowly. The other things that are going in our transceiver business, as I've mentioned to you, is some development projects around our DAS, our aids-to-navigation transceivers, and also some improvements around our core AIS Class A and Class B products.
One of the questions I've been asked in regards to our transceivers business is where do we sit with VDS? VDS is often conflated as being the same as a new version of AIS. It's not. It sits alongside AIS. The idea of that standard is that it provides greater two-way data communication than AIS, but the actual AIS will continue to operate in exactly the same fashion as it is now. The question for us is, we've been party to all those standards discussions. We are the supplier of 85%-90% of all AIS transponders worldwide, and we therefore are a major player in those standard discussions. What is the application for VDS in reality?
The danger in electronics and engineering is often you'll find that a new standard comes out because engineers thought it was a good idea. It's not necessarily something the market's gonna want. VDS is complicated, but we're not sure of what that application will be. Whilst it's the data capacity, not speed. Capacity is greater than AIS, it's very minimally greater. It's probably the equivalent to GPRS. Whereas the world is expecting 4G and 5G sort of data capacities, there are new satellite networks going up with mobile internet, you know, OneWeb and things like this. Mobile networks are much more pervasive, Wi-Fi networks. All our transponders have Wi-Fi in them already. Is it real?
It sounds all exciting and stuff, but is there really the market there for that and the application for that? We're not sure yet, but we're watching. When we're sure and if we're sure, then it's easy for us to take some of our DSP platforms and evolve that into a VDS application. In summary, our transceivers division has a whole bunch of proven products, 1,100 dealers and distributors and OEM partners, and the only thing that has constrained us this year was our ability to match production to demand, and we're now taking action to do that. We see that component issue will alleviate over the next 6-12 months. There's already sort of sparks of that happening. Our systems business. What is our systems business?
Our systems business has one product, and that is called the SRT-MDA system. At the heart of the SRT-MDA system is our GeoVS software platform. The GeoVS software platform is what binds everything together and delivers all the functionality. The SRT-MDA system essentially has two bits. It has sensors, which deliver the data, and then it has a monitoring system that uses that data to give the functionality to the user. Our USP is on the monitoring system. We are agnostic to the sensors. We integrate different platforms. What I mean by a platform is a satellite, a coast station, a patrol vessel, or a drone. On all of those platforms, you can have multiple sensors. So on a drone, you can have thermal imaging camera, AIS, RF scanning. On a coast station, you have radars.
On satellites, there's loads of different satellites in different orbits. They have optical. There's multiple operators of AIS, multiple operators of RF scanning. All this data comes in, and what we do is we design and deliver a complete system for our particular customer. The driver for the demand of these systems, which we identified eight years ago and started developing eight years ago, so that we can have our systems today, is today there is no maritime domain awareness. There's minimal maritime domain awareness. We get fooled when we look at some of the sort of amateur app websites and stuff that are just sort of getting random information. That's a little bit like flight tracker being used for air traffic control for Heathrow. You can't imagine that happening.
For professional organizations like coast guards and fishery authorities and ministries of transport, they need to have a system that gives them what we call maritime domain awareness, which is knowing what's going on in the marine domain. Tracking vessels, understanding the vessels, spotting where the problems are so they can do intelligence-led operations. Every project is different, but the same. Same in that there's always sensor systems and a monitoring center. Different in that there will be a different blend of sensors. There might be 50 coast stations or 100 coast stations or maybe one coast station, and they take it mostly from satellite or no satellite and all coast stations and patrol vessels.
Normally, it's a blend of the two because when you're near the coastline you need to have real-time pervasive surveillance, which can only be provided by terrestrial-based coast stations and patrol vessels. Satellites just don't give you that sort of reliable high-resolution coverage. Then on the monitoring side, you might have one customer that wants 18 command centers, or you might have another customer who has one command center, and the number of operators in each command center might be different. It's the same basic ingredients in each one. That is our product. What is the problem that we're solving?
The problem that we're solving is if you take some of the big countries in Southeast Asia, 2 million sq km of EEZ, 80,000 islands, 300,000 boats all milling around, and they might have 100 coast guard patrol vessels. They need to know where to send those patrol vessels to be efficient and effective. What they need therefore is intelligence. Today, most coast guards just have patrol vessels which go out on a patrol, and now the next step in this is now this intelligence-led maritime surveillance. What our system does, and the differentiator, is real integration of multiple sensors. If you have lots of sensors, you have lots of raw data. People often talk about integration.
To actually achieve that level of integration, where you integrate targets that are derived from radar, targets that are derived from RF detection. What do I mean by that? A boat will give off radio waves, where they can be detected and triangulated. Light detection. Boats will have lights, you can detect the lights. There's obviously transponders. They might be cooperatively transmitting their position. All of that data needs to come in. True integration of that across a big system, we're the only game in town that does this. It's as a result of us starting from a clean piece of paper eight years ago and spending all this time developing this mammoth system, which we call GeoVS, that glues all this together.
Now that you've got that data with the integration, you need to find out where the suspicious events are. We've developed a lot of AI analytics that look at the environment and look at the entities that are moving on that environment and can compare and contrast them in order to look at the behavior of the vessel individually and relative to each other in proximity. For example, if the system will detect, and bear in mind, there might be 100,000 targets the system's looking at, two vessels move out of a standard shipping lane, slow and move together, this is indicative of transshipment, which is likely smuggling. An alert can be generated.
Once they have an alert, they need to be able to action a patrol vessel to then go to that area and take action or apprehend those vessels when they go back to port, and you need the information system to say, "Oh, I know it's that vessel, and they're gonna be at that port." Our system provides that end-to-end workflow on a national scale. This has taken us a long time, and those long-suffering shareholders who have been with us for many years, we know it has been a long time. Our system today provides that complete workflow, and that's why we're now gaining traction with things. Hopefully that gives you a sort of feeling for the product and why people are looking to buy this.
If we talk about some of our existing product projects. We have our existing project with BFAR in the Philippines. This is the world's largest fisheries monitoring system. We are three years into a four-year project. That project then comes to an end at the end of this year. It's worth about GBP 31 million, and we've invoiced to date GBP 25 million of that. The project is broken up into payment milestones, which actually is an aggregation of multiple delivery milestones within each one. The final milestone that is to come is the final system acceptance, which is later this year.
We did not complete any payment milestones last financial year, but that's not to say that we did not make huge progress with implementing the system, transponders, coast stations, monitoring centers, et cetera. We had previously invoiced those other payment milestones. The contract's very clear about where the payment milestones are. Separate to that, we have cash payment milestones, which are not revenue milestones. Where BFAR is today is they have a fully operational system. They're able to track and monitor all their fishing boats that are currently fitted with transponders right the way across Western Pacific fisheries, across the Pacific Ocean, all their EEZ, South China Sea.
Three of the fifteen monitoring centers are now fully commissioned and up and running with all the staff training and everything there, all the two data centers, network centers. Most of the coast stations, 132 coast stations are installed. About half of the transponders are installed, and that's been quite problematic with COVID. They're not at a stage where we are free of that, so we have stop, start, stop, start with installation. But I think we've made very good progress with that, and they now have an amazing capability, certainly that exceeds anything else I would say worldwide today, in their ability and capabilities to run and manage their fisheries. We're very pleased with that.
The other notable thing with that particular business is we've now got to the stage where now that the monitoring centers are in, now we're supplying supplementary satellite data. Last year, about GBP 500,000 worth of satellite data went into the system. We expect that to then increase up to a certain level over the next couple of years. Earlier this year, calendar year, in January, we signed another contract with the Coast Guard, GBP 40 million. This will be delivered in three phases over a possible , at the moment it's expected two years, but this may come forward, but we'll see what the customer wants to do.
This we knew that we had over a year ago, but in this particular country, they have a pretty prolonged final contracting and checking process, and that culminated in us signing in January. Because we had gone and bought equipment previously ready for this, we were very quickly able to prepare that. We then, part of the contract is for them to then come over. Five people came here, to SRT in Somerset to inspect the equipment. This is a five-day operation with huge amounts of documentation that basically checks that what we put in our original proposal nearly three years ago is exactly what's sitting here with serial numbers and everything else. That is a contractual requirement. They obviously had to get their visas and permissions to travel and stuff. That happened.
That took about six weeks to arrange. That happened in early March. That was, as expected, a success in that they were happy that what we had put in our proposal was sitting in the warehouse. Once that was done, we then booked flights, which there's a lead time of two, three weeks to try and find space on these airplanes. Never mind people, cargo is also having an issue to get onto planes. That was then flown to the particular country. That is now on its way to their warehouse in country where they will do a second validation that what they saw here is what's arrived. At that point, that milestone, which is a payment milestone and an invoice milestone, is accepted.
We invoice, and then we get paid. The other thing that happens in that point is then that we go and start doing the installation. The installation then starts to happen quite quickly. Then once each of those components is installed, that is a further payment milestone and invoice. It's a sort of lily pad of successive milestones, payment, revenue and payment milestones over the next 12-24 months as the project is delivered in components. Again, it has monitoring system, base stations and transponders, all of which will be shipped, accepted. Now they've got the equipment, then installed, then we ship, then we invoice the balance of that.
Then there's a final project milestone right at the end when the whole system is fully installed, and we're paid for that. I would remind people, again, some of the questions I receive about, you know, are these countries gonna pay and stuff. You know, we've had business with Bahrain, Philippines, Panama Canal, Malaysia Port Authority. Everybody pays. There is no concern about all of this stuff. You follow the contracts that we have. We have proper contracts gone through very robust processes. As you know, it's a long bloody haul to get here.
That's because these are real projects as part of long-term strategies which are essential to these countries, and they're serious about it, and payment has just, you know, never really been an issue. Let's talk about this infamous or irritating, for some, validated sales pipeline. Let me start with what this is again. It's not a figment of our imagination or my imagination, what have you. The market for maritime domain awareness systems is truly global, and we get inquiries all the time. And you know, pretty much every country with a coastline is looking at doing this at some point. They will have project teams set up to go and investigate the market, and their starting point is Google, and they inquire to us.
We have limited resources, and I also don't want our sales resources suddenly disappearing off somewhere down in South America or Asia, where it's just a sort of glimmer of an idea and things, and actually they don't have the money, and actually they don't have real intent to proceed with any given timescale. Equally, we need to be realistic that these projects take years in the planning, and these are governments that just don't move quickly. They have their process, and we are a passenger on that process. There is no magic of us telling, "We need to go and get that contract." You can't go to these countries and just say, "Right, you must sign it, or I'm gonna increase the price and stuff." It just doesn't work that way with the countries.
What we do is we look at all these inquiries, and we obviously engage with them all. Very quickly, we can determine who's real and who isn't real. Have they really got the budget? Has the political decision made to do this? There might be some regulation. Do they have the land available to put all these things? When we know this is a real project and we have a belief that their timescale will be to start this at some point in the next three years, then it goes into the validated sales pipeline. That means we spend 90% of our sales resource focused on those. Of course, that's growing.
You know, as more and more of these things that have come in over the many years get to the point where finally, internally, they say, "Do you know what? My ministry has said, 'Yep, you can proceed with this,' or at least the first phases of our strategy to build a surveillance system," it then goes into the validated sales pipeline. Once it's in that validated sales pipeline, our role is to consult. It's a sales consultancy role with that customer. What we're trying to do is they have an idea if they want these maritime domain awareness systems, but they don't necessarily really know what the detail, how to deliver these complex systems and what they're made up of. It's an education process.
We use that to build up trust with the customer and also to drive them in a specification that suits our system. This is the key to our business. Yes, we do invest a lot of time and effort, which is money, in these sales opportunities. The purpose of the VSP is to make sure that we're doing that in a controlled manner, and that we're focusing on those that we think that we have a high opportunity of getting. Of course, trying to forecast that is exactly when these things are gonna fall is almost impossible. I'm often criticized for getting it wrong, and I get it wrong, and I apologize to everybody for having got that wrong. What I haven't got wrong is those VSPs are still there. We've not lost any.
They're real opportunities, and they're gradually now starting to convert. COVID didn't help with everybody stopping. Last year, they all started to reengage. We've already had one contract of GBP 40 million in January, and we do expect quite a few more coming up in the current financial year, as I've said previously in previous presentations. A particular note, if you look at our investor presentation of when we did our recent equity fundraise, there's one of about GBP 50 million for a Coast Guard and a second one of about GBP 130 million for the Coast Guard that look very promising for this year.
When I say promising, I would love to give you a specific date, and the customers have indicated that to me when they want to go, when they want to contract. You know, if I gave you that date, it's almost certain it's gonna be wrong by a few weeks or a month. What I can tell you is these are real projects that we've been working on for a number of years. That VSP is full of projects, some are right at the start, and we're at the beginning of that consulting period, and that might be one year or two years before we get to contract. Others, like the two that I just mentioned, we've been working on those for a couple of years already.
We have a very deep knowledge of all of that and the specifications and what their intent is and where they are with their budgets and approval processes and things. It's not a perfect science, but it for me serves within the company to direct our limited resources in those specific areas. We try to keep our overheads as low as possible. At the same time, it helps me to communicate with you guys and girls as to what you're investing in. You know, why have we spent eight years and tens of millions pounds developing our SRT-MDA system? You know, it's not something that you can create in two, three years.
I assume that it's a good thing to try and communicate what this opportunity is, rather than just saying we're trying to sell surveillance systems and waiting to hear about a new contract. In the year ahead, we will finish our BFAR project and make material progress with our new contract with the Coast Guard, the GBP 40 million one, and we will see significant revenues in the first half and the second half. That may come forward from two years to being a shorter period of time, but we will see. At the moment, it's over two calendar years. I would hope that we would be signing and starting and delivering against quite a few new system contracts.
I also expect more opportunities to be added to the VSP and some of those in the VSP to move forward towards contract as well. Some of those might be existing customers that we've already got, then continuing to develop their projects, and some of those might be entirely new customers. We sort of have a new way of thinking about our system customers, and we see them as accounts. You know, when you go and win a contract with a customer, let's say country X, it's not just that's it. This is the start of them building their maritime domain awareness and surveillance capabilities. Once they've got your platform, then I wouldn't say they're locked in, but they then start to use your system in a certain way. It's got certain logic.
It's got certain familiarity. There's a lot of training that goes on with all the personnel. These are projects that involve hundreds of people, and hopefully, they're conditioned around your system, and they want to see that as LEGO, and you can build on that with LEGO blocks. I think you know, last year was really a recovery year. Financially, not great, but it was a recovery year for us operationally. We made a lot of progress with new transceiver products, a lot of progress with our SRT-MDA system. We also took the opportunity to look at our systems business and the way we deliver our systems to be much more efficient and the assumption that we'd be able to travel less.
Things are much more configured and built in the U.K. and delivered ready to be installed in country. We've trained up our local partners to a higher level, and that results in us being able to deliver multiple system projects at the same time around the world efficiently with very good cost control. I think I've covered everything. I do have these questions that you can ask, and I'm just gonna have a little look at that and see what you've got to ask. If anybody's got any questions, right. I'm not gonna mention anybody's name. How would we cope if several contracts were signed at once? Well, we have several contracts at once. We have two at the moment on two different continents, and it's no problem.
Our delivery of our projects is done by our delivery team. We have a dedicated small delivery team, which includes project management and engineering support team. The SRT-MDA system is always, as I said, the same architecture. We have local partners that then go and install that with the help of our engineers. It's very important that you have these local partners, and that's not easy to find. These are large entities that have skilled people, have a lot of experience locally, and we've got to know, and they've got to know our system over the years. Nothing is easy, but we are the, i f all those contracts I just mentioned came in, we're talking about two or three more people in our delivery team.
Yeah, I've seen the comments about our em-trak website. I'm not sure that I agree that it's clunky. What's clunky for some is clear to others. I don't think it's perfect, and it can certainly improve, and we do that in an iterative process. I mean, I think it's dangerous with all these things. You can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds websites and things like that. We've evolved it in a proper way and a slow way. We don't spend a lot of money on marketing because that's just vanity. I do take your point that it can be improved, and there are improvements coming, but we do that in an iterative process. I don't agree that it's awful and stuff.
The SRT website has not been touched for ages. Again, we're not short of inquiries. It doesn't look very good and what have you at the moment. That is something that is on the list to do this year. I figured that our limited resources, product management, and ourselves needed to really focus on dealing with the customer inquiries of which we have plenty of. There isn't anybody looking for AIS who never misses us. We will be investing a little bit of time and money on our marketing, but it's not gonna be huge sums. Yeah, as SRT markets a leading product, is the company subject to requests from companies wishing to expand through acquisition? Something I'm not really gonna answer.
I don't think it's for me. I run the company, I don't own the company. You guys do. Certainly, given the market that we're in, there are people that wanna get into it and value what we've got. That's not really something that I'm gonna talk about right now. On cash, you want some detail on the cash situation. Well, again, I can't give you any insight other than what we've announced. We did an equity raise of GBP 4.8 million, GBP 4.9 million. And as we said at year end, we had GBP 5.9 million of cash. I know from the particular person who's saying that's not much, lucky you. For us, that's a lot.
We're happy with that situation. Bearing in mind, we're also now invoicing customers for equipment that we had bought over a year ago, so that we were in a position to deliver quickly. I think I have. I'm just gonna refresh that. I've answered everybody's questions. If you have any more questions, do email me or Richard Hurd, our CFO, or Neil Peniket, our COO, or Jean-Francois, our Director of Product Management. It doesn't always have to be me. You can email anybody you like at SRT. You're always welcome to come and visit. This year, we will do a face-to-face AGM and investor open day as well. All being well, we won't see any more restrictions and what have you. That'll be great.
That'll be back to normal, and you can come and see and kick the tires and talk to all the other people in the company. I hope today has been useful, and I will try to come back to you in you know within the next three months or so. This is not gonna be event-driven, so when we sign a contract and announce it, there won't suddenly be a webcast to discuss it in detail because there'll be nothing to discuss other than we've signed a deal worth X. I'll try and do it a little bit more regularly every three to four months to update you on the operations of the business as well as obviously RNSs when there are material events.
Thank you all very much for your support. I appreciate we've tested your patience, and, see you soon. Thank you. Bye.