Welcome to the annual general meeting of SRT Marine Systems plc. It's now shortly after 11:00 A.M., and as a quorum is present, I declare the meeting duly constituted and open. Let me begin by introducing my fellow directors. Simon Tucker, as you know, and you'll be hearing a lot from a little later on. Simon Rogers, our non-exec director. Richard Hurd, our Chief Financial Officer. I think you've all had a chance to speak to them individually through the morning. As I said, Simon will be presenting in a little while. We'll turn now to the formal business of the meeting. The notice of the AGM can be found in the back of your annual report, and accounts starting on page 56. With your permission, I would like to take the notice as read, if there are no objections. Thank you. Resolution 1.
The first item of business before you is to receive the accounts and the report of the directors for the year ended March 31st, 2021. Before I put the Resolution 1 to the meeting, do any of the shareholders have any questions regarding the annual accounts? Good. I can't see you very well. Take these off. I now propose that the annual accounts for the year ended 31st of March 2021, together with the reports of the directors and the report of the auditors, be received. All those in favor. Thank you. All those against. Thank you. Proxy votes were 41 for, two against, and three withheld. One discretionary being 2,007,000 shares for and 3,000 shares against. 19,700 shares withheld and 100 shares discretionary. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried. The resolution two is the reappointment of our auditors.
Resolution 2 deals with the appointment of the auditors. I now propose that Nexia Smith & Williamson Audit Limited be reappointed as auditors. All those in favor. Thank you. All those against. Thank you very much. Proxy votes were 42 for, 4 against, and 2 withheld, being 1,997,000 shares for and 12,305 against, and 24,500 shares withheld. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried. Number three. Resolution 3 is auditors remuneration. Resolution 3 relates to auditors remuneration. I now propose that the directors be authorized to determine the remuneration of Nexia Smith & Williamson Audit Limited. All those in favor. Thank you. Against. Again, thank you. Proxy votes were 44 for and three against, being 2,026,000 shares for and 4,761 shares against. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried. Now on to the re-election of directors. Firstly, Simon Rogers.
The company articles of association require one-third of the directors to retire by rotation each year. This year, Simon retires by rotation and being eligible, seeks re-election. The directors and the nomination committee has considered his reappointment and recommends re-election to shareholders. All those in favor. Thank you. All those against. Proxy votes were 44 for, and two against, and one withheld, being 2,028,000 shares for, 3,000 shares against, and 100 shares withheld. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried. Thank you, Simon. Re-election of Neil Peniket. Neil Peniket also being eligible seeks re-election. The directors again, and nomination committee, has considered his reappointment and recommends re-election to shareholders. All those for. All those against. Thank you. Proxy votes were 44 for, and two against, and one withheld, being 2,028,473 shares for, and 3,000 shares against, and 100 shares withheld. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried with joy.
Resolution 6 deals with the director's authority to allot shares to a nominal value of £54,751, 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, be approved. All those in favor. All those against. Thank you. Proxy votes were 39 for, six against, and three withheld, being 1,989,986 shares for, and 33,144 against, and 7,444 shares withheld. Thank you. I declare the resolution carried. I'm now moving on to special Resolution 7. This special resolution authorizes directors, and it's called a disapplication of preemption rights.
This special resolution authorizes directors to issue shares up to approximately 10% of the company issued share capital without offering them to shareholders first. This gives the directors the 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. Thank you. All those against. Thank you. Proxy votes were 35 for. One more against that I can see. That's 10 against, four withheld, and one discretionary, being 1,868,015 shares for 113,241 shares against, 41,000 shares withheld, and 7,331 shares discretionary. I have one against in the room, but overall, we have a majority to carry. Thank you. On that basis, 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 our Marine business and will then answer any questions you may have. Thanks, Simon.
Guys? It's done. It's done? Yeah. We're on? Right. Okay. If you've got questions, interrupt. I think that's the easiest thing. I want it to be interactive. A lot of this, a lot of you will have heard over the years again and again and again. Some of you are new, so maybe you're interested to hear it. Those of you that are online, ask questions. I don't have the tablet at the moment. That's being sorted out. Do ask questions, and I'll come back to it. If I'm asked questions here, I'm going to repeat them because the mics won't pick up your questions, and nobody here is being filmed. If you're online and you're anonymous, you can ask spiky, nasty questions, and I don't know who you are. That's fine. You can ask them here if you want as well.
Let's do a little summary. The last 18 months, I suppose, has been a period of forced consolidation. The reality is it's been disappointing financially. The contracts have been delayed than we expected. On the other hand, it's given us time to catch up on the development side and actually catch up on the planning of our delivery of these projects, and be able to get ourselves into a real situation where we're much more confident about delivering these things smoothly.
I think it's well to remember, and even we have had to sort of wake up to the fact that a GBP 50 million contract is a serious, big. It's a big number for a big reason, and that year has enabled us to make a lot of consolidation, a lot of change, and a lot of improvements to be in a position to ramp up much more quickly. On the transceivers side, we've maintained our revenues. We did think it would drop dramatically. The reality is, we were level pegging with that. In the new year, we've seen a return to growth. I think that's a credit to the product, that's a credit to our dealers, that's a credit to our sales team and support team that has maintained the supply into the market.
I think it's a general reflection of there's this very slow, lumbering snowball of more and more people wanting AIS transponders in the leisure and commercial markets. Most commercial vessels have some kind of regulation now that really require them to operate an AIS transponder, and smaller and smaller leisure vessels are fitting these as standard. The existing systems contract has continued to progress. We received GBP 13 million worth of payments. It was funny when we first sort of signed all these contracts, the first question is, "Ooh, these foreign governments, are they going to pay?" Actually, our experience is I'd rather have a contract with a foreign government than our own government. They pay regularly. Sometimes the wrong amounts, and I'm thinking of our guys in the Middle East and stuff, but they pay us. There's no credit risk there.
We've got some follow-on contracts coming from existing customers that we've got, both in the Middle East and also in BFAR in the Philippines, which will see the start for the first time of material data revenues, recurring revenues. We're looking at negotiating at the moment a 10-year contract with them. The money shot, obviously, is the bit at the end, which everyone is waiting for, is these big system contracts. I'm not going to blame COVID for everything. I think COVID has created a drag. It's been an anchor on the process. The contracting is complex, and government contracting is complex. All these countries have gone from very loose procurement systems in the last few years to completely the other way, very rigid procurement systems. Why? Because they want to get rid of corruption.
Actually, that's not a bad thing for us because we play with a very straight bat. We try to win these projects by persuading them our system is the best. Then it goes through a fair procurement process. We've got about GBP 125 million of our VSP, and I will talk specifically about this mythical VSP that lots of people have skepticism about, that are really there and really wonderful intents and purposes, and there's about GBP 71 million of those that we expect in the latter part of this financial year and about GBP 54 million worth of contracts to come shortly after that. That's the summary of the business that we're all vested in. What is our business? Just for those of you, to remind you. We're all about Maritime Domain Awareness.
You can't imagine the aviation without air traffic control. Really in the marine world, it's only really coming out of that, it's like World War II movie with the scopes, with a blip, and you can see this green blip on the horizon. People expect to see air traffic control type levels of control. That comes down to our transceivers business in the leisure and commercial markets, where we're selling safety and navigation transponders, and a systems division where we're providing integrated maritime surveillance, which is delivering intelligence to maritime authorities so they know where to send their patrol boats, they know who's doing the bad things. Actually it becomes a deterrent because if you can imagine, and this shows Southeast Asia, I mean Philippines is over 2 million square kilometers of EEZ.
They have 8,500 islands at low tide, and that changes at high tide, but inordinate numbers of coverage that they need to monitor. What are the drivers? I always think that when you're asking me about where are the contracts and all these sorts of things, it actually comes down to do they want to buy the system? If you don't believe that they want to buy what we're selling, then sell your shares. The market drivers are important to understand. The first one is security. All these countries are worried about their maritime security, coastline. We see this on our own coast, boats of immigrants arriving, all this sort of stuff. Can we track them? Do we know if they're coming? Imagine if you're in Southeast Asia, where you have all sorts of sovereignty issues.
You have Papua New Guinea and the proximity to the Philippines and Indonesia and Malaysia and Brunei, they're all sort of mixed up together. They're all very worried about their security and their maritime security and border control. Today, there's very little. They don't know who's entering their exclusive economic zones and territorial waters. They want systems to be able to give them that maritime security that they've got used to in aviation, but that they don't have in the marine world. Environment. For years, people didn't really worry about the environment. "I'll just catch an extra few fish. It's just me quietly on the reef," and stuff, or, "It doesn't matter if I take the coral and things." It's been so pervasive, now they're seeing, the fishermen now are seeing that the fish are getting smaller and smaller.
They recognize the need to protect their environment. They recognize the need that the tourists will go to the Philippines and Indonesia if Bali is pristine. It's not so interesting if somebody's been there pouring cyanide into the water or using dynamite to go fishing. You can't believe that somebody would pour cyanide in the water to kill the fish, to then catch them, because it's easier than sticking a line in. It happens. They recognize they need to control these huge, beautiful areas of the environment. Safety, and it is at the bottom for a reason as a driver. It's actually oddly not the primary driver for them acquiring systems, but it is an important thing.
You have in these island nations, you have lots of ferries and stuff, and we read every so often there's a disaster and there's 600 people on it, and it gets tipped over because it's hit another boat in the middle of the night and things. They want to be able to monitor the traffic and make sure that the ship doesn't hit the oil rig, which is producing the revenues for them through taxes and stuff. Why are they looking to buy these systems? There's a massive need for security, environmental protection, and safety. That's why they're starting on this macro trend of, I want a surveillance system to tell me where the problem areas are, because my area is so big and I can't cover it all with my traditional patrol boats.
What all that comes together is, and why we made this decision five years ago to get into the systems market from just selling transponders, is it's a macro demand trend, and that's underpinning this business and I dare say your investment decision and our decision to invest our lives in this business. As I've said, in the systems business, we have governments who suddenly realize that their marine domain is open completely and has no or minimal surveillance. We provide them with a solution to that, and that's an integrated maritime surveillance system. We call it the SRT MDA system, and the core of that is our GeoVS software suite, which if you've seen the demo system, you'll realize isn't just a sort of little web app for that with some triangles on it and stuff.
This is a complex, sophisticated system and it enables them to remotely, persistently have surveillance of their EEZ and beyond. Fuses satellite and terrestrial and patrol sensors and really gives them intelligence that they can then act on. In transceivers, you have AIS and VHF, and now really the established global data and voice communication systems that's used on boats. You will rarely find a boat, of which there are about 26 million worldwide, without a VHF radio of some sort. They are gradually fitting AIS. We are still right at the beginning, maybe 400,000, 500,000 boats have an AIS transponder. Probably 80% of those have come from Somerset here, which is a remarkable figure over the last decade or so. There's increasing regulation, there's increasing requirement for or awareness of safety. Particularly during COVID, people want to go further afield because the boats become more capable.
That means that they actually cross shipping lines, and they want to know if they're going to get in inclement weather that they can see each other. Actually, just a radar dot or a radar return is just not sufficient. We just continue to see that long-term trend, and that's reflected in the transceivers business, which hasn't met that £10 million revenue target yet, but is not far away. If I talk about our transceivers division, which is headed by Louise, we have three bits to it. We have our OEM and module. This is the bit that supplies brands. If you want to integrate AIS into your product portfolio because of all the demand drivers, you can come to us and you can short-circuit that very long and complicated development process of developing what is a sophisticated radio transceiver.
We're particularly clever at doing radio communications transceivers. Remember, the heritage of this company for 30 years was we developed satellite transceivers, and it was radio, and that's how we got into this whole thing. What we started to see is we saw when COVID came in, everybody canceled their orders for new boats. Oh my God, the world's going to be a complete disaster. We all need to move to New Zealand. They just canceled all their boat orders. We saw a drop in our OEM and module business. People started to come out of COVID, and they renewed all the orders, actually we're now seeing that come back up again because people think actually boating is an escape. Prices of boats have gone up and all that sort of stuff. We're now seeing that reverting back to that steady growth.
AIS has gone from an accessory product in big marine electronics brands to being a product segment of its own. We see a huge amount of opportunity using our ability to provide a marine electronics brand owner, perhaps somebody like Raymarine or Garmin or somebody like that, with an AIS solution to expand into VHF radio supply to them as well. I'll talk about that in a minute. In em-trak, we saw a drop in sales in the first six months last year, again, because everybody wasn't allowed to go to the marinas. I can't go and put an em-trak transponder on the boat. Pretty quickly, that reverted back, and again, people saw boating as an escape. As a result of that, we've seen that really start to accelerate. There's further regulations.
Greece has a new regulation where more people are required to have it. If you're a foreign boat coming into Greece, you must have one. A place like Gabon randomly has just introduced a regulation and stuff. We're seeing really good growth in em-trak. The positioning of em-trak, for those that aren't clear about that, is that is our own brand, and we sell to dealers and we sell to end users. We're selling to marine electronics companies, and they're selling to their own dealers and to end users, but they typically buy a big package for their big boats. Finally, but not least, we have what we call DAS, which is digital aids to navigation. Again, we invested in this about five, six years ago to create what is the world's best AtoN. Why is it the world's best AtoN?
Predominantly because it's small and has very low power consumption. Because if you think this needs to go on a buoy, there isn't just a three-pin plug that you can plug the thing into. You actually have to have a solar panel system and everything else. If it consumes lots of power, all of a sudden you have big battery, big solar, and it either topples over because it won't fit or it becomes a much more expensive fit. We see a huge opportunity here and this because there are tens of thousands of buoys that started off by just having a bell and somebody put a light on them, and the next thing is to electronically mark them. Why?
The boats are now having AI so they can receive those transmissions, and they can display them on their PCs and on their chart plotters. It's all interlinked, but this is a hugely complicated radio product. It enables long-distance environment monitoring as well from buoys. You've got autonomous vessels as well that need to be marked. We see a big opportunity in AIDN. We're really now starting to see that. In fact, last year, all of them generated about the same gross profit contribution for the business. Going forward, what are we doing? In our OEM and module business and in our em-trak business, we're improving our existing products. We're looking at introducing things like, there's an addition to the AIS standard, or it's separate, called VDES, which provides greater data communication.
We're also looking at bringing in a new product which combines VHF and AIS, which is called NEXUS. I'm not going to show you any more of the product than that. We're probably halfway through the development. The market fit here is, I just said to you earlier that pretty much every vessel has a VHF radio, and more and more of them wanting AIS. They both use a similar sort of communication method, and we see a big opportunity of fusing the two together in a very innovative way. This is a very big project for us. It enters us into a much bigger market. From 2023, we expect that to have a substantial effect on our transceivers business in terms of revenue and could be I'm not going to put any forecasts out there at the moment.
We believe there's a substantial global market. It plays to our development capability of being able to really integrate VHF communications in a clever way. We have spent a lot of time forming what's called a product management committee, which comprises a lot of professional sailors and boat people to really get their opinion around the usability of the technology. It's very easy as a technology business, we make something perform fantastically, but then it's rubbish to use. It's very tricky to use. We believe that we've come up with a range of products, it's not just one product, that really innovates in the way that the boat owner can access VHF communication and access AIS technology. We will launch this at METS in November this year to OEMs, and it will start shipping at the end of next year, we hope.
Just for Neil's, well, all our benefit here, is the complexity of this product is not to be underestimated with why it's valuable. Whilst we're forecasting December next year when we will start shipping, we might be a few months out from that because this is a substantial development. Oh, two questions at once. Go.
I've got a question. Why launch this year if there were concerns about?
You launch to OEMs and brand owners, they plan their product portfolio one, two, three years ahead of time. You want to launch it to them. We have the credibility. If I go and talk to a marine electronics brand, it's not that we lack the credibility to produce this. When you have that discussion, there's none of that. It's a question of the timing so that they have the time to plan, "How do we integrate that into our product portfolio?" Both marketing wise, because they print the brochures for next year, this year.
If it's like that, they will need it.
It's not if or when. It's a question of introducing it at the right time, and they need a year to plan that into their product portfolio. It also has quite a lot of integration possibilities to really integrate with all their various other marine electronics, and they need to do some work.
Can I ask you what price point that will be in relation to?
You can, but I'm not going to answer it.
Okay.
Yeah. Very competitive. The key thing here, and I think I've made the point here, there's a substantial global market at the right price. If it's like 10 grand, everyone's going to go, "Wow, it's fantastic," but ain't going to buy it. If it's GBP 5, everybody would buy it. It's not GBP 5 either.
You're actually good on the volume, so actually maybe you set up the right price.
We're looking to be in the middle market. Correct me if I'm wrong here, the volumes that we operate at don't really make a material difference on the price. It comes down to the integration of the design right at the start. The difference between making 5,000 and 20,000 units in electronics might save us a few percentage points. It's only if you, I don't know, went from 5,000-
100,000. Would that be fair?
Yes. Mobile phone, laptop, TV.
Yeah.
Millions of components. That's when you really get economies of scale. At our level of tens of thousands, whether it's 8,000 or 10,000 doesn't make any difference to component pricing.
We're really excited about that, and that in our transceivers division is the focus of 90% of the R&D right now, and we're just coming up to prototype stage of the first prototype and the proving of it, et cetera. We've already started ordering components, just to give you an idea how far ahead you have to start to plan all of these things. We're a long way down the line with this exciting product, and it really is, in our view, game changing in the market. That's transceivers. Is that clear as to where we're going with that? We've got a great business, which is growing 10%-20%, and we've got this product coming at the end of next year, which could super turbocharge this.
The development cost is written off as you go, or is it?
It's capitalized per our policy, yep. Then we start to amortize it over five years once it starts selling. If the product stops selling or doesn't sell, we write it off the minute it stops selling.
Right. That is volume dependent, though, the write-off per item.
No, it is a straight line over five years.
Yes, if you divide it by the number of items, it costs more per item to write it off if you have a lower volume.
I believe we just take the capital cost.
We just take the amount of the cost to develop the product.
Yes.
It could be 20 or 100,000 feet, and then we divide it by 60 months, a five-year period, and then amortize it straight line over that period.
We don't attribute it to each particular unit?
No.
We don't attribute the amortization to any particular unit or a number of units.
No.
It's the setup and the startup cost that's taken care of.
That's right.
Yeah.
I don't feel that's answered your question. We haven't understood it.
No, what I was doing was dividing the amount of write-off in a year to the number of units you were moving in a year and doing a mental calculation.
of write-off per unit.
I think the other way to repeat that back to you, if we obviously sell 10,000 a year as opposed to 5,000 a year, the development cost attributable per unit will be higher and lower accordingly. The way we treat it in the accounts is we just take the cost, let's say GBP 3 million, and we're going to sell that for five years. We just divide three into five and take the charge in the accounts each year to keep it simple. Yeah, sorry. Any question?
If you haven't, do you believe there's a material background that can see the business? Any projections going forward any stage?
No, not yet. That's the reason why we do. If you look at the VHF radio market alone, it's 10, 20, 30 times bigger than the AIS market. The question is what percentage of that we will take for the price point, and we can do all sorts of analysis, which we have done in assumptions and stuff. I wouldn't want to say anything to the market until we've gone and spoken to the OEMs, which is the initial introduction later this year. Me being cautious for a change. Yes.
At the last budget, the chances are they gave a generous R&D, like a boost rather than getting 100% of what we get, 130%. This is my fuzzy memory. I thought there was something in the last budget, the chance of R&D.
Well, we get R&D tax credit, which you would probably know better than me.
Yes. Each year, we get an R&D tax credit, which we convert that into cash. It's 130%, I think it is, of the R&D spend that we're able to claim.
If you spend GBP 100, you get GBP 130?
You get, yeah, 130.
In cash back.
Yeah. If you spend £100, you get GBP 130, marked by 15%.
Yeah. Thank you. Okay. The systems division. I'm not going to read what it says there, but basically, our product is the SRT MDA system, and that system comprises lots of different components all together. What it delivers, as I said earlier, to the government, is intelligence of what's going on in their maritime domain. I'll talk about what's unique about our system and why we believe that governments are so interested in buying it. I drew this diagram because I wanted to sort of try and explain what goes into the system because people always think of us as just transponders business. Of course, our heritage was transponders, but transponders is just part of a project. Actually, some of our projects, there's no transponders. Actually, if you ask delivery, they're like, "Yay.
No transponders in the project because that is actually the tricky bit and actually the lower margin part. We talk about our SRT MDA system. The core of it is the blue bits. That is GeoVis, and it's the software that glues together all the data from the sensors that we have supplied, which were agnostic to whichever sensors, with the operators, and gives them the functionality that they can see on their screen, if you saw the demo, where they're able to see a fusion of multiple different satellites, multiple different sensor types on those satellites with terrestrial, because satellite is by necessity, is a lower resolution than terrestrial. You need to fuse all of that together, and you then need to make sure all that data is distributed.
We have what we call our hub system, which is a set of servers all running our GeoVS HUB software. What that does is take in all the data and distributes that around the network because you might have 50 different operators. If you take our fisheries project in Philippines, there are 17 different fisheries monitoring centers spread across a huge country, all in different locations. When they sit in front of their consoles, I think there are about 60 consoles on that project. They're all sharing the same data. They're all able to communicate with each other. At the same time, they can all operate as a team, but individually. It creates a great deal of efficiency, and that is our GeoVS console software, which then gives them all that functionality. That is the monitoring system.
It needs to have data. The data comes from different sensor systems. It might be a terrestrial coast station. That terrestrial coast station might have different sensors on it. It could have a radar, a camera, AIS, RF detection, which you can triangulate because a vessel might not have an AIS transponder, but it has a radar, and you can pick that up and triangulate, and therefore, you can see that there's something there. As far as I'm aware, fish and whales don't walk around with a radar on their head. It must be a boat. You have the coast stations. You have satellites when you're further out away from the coastline. If you're near a coastline, this is what you want, out to your territorial waters, which is out to 12 nautical miles. Beyond that, you have satellites.
There's thousands of satellites. They are all with thanks to Mr. Musk and all his rich friends and stuff, loads of satellites going up all the time with all sorts of different sensors and all sorts of different data available. We accept all of that from light detection, RF detection, infrared, AIS, could be Iridium, Inmarsat, all of that data can feed into the hub. Patrol vessels, all of our customers, coast guards, even the fisheries, will have vessels roaming around. We can stream back from there all the data that their own radar and AI systems are fitting up. It's like a sort of roving coast station, if you will. Also drones, which are now used, and you can stream that back. Finally, field personnel. We have a product called GeoVS Connect, which enables a mobile phone.
They can go and do an inspection in the port, scan the barcode on a vessel, or make an inquiry to an owner of a vessel, and all that information all feeds back into the hub. All of this will depend on the project. There might be 50 of those, there might be none of those. It might just be satellite. There might be no satellite and just coast stations. There might be none of those and just that. Well, the first phase of the project is just that, and some of these, and a few of those. It's all modular, so it can be built over time. Because no one customer comes to you and says, "I want the." Well, they actually do.
They start off saying, "I want the complete system and thousands of coast stations and operators and stuff." You say, "Well, it's going to cost you GBP 500 million." They say, "Well, actually, we were thinking about GBP 20 million." You sort of start to break that down. Finally you have transponders on boats. Not all transponders have boats, but not all transponders have it, not all boats have transponders. We will now sell the transponders. The SRT MDA system comprises of all of that, and each project is slightly different in its mix, but it'll always have our GeoVis.
Simon, could I ask you a question? On the subject of satellites, I've read a message from one of your major shareholders the other day talking about exactEarth being taken over by Spire.
Yep.
I just wondered if there's any particular significance for SRT in that takeover?
Not particularly. I think it's great. Spire is a satellite operator. They've been aggressively putting satellites up. exactEarth has had its own, well, had its AIS transceivers on somebody else's satellite systems. For us, it's just another source of satellite data.
Okay.
We're agnostic. We don't mind who that is. What we see is the satellite landscape changing all the time. What isn't changing is the requirement for the national authority to be able to use that data in an intelligent way and fuse it with all their other information. I think the point here is no one sensor source gives you the solution. You need multiple sources. We have designed our system to be agnostic. All of this is sourced externally. Be it, I don't know, Kelvin Hughes or Terma or FLIR or Silent Sentinel, whoever it might be. All of that comes together, so if you then deploy that system, you have this unique multilayer system. Here you have the coast stations giving you full and continuous coverage along your coastline. Actually, that's where the density of the vessels are.
As you go further out, you can imagine it's bigger and bigger vessels. It's less and less of them. Here, when you've got lots of activity and stuff, and also little coves and smuggling and all the rest of it, you need to have really high-resolution surveillance in your ports, port entry and exits and things, and therefore, you have your coast stations. You then have satellites that are scanning the whole time, and you have different types. They scan for AIS, they scan for radio detection or light detection, or radar emissions, whatever it might be. You have drones then flying around also scanning, and you have the patrol vessel scanning. This bit beyond the territorial waters is constantly subject to scanning, all of that being fed together. That's actually what the system ends up looking like. What does that mean for us revenue-wise?
Is, of course, once they've got the monitoring system, they want to have more and more coast stations. You gradually build that over time. You have a succession of projects. Once you've actually got the buggers to sign up the first one, Can we edit buggers out of that? Probably not, but anyway. You want a succession of contracts for them to expand their coast station network. We will then have more and more satellite data coming as more and more satellites go up, and the software they've got, which is GeoVis, our software, is the one that harnesses it. I wanted to talk about some of the special bits, because again, I often get questions about, well, so what? Everybody else has got systems that do analytics and things like that.
It's very easy to say all of that. What's unique about our system and why are people buying? It starts with really we're offering our customer intelligence-based maritime operations. I think of a coast guard in Southeast Asia that has something like 200 boats. Sounds a lot. They have 2 million sq km to cover and 8,500 islands. These people go out and do a patrol. Actually, what they need to do is to be able to spot the hotspots and go to those particular places, or if there's a particular problem, be dispatched there. Actually, I was told a story this morning by somebody who went over to France in their boat and went into the port and came back again.
I was amazed actually, because we always criticize U.K. Border Force, and U.K. Border Force was there waiting for them as they came into U.K. territorial waters. The surveillance system said, "Oh, the pattern of that person is a bit peculiar, and so we will dispatch a boat to be waiting for them," as opposed to just randomly patrolling and being in the wrong spot at the wrong time and coming across the problem by chance. This is what it's enabling. What's unique about it, what we've managed to do in a pretty short period of time is, as I said, we can integrate and fuse all this data from all these different types of sensors. Up to 200 different coast station sites, each with multiple sensors on them. 20 different satellite constellations, each with multiple satellites and types.
500 field operators all around in different ports, all randomly at different times, accessing the system, getting information, updating the information, 200 system operators all in different locations, all operating as a team. That hub network, if you remember that blue pillar, that is what is enabling. That's a unique ability in a system. This isn't a web-delivered system, because it's locally in a country, because the country wants to control their data. If you go in and see a coast guard and say, "Well, okay, well, your data's going to be stored in a Google service somewhere over in Silicon Valley" as a security organization, national security organization, you'll say, "Forget it. I want control of my system in my country." To achieve all of that without being a web-delivered system is quite remarkable on a rock solid, reliable basis.
You've got to think about all the connectivity. I don't know about you, not everybody has glass fiber and perfect internet connectivity. The reality is, you go to these countries, and it's fluctuating up and down because of usages and attenuation and stuff. Built into our system is the ability to dynamically manage all of that. Does a coastal camera continue to stream high definition video at 70 frames a second when the connectivity drops? Do you then change that to one frame a second? Boats don't move that quickly, you don't need to have 70. It's nice to have a high definition video, it's all right to have a picture once a second. You at least see what the thing is. The effect on the backbone network is dramatic. We have enhanced digital visualization.
In the end, once you've got all that data, we're visual people, and so we use dynamic 3D and things, gaming technology, that really delivers advanced situational awareness. We've got used to that with games and things like that, and we've now brought that into the commercial space. Again, not an easy thing to deliver when you're talking about scale. You've seen in the demo system there, just in that little area in the demo system, is 70,000 vessels being tracked. To be able to convert that into a digital environment is tricky. We have an extensive Vessel Identification System. All the vessel details, but also its ownership, its history of its ownership. What is its license status?
Have they been a naughty ship over the period of time, and they've got lots of alerts and things, and therefore need to go on a special watch list or whatever it might be? All of that is embedded within that and available to all of these 200 system operators. At any time, they can find out where those boats are. Configurable analytics, I think Jeff made the point to you that we're looking at the demo system, that it looks fantastic, 70,000 boats, but most of them are just going about their business. What you need to do is to be able to look at the behavior, both individually and relative to each other, and spot where there might be a suspicious vessel of interest that you need to investigate a little bit further, get some more information on before you send out a patrol boat and stuff.
We have developed our own analytics engine with some very particular capabilities that enable us to handle that sort of quantity. You're constantly scanning the whole EEZ the whole time, and the bad guys or the vessels of interest are being alerted. Once you've got the alert, what the hell do you do with it? Often forgotten in these things. We have a whole action management system in there that enables the operator to request to his superior, "I need to get a helicopter to go and save those people. I need a huge coast guard boat to go there because a ferry is turned over, or I need a gunboat because I think that there's some smuggling going on, and it's likely to be armed in that particular area." They can actually do something about it, including automated responses.
We had one of our customers in the Middle East, and they switched on a whole load of analytics and stuff, and within a few days, they had sort of 6,000 alerts. What do you do with 6,000 alerts? They have eight operators. Well, I can tell you what you do, sort of just switch them all off and ignore it, unless you have an action management. Most of it's speeding and things like that. Well, the system can generate an email and send that to the guy that was speeding, who now goes, "Gosh, I'm being watched." It becomes a deterrent. I don't know about you guys, I find them irritating, the average speed cameras. They work, right? Because you know you're going to get a ticket. The same principle applies here. We have things like Electronic Fish Catch Reporting.
When you're in fisheries, one thing is going out at the right time and fishing in the right place, but it's how much fish you catch and what you catch. We have a system now that goes on their phone or in a kiosk, like an ATM thing in the port, and they key in what they're catching as they're catching it. It automatically gets transmitted back to the monitoring system.
They can file their mandatory reports. The fisherman can actually see for the first time, "Oh, when I was over here, I caught all of this, and when I was over here, I caught that." The system can say, "Well, I can see over here that the catch productivity is going down, and so what I need to do is to put a temporary quota on that area and stop people going there." All that intelligence starts to come through. Reporting, if you're going to make policy, you need to have reports as to where all this stuff is happening. This is what the MDA system does. The reason I've sort of droned on about this a little bit is that I do think sometimes people wonder why it's taking so long to develop.
To have these big ticket prices comes with some serious functionality, which is why these customers are coming to us to buy this system. Nobody offers this level of integration and functionality in the system. The reason we've been able to do that is we started five years ago from a blank piece of paper. We weren't lumbered by just starting with a port system or a small idea. We were able to say, "We think people want national maritime surveillance," and we were able to start with that vision and build up to that, where we are today.
I know these are all very wordy slides, and Richard did say they're all a bit wordy, but they stayed because I thought I need to explain the process. I thought it'd be worth going through the sales process, because I know everybody, including my mom, wonders why it takes so long for us to sign contracts and get to that point and get going. I just wanted to go through this a little bit. The first thing is they decide, the government decides they're interested in improving maritime surveillance. That it doesn't need us to go and market it to them and show them pretty pictures and stuff. They arrive at that conclusion themselves. The whole world is there already. They want to know what's going on in their marine domain, and they then make an inquiry. We are very well-known in the industry now.
Everybody that's thinking about doing that makes an inquiry to us. Just this week, Gabon, Libya, I think this morning. Everybody finds us and comes to us. We then exchange information with them. They typically say, "I want a maritime surveillance system." "Okay, what exactly do you want?" Silence normally. They don't really know what they want. What you need to do is to start taking them through what they might want, and we present the MDA system in concept and then start to mold it to what their ideas are, because all of them are slightly different. "Oh, I don't have anywhere to put a coast station because it'll get stolen, so I need to have satellite in that area, but I can put a coast station on that island there, and will it give me coverage?
I want to see 5,000 miles with it." You have to say, "Well, actually, no, you can see 50 miles with it." That's the reality. What that does is give them the information to enable them to make an internal proposal to their parent agency. Typically, a coast guard or fisheries agency will have no budget. They will have no power to contract on their own. They are an operational agency within a ministry, and this bit is about getting the information they need to make their idea into a proper proposal with a plan and a budget. Their boss will say, "Well, how much is this gonna cost?" They don't know. GBP 10 million, GBP 100 million, or GBP 1. At that point, they then go off and try to get some political approvals and what have you.
If they get that, the agency starts to intensify their discussions with those that they like, those that they feel that has the system that fits their needs, has an approach that fits their needs. It's at this point that you then know that they're serious or not, because they won't go past this unless they've had their parent agency say, "Yes, actually, this is great. The budget sounds okay. Let's work up a detailed project plan." For us, this is the key bit. This is actually where you win the project. Not down here. Because you've got to persuade them that it's your system that they want, and therefore, they will specify your system. Because all of the procurement is a competitive tender, full stop. Obviously, what you want to do is to try and make it as hard as possible for everybody else.
You want to talk about the fusion of terrestrial and satellite. You want to talk about the importance of a dynamic network and visualization and all those different things. That is the key thing. You really get a good feel for that because either they're constantly on the phone for you, increasingly, or less and less, and obviously, they're talking to somebody else, not you, and they prefer somebody else's system for whatever reason. This process can take years. It's not a short process, and it's an education process. People say to me, "Why don't you charge for it?" I can send them the bill, it'll be the last time I speak to them. They don't have a budget to spend with you.
It's an opportunity, and if we don't do it, somebody else will do it and persuade them to have a simpler, less sophisticated system or whatever, which really isn't what they want. It is an opportunity. It's part of our sales cost. It doesn't mean you're on the phone daily with them, but it's a pretty relentless long, what do you say, Francois? Long process and frustrating at times and stuff?
Very long.
Yeah, calls at 3:00 in the morning, and they don't worry about your time and stuff. You do it with them when they want. It is a long process to educate them because they are serious. They want to understand what system I want, where am I going to put staff, how is it going to work, how is the operate, the CONOPS, as we call it, gonna work, all of that sort of stuff. You get to the point where they now have an internal system specification, and then they take it internally and get the formal approvals. This here is the detailed specification. This is where the coast stations are gonna go, and these particular bits of property, and I've got them, I've got the people available to operate it. This is gonna be the benefit and everything else.
At this point, they actually get formal political approval and the actual budget allocation for the project. At that point, you know that's going ahead. Again, that can take several months. Sometimes it needs to go to Parliament. It can go from, I mean, we've got one country where it goes from what's called the Blue Book to the Green Book, or the other way around. Blue to the Green. Blue to the Green, yeah. The Blue Book is once it's got to here, the Green Book is once it's, okay, the money's done, as opposed to an indicative budget. Once they've granted that approval, they start their procurement process. Every country has its own procurement process. Frequently, it's done by a separate agency, or it requires multiple agencies, particularly now in the Middle East, where they have all the checks and balances.
In one particular country, there's eight agencies, eight individual ministries and agencies that need to sign off on everything to do with it. Your proposal is a few hundred pages. The paperwork that's produced is thousands of pages for all these approvals. That can take some time, and it's just the way it is with government contracting. Once we then get to the tender process, again, the rules of the country apply. We prepare and submit a bid. In some countries, it's very quick. We've got one in Southeast Asia where we know it's four weeks. Once the tender starts, it's four weeks to submit and award. In other countries, in the Middle East in particular, that tender process can be a few months. It can be six months where a decision is made.
I think there was one in Bangladesh, was it nine months for them to process? They kept on asking for delays after the tender had been submitted. Finally, once we have put that in, they evaluate it, then they form who the winner is, designate, then they go through their final contracting process. We know we have won. Actually, we know we have won here, but now you really know that you are just waiting for the contract that has to be produced. They do not allow agencies to issue the contracts themselves. They have to be prepared and approved because they are committing a country to pay. What has happened in the past is an agency has issued a contract to somebody, and they have just been freely committing the country to all these payments.
The poor guy with the checkbook in the Ministry of Finance suddenly gets all these bills, and they haven't really kept track of it. This is the process. It looks terrifying, doesn't it? The good news is the ones that I'm talking about with the GBP 125 million were down here. When you talk about the VSP, it starts here. You've got a large chunk here, and they gradually migrate down to here. The problem is, when I talk about Somebody said to me today, chuckled when he said, "Imminent," my word imminent, which I wish I'd never used. You're always told by these people, "Yep, next week, definitely, I'm expecting to be in a position to have the contract to issue to you." Next week arrives, "Well, actually, Bob wasn't there.
He's coming back next week, and it's currently in that ministry, needs to be signed off. They follow the process, their process, and they have no obligation to draw a flow diagram for you. We're right at the end of these bits here now, with a conveyor belt of opportunities now flowing through. That has taken five years to develop because of all the processes that people need to go to and the complexity of it. We are at the end of that conveyor belt, I'm pleased to say. Is that clear? Okay.
Is there a comment?
I'll stay on the systems division. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but are there any ongoing or initial dialogues or advanced dialogues with U.K.?
No
North America?
No. Nope. I don't know. I think the U.K. and Europe and the U.S. have a different approach. They have established systems and a more of a militaristic system and stuff than. I think probably feel more secure and safe than some of the other places that we go to. This is BFAR. Are there any questions from people who are watching or anything like that?
I've got two, Simon, actually. The first one is just asking about our system, and do we consider it to be the best system on the market, given our knowledge of our competitors, and why?
Okay. First question, just in case anybody heard that, was do we consider our system to be the best in the market, and why? If you're asking me, yes. Yes, of course, I would say that. Jeff, I think, would agree as well. Yep. Why? I think I answered that a few slides before. I think it's the integration of all that data, the analytics of all that data, and all the action management. It's all that functionality that glues together. I'm not going to drone on about that again. Hopefully, that question was answered previously. Is there a second one?
The second one was just to do with the R&D on that. Do we think that we'll need additional funding from shareholders?
On NEXUS, which is our new transceiver product that we're developing, the question was, do we think we'll need additional funding from shareholders to fund that? No. Okay. If there's any more Okay, great. Back to the systems division. We have an existing project with the Philippines, with BFAR. They paid us GBP 13 million in cash last year. There are further payments due this financial year, so we agreed a payment plan with them, and they've been very good payers, I'm pleased to say, and we've made good progress. This is the operations room, and today, the world's largest fisheries system is IMEMS system, I'm proud to say. Oh, question.
The GBP 13 million, when you announced it was stage payments because you hadn't supplied the ship. Has that changed? Or is it part of it?
That's a different-.
13 million?
No. GBP 13 million is the cash pay. We never announced what the cash payments would be. We signed a contract worth about GBP 32 million.
Yes
With the fisheries a couple of years ago, two and a half years ago.
Yes.
We then had staged payments over the four-year term of the project. We're two and a half years into that.
Right.
Last financial year, GBP 13 million of that GBP 32 was paid as scheduled.
Oh, right.
That's all.
It wasn't part. I understood there was a hold-up, and couldn't get the check there or something.
Nope.
No?
Nope.
Okay.
Nope. Despite COVID, there's been really good progress. We've been able to commission all of these monitoring centers. There's still more to come online. On the development side of things, we've significantly improved the SRT MDA system. Like I said at the beginning, this sort of forced consolidation of COVID really has allowed our development team to accelerate. Neil's made substantial improvements in our development methods. We've improved our team, and the level of functionality is day and night difference, and we're continuing to progress that. About every four months, there's a new big release of functionality. It's a never-ending increase in functionality. We see so many different opportunities. Six months? It hasn't been. There's what, 10.3, 10.2.8?
That's the plan.
Yeah. That's the plan. There we go. Okay, we try to do two big releases a year of major functionality. On delivery, we've refined our model a lot. As you know, our model is to use local partners to do the installation. It is absolutely fantastical to think that we would have a team here, and we'd send them to all these different countries, and we would do the installation. You need somebody on the ground with real muscle, real organizational muscle to do the installation, and we have very good local partners. Equally, what we want to do is to minimize our engineering delivery team but maximize their efficiency. What have we done? We now pre-build. These are hubs that are pre-built, ready for the Middle East. Why?
Because the Middle East have told us that when they do finally take their time and issue the contract, which we hope isn't very far away, they want this PDQ. This is all built up and ready to go. Whereas previously, we would ship it all individually in Dell boxes, and then we would scrabble around actually in here doing all the installations and configuration and what have you. We've also improved a lot of the documentation so we can train and support our local partners remotely. It's impossible for Tess and her team to be in five countries, each with two different customers, so 10 different projects all at the same time. Yes, there are airplanes and stuff, but it's a long way from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. It's nine hours and it's just not feasible for the scaling.
We've made a lot of progress with delivery. On the new business, as I've said, we have our validated contract opportunity pipeline about GBP 550 million. GBP 125 million are in their contracting procurement phase, right at the end of that long list process, and GBP 71 million of those are right at the bottom in their final contracting phase, and we just wait, actually, every day, to be told that, there it is, having been told in the case of one of them that it's already been won. There's some others that follow behind that that we think will be shortly behind that. A little bit more about Philippines contract. There are some pictures really of what this sort of thing looks like, the monitoring center. That's the data center, so the hub. There's two of those, where all that data is streaming in m illions and millions of data points continually.
These are some of the towers. There's 15 of these towers that have been built in key ports, so they can monitor all the vessels coming in and out, and they have radar and cameras so they can, if somebody's trying to sneak out without their transponder, and they've circumvented the anti-tamper, they're still picked up on the radar, and the camera can zoom in on them. It's all about catch landings and control and things. These are the transponders that have now been installed. I'm pleased to say there's nearly 1,000 of those now installed, and our local partner has now got the process going properly.
We're doing some marketing support, thanks to Cynthia over there, to actually get the fishermen to think that that's not Big Brother, that's actually a positive, and it's a lovely thing, not a scary thing, and they'll turn up for appointments for our local partner as opposed to saying, "Yes, I'll turn up on Friday to have my transponder," and not turn up. We're making really good progress with that. I wanted to show you this picture. That is your sort of typical large Philippine fishing boat, and this is the installation. You have the transponder sitting here out of the way, and you have what's called your electronic catch terminal up here, and this is where they will then key in all their fish.
A lot of the tuna that we're eating in Waitrose and Tesco is now being tracked and recorded by our system, I'm proud to say. That's the reality of what it looks like. It's not all pristine and glass cockpits and things, and this is the environment that these transponders need to live in. The result of that is then the Philippines is able to track their fishing boats every 15 minutes. That's in the middle of the Western Pacific Fisheries, and you can see all the little dots. Obviously, the space is determined by the speed, and you can see where he is and what he's doing. If you overlay with other vessels, you can see if there's transshipment, if they're doing something a bit that they shouldn't do, if they're actually in the area that they should be, et cetera.
It's a remarkable level of tracking the fishing boats that just isn't seen. In Europe, they're tracked, is it once an hour?
Yep.
Yep. We're doing, I think on average, what is it? Every 12 minutes or something in reality, thereabout.
It's eight minutes.
Eight minutes. See, I am not always over-optimistic. There we go. You can see here, this is a little time lapse of where the fishing boats go. They all come out. Some of them go in their local municipal waters, but a lot of them just go straight over here, and this is what is called Pocket One. This is all Western Pacific Fisheries, and this is all sort of governed by a collective of nations here, because the tuna are all sort of born here, which is the golden triangle, little babies, and then they swim over here. Philippines, got upset that, "I know that they get bigger over here and worth catching, but actually they are mine because they are babies over here, so I will stop them going here." They have a. I know I am simplifying it.
I think that was the principle, right? Kind of. They now have an organization that controls all of these, and they're allowed to fish in this area. The Philippines is able to track all these fishing boats, all remotely, and what they're catching and everything else. When they come back, it's all electronically recorded, like an accounting system. Pretty amazing, I think. From scratch.
What happens if a fishing boat goes out and harvests a lot of fish and then just goes off to a big Chinese supersonic ship and offloads its fish there?
Be tracked.
They don't know what fish they've actually unloaded.
Well, you will see it's called transshipment. The system will automatically detect that fishing boat because they can't disable their transponder because it has anti-tamper. You'll see him go outside of that area. Also you'll see the Chinese fishing boat because we use satellite radar and light detection and things, you'll see them come together, then there'll be an alert. The system will generate an alert. When that Philippine fishing boat comes back, you can say, "Well, look, can you just explain that to me, please?
Got it.
It might not have stopped the event because they're 1,000 mi out at sea, but it becomes a deterrent. I think the fundamental thing with this, if you have a credible system, you have a deterrent. The reality is the fisheries people are not looking to go and beat up the fishermen and stuff and be unpopular. They just, in their interests of the fishermen, they want to conserve the fishing stocks, and they want to do it in a cooperative way. Actually, when you have a credible system, it becomes a deterrent. By showing them these sorts of things, and this is the unenviable task that product management have, and Cynthia, who's recently joined us to work with delivery to help the customer spread that message to the fisherman, because that's all part of the project.
Of course, if it becomes super successful with the fisherman, well, there's another 295,000 of them who also might want to be more proactive about getting on board. That leads to more contracts for us. We've made really, really good progress for that with all our technology all working in anger on a day-to-day basis, and paying us. New contracts, we have two particular areas. We have Middle East. We have two significant projects totaling around $80 million over two years. One, in particular, is $60 million, which will be implemented in three phases, because of the way they want to divide up the country. The tender process is completed. We were informed in the winter 2020 that we had won it. We know we've won it, we've had the backs and everything else.
We're now waiting since then for them to complete all their contract approval, internal contract approval process. Literally, there's about seven agencies that all need to approve these four sets of documents that the particular agency, I nearly said it then, can issue to us. I was there two weeks ago with them to confirm a few minor points, and we're really not far away from that now, and we're all ready to go to ship these very quickly so we can deliver to their timescale, which is what they want it extremely quickly. It's nine months. We have another project, with another country very nearby to the bigger country, who is an existing, very valued customer of ours who bought an AIS system, so our Vessel Identification System. They want to upgrade that to our MDA system with cameras and radars and things.
They now have the funding source sorted. There was a delay on that because they weren't sure where the funding was going to come from. They now know where that is coming from. They're also including a whole bunch of new transponders. They want to replace the ones that were installed six years ago. They've realized through the process they have 6,000 vessels they didn't think they did have. Actually, they want another 6,000 on top of the original 7,500 that they had bought. We expect now that will be in the second half of this financial year, and we'll start that. We have Southeast Asia, where we have some contracts which together are worth about $48 million, which are pending. They have an 18-month delivery time.
We know that all the specifications are done of those. We've seen those along with other people around the place, and we're waiting for their tender processing backlog to be cleared. All the tenders in that particular country go through 1 particular agency, and they're rife with COVID, and it's stop, start, stop, start. They're now back to 30% capacity. We know we're sort of at the end of that sausage factory. Once we sort of plop out the bottom, then it's a one-month tender process. We are just waiting for that to happen. There's nothing for us to do. The actual agencies are more frustrated than me, and I'm more frustrated than you, because they're in desperate need for this. Those are the ones that we hope. I think I was asked earlier that, is this the year?
I think I've been asked that every year. I, having recently been in the Middle East and sat with these two customers, the heads of these organizations. I have seen the documentation that is there, including the actual contracts and things. Short of holding it and showing it to you, I'm not sure what else I can say. I do appreciate that some people sort of wonder about the integrity and the credibility that I keep saying all of those things, but I always sort of have to walk a fine line. Is it better not to say anything and just not tell you about any of that until the contract is issued? Or do I give you a bit of a narrative? Sometimes that means that narrative is wrong on timescales because the agency itself doesn't know, and they won't short-circuit their processes.
The administrators will not short-circuit the process because a border guard or a coast guard or a fisheries want to have it today. My conclusion, rightly or wrongly, is I prefer to tell you what is going on, to tell you the story factually, good and bad, as you know, that when there's bad news, we're straight away on the airwaves as well, so that you can understand why you might be invested in SRT and the scale of the projects that we're going after, as opposed to just say, "I'm not telling you anything until we get a contract," and you have months on silence. Obviously that means that I get things wrong at times, and that's just the way it is. I want to talk about this VSP thing. It's not a mythical thing for your benefit. It's actually something internally.
The problem that we have in sales, and you can shout me down if you want, Francois, is we get so many inquiries. We are not short of inquiries from all sorts of people around the place. We want this, we want that, and all the rest of it. Of course, the new ones are always super exciting because it's fresh opportunity and everything else, and you haven't been ground down by the other ones and stuff. It's so easy to spend huge amounts of time on it to the exclusion of the older ones that perhaps are harder and a little bit more boring, but actually are making steady progress. The purpose of the validated sales pipeline is who is serious and who's just interested, who's just exploring the opportunities.
What we have is a set of standard documentation, which we're trying to improve and standardize even more, that we can just send out. We don't ignore those inquiries, but we just send those out. They're not developed sufficiently for us to go and say, "Okay, well, I'm going to spend huge amounts of time on that. I'm going to fly backwards and forwards to that country to see them. We're going to invest in a demo" and all of that consultancy that costs money because everyone gets paid, that if it's just a general interest. The point here is that we really do talk about is it worth spending the time? Francois and I, every week are just go, "Does this qualify to get into our validated sales pipeline?
Do they have the money? We've had an inquiry from one, I won't mention the country because we're on camera and stuff, we're not going there because we know they don't have any money. They're all super interested in South America, super interested in everything else, we're just not going to because they haven't proven that they've got a decision to proceed with a system, that they really want to do it, that they've had the principal internal political and budget approvals. They really sort of thought through what this is going to cost. We believe that they're serious. It's not just on board today, on a Thursday, what I'll do, I'll call SRT and get them to have a nice presentation and stuff. I can use the conference room, which has got air conditioning, as opposed to my office that doesn't.
The VSP is a real thing. Within that VSP, obviously, there are some that are at the beginning and some that are at the end. It's not just a sort of made-up thing. It's an actual tool that we use. The reason I tell you guys is back to my point earlier, is that otherwise, how do you evaluate the prospects for this company in the absence of forecasts, which is difficult for us to do at the moment? I think the best way is to show these are the scale of the opportunities. This is why we're investing all this money in a really fancy system, because actually, people are prepared to pay these sorts of sums of money, and these are people that are genuinely interested, about 20 of them.
Within that, just to give you some dynamics, the largest is worth about GBP 125 million in that Southeast Asia. The smallest is GBP 400,000 in Africa. The shortest timescale is four months, the longest is three years. That doesn't necessarily link in value. The longest isn't the highest value and stuff. The shortest is that one, by the way, the longest isn't that one. The majority are coast guard and aimed at maritime security, that also then crosses over with IUU, illegal, unregulated, unlicensed fishing. Unreporting. What's that? Unreporting. Unreporting. Okay. I've been saying it wrong for years. There we are. Now I learn. Several are multi-phase projects, once we've done this one, then there's the next one and the next one and the next one because their appetite today is bigger than their tummy, their tummy being their budget.
For example, the one in the Middle East, the bigger one is initially what we call an NAIS vessel identification project. We already know that we're talking to them specifying the next phase, whether they'll add radars and cameras and all sorts of other fancy stuff. They're constantly wanting to improve. Like any IT system, you're constantly wanting to improve. As I said, they're all at different stages. Of them, about 125 million are in that final contracting stage, either just before going to tender, where we know that the tender is four weeks, or after tender, where we've been told we've been awarded it and we're waiting for them to issue the contract and have authority to issue the contract. Hopefully that explains to those that are viewing and also here a little bit more about this VSP, that it's not a fanciful thing.
Interestingly, when we put out these figures, we do need to validate these. I have to get it past Richard, who constantly questions me about it, and Francois about it. Also we then have to validate that with our brokers and stuff. These things aren't just made up. Yeah.
The question is SRT modular?
3 years or so, the London buses come through, you get four or five contracts come through one after another, you get sight of more coming through. What additional sort of infrastructure do you need to introduce to handle GBP 125 million, GBP 200 million over a two-year, thre-year process? We have Tess, it's all okay. You can deliver it. We have Jeff who's specifying it, we have Neil who's developing it. The answer to your question is we've created the functionality pillars of, if you will, the departments that we need to do all of that in the company. I think if you ask everybody here, there's not enough resources in each of those today. There's enough to do this and get started, then we can build the resource under that.
Because of the way we've developed our business model, it doesn't mean that you suddenly get this great big sucking noise in the bank account that we suddenly get all this gross profit, but it's all spent on people to deliver it, and therefore, the net that's left over is pointless. The business is scalable. Does that answer your question? Have we had any questions? Gosh. Either everyone's fallen asleep or it's a good presentation. Summary. Yeah, the last 18 months are frustrating. We've made the best of it, frankly. We really moved our product along and are planning to be able to scale up. I think we're super confident of our ability to do that.
We're not in a perfect resource position, but it would have been madness to carry on hiring lots and lots of people if we didn't have the contracts. We're in a good position courtesy of robust financial management. We don't spend a fortune on all sorts of things. We're constantly watching the pennies, as you would expect. On the systems business, we've made really good progress on the development of the product and on these contract opportunities. They are sitting there. There has been progress. I know you don't hear it, and you want progress to be if you sign the contract. I feel that in the last few months, this sort of quagmire of everything going so-so is really starting to speed up. Even I sometimes go, "Gosh, is this ever going to happen," right?
When I went to the Middle East the other day, it's clear this is just dotting of Is and crossing of Ts. Then we will have to pedal quickly to do the delivery in the timescale. Then on the transceivers, we're aiming for a 10%-20% annual growth, good margins, cash generation. I know it's not as sexy as the systems business, this business is now, this year, it's going to be around a GBP 9 million a year business, could be GBP 10 million a year. With NEXUS coming in 2023, that could be multiple times bigger than that. That's the summary. Any more questions or any questions? Yes, sir.
I'm assuming that if the GBP 135 million delivers, patience will be rewarded. That will allow the company to pay off its borrowings.
Yep.
Accumulate a cash reserve to see it through any potential difficult times. The company could then be having spare cash in the account, which could either be used for buying a bolt-on or possibly starting a dividend.
We have a boat. You've seen it in the back. We have one.
Possibly in two, three years time, a dividend policy.
Well, today, I don't see that there's any bolt-ons to buy at the moment. We've purposely set out to develop all our own stuff, and we're quite clear about the core of our systems and where the value is. In transceivers, nobody does AIS VHF transceivers better than us, in my opinion. The technology and our capability and our GeoVS system is truly unique. We're happy to have invested in those bits. I don't see that we'd buy a radar company or anything like that. We would like to build up that buffer, and then after that, I think as Warren Buffett says, if we can't deploy that cash and give a return, we should return it in the form of dividends.
I know, then some people get ratty about, "Oh my God, I'm going to get taxed on dividends as opposed to capital gains and stuff," or, "We should do share buyback." Let's close these. That's a lovely problem. It's transformational because of the profitability on the software of these systems. Then we'll decide.
As per a formal point perhaps, I want to share as auditing board for SRT. Last week, I posted that I am going to visit the AGM and asked, "Anybody got any questions?" I got one response, and that was, "Enjoy the cakes.
Yeah. Did you enjoy the cakes?
Not yet, no.
Okay. Well, maybe everyone's invested for the cakes, and this was a complete waste of time. I wouldn't blame you. Try the banana cake.
Yeah, right.
The banana cake's very good. Yeah.
For everyone.
Well, I don't know what. Yeah. I wish I could show you other stuff and documentation that I'm not allowed to show you, I think those that have some smidgen of skepticism, it would disappear. There are governments. I can't. When I was with somebody two weeks ago in the Middle East, I was told 10 days. It's the first time I've been given, this is a serious guy, actually a timescale. In my head, I thought, "Okay, well, 10 days, that's more like 20 days." We're sort of just past that 10 days bit. Let's see. He doesn't know. That's the point, because of the way the procurement happens.
We still don't see any serious institutions being interested in the business?
Interested, yes. Not buying. There's definitely a risk aversion. Our stories have been around there for a while. I think the institutions, which by the way only have money because you give them the money, a bit like the government, are looking for slightly shorter-term rewards, whereas I think we have benefited from the support of our shareholders over a long term to get to where we are. I think when these come in, that will change because there's a huge amount of interest that hasn't been converted into "Let's make an investment in SRT." Once these happen, they then understand that it leads on to data sales, it leads on to further contracts, et cetera. Particularly a lot of satellite data to be sold into these systems in Southeast Asia. That will come.
You mentioned a recurrent revenue stream.
Yes
that has been building up. Can you quantify it?
Uh-
The proportion of services.
Not really. I can talk to you about one particular project. In Southeast Asia, where we have our fisheries project. You're probably looking at just on that one, just on the transponders they have and thing, GBP two and a half million a year. If they expand the transponders, then there's going to be more. You have each project, they then expand the monitoring system, and then they need more data. More monitoring system, more data, so it just keeps going.
GBP 2.5 million roughly.
Correct. Yeah.
What is the company's view on hedging the currencies? Because obviously multiple currencies.
Yeah. Rich?
When we first started the Philippines project, that was something that we talked to our banks about and considered, and it became apparent that it was a hugely complex activity to do with things like cash deposits for unfavorable forward contracts that might unwind and things like that. We didn't hedge at the time, and actually, thankfully, we didn't hedge because we probably would have hedged at about 70 peso to the pound or more. Actually, through the life of that contract, we've probably achieved about 65 peso to the pound. Actually, we've been much more profitable as a result. That's sort of quite a volatile or relatively volatile currency. I think in the future with other contracts, they're more likely to be in maybe more stable currencies.
It's not something that's off the table and it's something that we talk to the banks about, but it's not something I'm hell-bent on at the moment.
I think also our contracts, particularly in Middle East, are dominated in US dollars, and the margin, unless there was a complete collapse or something in the currency, I think the margins withstand the reasonable fluctuations that you expect.
Better for our cost base as well as the US dollars that are payments to Flex and things like that, so you sort of have a natural hedge there as well, really.
I think the default culture here is simplicity, we see hedging as complex and not necessarily beneficial, so we tend towards just, "Let's just keep it simple." You can fire that back at us next year when the U.S. dollar's collapsed or something.
It's a profit center for someone else.
Sorry?
It's a profit center for someone else.
I suppose everyone makes a profit, don't they, for a service and stuff. At the moment, we're not persuaded, I think would be the answer. Any more questions from anyone on the online? No. Any more questions here? We're going to have a bit of lunch, you can keep asking questions if you like. Thank you very much. Thank you everybody for watching. Hopefully next year, a lot more people and a lot more success to get people here as well.
Thank you.
Thanks very much. Thanks. Thanks, guys.