Good morning, everybody. I'm Simon Tucker. I'm CEO of SRT, for those of you that don't know me. For new people that are joining this webcast, the purpose of this is to update you about the business, warts and all. I will not make anybody inside, so there will be some questions that I can't answer fully, either because of customer confidentiality and not making anybody inside. I try to do these once a quarter to give everybody an update. I was going to leave it a couple of weeks to do this one, but I think with all the turbulence in the market and what have you, I thought it was better to bring that forward, particularly share prices have been falling for no apparent reason other than the kerfuffle with Mr. Trump.
I thought it would be worth having a chat with everybody. I'm going to start with that sort of global environment. We have a responsibility to you guys, our shareholders, to talk about the business in the midst of all that turbulence. How does that affect SRT? I can only give you our view and what we're basing our decisions upon. About 10 years ago, we recognized that globalization was finished. Actually, you would have the rise of regional pacts. That was driven by the development of other countries and regions such as the Middle East, such as Southeast Asia, who therefore want true independence, are developing their own markets, their own economies at pace, and they have the money to do so. This concept of, perhaps Western concept of globalization was changing to be that of regional blocs.
What comes with that is countries wanting their own independent means, and in particular, their own security, their own communications, their own facilities, just as we've wanted that, just as the United States wants that. We see that really what's happened in the last couple of weeks is just the iceberg has popped above the surface. Of course, Mr. Trump is very good at media, and it's all across CNN and BBC and drives a lot of sentiment as a result of that. For better or worse, the markets have reacted accordingly. For SRT as a business, this actually is just really a continuation of what we always thought was happening and the macro trend that is driving the demand for our business.
The reason countries want to buy an independent maritime surveillance system is they are becoming more independent, and they want their own independent security, safety, and management systems. That is exactly what SRT offers and exactly what we set out to develop 10 years ago when perhaps nobody thought that there was a market. Today, we're now starting to see, with the conversion of contracts, increasing interest in our systems, those countries doing that. From our perspective, this kerfuffle in the market and tariffs and so-called trade war has no effect whatsoever financially on us, perhaps a little bit on our transceivers in the United States, which I will explain about in a minute. Actually, it is just accelerating what is, in our opinion, has been happening for the last 10 years.
As a business amongst unstable markets, we are financially strong with the fundraisings we've done in the last couple of years and the commencement of our projects with very significant cash payments to us, number one. Number two, we have long-term forward contracts with nation-states with fundamental drivers for those requirements and systems. In our transceivers division, most of the sales are actually driven by regulatory requirements in the commercial market. Actually, we are in an exceptionally good position going forward per our strategy. I do grant you, for those of you that have been here for a long time, it has taken some time to get here. That is by virtue of the fact that it takes a long time to develop real technology as opposed to a presentation or a simple app for that or some kind of web-delivered service and things.
Those 10 years of investment in the market and the technology has brought us to where we are today. Hopefully, that sort of settles some nerves and is actually the primary reason for me doing this webcast now and not in a couple of weeks' time after some other events. Let's talk about the individual business units. Let's talk about our transceivers business, which sells navigation, safety, and communications transponders. We have two real market segments. One is into the commercial market. One is into the leisure market. The commercial market is regulatory-driven. There is a patchwork quilt and a growing patchwork quilt of regulations.
They vary from mandates in perhaps somewhere like Bahrain or the Seychelles to individual mandates in Antwerp, European mandates, for example, on fishing boats over 12 meters, U.S. mandates, and the overarching IMO, International Maritime Organization, mandate on all big ships over 300 tons. That is continuing to drive growth and demand in the commercial market and also the replacement market. Every 5– 10 years, those boats, the regulations do not go away. They stay forever, pretty much. They keep generating repeat sales. In the leisure market, the typical buyer, and I was having a conversation with somebody the other day in front of a small boat. I could see that they were thinking that that is a 25 ft boat, looks quite big. That is not the typical leisure market buyer.
The typical leisure market buyer nowadays is somebody that has got a 40 ft-plus boat, either a new build or they're looking at doing proper coastal or intracoastal cruising, and they want these AIS transponders for safety. These are pretty wealthy individuals. These are expensive boats. Looking forward economically, I think that in our leisure division, which is probably about 30% of our transceiver sales, I think we'll see flat sales this year because I think people are nervous in the economy that perhaps holding back on purchases and things. It is not the person with the tiny boat that is struggling to pay for that boat that is buying these transponders. Therefore, an effect of a downturn in the economy doesn't really have a big effect on our transceivers business at the moment.
The size of boats that are fitting these things each year go down and down and down, but very, very gradually as that market grows. The effect of, if you will, a decrease in economic confidence in the leisure markets in Europe and the United States will have a very small effect on that transceiver business. In regards to the U.S. specifically, we ship about GBP 1 million a year currently into the United States. It is a growth area for us. We think the price inelasticity of our products means that we can wear those tariffs and our customers can wear those tariffs because they want an SRT product and they want to buy a quality product because they're relying on their safety on that. We get to those markets, by the way, through three different sales channels. One is through OEM and modules.
This is where we sell to existing marine electronics brands. I'm not going to name any names, but you will go to a dealer and you will see XYZ brand, all packaged up and everything else. Actually, that has been supplied by us or has the transceiver module inside that is supplied by us. The second way that we do that is through our own em-trak brand, where we've built up an international brand, an international dealer base from scratch, nearly 5,000 reseller partners all around the world. That is going for the retrofit market. Where somebody's not buying a new boat and therefore wanting the whole suite from an OEM brand, they're buying from our em-trak. We have our DAS division, which is all about autonomous shipping and transceivers that go onto buoys.
We're selling a whole range of transponders into those very successfully. We've got a very good reputation in that, and so we're very happy with that. The big new product that is coming is Nexus. We're going to start shipping that at some point during the summer. All our dealers are aware of that timescale. The product is type approved. It's in pre-production. What we're doing and the reason that we are consciously waiting before we release the first 1,500 units, which is the first production run which we expect to sell sort of almost instantly and have a lot of forward orders for, is that we're polishing the functionality. What do we mean by that? Having a function present doesn't necessarily mean that it absolutely works smoothly and as fluidly as we want.
Our reference is that the person that is going to be buying Nexus, which is a sort of market-disruptive product that brings a new level of convenience to a boat, will have driven down to their boat, probably in their BMW or Mercedes, where everything in their iPhone and stuff is all seamlessly integrated into their screens in the car, get onto their probably 40 ft– 50 ft boat with all its nice screens and stuff. They're using their iPhone and their iPad for navigation and things. They're going to connect to Nexus and be able to use their iWatch, their AirPods, their iPhone for maritime communications and safety. The fluidity of all that Nexus functionality that is enabling all of that has to match that and BMW and things. We're not far away from that, but we're not quite there with that refining and polishing.
It is my decision. We could easily launch the product, and we've got about 20 field customers actually using that today and providing feedback. We could launch that today, but I want to wait until it is absolutely perfect. The reason for that is I think it is a market-disruptive product. We are launching it globally instantly through our 5,000 network. Those first 1,500 people that have that product in the first few weeks, we want them to become those advocates and to be wowed by that. Having invested so much time and money in that great product taking us into that new area, we are rightfully being cautious about Nexus, and we've guided our market to be around sometime in the summer. Some people have asked me a question, "Why isn't it on the website?
Why haven't we got this, that, and the other?" We don't need to. We communicate directly with our dealers, and the dealers connect directly with their customers. The benefit of having that network is that we don't have to have all of this advertising in magazines and all that sort of stuff. We talk directly to our dealer base whom we have trust with and built up over many years. They talk to their customers individually. That is the best way to sell these things in a manner that actually generates money as opposed to just spending marketing dollars. That is our transceivers business. On our systems business, our systems business, we deliver integrated maritime surveillance systems. These are predominantly targeted at fisheries and at coast guards. My little notes here.
Today, we have about GBP 338 million of gross value of contracts in our back pocket that we're executing on. In our first half, we delivered upon those about GBP 25 million and were paid, which obviously is a sort of transformational position, not so much that we're being paid because we've always been paid, but now that we have overlapping contracts with multiple countries, we have five countries, as we see them as accounts, who have decided to build a new generation of integrated digital maritime system. What we mean by integrated is they're integrating multiple agencies. They might just start with the coast guard. What our system does is enable them to integrate customs and excise, fisheries, the navies, all the different agencies that go on in managing a maritime domain in the modern world.
are lots of interested stakeholders around the country, including the boat owners themselves, where they might want to register that they're going out to a particular area, automatically be able to inform a coast guard. If they don't come back, the coast guard has an alert and knows how many people were on that boat and supposed to come back. We are delivering well against all of those. We have more in the pipe. We have about GBP 1.2 billion worth of opportunities that we're pursuing. There are a couple that seem to be accelerating quite quickly, and we might see those inked this year or early part of next year. It's impossible to give any sort of definitive timescale on those because we're dealing with governments.
There's a specific one that I'm often asked about, which is our contract with BAKAMLA and the support of UK Export Finance. Just to explain is that UK Export Finance is specific to that specific project, not involved in anything else, which is a shame very often, but anyway. We are awaiting the loan agreement between the U.K. government and Indonesia is signed. This is done. Now there are what are called conditions precedent, which are some very minor administrative things that need to be done post that. They are, I'd say, within a week or two of being complete, at which point we will start commence the deliveries. We're in a really good situation. As we expected to be, it's just taken the time to get here. A couple of people have noted that we are employing people, and we are on a recruitment drive.
We have been for some time. We're obviously ramping that up a little bit. That is to fill our skeletal crew across the business. We're expanding our development. We see new opportunities. We're expanding our delivery team so that we can take some of the stress off some of the engineers who perhaps are traveling to three different countries in a week. It's difficult to have holidays. What happens if somebody's sick and all that sort of stuff? We have a little bit of redundancy in the organization, but also to prepare the next set of people for the next project. It's not that we're reliant on hiring these people to do the existing projects. It's about looking forward to growth and the next projects that are coming along.
We're doing that in an aggressive fashion to see who's out there and then picking the cream of the crop to come and join our great team. Looking ahead for the next six months, it's all about delivery on the systems. We have ambitious customers in Asia and Middle East, and we're delivering quickly to them without compromising quality. We have a reputation in the market of our systems doing what they say, of having analytics that really work, overcoming problems. We are constantly working with the customer as partners to make sure that we don't deliver stuff too quickly and then that it doesn't meet our quality requirements. We will now start to continue to deliver against all of those milestones.
Pretty much every week, there are almost daily, actually, if you were here with the project managers, daily, there are milestones being achieved in these projects, but not all of them are revenue milestones. In each project, you probably have maybe one or two revenue milestones per quarter or per half. I don't intend to provide a running commentary on any of these projects publicly. These are systems of nations and national security, and they trust us to deliver a system to them, and they trust us not to broadcast what they're doing. It's their system and their tools. It'd be wrong for me to give that running commentary.
Suffice to say, our strategy, as I said at the beginning of this call, that we started 10 years ago, is now coming to fruition with countries wanting to have their own independent capability, and they're building that around SRT's systems. The success that we're seeing now, just the start of it, is the product of real foundation building over many years. I think that's everything, but I'm just going to have a look and see if anybody has asked any questions. I'll just go to the screen here. On the Philippines and the allegations there, I'm not going to enter into sort of detail about that, but I'm very happy with the process that we're following, and I expect that to come to a satisfactory conclusion in due course. Am I on mute? No, I hope not. No, I'm not on mute.
Is recruitment on track to meet the demands of the new contracts? We do not need the recruitment to meet the demands of the new contracts. We are staffed up. We prepared for that. We are pressed with the amount of business that is coming to us, and therefore, the new recruits enable us to, I would not say be more relaxed, but have a little bit more redundancy in the organization to do that. Just to be clear, the recruitments are not an absolute requirement for us to do these projects. I think that is the last question. As usual, if anybody has any other questions, email me or any of the other directors, Richard or Neil, the Executive Directors, or any of the NEDs, and they will respond.
If anybody ever wants to come and visit SRT and kick the tires and see us and talk to some of the other managers, you're always welcome. It's not just the company open day. We see this as a team effort between all of us sitting, working in the company, and the shareholders that own the company have supported to this date. Please feel free to come and visit what you own a bit of. Thank you very much for your support. Don't worry too much about all the tariff wars and all this sort of stuff in regards to SRT. As I remind you again, our view is the world is becoming regionalized. For us, this is a great thing. Watch this space. Thanks very much.