Good morning, everybody, welcome to SRT's webcast. I'm Simon Tucker, the CEO. It's been quite some time since we've done this, my apologies. Those of you that are new to our webcast, this is unscripted, so excuse me if it's a little bit unpolished, but it's from the hip and it's designed to tell you about where we're going, what we're doing, and give you a real feel for the nuts and bolts of the business that you may or may not be invested in. I'm not gonna make anybody inside. We're a public company. We also have pretty strict and increasingly strict confidentiality with our customers 'cause we're talking about civil defense systems, and we respect that in the sovereign partnerships that we're in. Forgive me if I perhaps can't say the detail that you want.
I think it's interesting to reflect what we are today and where we've come from. We're now approaching 200 people working in nine different countries, speaking 14 different languages. 20% of us are women. The youngest is 19. Our average age is 42 years old. We've come from very small beginnings to now being a sizable technology-driven civil defense business at a time when sovereign civil defense has never been more important. It's present in the minds of countries around the world, and they're seeking to acquire these capabilities and these systems, and we're right at the nexus of that. We're really on our way, and we can see a clear path to becoming now a billion-pound business in the coming few years. I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about how that strategy is manifesting.
It sounds like a crazy figure. Consider this, that in the last few years, we have signed up nearly GBP 585 million of contracts. We've delivered on GBP 163 million of those. We have GBP 225 million of active business that we're in the process of delivering over the next year to 18 months. We have a GBP 200 million contract that we announced a few months ago that is in the process of being activated. On top of that, we've built a pipeline of new potential business, visible pipeline, when we're in discussions with proposals of about GBP 1.8 billion, half of which is from existing customers and half of which is from new customers. We're operating, we have long-term partnerships with five sovereigns already.
I think it's well to remember that journey where we've come from and where we are today, and it's just the tip of the iceberg on our way to becoming this global civil defense provider, all built around technology. That excludes our navigation safety business, which itself, again, consider where this has come from. In the past, we've shipped and manufactured 500,000 units, generating GBP 135 million worth of sales, and we have 5,000 distributors worldwide, all into the navigation safety business. We're at a really exciting point, but just at the beginning of that journey as we take those next steps and really accelerate into this.
I think those of you that have been around in our business for some time will recognize all of that, but perhaps have not considered that in one lump. Let's talk about the individual businesses, and let's start with our navigation safety business. We're addressing four segments of market. We're addressing in the marine domain, we're addressing leisure, commercial, ports and waterways, and professional. In the leisure and commercial markets, we have our AIS transponders, which we sell through 5,000 distributors. We've recently launched NEXUS. We've sold hundreds of those units. We're going slow initially to be able to get that iterative feedback and polishing of functionality in the field, but we're very happy with the way that is going, and we expect to see those sales really take off next year. We have our navigation safety...
We have our AtoN ports and waterways business, which is called DAS. That is all about helping navigate autonomous navigation through digitizing navigation aids. We now have a dedicated team that is pushing that forward, and we're seeing a lot of interest in that from ports and waterways, all trying to autonomize all the commercial traffic that goes on. If you just take Europe, there are 12,000 inland waterway vessels. 80% of economic trade goes on those, not on trucks, although we would think they would when you're driving down the motorway and all the traffic. There's a huge opportunity there, and we're making good inroads into that. We see new opportunities on the horizon, and this is in the professional market. What do I mean by that?
I mean military, and I mean aviation. If you consider a search and rescue helicopter, wouldn't it be helpful that within the avionics, they can see the AIS target of the vessel or the person in the water with their personal locator beacon, and they can go straight to it and not peering out of the window trying to find them? We can develop those sorts of transponders that embed and integrate into the aviation electronics. We see a big market for that, as well as highly encrypted and secure AIS transponders. We're starting to move into that. That is technologically very complex, which we like. We have very clever transceiver teams, and we can develop that. The certification, that creates a big moat around that market, the price is much, much higher than in the leisure and commercial markets.
In our navigation safety business, we see a number of different strands that will generate revenue and growth over the next five years, substantial growth over the next five years. The leisure and commercial market that we're in today, where we have the market-leading solutions: The DAS, which is autonomous navigation, and then into the professional market, which we're looking at at the moment. Our Nav business is great. Let's now talk about our systems business. I think obviously as an investor, you're very interested in the contracts, and I'll get onto that. What are we actually selling? I think it's important that it's understood what we're selling. What we're selling is ILO, which is intelligence-led operations. What our customers want is they want to be able to spot the bad guy.
They want to be able to spot the event, understand what that event is remotely, and then task the appropriate asset. The days of, you know, patrolling, shadowing boats and all this sort of stuff is just old-fashioned. We want to be able to observe from afar, use powerful technology to understand what that thing is, what it's going to do, and therefore be able to make an informed decision. This is what the SRT-MDA system does. It basically sits at the middle, and it provides an aggregation platform that takes in all the data from lots of different platforms and sources, satellites, USVs, UAVs, coastal towers, undersea fixtures, whatever is available, some of which we have supplied, some of which is already existing. Fuses that together and then applies analytics from the thousands of vessels and targets that it will detect.
We should talk about targets, not necessarily vessels. Characterize based on their behavior what they are doing, whether they're a threat, rank that threat, provide an operator with all that information. That's actually what we're selling in those systems, and that is what our customers want. The customers want that in the context of a global trend, which is globalization is really sort of dying and regionalization is arising. There's a resurgence in independence and sovereignty. Our countries, our customers want sovereign independent systems. When we engage with a customer, and we have five major customers today, we see it as a sovereign partnership. Their project is to build up a sovereign intelligence surveillance system, and they will do that in a series of contracts to build up that capability.
It might start with a small maritime system, and then they gradually add more surveillance towers, a UAV, more consoles, more command centers. It's like a Lego. It's a patchwork quilt. It's not one and done. They build that up. Their strategy is a project. They choose to partner with us because we can dynamically build that up for them and customize it to their needs, and we frame that in a sovereign partnership. What's interesting is that's taking us down a road, a really interesting road, where we're now a very large civil defense business right at the beginning of our life. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the growth. We today have interest in expanding our USV and UAV offerings. You don't want a manned patrol boat. You want an unmanned patrol vessel, patrol drone, perhaps subsea detection.
We can source those physically as we have in Kuwait, the world's first actually deployed USV, not in demo, actually deployed 24/7. Credit to the Kuwait Coast Guard for that visionary thinking, frankly. We can augment that with UAVs. We can augment that with satellite data. All of this comes together into a single integrated system. In addition to the USVs and UAVs, we're now being asked to look at land border. From our standpoint now looking to the future, it's just another target. A car or a person is just another target, like a boat and a person on the boat. It's a tailoring of the analytics. I'm making light of it. That's pretty heavy technology to do, but we're capable to do that. We can see that into the future.
Customers want early warning for drones so that they're not sort of shooting them out of the sky at the last minute. They're actually seeing them tens of kilometers away and again, can make an intelligence-led operations decision. Our business is now growing to be borders and territory, not just marine. It's the same principle of aggregating all of the sensors into a single platform, which is sovereign in the customer's country under their complete control, their data, their system, with really sophisticated analytics, visualization, mission, command, and control. Really exciting what we're seeing in the market and the deep engagement and long-term partnerships with our customers. We have one customer in the Middle East who we've been with for over a decade now, and they've just renewed for a further decade.
I think that speaks volumes as to the quality of our delivery, of our technology, the fact that we listen to customers. We don't get everything perfect all the time. This is this enduring partnership, which results in a series of recurring contracts years and years and years. Not always huge, sometimes smaller, as they grow their systems, significant business for SRT. Hopefully, that explains a little bit about our strategy. I wanna talk a little bit more about the contract situation. In the Middle East, let's talk about that, where there's been some turbulence recently. That hasn't affected the delivery of our projects. We have continued to execute on those. There've been some supply chain delays by a few weeks, but we've pushed through those. Our teams on the ground have continued to work, I'm proud to say.
It's been a little bit difficult to get into some of the countries, so you've had to fly and cross deserts in cars and stuff like that. That is part of our sovereign partnership, part of our real commitment to our, to our customers. Those projects are continuing. What the unfortunate events, because war and this sort of thing is just never good. It's just I'm often asked, "Oh, has it made people want the, you know, more systems and things?" These countries are clever. They know the future. They want their independence and sovereignty. All it has done is shone a spotlight, a media spotlight, on what they already knew, which is the maritime domain, their borders and their territories, and the integrity of them are important, and they want state-of-the-art surveillance. They want the best.
They can afford the best to give them that intelligence and security. It's just shone a spotlight on that. This was always a snowball that was going down the hill and was increasing in size and speed as people see the value and experience the value of security. The three big projects that we have going on in the Middle East are all progressing really well. We have two projects in Southeast Asia, Philippines, and Indonesia. They're also going well. We're continuing to support the fishery system in the Philippines, as we always have done. In Indonesia with the Coast Guard, progress is really accelerating now. We're going from the design and engineering phase now into real implementation and realization of the system.
A few months ago, we announced that we had signed another contract, which we had announced a notice of award from in November. This is contingent on a UKEF to government, inter-government, project loan. That's in the process. We think that will take several months. It's all on track. We're already doing some project workshops with the customer around all the planning, the preparation and what have you. In our VSP, we're super active with that, responding to evolution of proposals into detailed realization plans, discussions around contract values and things. You know, we're not short of inquiries and business coming down the road.
I think our biggest challenge is finding the right people in the right places in the business. As I said earlier, we've now reached a critical mass. We're attracting the great and the good from around the world, people who have talent and ambition, who want to come and work with a company that will offer them those horizons that they can really make a difference. They can see their ideas come to fruition. We have really forward-thinking, innovative customers that embrace that, which is great. Particularly one that I can think of that's always pushing us harder and harder and harder, which is fantastic. I think we're doing really well. Our teams are performing, our business is performing, and I think that's reflective.
This year we will do over GBP 100 million in revenue. That's just the start with, you know, hundreds of millions under contract to deliver at a GBP 1.8 billion VSP. All is well. Life is not without its challenges. All is well at SRT. Hopefully, that gives you a bit of a background of what's going on. I'm just going to have a look at some of the questions that have been raised, see if I can answer any. I'm being asked, are we aware of HawkEye 360? Yes, of course. They're radio frequency satellite. We buy their data. Often, I think you'll see, I don't know, MarineTraffic with some AIS targets, or you'll see HawkEye with some radio frequency-derived targets. All great businesses, great companies. We buy data from them.
Each one is not a full surveillance system. What you see, for example, on MarineTraffic in Hormuz is probably 5% of the traffic that is going through it. No more than that, because most don't have AIS trackers. You need different sorts of detection. HawkEye might be one of them, but that assumes that they have a radio transmission, so therefore they probably don't, so you need a different form of detection. The professional side of things is quite different. We buy data from HawkEye, so yes, we know them. What criteria would be needed to move to the main market? I don't know is the short answer to that question. We're all focused on building now towards a billion-pound business, if not more.
I think that'll be a natural discussion that we have with our advisors when the time is right. I don't think it stops anybody buying shares on AIM if they want, as far as I'm aware. Obviously that corporate side of things is now in focus as well as we, as we move forward. I've given you an update on the Middle East. There's minimal disruption. You know, as usual, I think the media was quite dramatic in portraying it. I went there during the missile strikes and things. Even have a nice picture of one. You know, it's super unfortunate. I wish this would never happen, and it'll probably phase away in time. Life goes on. We're committed to our customers, and we keep going. There's no problems there. Question mark VSP?
You must be a newbie. Validated sales pipeline. The concept of the VSP is that we get lots of inquiries. Everybody is interested in border and territory surveillance and monitoring and things. What we have to do with our is try the 80/20 rule, or even the 90/10 rule, is try and focus most of our effort on those that have taken the decision to transform their civil defense into an ILO-based doctrine. The political decision's been made. They've decided they wanna spend money on it. They've decided they wanna build that capability up over the next 20 years, which is what this is. This is a wholesale change. This isn't just putting a small system in. This is really changing your organization.
The validated sales pipeline are those that are really engaged with us, where we know that they've made the decision, we know they've got a budget, there's a proposal on the table, we're in active discussions. That way we focus our attention there. If you think about it, there's this huge market here, 180 countries with borders, not just maritime anymore. You then have a subset of that who have taken the decision to progress and specific proposals, so that is GBP 1.8 billion. From that, it then falls into our contract, under contract and active contracts. That's the way the VSP works. Yeah, I'm always asked about the SaaS revenue stuff. Governments don't do that. If you're looking for a SaaS model, SRT is not for you.
Our USP is our customers want their own sovereign tools. They want to buy the tools. They don't want it served up from the servers and Google and all that sort of stuff. Not in this particular area. They want a full, sovereign, independent system. No backdoors. They own the data, they own the system. As I said to you, theirs is a project to build up over decades, a surveillance system. Maybe it starts from the marine, goes into land, goes into drones, subsea. It's a series of contracts to build that up like Lego. We talk about recurring contracts, and this is the way our model works. The key thing is the customer is building a national platform around our GeoVS platform. They know by having that GeoVS platform and a partnership with SRT, they can keep plugging things in.
They can come to us with ideas. We go to them with ideas. In the Middle East, for example, early warning drone detection is a big thing, and they want that within the system. They come to us to ask us, What is the long-term solution for that? Can you go out to the market, find that long-term solution, integrate that into our system and create a project? This is how it works with SRT. We do have some recurring revenues with maintenance and support, data services and things like that. Whilst these will grow to become substantial, you need to get your mind around that these countries have 20-year projects. I bring you back to the Middle Eastern country that we contracted with 10 years ago, we just renewed again for another 10 years. That's two decades.
I talk about the cash flow and balance sheet. I can talk about that only insofar as what's in the market. We've recently done a fundraise. That is all about accelerating our expansion. I think those of you that have known about SRT is recognizing the message I'm communicating here is that we've arrived at the staging post. We're now really looking to grow quite rapidly. We now have the balance sheet and the cash to fund that and support the initial working capital required for additional new contracts. We're very happy where we are now with our balance sheet and cash. What has been accelerated by our recent equity raise? Not much at the moment 'cause it was only a week ago.
What we're planning to do, and we're in the process of doing, is accelerating our integration of AI, the insight that our system gives into the targets that it's ingesting, number one. Obviously that is the core of the intelligence. We're also looking to develop other areas that we see. For example, getting the AI to look at land targets, to look at how we can develop more USV and UAV offerings where we partner with external entities to provide the physical thing, and then we're looking at leasing that as a service, as we're doing in Kuwait to the customer because it's all part of an overall system. They don't buy these things individually, they buy it all as a system. We're able to bring in teams very quickly as contractors, then convert them to permanent people.
Obviously, it can take a time to find really good permanent people, but you can find them under contract and then convert them to permanent, so we can accelerate that. UKEF financing. UKEF is really useful and they do a great job. They do two things for us. One is, they provide underwriting for performance bonds. When you're signing contracts with governments, you need to provide performance bonds. They underwrite that. The second bit is they support U.K. governments by providing loan guarantees and loans to countries that want to buy products. Billions, this is not a sort of new thing for SRT. This is billions of GBP of business is done every year, often unseen by people, with the U.K. government providing those loans and loan guarantees.
We see that for some of our customers as a really important enabler. Frankly, it's expected in some areas, but not everybody wants to avail themselves of that. Is there some interest in Europe? Well, yes. On our system side, yes. Obviously, on DAS and on Nav Safety business a lot. We've started to see now a quick interest in Europe around subsea infrastructure protection again, having that intelligence so they know where to position the warships, where they know to position the patrol boats. The ocean in Baltic is huge. There's massive infrastructure that we rely upon. They need the intelligence, they need the system that makes sense of that data. We've recently started some discussions with that. How quickly that goes, who knows?
Nothing is in our VSP in that regard, and nothing in our contract pipeline at the moment. That would all be upside if something happened there. Are all the data streams you purchase long-term contract, the mitigation plans if they fail or are compromised? We buy external data from satellite providers. Most of our systems get their data from sensors that we have supplied as part of the system. Radar cameras that sit on the customer's patrol boats or on the USVs or UAVs that they have, or on towers that they have. Independent. There isn't something to fail. This is the point. On the satellite data side, where we're buying satellite data, because of the lowering cost of launching satellites, particularly into LEO orbit, which is low earth orbit, there's so many different sources of data.
There's so many different sources of companies taking photographs, companies receiving RF infrared scans. We have multiple sources actually of satellite surveillance data. It's ever-changing. If you know anything about satellites, when you put a satellite up into LEO orbit, it stays there for about five years and falls out the sky, you're constantly renewing. We have a whole breadth of people that we can buy data from. We try to form long-term relationships with them, with stable companies, of which there are many, there's a lot of competition in that space, that benefits us. How difficult is it to extend land to air, etcetera? We're not going into air traffic control. It's not about that. We are civil defense and surveillance.
What's of interest to our customers in the civil era is to have that border and territory protection, and that border and territory is sea, land, subsea, and near air, drones. It's very easy to source the sensors that will detect a car, a person, a drone, a boat. What's difficult once the targets come in is what is that person doing? Is he just having a picnic or is he laying a bomb or is he trying to sneak in with some drugs or something like that? Is that a drone that has come that is, you know, coming to attack or is that just, you know, someone's just having some fun or whatever. It's the analytics.
That is a big task to develop those analytics and the visualization, but we have the team and the understanding to do that, and we will build out our team to enable that offer to come forward. It's not something that is done in five minutes. It's not something that's done, is realized in five minutes. I'm talking now about a five-year strategy to take us to where we are, you know, as a GBP 200 million business to over GBP 1 billion business where we're providing that full gamut of surveillance. That has arisen because of the requests from customers where it's a clear and present demand from our customer to build on our system, and that's what we're responding to. To what extent does the desire to reduce exposure to U.S. technology, U.S. influence affect demand for SRT's offering? That's a tricky political one.
I think that in general, we play into a long-term trend in the world of countries wanting to have their own independent systems. I think COVID showed that when the chips are down, countries look after themselves, people look after themselves. I don't think that's informed people's decisions and countries' decisions where they want to have their own systems. They don't want an off switch somewhere else. I think that our general offer of a sovereign system owned, controlled, operated by a customer from a company that is independent and is able to support them on their project over multiple years and decades is extremely attractive to them and is part of the mix as to why we're winning business. Any feedback on NEXUS? Yes, we've sold hundreds of them. People are really happy with that.
We're, as is normal with all our projects, products, we're polishing functionality. It has an intercom system on it where we get feedback, and they might like something a little bit different and stuff. So far so good. How does SRT's business keep out of potentially dangerous politics, especially in the Middle East? I don't see that there are dangerous politics. I think that we do our business. We're true and committed to our customers. When we make a commitment to our customers, we make a commitment as a sovereign partnership, and this has been proven over the years and is well known. We just do our business. It is a tool that we're delivering to the customer. How they use it is up to them. We're not involved in the politics whatsoever. We don't share information between them.
If they want to talk between each other, if they wanna share information between each other, that's their affair. We just keep it simple. I don't think we have never had any issues there. Underwater surveillance, underwater cables, internet, can suppliers such as USV makers provide the analytics themselves for use? Yes. As a standalone thing, it's not very difficult to put a sonar on a boat and see that there's a cable there. Actually, when you talk about monitoring, what are you talking about? What a system will do is you map where your infrastructure is, that goes into the system. The system then knows where that infrastructure is. The surveillance then needs to look at traffic movement, both subsea and on the water.
Why is that boat loitering in the area of a pipeline when it's not a shipping lane? Well, that's an alert. Immediately, you need to see that that's the case. Why is that boat going backwards when the tide means it should be going the other way? That means it's dragging its anchor and it's near a pipeline. This is nothing to do whether it's a USV or UAV or whatever. This is about detecting the movement of vessel in relation to the subsea infrastructure. The next step is what you do about it, and that's where it's very interesting the use of USVs and subsea vessels to be able to go and investigate quickly what's going on. There's lots of people that offer those sorts of things.
We will partner with companies that have the best of the best, recommend that to our customer, probably sell that to our customer because they then want the camera from the subsea drone that is down on the pipeline 500 meters down. They wanna be in the control room looking at that, not on the boat that's controlling it. They want that as part of the integrated system. There's lots of strands now of expansion around that core platform, that ILO platform that SRT is delivering to each of these sovereigns. Today we have five of those sovereigns. We have six under contract. We have several more in our VSP. This is just the tip of the iceberg and we're on our way. I've answered all the questions. I've taken up enough of everybody's valuable time.
Thank you very much for listening, and hope you found it informative. If you have any more questions, please email me or Nora, who's our head of corporate communications, and you'll get a prompt answer normally the same day. Anybody is welcome as well to request a visit to come down to see SRT. There are some things we can't show you these days, but you can see the system. We have a full demo system and you can, you know, touch and feel it and talk to some other people and see how exciting the start of this journey is. Thank you very much.