Welcome to the DroneShield second quarter 2025 investor webinar. I'm Oleg Vornik, the Chief Executive Officer of DroneShield, and with me is Carla Balanco, our Chief Financial Officer. This session will go for approximately just under an hour, starting with about 20 minutes of the presentation, going on with the presentation we released a week ago in conjunction with our 4C, followed by Q&A. We encourage the participants to submit the questions as they arise, so we can go straight into Q&A at the completion of the main section of the presentation. On the macro thematic, we're seeing an increasing geopolitical threat profile as the world is unfortunately becoming a less stable place. A number of actors, governments, are continuing to significantly increase their covert operation capability and other attacks, including cyber, but also drones, and of course the war in Ukraine is continuing.
As a result, we're seeing the all-time high global defense spend, especially in Europe, but also more generally across NATO governments and elsewhere. Drones are playing an increasing part in just about every conflict around the world, and with it is the requirement for increased adoption of counter-drone solutions. Unlike other technologies, more established technologies like night vision goggles, guns, and radars, there's virtually no market penetration of drone and counter-drone solutions today, given how nascent the whole industry is, which is driving the urgency of procurement of both drones and counter-drone solutions. DroneShield believes that counter-drone is an approximately $10 billion total addressable market, with a very small to negligible market situation today.
A lot of what you're seeing on the slide on the screen is military-based, but we are expecting to also see the civilian markets, such as data centers, stadiums, airports, and the like, become significant contributors to our market as it starts to mature. Snapshot of the DroneShield performance: we have secured approximately AUD 72 million for the first half, and the full set of first half results will be available at the end of this month as part of our half-annual presentation. This is a 210% increase versus our first half of 2024, by far the highest first half result to date, and that includes the second quarter of 2025, so when December year ends, so June 2025 quarter revenue of AUD 38.8 million, up 480% versus the second quarter of 2024. Again, highest quarter revenue to date for the company as we continue to pick up steam.
On the SaaS front, SaaS is relatively small in dollar terms, AUD 3.5 million for the half year, but growing quickly, up 177% versus the first half of 2024. The company's strategy to keep driving SaaS is to continue to roll out new families of products. For example, today SaaS is driven mostly for the drone detection products, but we're also aiming to release a SaaS product focusing on drone defeat and also drive broader adoption of command and control systems, which are subscription based, and the next generation of drone guns will be SaaS enabled, which today's generation is not. All of that is expected to continue driving the SaaS.
AUD 176 million of year-to-date secured revenue means either revenues are recognized, which is the AUD 72 million of it as of the 30th of June, or we have received binding purchase orders and we intend to deliver that revenue prior to the end of this year. This was as of mid-July, so we expect to receive a number of additional POs prior to the end of the year, which will add to that amount. In addition to the record financial performance to date, we're continuing to execute on what we're seeing, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the company. We have a AUD 2.3 billion pipeline, which has increased about 112% over the first half of 2024, comprising about 284 projects, and that's corresponding to visibility to the end of this year and in 2026. That's an increase not just in dollar terms, but also a number of projects from 2024 to now.
Importantly, that includes a number of large deals, 13 deals over AUD 30 million each and 52 deals over AUD 5 million each. In terms of going forward, the complexity of the industry continues to evolve as drones themselves are getting more sophisticated. To deal with that, DroneShield is fundamentally an engineering business. Today we employ 285 world-class engineers across half a dozen different disciplines. We don't rely on any secret third-party source. We generate the IP that we sell inside the company, and we're continuing to selectively increase the engineering skill bench as we grow in the sophistication of our products. We spend more than AUD 50 million in R&D annually, and we have a significant cash balance to support our growth.
Now, as you've seen, the second quarter of 2025 was actually a positive cash flow quarter, but the cash balance ensures that regardless of what might possibly happen to revenues, we can continue to execute on our R&D programs. Things that we work on today, some of those products will not see light of day for another year, two years, and it's important to have that continuity. We are selectively looking at acquisitions which might be value adding to the company. We're very disciplined when it comes to acquisitions. We're mindful that for a lot of acquisitions, the target benefits more than the acquirer does, and it would need to really add to our presence in the counter-drone space for it to make sense. The next slide is largely a graphic of what we just talked about.
AUD 176 million of revenues locked in, about AUD 3.5 million in SaaS for half a year- to- date, growing cash receipts, and importantly, approximately 70% gross margin maintained across the board. Our products are highly differentiated. We're not a price taker, and continued rapid development of drone technology is what ensures that we can maintain our margins and keeps us away from the industry becoming commoditized. We like the complexity. We like the challenge. We feel we're well positioned for it, and that's what creates the economics of this company. The sales pipeline is becoming significantly more diversified compared to the previous years where the business was significantly geared towards our U.S. market. The U.S. market is continuing to be exceptionally strong in terms of the outlook, where we have a 25-person office, substantially sales-driven, but also increasingly R&D, where we now have several R&D pieces that we're expanding into.
The current U.S. administration's large recent bill is expected to significantly drive both our defense and Department of Homeland Security work, and that's reflective of the 100 deals in the pipeline, about AUD 684 million. Europe is the largest in terms of the pipeline outlook. That is both for Ukraine as well as NATO and other governments. That's also where we recently received a AUD 62 million order that we expect to complete delivery of prior to the end of this month. The U.K. has been a relatively small market for us, where we operate in partnership with British Telecom, but we believe that that market is really going to expand very quickly. The deals in the dollar values we're displaying on this page are just set well-defined projects that we're seeing as of today. All of that is going to grow as the urgency in the counter-drone space continues to increase.
Australia is our home, and this is also where we currently project about AUD 80 million over 16 deals. This is just for the rest of 2025 and 2026, the timeframe on all of this page. In terms of specific contracts, LAND 156 is unquestionably the biggest opportunity. We have recently announced a AUD 5 million win on the first phase of LAND 156, and now we are patiently awaiting the outcome of Phase II, or a system integration partner project, which would be a large and significant deal. It's difficult to tell exactly when it's going to come to fruition, but we are hopeful that we'll see the announcement of the preferred tender this year. In addition to that, we're executing on other opportunities in Australia. For example, our electronic warfare work, where we recently announced a two-year development of this contract.
Asia-Pacific remains a significant market for us, where we announced a AUD 32 million deal in April and are working on other opportunities, as well as other regions. We have now boots on the ground in terms of sales in Latin America, as well as the Middle East. In the interest of time, I will skip through our product summary. Most of you will be well familiar with it. The only newsworthy item is the addition of SentryCiv , which is right at the right edge of the slide, which is the recent product we've done in a soft launch mode, focused specifically on the civilian market. It's a subscription-based product. It's a lower priced product, but still has very favorable margins consistent with the rest of our economics.
As we believe that the civilian market is likely to explode in the next couple of years, this product will be our go-to for a lot of those customers that do not necessarily have the budget for our full-fledged DroneSentry solution, but require some kind of ability to detect and track drones around their facilities. Our hardware is complemented by several subscription packages, which will continue forming the backbone of our SaaS. On the detection front, it's RF AI, so using AI on a library-less basis to detect never-seen-before drones, and RF AI Attack, which we're planning to launch in the near future, which is the same, but for drone defeat. In the middle of the slide is DroneSentry-C2, or the command and control system. DroneShield is both a sensor maker as well as an integrator.
When you have multiple types of sensors pulling into your system, customers don't want to have lots of boxes. They want to have one smooth operating system using AI to do sensor fusion. That pulls everything onto one pane of glass, giving you drone tracks, giving you alerts, analytics, and so on. That is available both as the fully fledged DroneSentry-C2, a control room type software, and DroneSentry-C2 Tactical for field deployment on the tablet. We believe this is a fairly unique software, DroneSentry-C2 Tactical. The last bit, electronic warfare and signals intelligence, is very synergetic to our main counter-drone business about detection of never-seen-before signals and library-less approach. This is what we do our electronic warfare multi-year contracts with. Many of you will be familiar with our differentiating factors, largely its technology and the commercial factors. On the technology factors, in short, we've been there right from the start.
We had one of the largest engineering teams in the world at any given point in time. That means we're able to, as a result, sense further, defeat further, be more accurate, better built, and so on. Importantly, we believe data is critical. About five years ago, when we moved to AI-enabled detection, we started collecting what now became an exceptionally large data set of drone signals in different environments around the world. We have data engineering teams in Australia to manage the data, and it consistently gets larger as those devices provide additional data points to our engine, which drives the quarterly updates of that AI engine. On the commercial front, over the last 10 years, we have established a number of relationships with tier-one customers who are feeding us intelligence from all over the world, which enables us to respond and build our technology roadmap.
Today, we operate roughly a two, two and a half year roadmap, which is delivered on a monthly basis, and that is being consistently revised based on the feedback from the customers. That is really a key advantage for us, those customer relationships, as far as our commercial differentiators and the strength of the branding and the pipeline, of course. When you sell into defense and security markets, you don't just turn up and sell. Opportunities can take a long time to mature, and you have a number of compliance certifications, et cetera, metrics to meet. Having been in this game now for a number of years, and having sales which are materializing now, which might have started a while ago, is in line with our commercial advantages. On the tech roadmap, broadly, two priorities: acceleration of the current gen and release of next-gen products.
The focus, of course, is to try to put as much into the second box as possible, but it's also important to maintain the existing generation platforms. In terms of executional strategic priorities, I won't read through all of the slides, but essentially, it's about saying we want to keep launching next-gen of hardware and software to keep up with the increasing drone threats. Ultimately, what we say is that we're not competing with other counter-drone manufacturers. We are competing with the likes of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian governments who are seeking the best to avoid sensing and defeat of their drones by technologies like DroneShield. In addition to the enhancement of our technology, we're continuing to increase our SaaS revenue.
The ultimate goal is to have many, many thousands of devices in the field all receiving multiple SaaS updates, and that is forming the backbone of the revenue of the business. This will take us years to achieve, but that is the goal. Also enhancing our regional manufacturing. We started with manufacturing all based in Australia. Today, as those following us would see, we are expanding as part of our AUD 2.4 billion annual capacity manufacturing goal to set up manufacturing in Europe as well as in the U.S. Down the track, we see potentially establishing manufacturing hubs in the Middle East and South America as well. I'll complete the presentation at this point, and we'll turn to questions. I believe all of you guys will know how to ask a question. Please feel free to add into the queue, and I'll go through it in order.
The first question is, how do we stay ahead of the fast-changing technology? Local intelligence is key. You need to know what you are dealing with first. That's where our tier-one customer relationships come into the game, the feedback from the field, from the customers, the feedback from the demos. First, you establish a problem set, and then you have what we believe is the best and the brightest in the field in terms of engineers shaping the response. You put the products to customers, go through your own demos, the customer demos, and then you deploy the resulting software and hardware into the field.
Even though our hub is in Sydney at the end of the world, and this is truly a global problem, having those networks of customers, distributors, field teams that we've established over the last 10 years is what's feeding us intelligence to continue being one ahead in this threat. The next question is, how do we make sure that given the fast change in technology, our increased stock holdings do not become redundant? Stock redundancy is absolutely a risk, and we are cognizant of that. This is a risk that we've been managing for the entire 10 years of the business. If you think about DroneGun products today, we started with DroneGun Mk1 at the end of 2016, then we moved to DroneGun Mk2 , DroneGun Mk3, and now DroneGun Mk4, and also DroneGun Tactical.
RfPatrol is now in Mk2 , but also Mk2 Wideband, so second and third generation offering. There are multiple ways on how you deal with it. When you develop a technology roadmap, you have anticipated completion dates for the release dates of the new product. You try to basically run down the stocks of a particular line of the product before you release the new one. Also, even when you release the new product, there's quite a period of time when the existing product will continue to sell while you're bedding down a new product. The aim is to continue to, or aim to, fully sell out of the existing or the older product before you get to the new one. On the product build front, you try to have as many interchangeable parts as possible.
For example, our DroneGun products, and our DroneGun Mk4 and RfPatrol Mk2 have identical battery kits, charging kits, and so on. You'll be able to potentially reuse a lot of the parts, even if you do have a redundancy scenario for some units. The next question is, there is notification on the tender for an approximately AUD 12 million contract. Is that the research package already announced? Yes, that is the research package that we have previously announced, I think, about maybe two or three weeks before the tender notification came up. Also, to what extent are there conflicts between ASX reporting obligations or material sales and obligations of confidence, national security, commercial confidence, and what are consequential delays in announcing material sales as a result?
If we receive a material sale, it is our obligation as a company to immediately announce it to ASX, and the company continues to be in compliance with that obligation. ASX has rules that enable companies in the national security space, like DroneShield, to be less stringent on the specifics inside the contract when you do the announcement. To put it in simple terms, ASX says it doesn't matter if the contract is Brazil or Colombia, as an example. What matters is what is really important as a type of information for the investor to know. If you cannot state a name of the country or a name of the customer, can you do a description that gives the investor essentially the same level of information without specifically saying what it is? We've been working constructively with ASX on this now for several years. This is not a new issue.
That way you get around not breaching national security issues and at the same time have a timely disclosure to ASX.
I can take the next one. There's a question here. What are the percentage of product returns from warranty claims? What is the cost? What is this costing the company? Are there different products that have high or low warranty claims? Around warranty claims, the current cost to the company in relation to the warranty claims is currently around 1% of revenue. It's still relatively low.
Thank you, Carla. The next question is the impact of fiber-linked drones. My personal view is that fiber-linked drones are overhyped, and it's partly deliberate in terms of information warfare, disinformation, and so on. For those on this call, I invite you to think practically of how it works when you have a small drone dragging potentially 10 km of a fishing line behind it. If you go in a straight line or an open space, potentially no issue. Otherwise, the chances of you snagging 10 km of fishing line that you're dragging behind you on trees, buildings, other fishing lines, even a drone doing a maneuver and snagging into its own line are quite significant. While we are seeing this as a threat, I'm not being dismissive of it. For example, our radars are able to detect drones that operate using fiber optic wires because they still move.
We also cooperate with heart defib systems, for example, with our good friends in California at APRS that do high power microwaves that fry electrics in drones that move towards their panels. That'll be effective with the fiber optic drones. We believe it is more of a niche issue as opposed to a structural change. Fundamentally, radio frequency will remain the backbone of drones going forward. My personal view is that radio frequency to drones is a bit like wheels to cars. Whatever cars will look like in 50 years, chances are they will have wheels on them. Is there any update on when the LAND 156 SIPR award will be announced? No, unfortunately, we know just as much as everybody on this call does. We're patiently waiting to hear from the government. Next question is, is it only defense and airport industry sales come from?
Today, sales come from defense, law enforcement, border security, intelligence, and facilities protection. We expect, and I'm talking materials, I'm not talking small sales, which can come from a number of other sectors, but we expect that over the next two years, the civilian sector will significantly wake up. A lot of it can be a 9/11 of drones type driven, where a drone delivers a loaded handgun to a window of a prison, and they may shoot a bunch of people inside. Then there's an overnight change in legislation. Now every prison facility has to have a counter-drone system, which is where our SentryCiv, offering comes in. We think there is a large likelihood of the civilian sector changing their approach overnight, and we need to be ready.
Interestingly, production capacity is coming as an important differentiator, as we're hearing that a lot of our competitors are struggling with significant production capacity, which is also where the AUD 500 million- AUD 2.4 billion annual production expansion is coming into play to give confidence to our customers that we can fulfill larger orders as well. The next question is, the person asking says that they believe DroneGun Mk4 does not have SaaS tied to it. That's correct. Whereas the Mk5 will have the SaaS component tied to it. Also correct, which will help fuel the SaaS revenue growth. Yes, that's correct. When do we expect the Mk5 to be released? There's no release date at this stage, but we are working on it. How do we manage data sovereignty?
We have a partnership with a military-grade data center in Australia that hosts the information that we require, like the data sets and so on. What do you do to protect against a hostile state actor? I'm assuming we're talking about an attack on DroneShield itself as opposed to our customers using DroneShield equipment to protect against hostile state actors using drones. In terms of DroneShield security, there are particular standards that are a benchmark in Australia for defense companies. Those standards range from cyber to physical security to protection against insider threats, to how you best practice, how you segregate information, and so on. We have an inside security team, and they are ensuring that we are difficult to crack. Don't get me wrong. Nothing is perfect. Nothing is completely impossible to crack.
We have never had issues to date, and we hope to keep it that way by staying a step ahead. The next question is, when may we list on the U.S. exchange? Today, I believe it makes no sense to list on the U.S. exchange because at the current market cap of a couple billion dollars, we are significant by Australian, by ASX standards. For example, I believe that we'll be entering a new tier of the ASX index in September at the time of the next rebalance. However, by the U.S. standards, we are, I would not say micro cap, but we are a fairly small business. If you either dual list or you move the listing across, you will end up losing a lot of liquidity for not a lot of benefit. I also find that a number of American investors have no issue investing in ASX-listed stocks.
For example, Fidelity Management & Research has recently taken just under a 10% stake in DroneShield. This is a Boston-based world-class American fund. Similarly, Vanguard is just over 5%, another U.S.-based fund. Underneath the substantials, we have a number of other U.S. funds that have no issue under their mandates to invest in ASX-listed stocks. In terms of more ordinary retail American investors, generally, we believe that most of the U.S. stock brokers enable you to trade international stocks like ASX stocks. You just have to set it up on your trading account. The next question is, can we get a set of the slides? The slides that we're using today are the same set of investor slides as we released about a week ago when we released the 4C.
Please look at either the DroneShield investor page under our website or under the ASX's website for DroneShield from about a week ago. Was the Q2 profitable? We will be releasing the full set of accounts for the first half, so Q1 and Q2, by the end of this month as part of our HY 2025 report. How do we characterize our competition, and in what ways are you ahead? Let me share the competition slide that we have in the appendices. I would categorize competition as segment-based. In different product categories, we have different firms, and also they're usually fairly geographically focused. Engeril, for example, would be our prime competitor for the LAND 156 program. However, they are not our competitor in a sense of making DroneGuns or DroneSentry-X products, or even RfPatrols for that matter, or even really operating outside of 5IX. DroneShield is a very global business.
I won't go through all of these names, but just to give you maybe a selection of a few others. When it comes to Dedrone, that was acquired by Axon . They're a credible competitor in the law enforcement space, as their products are, in our experience, lower grade compared to the products that we offer. They don't have strength in portables in the same way as we do. We are pushing into their space with a recent hire of an ex-FBI sales director based in Virginia. We're trying to crowd into their space, but we don't really believe that they have the ability to move into the defense space where we operate. Axon, their parent, is fundamentally a great company, but in the law enforcement space primarily. Similarly, when you go through the others, like AeroVironment, BlueHalo, they have a product called Titan.
It's a DroneSentry-X competitor, but we don't really see them in the handheld space or really outside of a handful of countries that they prioritize. The next question is, I'll try to paraphrase the question, that drones for warfare are evolving in terms of the number of manufacturers out there significantly. Is it similar for the counter-drone space? Fortunately, no. Drones are a very commoditized market. I would not want to be in the drone market today, as it feels like every man with his dog is trying to build a weaponized drone. Counter-drone is, if anything, consolidating. If you look at the list and the notes on the page we are displaying, a lot of these companies have actually been acquired over the last 12- 24 months. The reason for that, it's actually much harder to build counter-drone tech than it is to build drone technology itself.
I would say that the counter-drone tech, if anything, is maturing and shrinking in size due to its increasing complexity. The next question is, do we think the revenue will continue to grow at the rate we're seeing? We do not, great question. We do not publish guidance because of the nascent nature of the industry. However, I believe we're well positioned for growth due to the low market situation. Customers who are buying from us, they have nowhere near enough gear to meet their requirements.
If you think about every group of a handful of soldiers needing a system, every armored vehicle, every installation, you guys probably both heard of the Operation Spider Web in Russia and Operation Rising Lion, which is similar in Iran, with drones essentially delivered via a van or similar to an edge of an airfield and then flying out from the edge and destroying a bunch of expensive airframes. The reality is that the majority of, if not almost all, airbases in the West have nothing to protect themselves against a threat like this. If anything, it's a miracle we're now seeing more of these attacks now happen that the blueprint has been so well established over the last couple of months.
There is this enormous rush by military planners to think how to stop attacks like this, drones being delivered to their front door and then attacking their facilities because the traditional method of stopping people walking into the base or sending a missile into the base is not effective for small drones, which can get around sensors built for sensing things which are not drones. The same thing for the defeat. We're seeing there's exploding demand. There's only a limited amount of parties that can provide counter-drone solutions to deal with that. Defense primes are not our competitors. They're, in our experience, generally struggling to innovate at the speed of relevance. From our perspective, we're well positioned on the technology front with our large engineering team. We're scaling up the operations in our production capacity.
The next question is, is demand largely driven by defense, or has public safety added to the growth? Public safety is rapidly emerging. It is part of our sales already. I think it will continue to grow. Legislation in the U.S., which enables public safety use of drone countermeasures, I think will continue expanding the market because legislation, especially in the U.S., meaning state and local law enforcement cannot jam drones, is probably the biggest stop to that market really growing really quickly. Next one is, being at the end of the road in Sydney, as you say, are there any problems in this connected world? As I was saying, our strength is deployment around the world. We have a number of distributors, customers, sales teams, field teams around the world, and they're feeding us that intelligence information.
Is there an application for commercial airport flight paths stopping rogue private drones entering hands endangering passenger planes? I think to rephrase the question, are drones dangerous for airports? 100% they are. If a drone gets ingested into an airplane engine, there have been all kinds of studies showing you've got to blow out the engine because something that's been designed to deal with birds cannot deal with metal objects with lithium-ion batteries in them. It's pretty deadly for engines. Now, if it's a four-engine plane, you're probably going to blow out one engine, but you're going to still land. If it's a single-engine plane, you're probably going to crash the aircraft. It's the reason why today drones are detected around pathways at airports. You have to shut down the whole airport until you deal with the drone.
Now, that's a lucky scenario because it means you've detected a drone, but if you haven't, the time when you'll know the drone is there is when it gets ingested into the engine of the plane. Luckily, there have never been publicly reported incidents of a drone getting ingested into the engine, but there have already been cases of a drone cracking into a windshield and damaging the fuselage of an airplane. I really think it's a matter of time before there's going to be something worse in the sense of an engine actually ingesting a drone. The next question is, are there significant European competitors within the same sector as DroneShield? Do we have a head start? If you look at the competitor slide that you should be seeing in front of you, we've got a couple of European competitors.
They tend to be niche to largely their own countries, be it Germany or France. There is a Danish competitor that is a bit more global in nature, but we find that we outperform them consistently on the quality of the products. We are not really seeing European competitors as much of an issue. Our stronger competitors, I would argue, are American-based. It is an interesting time. I would find it challenging today to be an American company being in Europe due to the general sentiment with the geopolitics going on. This is one of the strengths of being an Australian company. It's considered a fairly neutral place to be. Frankly, everybody loves Australians in our experience. There's nobody who is negative to Australians. That's our strength in terms of being a global exporter business.
The next question is, the person asking noticed that the company was cash flow positive from operating activities in the last quarter. That is correct. He's asking, can we provide some guidance on when we expect to achieve positive net profit on a full-year basis? We don't provide guidance, but stay tuned. The objective for us, and we received a clear message from our shareholders that they want us to be profitable. It is important for us to continue investing in R&D because it's very easy for the style of a company to milk it for cash for a couple of years and then see the revenues drop off the cliff because you haven't kept up in this rapidly expanding sector. On one hand, we are solving for continuing to be the leader in what is an absolutely exploding industry size-wise.
On the other hand, we understand that our investors want us to be profitable. The next question, I'll try to paraphrase it. I'm not sure I understand it, but I think it was about what happens to AI-enabled drones when you jam it. I think there's a lot of misconception out there about autonomous and AI-enabled drones. A lot of people think that if you fly without a pilot, that's autonomy. A lot of those drones are flying using satellite communication, and that is fairly easy to jam because satellites are quite high up in the sky. The signal is weak. If you jam that, the satellite communication is lost. The next piece of technology that we have seen coming into play is computer vision. A drone uses a camera, and it flies traditionally for the first majority of its flight until maybe the last 500 m- 1,000 m.
Then it's just close enough for the drone to see the target that it recognizes, like a tank or a human. Keep in mind that if it's a small target like a human, a drone will not carry an amazingly expensive camera. Remember, it's a AUD 1,000 drone. That creates a limitation on the distance. The technology is fundamentally similar to what you might use if you are running in the field and a drone is tracking you and filming you so it knows what you look like, so it just keeps following you. Similarly, a drone recognizes an object, and at that point, it just barrels towards an object and smashes into it. At that point, jamming is fairly useless.
The aim is to detect and jam the drone before the drone can see you, which is actually not that challenging because you just have to exceed the distance that computer vision for the drone enables you to do. The other thing to keep in mind is a lot of functions of a drone do not go well with autonomy. For example, if a drone is collecting data, it has to send it back to its base. If a drone needs to do precise strikes, it needs to often be guided by the pilot. If you cut away that and you just have a completely autonomous drone, that really has issues with how well it will continue performing. Next question, are we looking at water-based drones? Yes. To us, a drone is not C or not UAS, unmanned aerial system, but CUXS.
X could mean a drone that swims on the surface of the water, so USV, unmanned surface vehicle. It can mean a drone that's crawling on the ground, unmanned ground vehicle, UGV. It can be a drone that swims under the surface of the water, UUV. We believe that eventually there'll be a concept of drones in space, although some may say a satellite is already a drone anyway. Yes, drone in any environment to us is a target. How do we protect against hostiles taking equipment in the field and using it themselves or reverse engineering it? It's difficult to reverse engineer our products for a number of reasons. One, you have a very high degree of encryption inside of it.
Nothing is impossible to break, but even if you eventually break the encryption, remember the algorithms are built together with the AI data set that I was talking about. If you get access to the code, but you do not get access to the data set, which is stored in Australia, you can't really progress the code forward. A lot of these things you can see looking back on it, but you can't necessarily project it forward. Also, technology evolves super rapidly. If you haven't built the code and again, you don't have the data, what you have today will be largely useless in six or 12 months from now with how rapidly the technology evolves. The speed of evolution and the software updates on a quarterly basis is critical in this as well. Yes, technically, adversary can use the products if they find them in the field.
This is, I guess, same issues for really any defense technology. There are things like, you know, you can put a drill into the middle of the product and destroy it if you have time. If you don't, it's just like any other one. Anything can be hacked into ultimately. The speed of evolution and needing to marry it with a data set to really be useful for development is what makes it really useless in the long term. Next question is, have we or do we expect to be approached by a larger competitor in the takeover bid for DroneShield and for DroneShield to become their subsidiary? We have had approaches in the past, and none that the board has seen as credible enough to take to shareholders for a vote.
We are the only public listed company in the world, meaning we release a lot more information than our competitors do. I think this will continue. The way the board thinks about it is ultimately we're here on behalf of the shareholders. We are not running the company for sale. We're running it for growth. If we have an offer that's considered as credible enough or potentially worthy of shareholder acceptance, the board will take it to shareholders with a very sufficient voting threshold that the vote is approved, then we'll go ahead. We are pretty prepared about this. Have we made any plans to ensure that the supply chain isn't disrupted in the event of a global war? COVID was enough of a dry run for us, and we ran the ship pretty tight. The majority of our supply chain resides in Australia.
RfPatrol, our body-worn drone detection device, for example, is 85% Australian industry content. There are some things we get elsewhere, like chips we get from the U.S. because Australia doesn't have a chip industry. Generally, in terms of how we build redundancy, how we hold supply of worldwide items, when I say redundancy, it's a number of ways in terms of your contract manufacturers, in terms of supply chain parties for a particular discipline like metafabrication and so on. You try to have as much diversity as possible to avoid options.
There's a question regarding foreign exchange risks. How do we manage that? Currently, our strategy is using a natural hedge, but we are closely monitoring if we need to do anything above that. That's our strategy at the moment.
Thanks. The next question is about deploying the company's cash position towards acquisitions to accelerate growth. How do we see the reasonable conversion rate of the pipeline? On the cash position, the primary use in terms of acquisitions is acquiring other synergetic technologies. We are regularly looking at potential technology targets to see what could make sense. It's always buy versus build. We're happy with our core technology, so radiofrequency, jamming, integration, and we don't really need more capability in that space. In terms of other modalities of detection and defeat, this is something that we are regularly assessing. In terms of the conversion rate of the pipeline, historically, it's been changing. As the industry is rapidly maturing, it's changing again. It's a bit hard for us to comment. Next question is, do we have a product for swarm protection? Yes.
The great thing about radiofrequency detection and jamming is that it's irrelevant whether you're dealing with one drone or 100 drones. Both the detection and the defeat is for a particular area. For example, our DroneSentry-X will give you a complete bubble over your facility. As a result, you can deal with a virtually marvel. Nothing is unlimited, but a very, very large number of targets. Next question is, is Electro Optic Systems a major competitor to us? No. Electro Optic Systems do remote weapon stations, hard defeat. We think hard defeat is a very limited application for counter drones specifically. Detection, tracking, soft defeat integration is where the vast majority of the market is. Next question is, is the... By the way, we'll be wrapping up in the next couple of minutes. Is the plan to pay dividends? Is there a plan to pay dividends at some stage?
Focus for us right now is growth. The board is regularly assessing it and will advise if that changes. Is there a sustainability model in place for manufacturing DroneShield products? Yes. We follow the best in field practices in terms of sustainability for how we build. What excites us about the future of DroneShield? Do we ever become a prime defense player? Counter drone is what we do. We are not going to become the next Lockheed. I think the fastest way to get out of business is to become too broad in your offering and lose being the best in a particular thing. Counter drone is a huge, huge coming space, and we think being a leader in that is more than plenty. If we happen to win the SIPR for LAND 156, that essentially makes us a prime in that you deal with a lot of subcontractors underneath you.
In fact, we're already a small prime in our own way. We work with radar manufacturers, camera manufacturers, and we supply complete systems, which is kind of a definition of a prime. The size of the contracts is also increasing. The AUD 62 million contract that we recently announced and large amounts in the pipeline. At this point, we'll take the rest of questions on notice. If those of you that have questions outstanding, please be able to email us at investors@droneshield.com, and we'll aim to revert to you with all your queries. Thank you for your time.