In revenues, as well as about $202 million in cash receipts. This is a truly outstanding result, and approximately just under four times the increase from the top line of last year. But importantly, also, we have started really strongly on the 2026, and a reminder that we are going in calendar year ends. So roughly this time last year, we would have begun the year with maybe $5 or $10 million in locked-in cash receipts and revenues, while today we're at essentially $100 million that we have carried over from the end of last year, and that'll be reflected in the next one or two quarters, plus any additional business that we're currently working on.
The SaaS revenue similarly has continued to climb, so we have gone from just under AUD 3 million in 2024 to just under AUD 12 million in 2025, and we have already locked in over AUD 18 million for 2026. Again, this we anticipate to continue to climb as we secure more sales with SaaS attached to it, but more on that as we speak about our SaaS strategy. In terms of the profit before or after tax, we're going to be releasing this in about a month from now as part of our annual results, and that is what our finance team are busily working on. The next slide gives roughly a quarter-on-quarter and a year-on-year comparison. Across all top-line metrics, the revenue, the customer cash receipts, the SaaS revenue, and the operating cash flows, we are seeing significant increases.
The revenue from customers and the secured revenues is not the only metrics. The pipeline remains strong at about $2.1 billion, and that is a small reduction from the $2.4 billion roughly that we had about three months ago, and a lot of it is driven by us essentially being slightly more conservative when it comes to the civilian revenues in the US. We're seeing still a lot of momentum in those non-military opportunities in the US, and I'll talk more about it, but essentially as part of us being more strict in how we apply those metrics, and also remembering that the US civilian sector is a very nascent industry, and much like what military used to be several years ago, when you are at the early stages, you are not always seeing that progression in the PGOV. Just give me one second.
I have received a note that I need to reshare the slide deck, so I will do so now.
Do I turn the camera on?
Okay. Now you should be able to start seeing the screen again. Apologies for the mighty issue. So $2.1 billion pipeline, which is an exceptionally strong pipeline that I will talk more to in the next couple of slides, but ballpark, we're talking 300 deals diversified across products, geographies, stages of maturity, and so on. Underpinning all this is about 350 world-class hardware and software engineers here in Sydney that has taken a decade for us to build.
There is no team of this sophistication and quantum in the market that we're aware of, and this is what's leading to the highly differentiated nature of our products, both the current products, which I believe are the best out there, but also the next generation of products that will be commencing release of in the second half of the year, which we think will completely transform how our customers think about counter-drone solutions. The $70 million+ R&D spend, and we expect that to continue, slightly increase, but not a lot, so we expect to go from about 500 - 600 people, assuming our recruitment program goes on track by end of 2026. Most of those will be engineers, as well as ops and salespeople, and this will continue building on our highly, basically high gross margin products, so 65% gross margin, as well as a healthy cash balance.
So let's talk about the individual geographies. The U.S. has for a long time been the engine growth of the business, so 70% revenues. Last year, Europe has taken that title, and Europe will continue driving a lot of our momentum, as we're seeing a number of countries really ramp up their defense, realizing they cannot just rely on the U.S. They need to be self-reliant and increasing their defense expenditures significantly. And within that, we're really well positioned, including setting up manufacturing in Europe. We have a number of well-credentialed distributors that we trained and are deeply ingrained with our military, but also critical infrastructure and customers through Europe, and set up our office in Amsterdam, led by Luis Gamarra, our Global Chief Commercial Officer, who is then managing those distributors around Europe.
In the US, after a relatively quiet 2025, we expect to have a very strong 2026 once the current US congressional 2026 budgetary discussions are concluding, and hopefully that'll be all in the next month or so, and that is across several verticals. The defense budget, which is already at the record of $1 trillion in 2026, is proposed to be $1.5 trillion in 2027, and we believe we're well positioned as JIATF 401, which is the centralized procurement office for counter-drone in the US, will start kicking in. Outside of the defense, the Department of Homeland Security has set up a dedicated team, the Program Executive Office, with a $1.5 billion contract vehicle, and that's also linked into the FIFA World Cup in June-July, where you need significant security, including counter-drone.
Safer Skies Act, in a nutshell, enables police and the majority of police in the U.S. are state and local, not federal, enables state and local police to be able to jam. Our products, if you think DroneGuns , RfPatrol, DroneSentry-X on car sensors and effectors, are perfectly suited for police deployment. Also, we have been included in the Golden Dome, the $151 billion SHIELD IDIQ. Now, those are primarily missile protection sites, but all of them will need counter-drone protection, so that's where we intend to play.
In the UK, those of you following me on social media would have seen that I shared a picture in Hereford about a day ago, where there was a UK Minister of Defence visiting the SAS HQ facility, and there was our RfPatrol basically being demonstrated as part of the visit, and that is not a staged marketing opportunity. This was a genuine visit unrelated to DroneShield, and this shows how deeply embedded DroneShield is within the various arms of the Ministry of Defence. We believe that the actual opportunity is much more than just GBP 17 million or five projects. This is what we are actively tracking, but I think the UK will be spending significantly on counter-drone, and I believe we are by far the best-positioned business there.
In Australia, we've recently been included into the Line of Effort III panel for LAND 156, which is saying to be the managing contractor on specific sites, and we expect that work to commence, as in the participants on those panels will start getting those roles sometime this year, as well as us being part of the Line of Effort II, which is purchases of portables like DroneGuns and RfPatrols, and where we received initial small couple orders totaling $6 million last year, and we expect to get more off the back of that. In Asia, a lot of our efforts are driven off Japan and the rest of Chinese neighbors, and we expect that to continue ramping up significantly.
Outside of all these geographies, South America is probably the key driver, where we're very active in both Colombia and Mexico, and Colombia has announced a $1.7 billion US counter-drone budget, and the key focus for South America tends to be fixed-site systems, our DroneSentries, which provide protection for the whole facility. I'll largely skip through the Safer Skies Act, except to say that this is significantly increasing our US law enforcement demand. On the products, again, I will skim and maybe refer back to it during the Q&A session, but a reminder that we do a complete range of dismounted and on-the-move and fixed-site products. So we are a radio frequency AI-enabled drone detector and defeat maker, but we are also an integrator, so integrator of third-party detectors and third-party vectors, and this is quite important, especially when it comes to fixed sites.
I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the software strategy. So today, software is a small, about 5%, part of the total revenue. We plan to have it as close to 30% over the next several years as possible, and this will be achieved by every new product that will be released going forward, having one or multiple SaaS streams on top of that product. DroneSentry-X is a good example. So today, when you buy DroneSentry-X, you have RFAI, which is our AI-enabled engine that runs as a SaaS product on that, but then you're also probably going to have it deployed as part of your site, and within that, our C2 is also the other SaaS product that will be applicable to you.
If now you happen to run multiple sites, our enterprise SaaS, so DroneSentry- C2 enterprise kicks in, which gives you a region or a countrywide awareness, and that is an additional product again. Now, if you're having a multi-sensor solution, chances are you'll have cameras, so our DroneOpt ID SaaS, you'll probably have radars where there's SaaS attached to it as well, and we'll continue releasing new SaaS families, optimizing for more and more of the SaaS offerings on top of the hardware that we sell. I think selling as hardware and software positions us really well competitively.
I would not want to be a pure software business in the world of ChatGPTs, etc., today, where you're worried that the big AI is going to eat your lunch, and I think hardware, which is highly customized, high-IP sort of product, we have a lot of effort that we've been putting in in terms of designing that circuitry, designing those antennas, how it all sits together, and having AI that works on that hardware, not on the cloud, it's not large server farms, but on the device, AI on the device is making us a truly unique proposition that is very difficult for somebody to replicate, and I don't believe we have any competitors that are doing anything quite like we are in terms of our deployment of AI to sense and take down drones.
This is all strategy to then grow our SaaS to 30%, but then importantly, selling to militaries and government agencies is recurring by nature. In the world of counter-drone, where you really need new hardware every three or four years, whatever the customers are buying today in terms of hardware, they'll be fully replacing in about three or four years. In fact, some of our customers are already seeing the trend, and they're asking us, and I think this is potentially where the industry is moving towards counter-drone as a service. Instead of paying us $X for hardware and then continuing to pay SaaS, it's basically becoming one giant SaaS, and the hardware refreshers are baked into that.
Now, this is not going to be done by everybody, and this will enable us to continue receiving those bigger one-offs in the short term from the hardware purchases as well, but I think in the long term, so over the next five to ten years, I think a lot of the industry will move towards counter-drone as a service, which will further smooth out our cash flows. Number of differentiators, so technical and commercial, I talked to many of you about this before.
On the technical front, the AI, so our enormous database of drone signals, the largest proprietary database of its kind in the world, we believe, which is collecting drone signal data from 70-odd countries in which we operate, and this is one of our also key advantages compared to, say, North American or European competitors, a lot of whom focus on their regions because the markets are big enough. Coming out of Australia, we always had to be a global export business because the market here doesn't support a business of our size, and that enabled us the global reach as well as building those enormous databases. And then we have data engineers in Australia cleaning, tagging that data and enabling then that dedicated hardware with that AI engine to perform against drones.
Now, we're super excited, and we can talk more about it in the Q&A if people are interested on this call about the next generation of AI engine that we are planning to release later this year, which we really think will be a game changer in the performance of the drone detection as well as defeat. So as a result, our gear can detect further, defeat further, be lighter, smaller, and be in various form factors, so on the move, fixed-site, portable. On the commercial front, we are one of the most global counter-drone businesses. Now, we don't supply to the likes of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and so on, but within the Western and Western Allied countries, I don't believe there is a counter-drone company with a wider deployment than DroneShield is.
Over the last 10+ years, and we've truly been a pioneer in this business, and there are a lot of people in this company with very significant longevity. We've seen the whole cycle, both from the commercial and the technology experience. We have this think tank capability of understanding where the threat is moving, what the drones are likely to do, how to direct our roadmap, what makes sense, and this is also our competitive advantage in the world where you have to have understanding not just of military technology, drone technology, but also the acquisition cycles and how various customers buy. On the competitive positioning, we have one or two competitors usually across most of our product lines, but we are aiming, and I believe we are today the leader in every product segment in which we operate.
Traditional defense primes, we see more as our customers rather than competitors, just due to the requirement to rapidly evolve, like three to four years hardware cycles, quarterly software updates, and also be cost competitive. Defense large defense primes are not positioned for that kind of performance. Theirs are more like if you want to build a tank or a missile with very different sort of competitive moat. I believe that we remain the only public-listed pure counter-drone company in the world. There are other public-listed companies that do lots of things as well as counter-drone, being a relatively small part of what they do, but we are the only pure-play counter-drone listed company in the world. On the manufacturing capacity expansion, and maybe in the interest of time, I'll stop on this slide. We are on track to expand to $2.4 billion by end of the year.
We're just in the process of completing the move now to our eight times the size of the facility expansion in Sydney. We are setting up manufacturing in Europe and in the U.S. So the idea is for smaller shortages, so up to maybe $5 million, we can usually deliver really rapidly. So for example, the order that we announced on the 30th of December last year, about a month ago, we delivered the following day, and this was in Europe. And for larger orders, like the $62 million order we received in the middle of last year, we delivered that within two months. And the idea is that if we receive an order in hundreds of millions of dollars, we can still deliver that within, say, two quarters. So that's the goal of manufacturing capacity and how we look at the inventory.
I'll stop there and see if there are any questions in the function. Just give me one moment. So the first question is, why did the pipeline move from $2.5 billion to $2.1 billion? So this was what I was alluding to earlier about in the US. When it comes to the civilian sector, we had more bullish assumptions that we have today in terms of full-on projects. So some of those non-military, non-law enforcement, more nascent industry type situations where I still think there's going to be an enormous business to be done in data centers and airports and energy infrastructure. But a bit like what we've been seeing with the military sector, say, five years ago, those customers are still struggling given it's their very first time buying counter-drone equipment. They need to figure out how much they want to spend, how they want to lay it out.
So we have significantly trimmed and made more conservative our near-term forecasts for the U.S. non-law enforcement, non-military sector in terms of what we presented in the pipeline. So in the very near term, I still expect defense to be the majority driver of business in this company, except in the U.S., where I think law enforcement will be a very significant contributor. And I think over the next three years or so, the civilian sector will really start picking up to the point where if you think about the total addressable market, the $30 billion for the military U.S. and $30 billion U.S. for the civilian sector, I'd see in the long term this business being 50/50 military and non-military. Any guidance or TAM for Sentry-Civ? So Sentry-Civ is our commercially focused, more affordable product that we released several months ago.
We already started having early sales to customers, and this is focused on civilian customers who are budget conscious and don't want to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars or in the low millions for their deployment, but rather they want to be spending tens of thousands of dollars a year. It's a little bit too early to tell, and I think a lot of that adoption will drive as the civilian market starts to take on. We're talking potentially forums concerned about activists, and we've already been seeing purchases on that front, some energy infrastructure, stadiums, and so on. The next question is, when or how would we consider a U.S. listing to increase exposure to U.S. investors? I think there will be a time when that makes sense. However, my view is that you need to be significantly larger.
So today, we're about AUD 4 billion market cap, or US call it $2.5 billion. But while that is significant, so we are probably halfway on the ASX 200, that is truly a micro cap by the US standards, and I believe that it's going to be a disservice for our shareholders if we list on the US market now. But say if we are two times or three times the size, which given the growth we achieved, we more than tripled just last year alone in terms of the share price and the size, that could start making sense. So I think this is a regular thought that we're having, but right now, in my personal opinion, a bit too early in terms of diluting from our primary listing in Australia.
The next question is, when are we expecting to start manufacturing products in the European Union and in the U.S.? This half year. So in Europe this quarter and in the U.S. the following quarter. Are we finding any challenges to slow this down? No, I mean, there's obviously the usual process. I mean, nothing is simple in terms of the supply chains and whatnot, but we're not seeing an issue. The next question is, how do we counter fiber optic drones? So there's actually a slide in the appendix of the investor presentation that I will draw those of you who are interested in this question, but I'll give you a short summary. So radio frequency and drones are very closely linked. I see this a bit like wheels and cars because there's been so much invested in road infrastructure.
Whatever cars will look like in 50 years, they'll probably have wheels on, whatever they look like. So similarly, radio frequency is so core to the drone technology that the reason why fiber optic and attempts at AI exist is to try to circumvent what we do, but we are still dealing with the vast ramp of what drones are. And fiber optics have very severe limitations, like you think practically, right? Flying a drone with 10 kilometers of fishing line attached to it and snagging it on things or snagging the line itself, very, very difficult. You can't fly quickly. And a lot of the images, by the way, coming from Ukraine, I wouldn't necessarily trust what you see. Information warfare is prevalent. They say in war, the first casualty is often the truth.
But if you are really looking to make sure you can counter them, remember we integrate as well. So we build in radars and cameras that can track fiber optics, and we can integrate, and we already have, in fact, integrated things that can effectively counter electronic systems inside of our DroneSentry that can deal with that as well. But frankly, our customers are not seeing a lot of concern based on everything I'm observing on fiber optics, and it's more of a media thing. The next question I may pass to Angus about RFAI and our next generation and what it means. I'm personally really excited by that. So Angus, over to you.
Thanks, Oleg. Good morning, everyone. Thank you again for attending this morning and your continued support and interest in DroneShield. Yes, very keen to talk about our next generation AI technologies.
As many of you know, we have been a pioneer in the counter-drone space. We're also a pioneer in utilizing what we call micro AIs. So these are AIs that run on the edge. As Oleg mentioned, these are not cloud-based, big server farm, big GPU-based systems. These are very low power, very high throughput AI systems that run essentially on the edge. And that strategy that we developed over eight years ago has proved to be incredibly accurate as our detection performance, often, as you can see in the results of 2025, has been really good, and there's been a large adoption of these systems. And the other thing that it allows us to do is attach a software as a service license arrangement to the products as well to get those recurring revenues. The next generation is coming through now, and we're really excited about the developments.
So our current models, RFAI-ATK and RFAI V2, are doing really well in the market. We are working on both RFAI 3 and RFAI-ATK 2 that will be reduced, sorry, will be released onto the existing products, but also, as Oleg alluded to, our next generation platforms later this year. And there'll be a slow rollout through different products that are appropriate over time. One last point I'd make on here is the key thing you need to understand about building an AI business is the algorithms that you develop are important and they're difficult, but once you get through that, it really becomes a race for information, a race for data.
DroneShield has more data available on drones than almost any other company in the world, and we're utilizing that as the core foundation to both sustain our current generation AI models, but more importantly, that's also the bedrock of our next generation AI models, which will be much more open and much more applicable to the new varieties of drone technology that we're seeing in the future. So a bit of a bit of color on that one for you, Oleg.
Thanks, Angus. The next question is, do our products--I'm paraphrasing the question slightly--do our products have any familiarity to systems developed by Palantir? So Palantir develops more broader software-only based battlespace awareness systems. This is quite a bit different to us. We're focusing specifically on counter-drone. We're doing a fusion of hardware and software.
In fact, I believe that going forward, that fusion, that working together of software, the C2 and the hardware will become increasingly more important. So no, I don't quite see us competing with Palantir, which I think is a great company. The next question is, do we think that any of our customers are delaying purchasing of our current generation of products for the next generation? Look, I doubt it. So the next generation of products will come in batches through to and probably from the end of the year onwards. I mean, it's probably a bit of an analogy. Would you not buy an iPhone and wait for another year for another iPhone? Look, you probably would wait, except if your life depended on it, you'll probably buy the current iPhone as it stands, and then you'll buy the next one when that is released.
So I don't believe there's any way. There's expectation, in fact, that militaries see working with DroneShield as a long-term partnership, which is also how the 65% gross margins are justified in that we're doing significant ongoing investment in R&D, which means we will be releasing new hardware every several years, software every quarter, and there will be having to upgrade. And also that's where counter-UAS as a service idea comes in. Next question is, can we talk to the new product roadmap and any changes in the mix of potential uplift? So there's not everything that I can speak about, but the general comment I would make is that the average sales price would be higher.
So we're pricing our product to the gross margin, which we on the hardware front are planning to keep at 65%, but the actual product cost is likely to be close to triple just due to the more advanced chips, circuitry, and so on. But essentially, it would mean that the revenues should continue to rise, I believe, as low market situation and customers are looking to still have counter-drone products where they often have very little by way of. The civilian sector hasn't even started, for example. And so larger dollar numbers, but similar margins. And hopefully, as SaaS continues to increase as percentage, that will in time increase the gross margins across the business. The next question, sorry, it's a bit of a long one. I'm trying to read it as I go. So maybe I'll turn this one to Angus as well.
So the person is asking about us previously talking about the ongoing cat-and-mouse dynamic in the technology. Can we give an update on how that landscape is evolving? So what are the drone makers doing to make our life difficult, essentially? And how are we responding? And then a follow-up, what are the fundamental shifts in the underlying technology that we're seeing and how we're positioned with those changes? So Angus, over to you.
Thanks, Oleg. Great question. So yes, we are definitely in counter-drone 2.0, and we talk about that a lot at DroneShield where we really are in the second era of counter-drone warfare, whereby the big shift here is that the drone manufacturers are actively building systems and technologies to mitigate previously deployed counter-drone solutions. And so we are seeing a really large uptick in that. And look, we've spoken about this before.
This is the reason why we invest so much of our time and energy and financial resources into R&D. We have, as Oleg mentioned, the largest R&D team specifically to meet the needs of this emerging market. So to give you some examples of what we're seeing drone manufacturers use, we are seeing really wide-band RF communications. We're seeing mesh networking of drones. We're seeing, obviously, the fiber optic, which we still feel is fairly niche use case technology, is coming into play, and we're responding accordingly. But we're responding with solutions that our customers can actually purchase and field. There's a lot of solutions out there, particularly once you get into kinetic and high energy and laser systems that either financially or operationally are not really something that a lot of our customers can deploy easily to the level that they expect from DroneShield.
So we're responding with solutions that are going to work for our customers, most importantly. The thing, and going back to the point before, we've been looking at this for 10 years now. The thing that we really understand is the core principles of the drone technology. We've watched this technology evolve over time, and we have some pretty good understanding of where the evolution is going. And it really is going back to first principles. There are physical limitations on what you can do with a radio system. There are physical limitations on airframes. And once you understand those first principles, then you can build technology to meet those changing needs. And as Oleg mentioned, what are we doing about it? We are looking at integrations of a number of different technologies that we don't plan to build ourselves.
A good example of that is the intercept drone category, but we are currently doing test and evaluation, and we are in very close communications with a number of intercept drone companies around the world. That market itself is very competitive, no clear owner and winner. So we plan to take a strategic view and just partner with best in breed. We are doing that work now to work out who those partners are and pushing those integrations. Oleg, did you want to talk to anything on the M&A front on that side?
On the M&A front, our goal is to ensure that we continue being best of breed in anything that we buy. So you notice we have AUD 200 million in the bank. Obviously, we have the ability to use our stock as well, but we do not want to buy one of many.
I think there have been cases in the counter-drone industry where people went out and purchased companies that were not best of breed, basically just for the sake of making a transaction. We are very disciplined, which is why in our 10+ year history, we haven't done an opportunity yet. But that's not to say that we're not actively looking. In fact, we have hired Josh Bollo to start with us this week, and one of his explicit focus areas is assisting to identify M&A targets for us. So this is something that we're actively thinking about, but it has to be a success for the company. I often find that, and as you guys may well know, I come from an M&A background myself, in a transaction situation, the target benefits much more than an acquirer.
Obviously, here, us being an acquirer, we want to make sure that it is value-add to the shareholders. We're being very careful, but I believe the opportunity is there in terms of acquiring best of breed capability. Otherwise, we'll just keep developing things organically. The next question is around the Golden Dome of the SHIELD IDIQ, the $151 billion program that we are now a part of. The question is, has the US given any context to the timelines and when are we going to see pipeline from SHIELD IDIQ? So there is no pipeline from SHIELD IDIQ in our sales pipeline right now because it's all a little bit too early. On the timing, it's really difficult to tell. There have been, as you probably know, a large number of companies included in that IDIQ, but it's also a very large program.
So I'm hoping to get some news over the next six to 12 months on this. I'm glad we're included. Like I said, all of these missile protection sites will need to have a counter-drone program attached to it. I believe we're well positioned. The next question is, I'm trying to summarize it, is that basically, I think the asker is wanting to get some more background around me selling the stock of the performance options in the business back in November last year. Look, the background is as follows. Myself, as well as a number of senior executives in the business, get rewarded when we hit revenue thresholds. Those are exceptionally ambitious thresholds. When we had no revenue to speak of, it was $10 million. When we hit $10 million, the next threshold was $50 million.
When we had 50, the next threshold was 200, which is the one that was achieved in November last year. Now the next threshold we communicated, which is more of an industry best standard, is a number of those thresholds rather than what you call cliff vesting, which is what we've been operating in a more elegant way up to now, where you have AUD 300 million, AUD 400 million, and AUD 500 million revenue as your threshold. Then for each one of these numbers being reached, you have some vesting of the options immediately and some the other half 12 months later. So it's in a very staggered fashion. So once those performance options have vested and I've chosen to exercise them, that essentially crystallized immediately half of that as a tax bill, regardless whether I would have sold them or not, and regardless where the share price would have gone.
So essentially for me, it immediately crystallized AUD 25 million in tax liability, regardless where the drone share price is, which is a huge burden. So clearly, anybody looking at this now would have said, "Okay, well, Oleg is looking to sell at least AUD 25 million worth of stock to pay the bill to the ATO." And then the rest, look, I grew up in a fairly poor condition, as some of you who followed me would know, and social housing and so on. So this was an opportunity for me to secure my financial future. I had a mortgage, a fairly significant renovation bill, unfortunately, that went out of control, but more generally secure the financial future. Look, unlike what some of the articles reported, I did not sell everything.
I still have a multi-million AUD equity position through the stock options, and I'll basically continue to care about the business. I would also say that while the price has reduced a bit before, like from about AUD 6+ to about AUD 4, it was completely unrelated to selling. It was before the selling. This was in line with the general listed market slide down after a hard run-up a couple of months before. In terms of impact from my selling, well, the price now is higher than what it was before I started selling. So those that would have held on, they'll be seeing the money. I would say that we are number one performing stock in terms of 3x+ growth out of the ASX 200 in 2025. I hope as we continue to kick goals, the share price will continue to perform.
Maybe the last thing I would say is that while obviously I was in the news over as a director and my filings are public, there are a number of employees in the company that also benefited from this. I'm really glad for them because life at DroneShield is not simple. In order to achieve those revenue targets, the amount of effort and the sacrifice on people's family life and so on is very, very significant. We're not just posting these results because we're lucky. I'm glad that all of these employees that have been around for many years and have prioritized the company over anything else in their lives have been rewarded and continue to be rewarded as part of this stock structure. This is aligning with obvious investor interests.
And then ultimately, as we continue to kick goals in terms of our financial performance, the stock price follows that as we've seen through 2025. I think the next question I might pass to Angus in terms of the other current supply shortages across semiconductor industry expected to impact 2026 revenue, and maybe more generally, Angus, if we talk about our supply chain and how we deal with that.
Sure. So one thing we're really proud of at DroneShield is we've never missed a delivery. So in all of our history, when we have been working with our customers, many of those have been urgent requests for equipment, we've been able to supply generally to the timeline in which the customer needed that equipment. That's something we're really proud of.
That's the sort of thing that gives many of our end users and our customers the confidence to go with DroneShield and that they can place significantly larger orders with DroneShield and know that we'll meet their demands. I mean, the great example we had last year was the very large European order, over AUD 60 million, which we essentially were able to turn around in just over two months, which is an incredible feat of our operations team working very closely with our various supply chain partners. In terms of the supply chain, we are investing a lot of capital into ensuring that we can meet those long lead time items. We can build confidence in our supply chain partners, and we can secure the stock that we need.
Obviously, the much larger facilities that we are opening up in Sydney at the moment are supporting that as well, having additional warehousing and just logistics support to do much larger orders and turn them around very rapidly. So we're not experiencing any delays that are material to us delivering orders at this time. And so we're in a relatively good position there.
Thanks, Hings. The next question is around whether DroneShield is being affected by the Trump tariffs. So we have revised our pricing and fully passed on the tariffs when they were introduced last year. So no, we are not affected. The next question is slightly long, so I'm trying to summarize it. It's around how do we continue to innovate in response to new drone technologies such as fiber optics?
So to kind of reiterate what me and Angus said before, DroneShield at the heart is an engineering organization. We have 350 engineers, but not just slapped together over the last month, but a lot of these people have been in the organization, especially in the senior roles in the last 5, 7 years, right? I've been in this company now for more than 10 years. Angus has been here for a very similar amount of time, even outside of engineering functions. Carla, our CFO, has been here for about 8 years. So there's a lot of longevity in the business and understanding of the trends and where things might go, right? And the drone makers are a clever bunch, but physics is physics, and there are natural limitations of what those guys can do.
I guess further up the curve you go, the more difficult it gets and where they are waiting for them as they're making their technologies more sophisticated. So to me, innovation in drones is a very positive thing. If the drone makers stopped innovating, the counter-drone industry would commoditize and our gross margins would collapse. So that rapid engineering mindset and deep experience in anything to do with counter-drone is our key competitive advantage. And we actually want the drone makers to keep innovating. Our customers do not want us to be what they're not expecting us to be 100%. Nobody is, but they want us to be materially better than competition, which I believe we are, and to continue to innovate. The next question is whether we can give an update on the Homeland Security World Cup. So this is the June-July event and how we're positioned.
There was a grant from FEMA, U.S. Government Agency, for about $500 million. There are a number of U.S. law enforcement agencies that have been applying for these grants at various degrees of that process. There's only so much I can share. And obviously, under the Safer Skies Act, a lot of these guys, once they go through their Huntsville, Alabama, FBI range training school, are able to use jammers as well. So we are well positioned. Obviously, the urgency is there. So I'm pretty optimistic, but I can't give a solid update in terms of the dollar numbers that we're currently associating with the program, in part because I think there's just going to be so much movement over the next several months. The next couple of questions are essentially asking us for revenue forecast for 2026.
Look, I'd love to have a crystal ball. So we don't give guidance. The reason why we don't is because you're in a nascent industry, and it would just be irresponsible for us to give a number. We're not a toll road. We're not an airport. I can tell you that my internal direction to the sales team is to have a very meaningful increase. We're talking a multiple increase over 25 sales. And obviously, we'll update the market as we continue to push towards the target. And I would note that we already started the year with essentially AUD 100 million in the bank in terms of the revenues, which is by far the strongest we ever had in any of the years in the past. The next one I'll pass to Angus. Does DroneShield have concerns with the emergence of microwave-based drone defense technology?
How differentiate ourselves from the company's folks on that technology, specifically combating drone swarm defense?
Thanks, Oleg. So yes, high-powered microwave solutions are emerging as a counter-drone technology. Many of you will remember we do have a strategic relationship with a company out of the U.S. called Epirus, who are, in our opinion, the leader globally in that space. The technology is incredibly impressive. However, it has very large limitations around cost. We are talking multiple tens of millions of dollars per panel, which is a price point significantly higher, many magnitudes higher above where many of our solutions are priced. So it's a very different price point. So often we don't compete directly with these types of companies, and we see them more as a strategic partner for those customers.
Those customers are a very limited subset of the core defense customers that we have who are interested in that technology. We have ways to partner with various companies to provide that should we be requested. So yeah, very different price point, very different technology, and very complex to deploy, very complex to sustain. So incredible technology, and we think we've got some great partnerships there, but it's a very different strategy than the much more broader, larger piece of the pie that DroneShield is going after.
Thanks, Angus. To reinforce what Angus just said, I firmly believe that for a counter-drone solution to work, it has to be cost-effective. So drones are costing a few thousand dollars a piece.
You can't have a $10-$20 million piece of equipment unless you're protecting only what will be effectively a couple of sites in a nation where you basically throw anything at that in a counter-drone solution. So if you want to be selling more than five or 10 of something, you can't be costing $10 or $20 million in the counter-drone land, which is also why we don't really see defense primes in this situation. The next question is about dividends, also a topic we get periodically. When will the dividends be payable given? Well, the question was also saying, given performance options are taking priority. So firstly, I wouldn't see dividends and performance options as a trade-off. They relate to entirely different things. Performance options relate to basically motivating the staff to achieve the results that shareholders are looking for.
The dividends are about capital allocation in saying, are we wanting to invest the capital for rapid growth, or do we want to return the excess capital that we don't have deployment for to achieve the growth of shareholders? Right now, we're seeing an immense amount of opportunity as we continue to post these record results. So dividends are not a priority at this time, but this is something that the board regularly reconsiders. I would see this, frankly, more of a consideration when we finish the growth rate at the incredible levels that we are doing now. The next one is thoughts on being part of ASX 100. We got into ASX 300 in September 2024, into ASX 200 in September 2025, if my memory serves me right, or I could be slightly off.
We are today, I believe, sitting somewhere around number, depending how you count, 120 or 130. But in order to get into the ASX 100, you can't be number 99, and you need to be more further up. So there's a significant jump from where we are to get to ASX 100. But hey, if we tripled on the share price last year, depending on where we get to this year, this is all in the realm of possible. And obviously, that opens additional angles in terms of further funds investing into the company. The next question is, can we give some context into the $800 million opportunity that we're working on? What stage of the sales cycle are we in this deal? So it's a European countrywide deployment where this is a part of a much bigger deployment, but our share of it is about $800 million.
It's the same customer that we had the $62 million order with in the middle of last year. I hope to see the project awarded in the second half of the year. But as you'd expect of mega projects of this size, there's a lot of political angles to it, budgetary allocations at the national level. So there are a lot of moving parts. But I'm hopeful to have the order in the second half of the year. And then the question is, how soon do they want it fielded? So whether it's ASAP or whether it'll be staged over a period of a year or a couple of years, perhaps. And also, what are the payment terms? Obviously, we'll be seeking payment terms to ensure that we either have no or absolutely minimal cash drag.
And remember, 65% gross margin means that you don't need to have enormously favorable payment terms not to have cash drag on an order of that size. So the next question, I think this is the last question that we currently see in the line. So if you have more, please feel free to ask now. Can we talk? Can we speak? Sorry, I'm just trying to summarize this. So can we talk to market-sensitive contracts, which are now under $20 million threshold? For example, would LAND 156 or other Australian government contracts always be market-sensitive? So I think the question is for contracts which are not quite $20 million. So $20 million is a dollar threshold over which we will always announce. If it's under $20 million, but it has some kind of a deep strategic element, would we announce it?
The answer is, if there is a deep strategic element, meaning it has a clear pathway towards larger sales, the fact that we got a particular contract, then we would be looking to consider announcing. But there needs to be the strategic element for us to do so. You would be expecting a lot less cadence in the amount of sales announcements we do. But obviously, each one is going to be a lot more material than what people have seen in the past. The next question is about the expense. Do we expect to increase our fixed expenditure line? Maybe I'll pass this one to Carla, our CFO.
Thank you, Oleg. On the question, it asked specifically if the AUD 800 million would increase our fixed expenses. The answer to that is no. So it would not significantly increase it because we are currently putting structures in place so that we can increase our manufacturing to way above that level. So therefore, everything that we are currently doing in terms of uplifting all of the internal structures, focusing on our manufacturing capability, we will not need to significantly increase our fixed cash costs. Thank you.
Thanks, Carla. And in terms of our base cost, so as we said in the investor presentation, there is about AUD 150 million in run rate cash cost. That's not quite what the question was asking, but I'm just expanding on that. As of December, and this is based on about 500 people headcount plus the on-costs, like the spaces, the lease, and so on. So that will increase a bit as we get from 500 - 600.
But at the revenue growth that we're expecting, our aim is to continue being operating cash flow positive, as in fact we have been in the December quarter, as you can see from the 4C quarterly. Then the next one is, do we have any updates on Mission Syracuse? No, we do not. And if there is an update, chances are you will hear it from the Commonwealth before you hear it from us. That's usually how the nature of the Australian defense announcement works. You have to let the customer make the announcement first. The partnerships question. So maybe I'll pass it to Angus. So is DroneShield considering partnerships with specialist connectivity providers such as Elsight to enhance resilience, stability, or RF communications, avoid signal loss, tight integration? Sounds like an outside shareholder asking this question. And enabling tight integration across different platforms, assets, and operating environments. Angus, over to you.
Thanks, Oleg. Look, we have a number of partnerships, some of which we do talk about. A lot of them we don't. And that is for supply chain resiliency, but also just for commercial reasons. We don't always announce our partners. Look, we are open to partnering where it makes sense. But also, I think one of the hard lessons we've learned over the last 10 years is core capabilities, core technologies. If you don't have them in-house and you don't control the destiny of those technologies, it's very hard to keep pace with where the market is going. And so we do have a strong tendency for core technologies, particularly those two right now. Sorry, those three are the RF detection, RF defeat, and the C2 layer. These are our core technologies. We remain in-house.
And then we look to partner with the integrators and different technology providers to layer on top of those three. The story behind that strategy is those are the three elements that most of our customers need first. So DroneShield is generally the first partner or first supplier that most of our customers come to. They're the first three layers that they look to put in place. And then we can work with those end customers to layer in additional partners and technology. So we want to control that relationship. We want to supply that intelligence and our understanding of the industry to those customers. And so that's why we focus again on those three layers. And then we add those additional layers where it makes sense.
Thanks. Question that just came through. Have any major European and North American institutional investors already discovered DroneShield? If so, which ones?
In terms of public information, you would see that Fidelity has been our substantial shareholders, so over 5%. I think they're currently sitting at about 7% according to their substantial shareholder notices. So that's obviously a sort of a pan, call it Boston-London, huge investment giant. And now they've been with us for quite some time. I want to say probably over a year, if I remember correctly. And then we're kind of the common and the registered composition, but we see a AUD 4 billion market cap and quite deep liquidity and inclusion of a bunch of indices. We're now getting to the precipice of being on the screen for a lot of the funds. And we are starting to do an active outreach using opportunities like quarterly releases and annual report that we're releasing in a month to market to those institutions.
We still remain a majority retail held stock. And I think it just reflects our heritage of having grown very quickly from a tiny company to a fairly big one. But I think in the long term, this would be a majority institutionally held company, as you'd expect. I believe that concludes all of the questions. So we'll stop there. Thank you for your time. And if you think of anything else, please feel free to email us with your question at investors@DroneShield.com. Thanks for your time.