AUD 9 million of net cash from operations. This reinforces our aim to have rapid growth, as well as being profitable and operating cash flow positive moving forward. The pipeline has slightly increased from AUD 2.1 billion-AUD 2.3 billion in the last month since we presented the 4Q results. A lot of it was due to our increase in the Asia Pacific pipeline, specifically. The pipeline corresponds to about 295 deals. Great diversity of deals is how we have certainty of ongoing business, where there's diversification across the stages of maturity, geography, products, customers, and other factors. Some of those deals are significant. There is about 18 deals over AUD 30 million each. Our largest deal being about AUD 750 million.
Previously, we advertised this deal as about AUD 800 million. With it being a European deal and the Australian dollar continuing to strengthen, the Australian dollar value of the deal has slightly reduced. DroneShield continues to be significantly well-positioned to win in the exploding counter drone market. We have 160 employees in about seven countries around the world, and that includes over 350 engineers. We continue to invest significantly in R&D in this rapidly evolving landscape, and it's about AUD 70 million+ of R&D that we spend every year. We continue to have significant cash balance of over AUD 200 million to support our growth.
To recap, on top of what I was saying earlier about the record revenues, the SaaS is continuing to grow. Our goal is to continue to ramp it up to the eventual aim of over 30% a year over the next five years. The growth in SaaS will be reached through having multiple streams of SaaS over increasing amount of hardware in our space. We're familiar with some of the recent market commentary about some of the software companies that have been sold off. The big difference in the DroneShield case is we have an integrated hardware and software solution, where a lot of our IP is really deeply inside the hardware as well as software. The data we use for our software is not something you can easily just scrub off the internet.
When you're looking at the drone signal data, you have to collect it in a number of countries, often very sensitive situations. Very high IP that cannot be easily disrupted by the likes of ChatGPT. Along with the record revenue growth, we're seeing significant matching growth in customer cash receipts and big increase also in the committed and also recognized year-to-date revenues and cash receipts already going into 2026. A very strong start of the year. We talked briefly about the profit, where the underlying profit before tax for 2025 has been about AUD 33 million, and that is showing the significant operating leverage going forward. What I mean by that is with the roughly 65% gross profit margin, as the revenues grow, that is going to outpace the growth in costs, resulting in what we're aiming to be increasingly profitable position.
The bottom right-hand chart is the NPAT to EBITDA bridge. I'll leave it as read, essentially AUD 36 million in underlying EBITDA, with AUD 3.5 million statutory NPAT. If there are any questions on that, happy to answer that. The sales pipeline, this has largely been covered when we presented about a month ago. One change, as I mentioned, is the increase in our Asia Pacific position, where a number of countries bordering China are significantly concerned about the Chinese drone threat, and we're continuing to see increase in demand there. Overall, to recap on the key themes, U.S., we believe, will have a number of growth factors.
In addition to the military, where there is a $1 trillion record defense budget for 2026 and a $1.5 trillion defense budget proposed for 2027, we're expecting to see significant public safety market, not just with the Safer Skies Act enabling police to take down drones, but also significant funding applied ahead of the FIFA World Cup in June, July, and we expect to see meaningful sales between now and that time, and also going forward. Importantly, we believe the police will be a bridge towards the counter-drone being seen less so as strictly military type of solutions and more into the civilian solution. Then increasingly deployed by critical infrastructure operators, airports, and even corporates.
In Europe and U.K., we have opened our sales office in Amsterdam, managing our local distributors around Europe. Both Europe and U.K. are driving our momentum significantly at the moment, underpinned by everything you're reading in the news about Ukraine and the general instability there. Europeans realizing they cannot rely on U.S. for their security. Being Australian is a great neutral position in terms of appealing for sales for both the European and the U.S. markets. In Australia, DroneShield has been selected on the panel for LAND 156, which is the rollout across defense bases nationally, and we anticipate for there to be significant amount of business for us, even starting from this year in this AUD 1.3 billion program. We have approximately AUD 79 million in inventory as of 31st of December.
That combines $26 million in finished goods, as well as $53 million in raw inventory, which is largely the long lead items to ensure that we can deliver to our customers in a short amount of time. We have moved to a enterprise ERP system, which enables us to really push out on our goal of moving production from $500 million a year to $2.4 billion by the end of the year, which is underpinned by the new 3,000 square meter facility in Sydney, as well as our manufacturing hubs in the U.S. and Europe, which are being finalized as we speak. 2025 has seen inventory impairment of about $10.3 million, constituting two factors: the $8.5 million in finished goods, which substantively relates to DroneGun Mk4, outselling DroneGun Tactical.
We believe it's a one-off situation because we essentially introduced two product lines, with the Mark Four being the success to Tactical within a couple of years of each other, and we do not intend to introduce successive versions to the DroneGun Mk4 and RfPatrol, as we believe that at the hardware level, those are essentially as best as the technology can get within those form factors, and the future versions of those technologies will look entirely different. Therefore, we do not believe that similar sort of impairment is likely going forward. The AUD 1.8 million in raw materials, so a lot of it was linked to us moving to the new ERP, and it's in line with FY 2024 impairment of AUD 0.6 million.
On the manufacturing, as I mentioned earlier, we are expanding from AUD 500 million a year to AUD 2.4 billion, and that includes the European and the U.S. assemblies. For those relatively new to our story, we have essentially two streams of products. You have the dismounted, being the RfPatrol body-worn drone detector. It's a hardware that has AI on the edge, so it has software that lives inside of it, that we do quarter the software updates on. There's DroneGun, which is what we've historically been most well known for. In fact, those observing our news probably would have seen with Electronic Arts, major game adopting DroneGun as one of its key weapons. In fact, DroneGun has only been just under 20%, 19% of our revenues in FY 2025.
In fact, the business is fundamentally moving towards being a diversified company with our on the move and fixed site DroneSentry system constituting just under 40%, and our RfPatrol being just over 40% of our revenues. SentryCiv, the civilian-specific subscription-based product that we launched last year, I think will start ramping up as the civilian sector grows as well. Our sales strategy is separated into three streams. You have the device-level SaaS. Today, when you buy RfPatrol or DroneSentry-X, that comes with RFAI detection software, and then we currently trialing the RFAI-ATK, which is AI-enabled defeat software. That will be a paid product from about middle of the year.
We do AI that sits inside the cameras, and also utilize third-party AI for radars, and of course, SentryCiv, which is our own SaaS as well. The side SaaS, so when you have a base or generally maybe critical infrastructure facility, you'll be having a number of sensors, DroneShield, and third parties stitched together by our DroneSentry-C2, or perhaps commanders with tablets with our DroneSentry-C2 Tactical. Our latest product that we introduced at the end of last year being our DroneSentry-C2 Enterprise, when you have entire region or a country looking for patterns of drone incursions, drone attacks.
The idea when I was saying earlier about the SaaS getting to 30% of the revenues over the next five years being our goal, for example, you might be buying DroneSentry-X, and on that, you might have RFAI detection software and then RFAI defeats. You'll probably be pairing DroneSentry-X with a camera that will come with our DroneOptID SaaS, probably a radar as well, which will have its own SaaS. It'll probably sit on a base underpinned by DroneSentry-C2, and potentially even in the regional, we're seen by DroneSentry-C2 Enterprise. This is an example of how multiple SaaS packages can apply to a single piece of hardware. Sometimes we get asked: What's a small company at the end of the world in Sydney able to do to compete against large defense players?
Historically, when you think about defense, you think about perhaps U.S., Europe, Israel, maybe South Korea. You don't think about Australia. We have been lucky to an extent of being in this game right from the start and deploying significant engineering force on this. Also being in Australia, we knew that we cannot sustain ourselves just with Australian market, so we became an export business from day one. In fact, today, about 95% of our revenues are export, and I'm expecting the trend to be similar going forward. As a result, and this truly global threat being the drone attacks, we developed distributors in about 70 countries around the world, and now we have active customers in dozens of countries around the world.
With that, over time, Australia also being a very good base for engineering, we developed solutions which are smaller, lighter, more effective for both detection and defeat. Also those relationships with end users around the world, Australia being a great country, again, in terms of the relationships with these Western and Western allied countries, then feed us, honestly, probably more information that we can do with in terms of rapidly changing our technology roadmap to adapt to the latest drone threat. A number of commercial and technical differentiators. In terms of specific competitors, what we generally say is that within the niches of counter-drone that we choose to compete in, we are the dominant player. If you think about body-worn drone detection, our RfPatrol is, we believe, the leading product by number of units sold around the world. There are a couple others.
MyDefence has a product, Design has a product, but we believe that we significantly outsell them based on what we're seeing. Similarly, for handheld defeat, we believe DroneGun is the best-selling product of its nature around the world. In the on-the-move detection and defeat, the closest product to DroneSentry-X would be a product that AeroVironment has, but it's a pretty small part of their business, and if anything, in the long term, this potentially be a cooperative relationship. In terms of the C2 solutions, there are two competitors, so we're listing Dedrone and Anduril, but I think we have a number of unique differentiators on both of them, and we don't necessarily compete with Anduril being a much higher cost and strictly military solution compared to DroneSentry-C2.
Last thing to add here is that the traditional defense primes are not competitors and really more customers because they are not really moving at the speed and the cost base that is required to be successful in this cost asymmetric market. Cost asymmetric, meaning if you've got a $500 drone, you can't really be fielding a $10 million solution. So with that, we see the traditional primes as customers. On the corporate governance, many of you will be familiar with a lot of the media scrutiny we had at the end of last year. We have engaged Freehills, a tier one legal advisor, to give us essentially gold standard in corporate governance. With that, we have yesterday revealed a number of updates of our policies, the trading policy, disclosure policy, the minimum shareholding policy, and others.
In my view, what has actually happened is the business has been growing incredibly quickly. On the indices front, for example, we joined the All Ords in March 2024, ASX 300 in September 2024, ASX 200 in September 2025, and now, depending on how fast we grow, we might be knocking on the door of ASX 100. As a result, when you grow so quickly, policies, procedures can sometimes fall behind, and this was an opportunity for us to establish gold standard for this particular area, much like we are running really quickly, changing our policies for a much larger business right across the company. We made a number of hires, so Head of People and Performance at the end of last year.
Josh joined us in January this year, and also Chief Operating Officer, who joined us from a similar position from Thales, where he brings a wealth of that high-end operational experience. The last slide, then we'll turn to questions, and I encourage everybody again to please be asking us questions. As we stand today, we are excited to be starting to launch the next generation of hardware across our product family, so this will be towards the second half of the year and into 2027. The counter-drone market continues to have very low saturation because you think about drones, they only really came into people's minds about 10 years ago, really started having negative, that sort of nefarious impact from the start of the Ukraine War.
Thinking about only five years ago, and counter-drone is a derivative of the drone market, military started to buy or looking to buy in any meaningful quantities only in the last five years, and when you're selling to the government market, the wheels can grind slowly, right? As a result, I would say militaries have probably sub 5% market saturation, civilian market has close to zero, and therefore, we have significant opportunity in front of us. The SaaS revenue we talked about are going from about 5% current to about 30% and continuing to expand our market share. In addition to selling hardware and software, we'll be looking to expand into training solutions, support, counter-drone as a service, and other related initiatives to maximize, I guess, that ownership of the customer and providing the services to them.
We talked about establishing of the European manufacturing facility, and also in the U.S., and we believe that the next 12 to 18 months, we'll start seeing additional initial material sales in the civilian space, such as data centers, potentially airports, and other key customers. We're continuing to work on our processes and systems due to our rapid growth and in a very disciplined manner, looking at the opportunistic M&A. Now, there are no competitors that would like to buy, but we're always interested to look at counter-drone technologies, in addition to what we may be doing in-house, and we're really well-positioned to assess what makes sense due to our understanding of the sector. As we look over the next five years, we're looking to get to the target revenue of over $1 billion a year.
This may sound like a lot, we quadrupled our revenues last year alone, so that will hopefully give you some sense of our ambition. Also, just the fact that the maturity of the market is still so early, the customers are gonna be putting increasing orders, hopefully. Most of our revenues are from repeat customers, right? People placing increasing orders as they get more comfortable with the idea of having counter-drone solutions and more budgets to go with it. Continuing to have that global focus is probably the last point to say. With that, we'll conclude the presentation part of that session and turn to any questions. Okay.
The first question is: How likely do we think is it to sign a AUD 750 million deal with Europe, and do we have production to deliver on the deal timely? It's not gonna be trivial, we think that we're well-positioned, and it's the same customer who gave us a AUD 62 million order in the middle of last year, and smaller orders in addition to that. We have an existing, really good relationship with that customer. The production capacity, depending on how fast the customer wants to execute on the deal, if they say to us, "Go as fast as you can," I believe we should be able to deliver it in batches over perhaps under nine months.
If the customer wants to stagger it, which is entirely possible, in stages, it might be, say, over two years or so. That's my best estimate at this stage. I think the next question, I'm trying to rephrase it: What is our announcement level for deals? We continue our approach as of the past, where approximately 10% of last year's revenue has been our announcement threshold. For 2026, it'll be AUD 20 million, unless there is a strategic element to announce a smaller deal. There's a question about 18 of the AUD 30 million deals. When are we going to be announcing them? Well, hopefully, once we win them, we will be announcing them.
The next question is about: Does DroneShield have plans to expand its drone technology into different domains, such as naval drones, used in Ukraine conflict? Do we see it as an area we could pivot to? Absolutely. When you see us talking in our announcements about counter-drone, we actually refer to it often as C-UxS, not C-UAS, A being aerial. We consider drones being all domains, whether it's ground, naval, or flying machines. The good news is that the technology that we use is equally valid for flying machines, swimming machines, and crawling machines, and we can be effective on all of those.
The only time when the technology stops working is for the underwater drones, so UUVs, where our command and control is still effective, but for the detection, for example, you'll be most likely looking to use a sonar. If we see more of that being where the market is heading, we would simply focus on integration of most sonars and lead with our C2. The vast majority, we believe, for the foreseeable future, will be aerial, ground, and what we see in Ukraine, as you said, being the swimming drones. I think the next question I might pass to Carla, our CFO. The January update referenced gross margin of 65%. The statutory FY 2025 number was 61% after the inventory impairment. Should we think of 65% as the normalized run rate?
Thanks, Oleg. Yes, our average normalized run rate for the gross profit margin should be seen as 65%. There's obviously items that will affect this margin. Those items will be the percentage of system sales versus dismounted sales. Our systems carry a lower gross profit margin. The reason for that is because of the external third-party componentry that is incorporated in the system, such as the cameras and the radars. Those items carry gross profit margins between 15% and 30%. Therefore, we do think a 65% average moving forward for our gross profit margin is our aim. Thanks, Oleg.
Thanks, Carla. The next question is about Bundeswehr, the German Army. Are they a customer of our products, and do we have plans to supply the Bundeswehr? Yes, Bundeswehr is a key focus for us, and in fact, if you follow the German defense market, there's a high-profile defense exhibition in Germany that is just concluding now that we're at. Yes, it's very much focus for us. Germany is a key European market. The next question is, what is our current penetration of Ukraine and neighboring NATO markets? We have hundreds of detection and defeat systems deployed in Ukraine and continuing to add more. We have systems deployed in Poland and a number of other areas.
Yes, absolutely, we are deployed, I wanna say probably with about 10 or 12 European NATO countries, plus obviously U.S. and Canada, as far as NATO is concerned. The next question is: Is there a goal for the stock price? I mean, as high as possible, but unfortunately, I only get to influence it so much. How much revenue do we estimate currently comes from civilian buyers? Do we estimate a shift? Today, almost all of the revenue comes from military, border security, and intelligence community, with a bit of public safety being police. I think the question was referring more to customers like airports and data centers.
Today those are minimal, but we're starting to see green shoots of demand, and if you looked at our total addressable market, we're estimating about AUD 30 billion TAM, total addressable market, for the military and another roughly AUD 30 billion for the civilian market. We think over the next five years, our revenues will truly become more 50/50, and once the civilian market gets going, I think it can evolve potentially much faster than the military market has. Next question: Given the continuous innovation in the industry, what gives us confidence that the inventory is sound, and are we able to reduce the inventory risk in terms of moving to just-in-time manufacturing?
As I briefly mentioned, the inventory write-down this year was a bit of a unique situation, where we introduced 2 DroneGuns within several years of each other, and essentially, our newer DroneGun ended up cannibalizing some of the older DroneGun sales. By the way, we continue to sell DroneGun Tacticals. We just decided, together with our auditors, to take a prudent approach and do the inventory write-down. Going forward, we don't expect to launch superseding versions of any of our product lines today, but rather really different product form factors. I don't expect for there to be cannibalization, meaning if you wanna have a jammer in the shape of a gun that you hold in your hand, I believe DroneGun Mk4 is kind of as good as it will get.
There will be better jammers, but they'll be backpacks, they'll need more space, and so on. I don't believe that just-in-time manufacturing really works for this industry because some of our longest lead circuitry has a 25-week lead time, and I don't believe it will change much because, again, of just complexity of the technologies that we're dealing with, and our buyers want to be able to fulfill small orders quickly, right? Our goal, which is largely in consultation with our sales force and customer expectations, is to be able to deliver orders in single digits of millions instantly. You probably would have seen we did an announcement at the end of last year. We received an order about AUD 5 million on the 30th of December, delivered it by the 31st of December, which was pretty incredible.
The $62 million order we had in the middle of last year, we delivered within two months, and then the $750 million order I talked about, fulfillment in under nine months. For that, you need to hold inventory, but we're pretty happy with the raw and finished inventory we're holding. Please remember that raw, as I was saying, is largely long lead time items as well. They're not finished goods. Also, keep in mind that, for example, RfPatrol and DroneGun and some other products we have interchangeable parts, so you can use in between the products, and we're trying to have as many interchangeable parts between product families as possible. What are our plans for increasing effective range and distance of our products? I guess it's the same thing, range and distance.
My first comment, somewhat flippantly, is that more is not always better. For example, for the detection, more range you get, often more false alarms you get, and our customers don't necessarily wanna be able to see 20, 30 kilometers out, and at some point, physics kicks in as well, right? A lot of our work with customers, if they're very new to counter-drone, is saying, "Okay, well, if you come with an expectation of detecting a proper missile 200 kilometers away, there's nothing that will detect a small drone 200 kilometers away." Explaining that there is natural physics limitation to range, but a lot of it is just pushing the envelope of physics, right? You're saying, "Okay, there's noise floor and radio frequency. How do you see through the noise floor?
How do you, how do you reduce the false alarms? There are quite a lot of parameters that you want to optimize. How you detect never-seen-before drones, how do you deal with the Chinese drones, which are hiding behind other bits of noise, which are running away from you when you're trying to disrupt it? There are a number of challenges in addition to distance, but that is ultimately why you have 350+ engineers working on that problem with a lot of drone signal data, and just continuing to get information from their customers. The next question is about: Can we provide some more detail about the types of drone deployments by China, which are behind the concerns that our Asia-Pacific customers have?
A well-publicized example, this is a bit dated, about two years ago, has been of a Chinese drone landing on the deck of a Japanese naval ship. You imagine massive embarrassment, loss of face, that's an example, right? Small drones are buzzing over military facilities and just generally harassing both the civilian and the military targets. This is what our Asia-Pacific customers are looking to protect against. Has DroneShield considered underwater drones and drone capabilities, anti-drone capabilities and detection? Yes. We actually first came upon the concept of underwater drones and what to do about them about five years ago.
Those who've been following us for a while would have seen we introduced a partnership with a sonar company, and our job there is our command and control. DroneSentry-C2. Again, remember, we're not a DroneGun company, we are much more than that, so we make a command and control solution that various modalities of sensors plug into. We had a sonar compatible with our command and control system, started marketing it those five years ago. Not a one person bought one. The conclusion we reached is that the market just wasn't ready for it, and my view is that the market is still not ready for underwater drones, but the threat is there.
Underwater is significantly different, as I was just saying five minutes ago, to every other types of drones, so drones that crawl on the ground, or on the surface of the water, that fly in the air, because traditional physics of radio frequency in the air doesn't propagate well underwater. You need sonar for the detection and something else, be it nets, torpedoes, it depends really on the customer and their ability to deploy countermeasures for the defeat. Our role in all of this will be providing a command and control solution, which also will protect against drones from the air and the ground and so on. Can we quantify the current order backlog and how much of the revenues expect to be awarded in this financial year?
If you look at the charts, we are sitting at a bit over AUD 100 million in committed revenue this year, and we recognize roughly about AUD 20-ish or so. That means the backlog of about AUD 80 million and virtually all of it is for this year, plus obviously, the revenue that we will actually secure. Now, my controversial view is that I don't like backlog. Backlog means a customer has placed an order and is patiently waiting, or sometimes impatiently, waiting on delivery from us. My goal is to deliver goods under order as soon as possible to customers. You find that big defense primes often advertise their backlog. They say, "Hey, I've got a 5-year contract. I'm going to deliver this and that over the next five years," and that is seen as a positive.
Great. In our industry, it's actually negative, in a sense that you wanna be rapidly delivering to customers and not making them wait. Vast majority of the revenue I'd anticipate for 2026 is not inside of that AUD 80 million or so current backlog, but the new revenue that we will earn and deliver and recognize from now before the end of the year. What likely drone threats exist or may exist that DroneShield does not have solutions for example, cable drones? I think the person is referring to the fiber optic drones. There's a slide in our presentation which talks specifically about why fiber optic drones are not a threat.
For example, we are effective against fiber optic drones because we offer a command and control solution that integrates with radars, which can detect anything that flies, including fiber optic drones, and also it, depending on the customer solutions, like HPM, that can take down those drones. My view is, I think I said to many of you before, is that radio frequency is the backbone of drones, and fiber optics exists very much around the edges with significant limitations. You think about flying a drone with 10 kilometers of fishing line attached to it, wrapping around trees, buildings. You fly a bit too quickly, you snag the cable. It's really very much an edge case, and RF to drones, I believe, will be a bit like wheels and cars.
Like, whatever cars will look like in 50 years, they'll probably have wheels on them because we've flattened our world and built a lot of roads. Similarly for how much was invested in a radio frequency. Now, that's not to say there will be new types of RF, which is, like I was saying, the Chinese are now putting what was five years ago, sensitive electronic warfare techniques into $5,000 drones designed to avoid detection and defeat. We're starting to see a slow rise of cellular controlled drones. Tethered drones, I don't believe have that much future, and our existing on-the-move and fixed-site solutions already have a way of dealing with them. The next question is, AUD 28 million of our FY 2026 committed revenue is the SaaS pipeline tracking to X of 25.
About 7% of SaaS for FY 2026. How are we gonna get an uplift to get to 30% by 2030? Great question. I talked before about the three strands of SaaS. The device-level SaaS, which has a bunch of elements to it, like the detection, defeat for the radio frequency to separate SaaS, RFAI-ATK. Talked about DroneOptID SaaS, the Radar SaaS, the SentryCiv SaaS, and then the DroneSentry-C2, and the C2 Enterprise. Today, out of the roughly 4,500 pieces of hardware deployed around the world, maybe only half actually receive SaaS, the other half being DroneGuns, which don't require SaaS by design.
Going forward, as the technology continues to rapidly iterate, so hardware probably has a three, four year cycle, I would expect over the next five years for us to have tens of thousands of pieces of hardware, almost all of them receiving SaaS. Not just one piece of SaaS on every piece of hardware, but having, like an example I was giving with DroneSentry-X, you have one piece of hardware, but then you might have RFAI-ATK. It's part of a system, so it has a Radar SaaS, Camera SaaS, and the C2 SaaS. Having multiple pieces of SaaS maximizing that SaaS element as part of the total revenue. Also on top of that, I talked about the wallet share, right? Talking about the training and counter drone as a service.
There's quite a lot of elements that we are actively exploring with customers at the moment. The next question is about: How do we see ourselves in terms of the World Cup this year in the U.S.? We talked about the Safer Skies Act, which enables police and public safety officers more generally to use jammers to take drones down going forward. This, we believe, will really drive adoption of counter-drone technologies within public safety system that will protect those stadium venues. We have a public safety team inside of our U.S. office, run by Tom Adams, an ex-FBI guy, and we are actively engaging with a number of police agencies around the U.S. at the moment, and believe we'll have meaningful sales from them between now and the World Cup.
What countries or theaters of war are considered no-go for DroneShield? Pretty common sense, right? We would not work with Russia, China, North Korea, Iran. I mean, essentially, any country which is either prohibited or gray zone list by the Australian government, because we do need export licenses to sell. Well clear of what those are. We've been working with Defence Export Controls now since the beginning, and we have a very close relationship with them. We basically would never ship to those countries, and the processes are very strict, right? I mean, even though our products are entirely safe for humans, None of our products can hurt a human being and or even a drone, for that matter, the strictness of export controls is comparable to a proper weapon.
For example, a guy who runs our shipping department is an Italian guy who used to be shipping torpedoes around the world on behalf of an Italian defense prime. It's the same strictness of the process in terms of the end users entering into paperwork, not to share our equipment with anybody else. Ultimately, this is not just between us and them, but also involving Australian government. Exceptionally strict control processes. What are some of the drone-related verticals that look interesting to us from an M&A perspective? We'll always stick with counter-drone, as we want to continue playing in what we know. There are technologies like high-power microwave, which I find really interesting, and it fits in our non-lethal, but complementary to drones.
For example, I think there'll be new methods of detection, potentially relating to shock and vibration coming from drones. Essentially, the way I see this is the equipment needs to be cost-effective. It's hard to justify having a AUD 10 million piece of equipment against AUD 200 drones. It needs to ideally protect an area, not just, you know, 200 meter range around it, unless it's super cheap, so you can have mass volume of these things. Ideally, non-ITAR, because we wanna have the market of all of the NATO and NATO allied countries. The current AUKUS process, in terms of Pillar Two, is streamlining a lot of that ITAR stuff between Australia, U.K., and the U.S. Ideally, we wanna be continuing to focus on non-ITAR technologies.
The next question talks about how was our exhibition at Enforce Tac in Nuremberg? I wasn't there myself. Angus, our chief product officer, was leading our delegation. We have a number of European team members who were in Enforce Tac, and the download I had so far is that it's been an exceptionally positive meeting and helpful for our folks on Germany, with Bundeswehr, as well as the rest of the European market. The next question is why has DroneShield not introduced phantom shares to attract and retain talent and not put pressure on the share price? The board regularly revisits what are the most appropriate structures. In my opinion, phantom shares are not an optimal structure, and so we haven't been introducing it.
This is something the board does review regularly what makes most sense. There are increasing reports of hybrid attacks at airports throughout Europe. What are our plans in that space? We have had equipment deployed at airports. For example, you might have seen news articles with the DroneSentry-X at Copenhagen Airport a few months ago. I think airports more generally struggle bureaucratically. In some countries, like in Germany, actually, Bundeswehr has technically a lot of influence over what gets deployed at the airport. It just becomes of kind of too many cooks problem, where you have airport, you have the military, you have government more generally, kind of all coming up with what's the most appropriate solution. I think you're right in that the pressure continues to escalate on airports to deploy counter-drone measures.
As today, you imagine you stop all flights for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour, and that's a significant disruption, and the alternative is even worse, plane taking off and a drone blowing out an engine, right? We are talking to a number of regulators, we're talking to airports directly, we're talking to military. The idea is that you just keep pushing, chipping away at the stakeholders until eventually you kind of break through and start deploying gear. The next question about a viewer saying they watched a terrifying video on Chinese robot advancement, moving to RF control. I mean, robots can be seen as UGVs, unmanned ground vehicles, and this is very much part of our market.
UGVs, ground vehicles, UAVs, aerial vehicles or flying drones, and USVs, so unmanned surface vehicles, boats essentially, on the surface of the water. The physics is exactly the same in terms of how radio frequency Radars work a bit not so well close to the ground because you get a lot of ground clutter coming off, but radio frequency is generally pretty good. Have any shipping companies expressed interest in DroneShield to protect ships through conflict areas in Red Sea and Iran? Yes, we have some shipping companies using our kit already. This normally needs to be a bit of a layered arrangement of government forces being on those ships and them having our kit, which ultimately links to who can own, possess jammers.
Law of high seas essentially says, well, anybody can do anything, but then, of course, those ships need to come to harbor eventually. Usually the arrangement that we're seeing at the moment is if the ship has government security on it, they'll be able to use our kit, and some of them do. I'll pass the next question to Carla, as it deals with the net profit margin. I'll read out the question. I understand we're investing heavily to scale, which is impacting reported net profit, but net margin is low. When do we expect net profit margin to materially improve, and at what level of margin do we believe is achievable in FY 2026 as we continue to scale?
Thank you, Oleg. Right now, our focus is obviously we want to grow the business, and we want to increase our revenues. We know that profitability is important as well, and we are focusing on trying to improve our profitability position, taking into account that we were in an operating loss, a net loss, you know, a couple of years ago. We've only now really started to focus on improving our net profit position. However, as you mentioned, we are scaling really rapidly, so balancing that rapid scale in terms of implementing a new enterprise risk system that we'll be doing this year. Also our ERP system, opening a European office, focusing on U.S. manufacturing, European manufacturing, all of these items add costs to the P&L.
We are focusing on trying to control costs, but focusing on increasing those revenues, and by doing those two things, naturally, our net profit will increase. I cannot provide any details at this stage in terms of what I forecast our net profit margin to be. But what I can say is our fixed cash costs for this year is looking at around AUD 150 million. We have capitalized R&D, and so we're looking to capitalize between AUD 25 million-AUD 30 million on R&D. Our gross profit margin, we spoke about already, which are, is 65% in terms of a normalized average gross profit margin, and that is about as much as I can provide at this time. Thank you.
Thanks, Carla. Does DroneShield see Asia, excluding China and Central South America, as bigger potential markets than European Union, as they quickly adopt drones, as seen in the Thai-Cambodian conflict? Are there any difficulties selling into those regions, countries not seen as Australian allies? I'm not sure about these becoming bigger than EU. EU is a huge driver for us, but becoming big, yes. The key countries in Asia we're focusing on is Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, and there are a couple of others as well. None of those markets have an issue with export permits with the Australian government, so we've been working there. In Central and South America, Mexico and Colombia both have issues with drug cartels, and past that, there's Brazil, Argentina, and others.
Again, growing markets, especially Mexico and Colombia, we haven't had issues in terms of export permits, working with Defence Export Controls. The next question talks about competitive landscape across product lines. We're seeing new entrants, are we increasingly having to compete on price? No, we don't compete on price. It's interesting, when we started 10, 11 years ago, there was really maybe us and one or two other companies, then roughly maybe five years ago, the amount of competition really blew out. You go to a defense show, every single stand is suddenly a counter-drone company. All kinds of stuff. We're seeing the market consolidate significantly, so some get merged or acquired.
For example, Design, which is a compilation of three or four companies, or BlueHalo, they got absorbed into AeroVironment, and some go out of business just because customers basically don't buy from them because the products don't make sense. We don't really see new entrants just because the industry is so high barrier now. We talked, for example, about drone signal data, right? Like, you try to go around dozens of countries collecting drone signals in various environments. Some of these drones are very sophisticated, restricted government drones. Very, very difficult to build up and maintain that database, deal with the relationships with military, government, and customers.
Looking at radio frequency at the edge of physics, like, say, maybe five, seven years ago, the aim is to take an existing technology that's been successfully deployed in electronic warfare and cost-effectively adapt it to counter-drone. Today, you are truly at the edge. Like, stuff that we are using is often a lot more sophisticated than any electronic warfare solution, just again, because we've been at it for so long, and you just keep getting better and better. It's very hard for new entrants. If anything, I would say our products will become more expensive, but also with more capability. Some of our new product lines we'll be launching from end of the year will be 3x the cost of the existing products, but roughly keeping the same gross margin. The capability will be significantly higher as well.
If anything, I'd see our pricing trending higher rather than lower. How do we keep captured equipment from being used by the enemy? Depends on the equipment. Most of our equipment, and increasingly more and more are software-enabled, so obviously, we have ability to deny any changes in software, and then if you don't do changes in the software, then the software quickly becomes obsolete. Can it be linked with laser beam technology? Can be, in terms of our command and control DroneSentry-C2, I actually have a pretty dim view on the laser. It makes for cool news headlines, remember, right, Lasers have their place, right? You will always see militaries deploying some laser solutions, but think about mass deployments.
You have systems that often cost AUD 10 million + that have obviously kinetic impact. You don't wanna be blinding people if you're using it for stadium. I would consider laser in the same bucket as, say, high-power microwave, an exquisite, very useful, but very specific use case, rather than what we are targeting most of our technologies, being mass deployment to as much of the customer base around the world as possible, which has to be no collateral impact. If a customer comes to us and says, "Can you provide a laser solution?" We have our great friends in AIM Defence, based in Melbourne. They do amazing laser solutions, so that's what we'll be putting forward, assuming it works from an export compliance point of view. Have we considered drone protection with the making of other drones? I think anti-jamming...
I'm trying to rephrase the question. No, we don't, we don't really do things on the drones that stop other counter-drone systems being able to detect or defeat them. It's very different technology. I mean, it's a bit like saying Boeing doesn't do anti-aircraft missiles, even though Boeing is great at planes. Like, you kind of have to stick to what you're good at. Drones and counter-drone are actually very different technologies, even though they are obviously on the opposite ends of the same battle. Are we prepared for threats to the business, such as cyberattacks, theft of facilities, or threats to executives or employees? This is something we take very seriously, and also there are government standards across physical, cyber, and other classes of security that we follow.
We have a team, led by an experienced executive that deals specifically with cyber threats, and thankfully, knock on wood, we haven't had a single successful cyber attempt, but we're continuing to see a ton, and this is something we take extremely seriously. In terms of insider threat, there is a very thorough employee vetting, and also, employee vetting program. We use dedicated defense software in terms of monitoring employee actions, for example, ensuring the person doesn't download a whole bunch of stuff they're not supposed to. There is natural segregation on a need-to-know basis. For example, I don't actually write code, so I don't have access to the code database, because why should I? A number of other kind of standard defense industry things.
We don't need to reinvent the wheel here, similar things to what the likes of Lockheed Martin or Thales or Raytheon doing. I mean, we do largely all the same stuff, gold standard and continuing to revise that as the technology evolves. In terms of threats to the executives, yeah, look, I mean, it's something that we looked at a lot. For example, about a week or two ago, to give you a recent one, there was a case of somebody, I believe it was a Ukrainian guy, who got deported from Dubai, where he was based, forcefully to Russia, as he was accused by Russia of killing a Russian general involved in the Ukraine war.
For example, my directive internally was, if you happen to be on the Russian sanctions list, which I personally am, for example, then you don't transit through Dubai. You don't stop in Dubai. This is something that we take very seriously. Do we have a capability to detect and neutralize drone swarms? Yes. Our detection and defeat is what you'd call volumetric, meaning you're scanning not just a little area at a time, but a whole wide area, and you're basically staring at the sky, and you can detect multiple drones at the same time. Essentially, I don't wanna say unlimited, but exceptionally large number of drones. And similarly for the defeat, jamming and its advantage of jamming versus some other technologies like cyber, can affect multiple drones at the same time.
next one: What do we see as the main threats to our growth and profitability going forward? Is it emerging competitors, for example? It's a great question. I don't believe there are major blocks, right? Generally, you wanna be on top of technology, so you always live in fear that our friends in China will invent something that's entirely immune to anything that we do, detection and defeat-wise. The reality is that physics are physics, and as smart as engineers in China are, they still have to follow the laws of physics, so that naturally limits to what parts of the bands you use and how you hide behind noise, and so on. We think we're pretty well positioned, and again, we've been in this space for 11 years.
We understand the industry, and we continue to be on the bleeding edge of it. You need to keep at it, right? Like, you can't rest on your laurels. That's why you have 350 engineers out of the 460 people because you just have to keep innovating on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. I'm super excited about the next gen of hardware that we're releasing, the next gen of software, our RFAI version three, that will go on top of the new gen of hardware when we release it at the end of the year. This is all part of that. Also, there is just general growth, right?
The organizational theory is that as you get past 30, 50, 100, 300, 500 employees, you almost have to break and remake organization. How you follow your processes, how you communicate, all of that needs to be entirely changed, so the organization doesn't sort of collapse onto itself. That's what a lot of our focus is on at the moment. Do we need to work with CASA to certify our solutions to use in the Australian airports? There is no such thing, really, I wish there was, as a certification to be deployed at Australian airports. First of all, it's not CASA. CASA used to be in charge of counter-drone security, and then it was transitioned to Airservices Australia several years ago. Airservices ran a limited trial.
We were involved in it, and since then, nothing really happened, unfortunately. I mean, I get it. I don't wanna blame Australian government. To be honest, U.S. government and all the other Western governments are doing exactly the same, meaning not doing much. But I think as drones continue to pose a threat to airports, this will just continue to become more and more pressing issue. I think once a few airports start deploying it, you'll be seeing more and more continue to do it, because today it's kind of easy to say, "Well, nobody else is deploying. No other airports are deploying counter-drones, so I just won't do anything." I think that excuse will start going away, and so we're really excited about that eventually starting to snowball. We're continuing to push.
In Australia, this ultimately sits with the transport minister, we're continuing to push at the government level to have counter-drone deployed at airports. Next one: Are we seeing increasing pricing pressure with Anduril and others, other primes pushing into the space? I think if anything to do with primes would probably mean we're increasing our margins, not reducing, given the cost structure of the primes, and Anduril would be in the same bucket. I wouldn't call them the cheapest by any measure. No, as I was saying, Anduril is really only overlapping with us on Lattice, their C2, and I don't wanna say it's a competitor to DroneSentry-C2 Enterprise, it's just a different product.
There will be customers like the U.S. military, where Lattice will be competing with Northrop Grumman and AeroVironment and other dedicated C2s. For example, the countries where we're deployed, they, for various reasons, wouldn't be using Anduril C2. I'd say, and also, by the way, in the civilian space, Anduril doesn't really go into that space either. Or public safety, for that matter. I think it's not really competitors, but if anything, our customers. Anduril is our customer too, by the way, as they are the SIP, the administrator, essentially, on the U.S. SOCOM program. Next question is: We just released the AUD 21 million contract. Can we elaborate? We've been working with this Western customer for a number of years.
If you read the announcement, the details are all there. Had a number of contracts with them. Now they're just ramping up in terms of the deployment. We're really excited. In that particular country, we are the only counter-drone system of any significance, and it's actually a very large Western country in terms of defense budget. Now it's just a matter of continuing to sell more. We talked about low market situation to really kind of assist the customer into a higher situation with our equipment. Okay, last question I'm seeing here. If there are any more, please ask, or otherwise, you can email your questions to us later. Are there any plans to integrate counter-drone tools directly into drones or other mobile platforms? What are the challenges of this?
Not drones, but if you look at programs like AIR 6500, which is Australia's missile protection system, operated by Lockheed Martin. Those likes of programs where you have complete airspace awareness, so you are protecting against missile threats, but also you wanna be able to protect your lower airspace against drone threats, or, for example, attacks locally from drones taking out your jet fighters at Amberley or Williamtown airbases. It's the likes of those, so call it like the larger air defense programs they'll be looking to integrate with over time. Our DroneSentry-C2 has pretty standard APIs, so that makes the integration pretty streamlined. Ultimately, the government and customers will be driving a lot of this. The next one I'll leave to Carla.
Can we talk to income tax benefit in the second half versus tax expense in the first half? What to expect going forward?
Thanks, Oleg. With regards to our taxes, you would have seen in the annual report that we have a complicated tax structure. We are a tax resident in the U.S. as well as in Australia. What that means is that, obviously, our tax profit and our accounting profit are very different, and there's items that were deductible in the second half of the year versus the first half, resulting in a tax benefit versus a tax expense for the first half of the year. Currently, we have about AUD 11 million in carried forward losses to be used against future tax profits. Thanks.
Thanks, Carla. How does selling through resellers impact margins? Our margins are already after the use of resellers. Essentially, the way you should think about the customer cash flow is our revenue is what we get from the reseller, and the reseller would have their own margin on top. What we do is in the U.S. and Australia, we would influence the customer directly, but in the U.S., when you sell, you often sell through vehicles like DLA, TLS. It's just how you do defense procurement there, so there is a degree of clipping the ticket.
When you, say, sell in many European countries or Asia-Pacific, you have to go through distributors because these are people that have local relationships, obviously understand the customs, the language, and it saves us from trying to hire people in so many countries around the world. Even despite the resellers, we're able to achieve very attractive 65% gross margins, we don't have to employ people in every country. To be honest, some of the best guys who are resellers in terms of their relationships with end customers, you can't employ them. They'll have their own, their own little shops where they would sell maybe a dozen different product lines.
We would often be their only counter-drone brand, but then they'll be, for example, selling radars, electronic warfare, maybe drones themselves to the customers, and we tap into those unique relationships. A lot of the recent contracts are with existing customers. How are we going with converting prospects into customers? What's been the experience like bringing new customers into DroneShield? This is the whole art of selling to governments, right? We lean on our distributors, but also we try to own as much of the end customer relationship as possible, so you're not entirely dependent on the distributor. There is this complex web of the government budgets, which are often competing with different priorities, and counter-drone is a priority.
For example, sometimes a customer may choose to buy drones rather than counter-drone equipment, as that happens to get the priority. I mean, usually, the customer gets a bit of both. you often have, you know, is it us, or is it gonna be another competitor, you normally try to ensure that the tenders are written with advantage to DroneShield in mind. Often, if you see tender for the first time when it comes out, that means that it's been shaped by a competitor, so you want to be involved in the, in the earlier stage. Generally speaking, you really want to ensure you're servicing the customer, right? You providing that quarterly software updates is important touch point.
If there is an issue, you attend to that, and that's also expanding our fee wallet as well, as I was saying, in terms of having those support fees that we plan going forward. In terms of the new customers, we continue to gradually expand to new customers. Every once in a while, we, like, for example, there was a new customer in South Africa about a year ago that we got, and there are smaller customers in Asia Pacific that we would get in the last couple of months. The goal really is to say in terms of what moves the dial, right?
There are probably 20 government customers around the world, like U.S. Army, that move the needle, the best bet for us is to focus on programmatic level, so large-scale deployments, while opportunistically going in the tactical level, so unit level, to get those purchases. It's less about kind of scrubbing, ensuring you get all the little fish. I mean, you do that kind of in your spare time, best you can, and going around the elephant opportunities. Also, once you have a product deployed with customer, often they'll come back to you anyways for the top up. It's a pretty sticky position. I think that's all the questions we had, and we are over an hour, so we'll stop here. Thank you for your time, and if there are any questions, please email them to us at investors@droneshield.com.
Thanks for your time.