Greetings and welcome to the Draganfly Q3 2022 earnings call. As most of you know, my name is Rolly Bustos, and I am Investor Relations here at Draganfly. I wanna say welcome each and every shareholder, stakeholder, and analyst on our call today. Today's call will begin with our CEO and President, Cameron Chell, discussing third quarter operating highlights. From there, CFO, Paul Sun, will discuss financials as reported earlier this afternoon. We'll then go to the usual procedures with Scott Larson taking the Q&A portion. Remember, you're always welcome to reach out to investor.relations@draganfly.com if we can get to your question. Lastly, I want to remind everyone that this presentation may include forward-looking statements which do not guarantee future performance, and undue reliance should not be placed. Any future events or financial results may differ from what might be discussed here.
The full forward-looking disclaimer can be found on page 2 of the presentation, and I'd be happy to send that to anybody upon request. Cam, please go ahead.
That's great. Thank you, Rolly. Welcome, everyone. We appreciate your time and consideration being with us here today. Jumping right to the heart of the matter, we are pleased to announce that our 2022 Q3 revenue was $1.876 million, so just underneath $1.9 million, with product sales being $1.359 million and service sales being $516,000. We had a gross profit in Q3 of $626,908, which demonstrates a margin of 33.4%. At the end of September, our cash balance was $11.7 million.
We are on budget as per plan and expect to continue with these results as per budget around the expectations of our Q4 results and our year-end filings. Just as a quick overview, Draganfly is the oldest, recognized often or usually as the oldest commercial drone manufacturer in the world. We've been in business since 1998. We commercialized our first drone in 1998, and we are a total solution provider. We are an organization that does not provide just an airframe or just a component of something that somebody in the drone industry customer would purchase, but rather we provide full turnkey solutions. We are able to do this, frankly, because of the amount of time that we've been in the industry, the bench strength and the experience that we bring to the table.
As noted before, we're excited about this industry for a lot of reasons other than just being passionate about drones and what impact we'll have on society, but also because today it's a $1-trillion industry, which is primarily a military-focused industry, in terms of those revenues. It's growing to a $40+ million industry over the next number of years, and most of that growth will be in the commercial space, excuse me, where Draganfly is uniquely positioned, we think to own significant market share of that growth. Operational highlights for last quarter for us were in large part focused on the release and now the initial sales of our latest product lineup. We unveiled three particular new products, one being the Draganfly Heavy Lift Drone, the Draganfly Commander 3XL drone, and the Draganfly Long Range LiDAR system.
These were actually announced at the end of Q2 and the beginning of Q3 and actually went on sale at the end of Q3. What's really important to know and probably the statistic that I'm most pleased about in Q3 is to look at our pipeline growth. Not just from, you know, from a very tactical and a very quantitative perspective. We can see where our order sizes are now going from, you know, ones and twos and threes in terms of airframes to 10s and 20s and 30s in terms of order sizes. I think this is for a number of reasons. One, the maturing of the industry, the ongoing clarity around regulation, and for us in particular, the actual now availability of these particular products.
When we initially went public on July 21, 2021, our use of proceeds was focused on building out our capacity to be able to meet the demand, which is still the overall constraint around our numbers growing. We feel that by the end of Q2, we'll be at the spot where we can meet demand. We'll continue to see growth obviously between now and then. The other was the new product lineup. The products you see before you really are more sophisticated products than what I would suggest a number of our competitors are coming to market with. I don't mean that in a poor way or a poor reflection on them.
A lot of their markets, what we're seeing is tends to be towards, you know, the small Blue UAS or the smaller type drone offerings. What we're finding is that what our customers and the customers we're dealing with, whether it's commercial, industrial or military, are really refocused on sophisticated central deployment or payload deployment that tends to be a bit heavier. That's what really determines and dictates to us the airframes that we are building. You'll see that middle drone there. That's the 3XL, which we've now had at a number of trade shows. We see our pipeline's incredibly strong looking for this particular product. This 3XL is likely to be, in my opinion anyway, the most efficient drone in the market today. It is actually quite large.
You know, it's a few feet or 2.5 feet square. Now it's a 20-pound drone, and it can carry 24 pounds of payload, so it stays underneath the 55-pound threshold for that still allows you to run under a Part 107 license without having to get additional permits or waivers from the FAA. That's very important. The other really key component of this particular product is that it is a direct replacement for the DJI M600, which is their heavy lift drone, which has now been discontinued. We're seeing huge demand for this as a direct replacement for that. All the rails on this, they fit all the payloads that fit on the DJI.
It's got a familiar type of feel to it other than it can carry a lot more than what it's replacing, and it still fits under that 55-pound threshold. This application is everything from, again, light commercial, industrial, and right through to light military use. On the far left, you'll see the Heavy Lift Drone. That's a drone that's about 9 feet across. That does require special waivers to be flown by pilots from the FAA. It has full autonomous capabilities Beyond Visual Line of Sight capabilities, as does the XL as well.
This particular drone right now is a little bit longer lead time, but we've got really solid demand in this, and we're working on a number of BVLOS certificates with a number of government agencies now in order to utilize this drone. This drone carries an extreme mission and heavy payload, and can be used for anything from additional medical delivery, cargo delivery, logistics for military, and et cetera. On the far right, you'll see our LiDAR system there. This is a LiDAR with accuracy that typically before would have to be flown on an aircraft. We're now receiving a generation of LiDAR that's able to fly on a drone. Again, because so many of our customers are coming to us not necessarily looking for a particular airframe, they're looking for a solution.
The demand demonstrated to us is that we actually needed to provide a turnkey solution around the LiDAR and the drones, as you see on the far right-hand side. While this last quarter was really focused product, it also really focused on our internal sales process, the integration of our ERP systems that we had installed this year, the integrations of our CRM systems. Ultimately, what it means is that we now have a greater inbound traffic driven by our PR, our IR, and our customers to our website than we've ever seen. We're collecting incredible data about what we should be building, how we should be building it, when it needs to be deployed. The whole maturing of the business right now is probably the thing that's most exciting to me.
The demand in the market has always been there, or has been there for a number of years, constrained either by capacity or moreover by regulation, both of which are opening up at a really nice pace right now. I've already spoken to this a bit, but what's really cool to see is that we now have a significant wait list that's growing, in particular for the Commander 3XL. We think this is gonna be a particular runaway product for us over the course of the next year 'cause it's replacing a large installed base of products that's out there with a higher degree of efficiency and a greater degree of sophistication and a wider range of payloads that can be used on this particular drone.
Again, whether it's light military or drone as a first responder for public safety or whether it's carrying chainsaws up mountains for firefighters, this thing has got all kinds of applicability and people on the waiting list now, which Paul Mullen has things in full production. I think a couple of other things on the product side which are noteworthy is that we did unveil our product, our Vital Intelligence product, which was born out of pandemic to the California Probation, Parole and Correctional Association at their training conference. We see a very large pipeline now.
A very large is tough to quantify, but we see a significant pipeline now of, in particular, correctional institutions and facilities that require intake of personnel or patients or inmates to be able to do touchless vital signs. This isn't a simple thermometer temperature reading. It provides heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels and those types of things. The ROI on this is that it speeds up the intake process. It also requires a minimum less of personnel in order to run it. This is something that is has really started to take off for us in directions that we didn't necessarily expect, but is doing quite well. That same technology is being innovated and has been tested on drones as well.
If you think about the applicability of this for search and rescue or for military operations or reconnaissance operations to understand troop conditions and things like that, the opportunity around this particular technology will continue to grow. Really excited about what's been unveiled here in the last quarter on it. I think it's worthy to note that, you know, understanding our product positioning to our shareholders and stakeholders because it is an important thing. Drill down in that bottom left corner, you know, that's where you would see the greater amount of consumer drones or even prosumer drones or a number of the DJI type or Parrot type of products.
Those are gonna be the small kinda like the Blue UAS drones that are into some of the middle units and such. As you move further up into that top hand corner from the bottom left-hand corner, you start moving more to autonomy, artificial intelligence, sensor awareness, things that are really, really important and sophisticated, we think are a greater margin and are really, really important in the commercial and the light military space. These are all systems here that we built or worked on or that our personnel have worked on.
To see the vast majority of them continue to skew in the technical sophistication area, and that's where we're gonna continue to push our market as we see, you know, again, we've seen three or four times now over the last at least my 15 years and probably for some other employees who've been around longer than that. I've seen at least three cycles of this, where we have new entrants come into the market, and they all tend to go down to that smaller airframe. They all tend to push into what I would almost consider a prosumer space. We're seeing right now where that is getting very crowded very quickly. Once again, we're not going to go into that space. We're gonna stay up in this upper corner.
This upper corner, you know, that is a bit more regulatory dependent, but the whole industry is regulatory dependent now. We feel it's certainly time to continue and move in this direction. Also, we wanted to just provide an update on some of the work that we've done in the Ukraine.
Strategically, we have, we believe, or at least our realization around work in Ukraine is that in the coming years, in particular, in the light military and in the commercial and industrial space, if you weren't present in Ukraine, if you did not have operations in Ukraine, you were not in there, you know, learning, developing, improving your price, your services, your techniques, your training, all of that type of stuff with the various players, stakeholders in that environment, you are gonna ask why a couple of years from now, why you there. Like, you know, from a perspective of like, that's where all the best pilots are coming out of, it's where all new techniques are being learned. It's where the new technology is getting battle tested literally very quickly.
We're now already seeing international business, you know, whether India or the Middle East, one of the first questions they ask is, "Are you in Ukraine? What are you learning from Ukraine? What is your equipment doing there?" Because we have demonstrated the ability to be in there in that theater, and we put people on the ground over there, and we're working hand-in-hand with customers, we are able to speak very, very credibly with not just those international partners, but the customers that we're talking with back in North America as well. The Ukraine to us is much more important than just the immediate revenue sales over the next number of years, which appear to be, you know, trending towards being very significant. We'll talk about a couple of things in that regard.
More importantly, as a company that is you know, a focused and dedicated drone organization, you know, what is it that you've learned? How have you been there? What credibility do you bring to the table from having been there, and what have you learned? I certainly know from our organization, we've accelerated in terms of our insights, our abilities, our capabilities because of the work that we've done there. Specifically, we've done medical response drones, which are really in this case becoming a logistics drone. They can also deliver many other types of packages in. We have done reconnaissance drones in the area and we'll continue to do more and more of that.
The other area that was not planned but has really come across and is a massive market is landmine detection. It's gonna take 20 years to demine Ukraine, just Ukraine alone. For every day of war, there's 30 days of demining that has to happen. There's, you know, $ hundreds of millions budget per year that's required to do that demining. This isn't demining in, you know, remote regions that people are not living. I mean, this is city urban centers. It's areas around cities. It's areas lining the rivers. It's agricultural land. It's the industrial land. Like, it's just unbelievable the amount of mining.
In fact, the entire offensive right now, where we see Russia pulling out of Kherson, actually the only thing that's delaying that from even happening faster, we see it happening now but from a couple of weeks ago, is all the mines that were laid. There's a big push in this area, and we've got some very exciting news coming up in that regard, with the amount of work that we've done, the sensors that we have, the testing facilities that we've built, et cetera. In the area too, I think it's also important to note that we are in country there. We have working relationships with industry, with ministry, with civil departments on many different levels.
If you're not willing to be there doing the work, you're not gonna get the work. The fact that we have been there and made that commitment, and the relationships that we've built there, we think is gonna garner us years and years of work, not just during this very unfortunate time, but during the rebuilding process for not just Ukraine, but all of Eastern Europe. The inroads that that's now actually giving us into the European market, the credibility in the MENA region, and in India as well, has been, you know, really significant.
This is, you know, an unfortunate conflict, but for a company like Draganfly, it will turn out to be an incredible opportunity for us to further develop our abilities and grow our organization. At this point, I'd like to turn it over to Paul Sun, our CFO, to run through our specific results for Q3, and then we'll go to some Q&A from everybody, led by Scott Larson. Thank you.
Thanks very much, Cam. Appreciate it. Yeah, so just looking at this, at this slide here on the left, you basically see a caption of the income statement. It's a snapshot of Q3. Revenue for the third quarter, as Cam mentioned, was $1.36 million of products and $516 thousand coming from drone services. Basically, it was a flat quarter, just down 1.1%, year-over-year from the same period last year. Looking at gross profits, it decreased by about $146 thousand this quarter over the same period last year. Gross margin as a percentage of revenue was 33.4% this quarter versus 40.8% in the same quarter last year.
That's a result of more sales coming from some lower margin products versus those sold in Q3 of last year. As you know, you know, the sales mix varies from quarter to quarter. The total comprehensive loss for the quarter was $4.99 million compared to income of $23.9 million in the same quarter of last year. For those that follow us know that there's an accounting treatment where there's a non-cash change in fair value derivative that's included in these numbers. In this quarter, the non-cash gain is $305 thousand from that derivative liability. The comprehensive loss would've been $5.3 million.
If you x out the non-cash change in fair value of derivative liability from the same period last year of $30.6 million, the loss would have been $6.6 million. The year-over-year improvement in the loss was mainly attributed to a decrease in insurance, professional fees, slightly offset by an increase in wages as the company scales. The loss per share would be approximately $0.16 even, you know, including these variations. It is as reported. Switching to the middle table, which is the balance sheet. You can see our total assets are at $29.4 million for the quarter. The deployment of cash and reduction of prepays, you know, is probably the main contributor for the assets there.
Working capital surplus as at September 30, 2022 was $18.5 million. Would have been a surplus of $18.9 million, and shareholders' equity would have been $27.7 million versus the $26.8 million shown here. Again, we X out that non-cash fair value of derivative liability of $391,000 and continued to have minimal debt on the balance sheet. As Cam mentioned, though our cash balance at the end of the quarter was $11.7 million. Now looking at the last table on the right, we just spoke about year-over-year changes. Now we'll talk about quarter-over-quarter changes looking at Q3 this quarter compared to Q2 of last quarter.
Revenue for Q3, again, was $1.88 million compared to $2.37 million for Q2 of 2022. Main reason here was there were some lower product sales due to expected timing. You know, again, things just where the dates land, sometimes it'll, you know, get pushed into the following quarter. We think that's, you know, what happened here. On the gross margin percentage, Q3 decreased to 33.4% compared to 42.8% in the second quarter of this year. Again, the decrease is due to the sales mix of the products sold. Operating expenses for the quarter decreased 2.4% from Q2 of 2022, in part due to lower professional fees and insurance costs.
Finally, on the total comprehensive loss for Q3 2022, we mentioned $4.99 million was the loss compared to a comprehensive income of $640,000 in Q2 of this year. Again, you'll recall a non-cash change in fair value derivative of $305,000. If we x that out, Q3 would've had a comprehensive loss of $5.29 million compared to a loss of $5.45 million in Q2 of this year, making this quarter's loss slightly better than that of last quarter. With that, I'll pass it back to you, Cam.
That's great, Paul. Thanks very much. Appreciate it as always. I think the you know certainly the highlight for us was the amount of sales activity, which is by far greater than we've seen in any other quarter. We certainly had a number of orders slip somewhat due to supply chain matters and somewhat due just to new production capabilities and capacities increasing. That said, we haven't lost any orders and we are on budget. Some of this stuff obviously is pushed into Q4. Again, overall, you know, we're on record pace as our Q3 numbers roll through. You know, we expect things to continue and start to accelerate from this point.
Maybe what we'll do is, I'll just stop sharing here and I'll turn it over to Scott Larson, our lead director, to be able to answer any questions. Very fortunately, we have Paul Mullen, who's our Chief Operating Officer here with us as well, who's also available to answer any questions. Scott?
Yeah. Thanks, Cam, and thanks everybody for joining in. We're fielding questions from kind of two or three different sources, questions that were emailed in before, questions that are coming through in the chat. So, I'm trying to aggregate these and put them into a single place. So, bear with us. We'll get through as many of these questions as we can. A couple here that came in via email just before. Are there any acquisitions in the pipeline? Maybe I'll just answer that myself. I think, as Cam's mentioned before, the industry is going through some level of consolidation. I don't think that's any surprise to anybody out there. That's just the way the nature of the industry is. There was a bunch of companies in it.
It is going through a consolidation, and we get calls from companies who are looking to do a transaction, a merger, looking to be acquired, looking for a financing, looking for anything, frankly, on an incredibly regular basis. I don't want to, you know, there's nothing that's being announced, but these are ongoing conversations. We look at a bunch. We have passed on a bunch. We will keep looking at a bunch. We'll make the most strategic and tactical decisions we can with regards to acquisitions, focusing mainly on revenue as opposed to technology, just because we think from a technology standpoint, we're pretty well positioned. We'll be opportunistic. We'll be opportunistic on all of these. The short answer to the question is that we are looking at acquisitions. We look at them all the time.
There's nothing that needs to be announced right now or is at that point. When we get there, we'll certainly be announcing. Acquisitions are part of our strategy. It's part of the mandate that the board has given. It's part of what the industry is going through on its own. We will keep looking at that on a strategic basis as best we can. Another one here, Cam, maybe I'll pass this one back to you. Can you give an update on the timeline for production and first sales of the DDL contract? Is this Q4? Is this Q1 next year? What does that look like? Any thoughts or comments there?
Yeah, sounds good. You know, we're from a project planning perspective, we are still targeting Q4 for the first initial rollout of product. The reality is it'll be pushing into Q1, which isn't even remotely entirely unexpected for us before we actually start to see some of that generate. Maybe what I will do is I'll turn it over to Paul a little bit, or not a little bit. I'll turn it over to Paul here to get his comments. Paul?
Thank you, Cam. We're continuing to work very actively with the Digital Dream Labs team in product development. We've recently seen a new generation of flying prototypes that are reflective of the Cozmo character that they're developing. We are expecting, as Cam mentioned, to start seeing revenue from that partnership through early Q1, likely with some sort of prototype or collector edition sale, and then scaling up into the larger volumes that were reflected in the initial agreements.
Another question here is can you discuss how you think about the push-pull between investing in the business to drive future growth and the demand for profitability in the near term? You know, Cam, maybe I'll throw this back to you.
A couple of comments on the ongoing discussions that we have between looking to grow the business, looking forward, as well as kind of looking at near-term in terms of improving profitability, keeping costs to a minimum. How do we think about the balance there?
Yeah. Very intricate and complex balance, as you know, and I think the biggest advantage that Draganfly has in this regard is that we have a very experienced board, and we have a very experienced management team that has grown companies from microcap companies to multi-billion-dollar market caps through these product cycles, through rough markets. The variables aren't just a matter of, hey, you know, are we gonna get more market share by spending more money or are we gonna you know, get to profitability quicker, as indicated by the question. It is complex. You know, if the markets are really good and, you know, they've got an acceptance level around, hey, we want you to get market share, they're robust, there's lots of financing, valuations are high, you know, then you're gonna be a bit more aggressive.
That's certainly where we were. We were tending, let's call it a year, right. You know, markets have definitely constrained, pulled back. Have we in terms of some of our aspirations. We've been prudent with the cash that we've got. We've been very, very selective around any acquisition talks. You know, we are gonna kinda manage that balance. For us, we have a little bit of a luxurious position because we have the ability to organically grow. It's not. For us, it's a capacity issue, not a demand issue. We'll continue to invest in growing organically, right, with the products that we now have at hand and selectively around the larger initiatives, the larger business development initiatives that we have.
That on the acquisition side, we're gonna have to be and want to be very, very selective in terms of like, you know, kind of getting, you know, orders of magnitude jump in scale. I think one of the reasons that we have a number of acquisitions that are coming and talking to us is because of our internal processes, because of our internal production capacity, you know, because we are an organically built business that can scale and can do very well at 20% growth or can now handle 50 or 80 or 100% growth. I would say I'm trying to answer what I think the question is that we're gonna be a bit more cautious around this because, you know, capital for the entire market is tight.
We're very confident in our plan right now. I know there's another question in there, how long is our cash good till. You know, on budget with where we're at right now, we've got cash for next year. And you know, candidly, we're financeable. Like, that's the. You know, market pricing isn't great right now, but the advantage of that is it's not great for anybody. So there's a real advantage to companies that are financeable right now, even if they do a financing at these lower levels, because then acquisitions, you know, are at a massive discount. So anyway, that's a bit of yeah, speculation might be the wrong word in there, but that's a. It's a complex answer to a complex question. We're gonna manage it very carefully. Cash is king.
Organic sales is most important, and that's what we're focused on.
Can you discuss how the current sales pipeline directionally, how does it compare to a quarter ago and a year ago? Is the sales pipeline growing? Is it getting smaller? Is the market getting tighter? Maybe some word or two on that based on kinda last quarter as well as 12 months ago.
Yeah. I'll split the sales pipeline into, you know, three categories. The first category, I'll call it like a product SKU category, where, you know, we've got products that, you know, people have got familiarity with. They've got a certain stack. They're looking for it to do certain things, and they just need to order it. We've a stronger lineup of that now than we've ever had. We are starting to see a stronger pipeline, you know, in that particular direction. Now, the specific products in that area are the products that we talked about earlier in the presentation. They're tending to be a bit bigger. They're tending to lean, again, more towards the sophistication side, and they're tending to be able to be multipurpose and have multiple solutions around them.
That's much stronger. What we are seeing is a decrease, and it might be just because it's where we're focusing, but I think overall the market is not going to be as robust as it is in that prosumer model. Or and/or there's gonna be, you know, continued lots of activity with lots of different companies in there. The second category that I'll throw in there is services. We are seeing our services revenue look to increase, but again, because of the product that we're bringing out actually allows us to provide services or sell product to service companies at a better ROI. In particular, the 3XL just has so many payload capabilities, capacities, right? Where now you're buying one drone that can do so many things.
You know, it's the Switchblade we're calling it, or not the Switchblade, the Swiss Army Knife of the drone space. That's tending to push our services, again, much more in that industrial and that commercial side. I mean, they're looking to use these drones for the de-mining projects. Like, two years ago, I wouldn't imagine that we would've had a drone that was so universal and so efficient in that regard. That's a trend that we're seeing for us in particular. Then on the solution side, which is the third category, you know, these are the real needle movers. These are the opportunities out there, where a de-mining, like an entire industry is wide open, for somebody to come in and be the industry leader.
There's you know, half a dozen of those that we have continued to push forward. There was probably 12 of them a year ago, and we've paired that down probably to about the half dozen range, one, because we wanna make sure that we're preserving capital, and two, we wanna make sure that we're working on the things that are closest at hand. Some of those are in the specific delivery space, not the overall general delivery space, because we think overall general delivery space has still got a ways to go, but there are some very specific opportunities in some areas of public safety and first responder and some different things like that that are very lucrative, that have budgets applied to them now, will be first in regulation.
Those types of solution sets, we see moving towards it. It's more sophisticated, it's more B2B, it's more kind of industrial, commercial, light military, and further away from, you know, fly a drone, get a picture, you know, typical sensors, RGB, thermal. Those are all just table stakes. Now we see a lot of new entrants in that space and we continue to move in that direction. You know, away from that and into the direction that we've described.
Question here maybe for Paul Sun. Is this level of insurance and professional fees a fair run rate assumption going forward, or should we expect these costs to move back higher? I think mainly regarding D&O insurance and some of the other things we've talked about there.
Sure. Thanks, Scott. When we first went public in the US on the Nasdaq, our D&O insurance was quite high. We were a new company on the Nasdaq. As you can imagine, you know, typical insurance from a premium perspective, it was high. In the market, it is high. The market certainly in 2021 was extremely tight. There was only a handful of underwriters. Everybody had high D&O. Now that we've kind of been, you know, around for a decent amount of time, you know, the insurers kind of view us as less of a risk, if you will. As a result, our premiums have come down.
You know, fingers crossed, if you know, if the market dynamic stays the same within insurance, we would hope that it wouldn't go up or wouldn't go back up. It would kind of stay where we are or if anything, continue to go down as we continue to operate on the Nasdaq. As it relates to professional fees, you know, we are. You know, if you kind of look at our financials, our numbers are getting better from a cash burn or loss perspective. We are trying to, you know, bring certain functions in-house that will lower costs.
Things like, you know, legal, as an example, would be one where we're kind of, you know, trying to, you know, rein things in and just basically be a bit more thoughtful on, you know, where we spend as we continue to scale the company. Hopefully that answers the question.
Yeah. Okay, good. Okay, so couple more questions that have come in here, you know, looking for revenue guidance, looking for a few things like that. I think we'll probably pause on those. We don't give guidance at this stage. That might happen at some point in the future, but I think we'll, you know, just kind of point people back to our financial statements. There's all kinds of information in there and as opposed to giving revenue guidance, I think we'll probably put that on hold for now. There is a question here. Cam, maybe I'll throw this back to you, and then perhaps I'll give a little color at the end of it. Where is the current product demand coming from?
Any interesting industry or product color that you can talk about here outside of some of the stuff we've talked about with regards to Ukraine particularly, I guess, but are there any other anecdotes or just a little context around where new product demand is coming from?
Yeah. Certainly government and things at all different types of agency levels. Whether it's kind of a light military type thing or whether it's public safety and DFR, right? Drone as a first responder. Lots and lots of agency work. You know, budgets are now coming through, are starting to come through for next year that are incorporating these things. There's certain level of regulation that, you know, DFR and different agencies know how to work with now, which is one of the reasons that 3 XL was developed, 'cause it could work under a Part 107. That's a significant area. Industrial-wise, inspection is growing.
whether it's a long-form, you know, inspection, you know, pipelines, power lines, infrastructure facilities, forestry, you know, inventories, things like that. That's where we're gonna continue to see that proven use cases. ROI is there. They're now just looking for reliable providers and suppliers, you know, typically North American built in order to do and provide that. In terms of demand, then I'll let you finish up with it, with Scott is the international. That, you know, international is, it just continues to surprise me how big and robust that market is.
If we look at, you know, areas like MENA and India, in particular, the demand that's coming out of there for our particular products and expertise and the initiatives that those governments have in place around inspection, surveillance, agriculture, I mean, they're just massive. Like, the numbers are just unbelievable. Those are the interesting, like, near term things that we see. I mean, there's other very interesting things longer term, but right now, you know, we're trying to keep everything within the perspective of the next year. Scott?
I think part of that is actually just based on geopolitics. A number of countries don't wanna buy drones that are made in certain countries. They're looking for North America, and they're looking for homegrown, they're looking for drones that you know that kind of fit in with government policy. On top of the regulatory standpoint, which is you know the regulatory environment here in North America is
It's more difficult in certain cases. It's more evolved and the rules are there, the guidelines are there. In some of these other countries, they don't quite have the same framework. This is why you see other drone companies doing large initiatives in Africa for drone deliveries and things like that. That would be frankly impossible here in North America or incredibly difficult. To Cam's point, both from a technology adoption standpoint as well as the regulatory environment, and frankly, just adding the geopolitical context on top of that, the demand for North American-made drones is significant. We'll continue to participate there. We'll continue to participate in that.
We get inbound requests on a, you know, daily is a stretch, but certainly on a regular basis, calls from all over parts of the world, Africa, Middle East, South Asia, asking for quotes that, you know, just product information, can we work together to expand the market. We'll keep working our way through. Those are all difficult conversations. It's on the other side of the planet. It's all kinda tough work. To Cam's point, some of the stuff that we're doing in Ukraine actually feeds into that. Question here maybe for Paul Mullen. When will the LiDAR product be available to the public?
Yeah. Thanks, Scott. The LiDAR product is currently available. We're accepting requests for demonstration, et cetera. Our sales team is actively developing our funnel on the LiDAR unit. We'd certainly be glad to field any requests for further demonstration or technical information on that product.
Yeah. Okay. A couple more that are coming in here, that are all looking for guidance. I'm just gonna kinda revert back to that, and we don't give guidance. Maybe one or two. Yeah, Cam, this is probably the last question. I think everything else we've actually answered here. Maybe talk a little bit about, where you see the industry going over the next kind of five, six months. Are there short-term dynamics that are in play? We've talked a little bit about some of the regulatory stuff. Outside of the consolidation, do you think this is kinda status quo for the next few months, or is there something here that we can expect?
Yeah. I think the catalyst events within the industry are regulation primarily. I think the industry is quite dependent on markets right now because the industry is in a growth building phase. The ability to attract or have capital, have confidence in you is really important. Most absolutely, most importantly is execution on a product and service production level and working with customers on a block and tackle level. The winners in this game, in our opinion, right now are gonna be the companies that have the best ability to produce product that the customer wants and work on customer solutions.
I personally believe that Draganfly's absolute strategic differentiator is that we, you know, that we know the customer, that we do what the customer needs. We don't see other executive and production team members in the field in various parts of the world and with all types of customers as much as you do with Draganfly. That is absolutely gonna be the key. We're still in a customer education phase of the industry. Not that there aren't some other companies out there that do it well, but I don't think anybody does it as well as Draganfly. That is not as big and sexy as we'd like to suggest, but it's the thing that's gonna win this industry.
Yeah. I think that's well said. I mean, we're. You know, we talk about this all the time. We're looking at two things. One is just kinda keep growing organically, keep kinda making those numbers. To Cam's point, layer on things that actually have the ability to move the needle and change the entire dynamic of the company, and we'll keep trying to widen the market that we can address through some of those. With that said, this is 45 minutes, which is exactly how long we like these calls to be. We've answered all the questions, some of the ones that have been emailed in. If we've missed any, certainly email Investor Relations, and we'll get back to those as soon as we can.
We appreciate this kind of dialogue. Cam, why don't you go ahead and wrap us up, and then we'll look to close the call.
Yeah. First and foremost, I really wanna thank our employees for the incredible work and commitment that they've done. The one thing that's, I think, telltale about Draganfly is we don't have problem recruiting. I'm really excited about the people personally that I get to work with on all levels within the company. I'm just blown away every single week and month about the things that are being done and how they're being done and how we're looking after customers and the opportunities that are growing out there. It's really cool to be a part of. Thanks for that. I also really wanna thank the customers that believe in working with us. Many of our customers are shareholders.
Many of our customers, you know, share a passion for what this industry will be and for the mission that they're on internally within their organization and how Draganfly can be a part of it. These are long-term relationships. Obviously really wanna thank our shareholders. It has been a very tough market, not just for us, obviously for everybody, over the course of the last year and a half. You know, it just feels so nice to be able to sleep well at night knowing that we're growing the business every single week, that we're increasing customers, that we've got great production teams, that we've got incredible, you know, engineering, and that it is working, right? We just see the processes happening.
You know, I've been through these cycles before in this industry and with other companies that have become billion-dollar organizations, and there's no doubt in my mind that this thing's on the same path. Thanks to everybody for your time, patience, and consideration. We look forward to working hard and continuing to hit the numbers.