Hello everyone, and a very warm welcome to the Austria On Air Conference. It is a pleasure to have you all here today for this special roundtable session. This session is dedicated to Frequentis AG, and we are delighted to have the chance to hear from their leadership. It is my honor to introduce the CEO, Norbert Haslacher, as well as the Head of Investor Relations, Stefan Marin, who will share insights with us in just a moment. Let me hand over to Stefan. The stage is yours.
Yes, hello everybody. I guess in Europe, I guess the Americans are still sleeping. Nevertheless, we are happy to have you here for this first Austria On Air Conference organized by Airtems. Thanks for the invitation. Without further ado, I would like to hand over to Norbert to present to us, and then there will be, of course, a Q&A session afterwards.
Yes, good morning everyone, and thank you for joining this short presentation about the Frequentis Group. We have prepared some slides to give an overview about our business model, about our markets, and also reserve some time for questions in case there are any. I think we have started really strong into that fiscal year. In the first half year, we have improved our order intake volume, our orders on hand, and also our revenues. We have a good flow currently in the market segment where we are specialized in. To give you a little bit of understanding of what we are doing, we provide applications for safety-critical control centers around the world.
Here you see in the pictures typically a control center on a tower at an airport where the operator or the air traffic controller is managing air traffic based on radar data, different sensor data, video data, and also communication streams to the aircraft and ground-to-ground communication. That's a typical workplace for an air traffic controller in the tower. Military organizations also have control centers managing their military operations or their military infrastructure in the country. Same for public safety, police, fire brigade, rescue centers, public transport, as of rail organizations, or coast guards, navy, in the maritime space. This is the space where we are operating in. We are usually a full-service provider to these customers who are typically governmental entities or governments because they manage and operate national safety-critical infrastructures and networks, and they have to be up and running 24/7, 365 days a year.
The market we are in is pretty huge. What we see worldwide is a tender volume of around EUR 14 billion annually in tenders addressing safety-critical control rooms around the world. What is driving investments into our customer base is, first of all, the importance of security. I think it's obvious currently that we have a lot of tensions around the world. Therefore, investments into national security are increasing, especially driven by the commitment of NATO members to increase their military spendings from 2% of GDP to 5% of GDP. What we expect over the next couple of years is a significant increase of military spending in the area where we can be active. Another driver for investments into our markets is the growing mobility worldwide. If you see the forecasts of Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, and other aircraft producers, more than 1,000 aircraft annually join airspace.
That means that there is a necessity to create infrastructure on the ground to manage that increasing air traffic in the airspace. Not only aircraft are entering an airspace of around 1,000 a year, also unmanned traffic vehicles are entering the airspace, one side on the military side, but also on the civil side. What's also driving investments into our market is a technological change. You have to understand that our customers are governments in the safety-critical space. They are usually very, very risk-averse and very slow because they have to manage an infrastructure which has to be up and running 24/7. Nevertheless, they also now start to think of changing their environment into more IT, virtual service-oriented architecture software as there is a new ATM Master Plan released from the European Commission that all European Air Navigation Service providers have to change their technology base towards service-oriented architecture.
Therefore, a new technology change will come into those segments, and that will be also financed by the European Union in the program of SESAR to give the industry the chance to change their portfolio elements to address these topics like virtual environments and service-oriented architectures. What's new for our customers and what's a new business model for us in the future is that our customers, of course, have to think about cloud operations, cloud solutions, software as a service models, but also having the, of course, necessity to even more secure their IT, future IT infrastructure based on NIS 2 or Cyber Resilience Act regulation coming from the European Union, but also being very strong in the United States, Asia, and in Australia. What's also interesting for us currently, we can address with our current portfolio around EUR 3.8 billion out of the EUR 14 billion.
That's why we invest into M&A and R&D to get more and more addressable from the total market size for Frequentis. One area where we invest since around four or five years is the drone management system, which is currently very attractive, to be honest, because due to the incidents we had in Europe and we still have in Europe, there is an increasing demand on getting a UTM, Unmanned Traffic Management system, in place to be able to identify drones and also identify them as an enemy or as a friend, and then potentially take actions and countermeasure against those drone traffic. Another area where we also invest a lot of money is the 5G MCX solution. What we see in the United States, Europe, and Australia is that the TETRA digital radio network infrastructure is now 30 years old. It's very, very low bandwidth oriented.
You can transfer voice and text, but for 2025, that's not an appropriate infrastructure as mass data video transmission and mass data transmission in a secure way is required. It can't be that police forces and law enforcement agencies transport with private iPhones their videos as there is no infrastructure available. Therefore, Europeans are now starting to budget a transformation program from TETRA digital radio networks into 5G LTE usage with software-defined network layers like MCX to be able to transport mass data in a secure way from the police force or the assets out to the control centers. What we see is a lot of investment coming into our space based on our mega trends, and that's why we are confident that we can even extend the addressable market. We already have extended the last years via M&A transactions or respective R&D activities.
I think the figures are disclosed for a long time now. We had a really good first half year, so we have increased even all of our figures. What's important to us is that we have, as a family company, a good equity ratio as well and a net cash position at the end of the year. It's also important for our customers. They have the right to audit us during the year and come to Vienna and beside our financial auditors and FMA and BaFin from the stock exchange, we also have always customers auditing us. What they really appreciate is that they have a stable, sustainable vendor who can serve them for a long time because if we implement one of our solutions into the environment of our customers, it has to be up and running for the next 15- 20 years.
To give you a little bit of an overview about the classical programs we acquired during the year, I would like to start in the middle with public safety. Recently, we have won a large contract of the Thuringian State Police in Germany. We already equip our LifeX platform, which is a cloud-based solution, in Northwest Wales, in Bavaria, in Saarland, so in nine countries, we already have deployed our solution. Thuringian is now the next country where we implement our software solution for the state police. That's a very large contract for us because we roll it out to all police forces within the state. The control center technology is already ready for multimedia communications and future broadband. That's very important for the Germans as they're also targeting, with BDBOS as the infrastructure provider, a change in technology going away from TETRA into the MCX space.
In air traffic management, I think it's valuable to tell you that we really secured large contracts in the military area and also in the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration infrastructure for civil purposes. We have deployed the first U.S. Department of Defense digital air traffic control tower, which was tested in the United States from the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Marines and is now deployed in Germany at the U.S. Army base in Garrison. What's also important to us is that this infrastructure is really driving a lot of security elements in the military. We are currently in Atlantic City in the tech center of the FAA to get certification, which is predicted by Q2 2026, for that technology to be able to be deployed in the national airspace of the United States next year.
That's a very important technology from Frequentis, where we hope that we will be the only provider of that technology from Q2 2026 onwards. I also would like to mention that we are in the middle of a rollout of a large program in the U.S., which we have got awarded last year. The budget for that program is around EUR 500 million for Frequentis to convert their classical infrastructure they currently have into the IP world to make the FAA network IP capable. That's also one of the programs of the new administration of the U.S. to transform that network and the infrastructure as soon as possible into a modern IP environment. Last point I want to mention is on the right side that one of our major focuses is public safety, not only in Germany, but also within Europe.
We secured very interesting contracts for us in the U.K. and especially Norway, where we currently roll out all fire emergency call centers with our new LifeX platform over whole Norway. We also got a contract for our new computer dispatching system from the U.K. and Italy, provided by our latest acquisition, Regular, based in Italy. The figures you see here are order intake. Those are confirmed orders. Those are not budgets. Those are confirmed orders we have in our books. We really had a great jump in the first half year 2025 compared to the first half year 2024. This jump is pretty much based on the mega trend developments I have shown you in the beginning. That also has driven our orders on hand, so we have a visibility of around one and a half years in orders on hand already committed in our books.
We also had double-digit revenue growth. We were also able to execute the orders accordingly. We had a good development also of our orders into revenues. The split between the two segments, ATM, which is civil and defense, and PST is like last year, 70/30. What's interesting is that our U.S. business was really growing pretty well in the first half year, and we expect to continue like that also in Q3 and Q4 as we secured really large orders from the U.S. administration. Our European share went down compared to last year from 64%- 61%, and our Americas from 17%- 23%. That's very important to us also to have a more balanced allocation of our orders between Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Americas. I also want to give you an overview about the seasonality of our public sector business.
Every company which is working in the public sector business doing projects is facing the same pattern that usually the projects are closed in Q3 and Q4, most of them in Q4. All of our margin is executed in Q4 when we close our milestones and finalize our programs with site acceptance tests together with our customers. That's a pattern which is, unfortunately, I would love to have another pattern, but that's a typical public sector project pattern which is valid for decades now. Concerning the fluctuation of U.S. dollars, exchange rate losses are largely offset by exchange rate gains. We hedge five currencies as we deliver to 150 countries in the world, but only allow 5-6 contractual currencies maximum. What's the outlook and management agenda for 2025?
As I said, we really have a very good, strong pipeline for all our segments, and not only till the end of this year, also for 2026. What we aim is to increase order intake in a low double-digit percent range because we also have to be careful not to overstress our organization. We have changed our guidance in the area of revenues that we had for around 10%. We changed that to at least 10% as we are very confident that we will have another growth year 2025 compared to '24. The EBIT margin is around 6.5%- 7%. It's important to understand that we spend around EUR 30 million annually in R&D, which is expensed and not capitalized. When you look in our balance sheet, you will find no capitalization of any R&D software.
We fully expense the EUR 30 million from our EBIT year over year as we have to invest into future solutions and also in the transformation of our portfolio from hardware-centric legacy into software-centric portfolio elements. Thank you very much. That's what I wanted to show you. I'm open for questions now, and I give back to you.
Yes, thank you very much for this insightful presentation, Mr. Haslacher. We will now move on to our Q&A session. For a dynamic conversation, we kindly ask you to raise your hand and place your questions via our audio line. If, however, you prefer not to speak today, you are also more than welcome to share your questions in our chat, and we will keep an eye on both for this. We had some questions coming in before the roundtable, and I will start with this, Mr. Haslacher. Can you estimate when the contract in the U.K. involving 300,000 emergency personnel will be completed?
That's a good question. We are a subcontractor to IBM, and we are part of a consortium together with Samsung, Ericsson, IBM, and Frequentis. I think the robot program will take another four years, if I'm not mistaken. Currently, there are still discussions about the 3GPP standard, how this standard can be met. I think three to four years should be a good timeframe for going into operations.
Thank you very much. Can MCX also be used in other areas such as maritime or air traffic control?
That's a very good question, and the answer is yes. Wherever TETRA is currently in operation, MCX will be the substitution for that. Where you have TETRA or even GSM-R, I think those are the two technologies which have to be replaced. Therefore, we talk about rail, where we have GSM-R. We talk about airports, harbors, and defense using TETRA. Wherever TETRA and GSM-R is in operation, MCX has a chance to replace it.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, please let me remind you to place your questions now. I have one more. In which regions outside Europe do you see opportunities for MCX?
We see also Asia because Asia faces the same problem. They also have a large amount of TETRA installations. We currently focus very much on Europe because we expect a big amount of tenders coming up over the next three to five years. Those tenders are very complex, and the programs are very large. Therefore, we currently focus on Europe. The United States has already implemented that based on the FirstNet program the last six years, but they don't go out of the U.S., so they stay within the U.S. I think the European solution, and especially the European 3GPP standard, will probably also drive the Asian market in the future.
Thank you very much for your questions. I have one raised hand from Andreas Groß. You should be able to speak now. Please unmute yourself. Yes.
I can hear you still.
Yes, I can hear you.
Because here was such a big window. Hello Norbert, this is Andreas. This is Andreas speaking from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nice to see you again on this platform. My question is about a very actual issue, which is drone issues coming from Russia, probably flying over parts of Poland and Germany as well. Is there anything that can Frequentis do about this? Maybe there's a business opportunity.
Yes, hello Andreas, and thank you for the question. Yes, of course. I mean, there is an additional threat coming to Europe, and we shouldn't forget we are not on war. We have peace times in Europe. Nevertheless, we have to defend against those threats. We have a solution, which is our UTM solution already deployed in some countries, especially in the Baltics, where our solution can take data from different sensors to identify a drone. There can be sensors based on video. There can be sensors based on radar. There can be sensors based on noise. There are different sensors. We aggregate these data and fuse that data in our UTM solution to make sure that there is a drone identified. The next step our solution is doing is to compare that drone movement with a filed flight plan and the registration of the drone.
If there is a registration and a flight plan filed, then we can assume it's a friendly drone which is registered. We know who the owner and who the operator is, and there is a reason for that flight. If there is no match in our system of that drone behavior and drone flight versus the plan and the registration, we can assume it's an unfriendly drone. We can give position data to effectors, which are very different, to shoot them down or to jam them or to send the drone to catch them and engage an effector. The center of this data flow is based on our UTM solution.
You mentioned it's only in the Baltic areas. Why just there? Can it be rolled out to other countries as well?
Yes, it can be rolled out. To be honest, we expect also additional tenders coming up for that. I think it's a very hot topic currently. Europeans think about drone walls, think about drone countermeasurement activities. We expect the European market will accelerate tendering this type of solutions. I think Frequentis has a very good chance in that upcoming processes.
Thank you, Norbert.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your questions, Mr. Gross. I will hold the room another moment if there are any questions coming in. That doesn't seem to be the case. As no further questions have come in, we come to the end of today's roundtable of Frequentis AG. At this point, we would like to cordially invite you to Frequentis AG's next roundtable this coming Thursday at 11:00 A.M. in German language and 4:00 P.M. in English language. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Stefan Marin. We are looking forward to this day and kindly invite you to our panel discussion at 1:00 P.M. with Vienna Stock Exchange. Thank you dearly to Mr. Haslacher and Mr. Marin and to all of you for attending this call. Now, I hand over again for some final remarks to Mr. Haslacher.
Yes, thank you for your interest. As already said, we have two more conferences this week. Stefan, you also want to mention our Investor Relations email address in case there are requests for additional information.
Thanks. Yeah, just drop me a line at investor@frequentis.com if you want to be included in the investor relations newsletter or if you want to continue the dialogue with us. Thank you so much and goodbye.
Thank you. Goodbye.