Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us for the 2025 full year results presentation. I'll talk you through an update on the company and the strategy to begin with, and then Stuart will obviously talk you through the financial numbers, and then we'll obviously go into Q&A at the end as usual. At Ceres, we're operating on three strategic imperatives. First one is signing more licensees. New manufacturing license partners is a key focus for us as a business. The second is once we have those partners, bringing those partners to market. That's obviously assisting them as they scale up and put in capacity, but also actually helping to stimulate demand, which actually helps pull through the products that we're developing with partners. The third is obviously technology leadership.
We believe we have the best solid oxide technology in the world. We have a single stack platform, which we're actually going to be launching in April. We need to maintain that technology leadership advantage 'cause that's what our partners come to rely on from Ceres. Over the last 12 months, we've made significant progress on all these activities. The first thing to say is there is an acute need for power driving the commercial interest in our technology right now, and particularly for SOFC technology, in the wider landscape. As we go into partner progress, in the past 12 months, we signed a new manufacturing license agreement in China with Weichai, our partner. We'll give you a little bit more on that today, but that's going extremely well, extremely rapidly.
In Taiwan, Delta is also scaling and starting to produce first prototype products and is also investing significantly in land and facilities to do that scale up as well. In South Korea, a big milestone for us in the past 12 months was Doosan starting production at their factory there, both for SOFC stacks and power systems, and that also generated first royalties for the company in this period. In Japan, our partnership with Denso on the electrolysis side began production of first hydrogen with JERA and also led to government funding recently with an estimated value of approximately JPY 35 billion, approximately GBP 165 million to continue the advancement of SOEC technology. Great progress in India with Shell. The megawatt scale electrolysis demonstrator actually exceeded performance expectations, high efficiency, but capacity as well.
We're progressing now towards the pressurized systems as well with Thermax and Shell developing a new pilot facility for testing of those systems. We also undertook a business transformation plan around those three strategic imperatives that we talked about. We've restructured the business very much focused on accelerating the commercial opportunities. After 25 years of developing this technology, we are now at that point of commercialization and the point of first production and scale-up. We'll talk more about this business transformation, but there's a cultural change there, but also it's anticipated it will drive cost savings around 20% this year compared to the 2025 cost base. We finished the year with a very strong cash position of over GBP 83 million at the end of the period.
Again, we'll talk in more detail about financial management in the H2 of the presentation. We had some news this morning as well, which is very pleasing. Partnership with Centrica here in the U.K. It's fantastic to be able to actually bring this British technology to the U.K. This really is part of our second pillar of that strategy, which is how do we stimulate demand and how do we bring this technology forwards at scale. Centrica, as you all know, FTSE 100 leading energy integration company. The statement there is about a multi-gigawatt opportunity that we see in the U.K., or Centrica sees, and that's on this gap that we're seeing as we have more need for electrification. We have a time to power need that's becoming quite acute.
This modular high efficiency technology can really service that market, both in terms of the data center needs, commercial and industrialization, partners as well. The purpose of this is we're introducing our licensing partner network to Centrica, the whole ecosystem of manufacturing partners, and we will support Centrica in terms of bringing that forward. If you like, acting as their technical advisory arm, helping them to set up this model of how they go to market with this. That will include our expertise in things like installation, commissioning, remote monitoring, maintenance, recycling, all of those good things that we at Ceres know how to do. The initial focus will be the data center market, commercial customers and industrial power.
That's a fantastic step forward for us today, and we'll have more details on that. We have an upcoming Capital Markets Day on April 15, and we'll be able to provide you with more detail on that and from Centrica as well. That's just a very exciting development today. I mentioned the single stack platform. We're gonna launch that also at our Capital Markets Day. One of the things that's unique about Ceres is this solid oxide platform, the same stack, the same cell technology can run in both directions, both for power generation and for green hydrogen. That's an amazing benefit to our partners because as they develop the supply chain, as they scale up, that investment that they're putting into factories now for power generation also has this dual use aspect in the future for hydrogen as well.
As you can see in the chart here, that same stack technology is now going into products, Doosan, Weichai, Delta, but also we're using that on the hydrogen side with partners like Denso, Thermax, Shell and Delta as well. Just wanted to spend a little bit of time on what we're seeing as the emerging demand for power. Our estimate is we see an opportunity for power generation using solid oxide of around 22 GW by 2030. We see that market roughly split about 50% the data center opportunity, but also a very significant part in the industrial and commercial applications as well. Around 50/50 kind of split. Geographically, it's an interesting split as well. About 25% of that is the U.S. market, which gets a lot of attention right now.
I'm sure you're all covering data center applications in North America, but just under 20% of that is here in Europe as well. You know, the U.K. is a great market opportunity when you think about we have some of the highest power prices anywhere in the world. This is a market that really lends itself well to this application. About 50% of that market we see is Asia, the wider Asian opportunity as well. With our partnership network, we're able to access all aspects of this market. Our aim here is to really establish the Ceres technology as the industry standard, and we're doing that by embedding it in these global partners that are accessing and servicing these different parts of the market. Why is that becoming a critical factor?
Well, today, if you need power generation, you're waiting about six years-seven years for a gas turbine. Small Modular Reactors are also coming down the pipeline, but they're about seven years-10 years away. High voltage grid connections, five years-15 years away. Right now, with this acute need for power generation, behind the meter or on-site generation is becoming a really viable alternative because there just isn't the conventional power generation equipment available. I think it also opens a window for us in terms of the technology today is good enough. It's viable in terms of its lifetime, its performance, and its cost to actually enter the market. As we scale, we anticipate these costs coming down significantly. Just to show you some of the progress that's been made, these are the first units developed by Delta.
Took a license just under two years ago. This is at Taipower in Taiwan. You can see here the first prototype unit's been made using Ceres stacks, but all the systems done by Delta. Delta are fitting out their production as well, and they're on track. Delta is a very exciting partnership for us because when we talk about that data center market, Delta are already very much in that supply chain. They're the, I think by market cap now, they're the second or third biggest company in Taiwan after NVIDIA and Foxconn. Where we fit in is they make solid-state transformers, they make power conditioning, they make UPSs, et cetera. By adding in the power generation capability of the solid oxide, they're developing a complete offering from fuel in all the way through to power out.
That power out can either be AC power or, in the data center application, 800-volt DC. Don't forget that the fuel cell technology is actually generating DC power. The way that you actually combine stacks, you're very close to being able to match up that 800-volt DC power direct from the power generation unit, which is the SOFC. It's fuel flexible. We run on natural gas today. We can run on biogas. We can run on hydrogen in the future. It lends itself extremely well to things like carbon capture. And also if you want to, you can capture the heat or convert that heat into cooling through absorption chilling as well. You have the option to go from low carbon all the way through to zero carbon and also push very high efficiencies.
In Delta's case, the same market applications apply. It's microgrids, AI data centers, even for the semiconductor industry and manufacturing in general. I think this is a really good illustration of how our partners take this technology and put it into a complete offering for these kind of market opportunities. Weichai is an exciting partner for us. We've been working with them on system level for about seven years or eight years now. Their systems are very impressive, I have to say. I'm expecting this year they'll launch their latest system, which is gonna be a very impressive unit. We've taken the step with them. We've done the technology transfer. We signed last November.
Already we're going very quickly and there'll be more to come from Weichai this year, but they're probably going, I would say, faster than any of our partners have ever gone before. Doosan factory, I was privileged to go around the factory. I've been a couple of times, but this was in July with Doo Soon Lee, the CEO of Doosan. First production was there. When you actually get in there to see the realization, the single piece flow end to end, it's about the size of three football pitches, a semi-clean room. It's an impressive facility. They've actually fulfilled their first capacity orders in the past few months, and that factory is now up and running. That's a big milestone for us going full circle. Doosan's the first.
We expect Delta starting to come on stream and then Weichai. We are building out this ecosystem. On the hydrogen side, I think it's been fair to say that over the past 12 months there's been more headwinds on the hydrogen side. At the same time, I think that opens up an opportunity for, again, higher efficiency technology like the Ceres technology. As I mentioned, all the investments that are going in now are directly applicable onto the hydrogen side of the business. Extremely pleased with our partnership with Shell. We've exceeded expectations there. We've met all the targets that we set, and that's leading on to the pressurized development, which is now underway.
Taking this one, which was the first atmospheric SOEC that we did, and now actually putting that into a pressurized system that can be scaled to megawatt scale, and we're doing that engineering ourselves to begin with. In partnership with Thermax in India, who can really drive down cost, and India is one of the big markets that we see for this green hydrogen in the future. We see green hydrogen, particularly opportunities in China and India, as those areas come on stream. We also did this with Denso very quickly. Similar to the Shell container, Denso actually deployed this on site within 18 months of actually taking the license, and that's using Ceres technology. That's putting in hydrogen into a thermal power station to reduce emissions from conventional power generation.
That's unlocked further funding for Denso as well. Great progress on all aspects of the hydrogen side as well. In terms of where we are as a business, you know, we're building out this ecosystem of partners, and really our aim is to be the technology provider of choice. We now have manufacturing in Korea. We're seeing manufacturing being built now in Taiwan, that will come on stream in China as well, and with Denso in Japan. Really strong ecosystem of partners. Shell is more in the end user category, and we can add Centrica to that list of partners today as well for U.K. and Europe. Our aim is to embed this technology to become the industry standard. With that, I'm gonna hand over to Stuart to give you the financial update for the past year.
Thanks, Phil. Morning, everyone. I'm just gonna take you through a few slides just to give you a bit of an update on where we are from a financial position and financial planning position, and some of the actions we've taken to put ourselves in a strong position to be able to execute the strategy Phil's laid out. Here's the headline numbers you can see. As you'll know, you know, the revenues of Ceres are largely dependent on how successful we can be in terms of signing MLAs. We signed Weichai in 2025, but towards the end of the year, with insufficient time to recognize any revenue at all from that contract. We're rolling that into 2026. You can still see that the margins remain high, right?
That's the asset-light model we retain and we have good financial discipline around that. The other thing to note here is cash. We're still very strong on the cash side. You can see that, you know, the cash burn in the year was just under GBP 20 million and yeah, like I said, that was without the benefit of having an MLA. We're pretty efficient now. We believe we've got the optimized cost base, which I'll take you through. You can see that the restructuring that we've been going through in the last few years has fed through to the cost saving in 2025 from 2024. There's more to come on that, but we'll take you through that and be very clear. We now believe we have an optimized cost base.
The actions we took towards the end of 2025 will flow through to 2026. We really do think now we've got the correct team to prosecute the strategy which we've chosen. Here's just a graphical representation of the revenue and gross profit. Gross profits remain industry-leading with the asset-light model we have. Of course, the success and the health of those are maintained by signing new MLAs. We're, you know, we retain the confidence that we have the opportunities to keep on chasing that pillar one on Phil's strategy of signing new MLAs and be successful in doing that in 2026. Phil mentioned business transformation earlier. Very important to us.
We now have that single stack platform commercially viable to get out into the market, and that started in earnest with Doosan with others to follow. Now we need to make sure that we are still innovating. Pillar three was keeping a technology lead very, very important to a licenser, and we'll continue to do that with one of the biggest solid oxide expertise pools in the world. Now we believe we've reached a point where we need to just look at the focus of the company and be very, very commercially disciplined, commercially focused, and make sure we have the right people in the background giving the R&D sufficient attention that we have something to license in the future.
We believe during the end of Q4 2025, we've realigned the business to be able to do that. The flow through of that will be a 20% cost saving in 2026, but all the actions needed to do that have been taken and are now finished. Now we're into a business transformation for this year, which is all about culture, team, and making a cohesive unit so we can make sure that we succeed and our team succeed at the same time. This is all crystallizing, as Phil said in the Capital Markets Day, where we're launching this single stack platform.
We're very proud of it, and hopefully that will make sense for everyone when they see it, and it's something we can go out and more actively sell into the marketplace. In terms of the cost base, this is the optimized cost base we see for the next commercial phase. All the actions we've had to take have been taken. There'll be a natural flow through into 2026 of this cost saving, we are essentially building from here. We've still got a world-class R&D team. They're very focused on the things we need to do to be successful. That's cost down, that's lifetime, and we've strengthened the commercial teams in order that we can make the biggest impact we can on the top line.
We really do think we've got the right team, the right place, the right assets in place to make a real success for the next few years. Why are we doing that? Well, you can see that commercial momentum essentially over the last few years has reduced our cash outflows, and we're very clear. We've now got the model of our business. If we can sign one MLA on average every 12 months on that sort of cadence, we will be very close to breakeven and cash flow neutral. That's important. That gives us control of our own destiny without having to rely on the capital markets. It's building that MLA base so we can become that industry standard that Phil talks about. Why is that important?
Well, the end goal for any company that's ultimately a licensing company is to build your royalty streams. As Phil mentioned, we're just at this orange blob stage here today. You know, Doosan have fulfilled their first order at the very end of last year, led to our first royalty revenues, a big milestone after 20 years,25 years of development of this project. You know, we need now to push on if we can become the industry standard, essentially have a portfolio effect of many partners building. We're really gonna be able to build these royalty streams, power first, hydrogen second. As Phil mentioned, you know, this is the same technology that you can attack two markets, one right and acute now, and the other coming several years after.
You know, we're in this in order to keep on signing licensing agreements, which we know we can for the next few years, and then it's all about building the royalty base. Yeah, we like the model. Every time we make progress with Centrica and partners, we think it reinforces the success we need to have that model. Importantly, we need to show that we're financially disciplined to keep this asset-light model, which we're doing. With that, I'll hand back to Phil.
Yeah, look, I think we have a very clear strategy. I think the steps we took last year put us in a extremely good position with the asset-light model. The three priorities for this year remain unchanged. You know, we're working hard on signing new manufacturing licenses. Well, I think we're at an exciting stage now where you'll probably hear more from our partners this year as they're starting to actually scale and launch things, but also helping to drive that demand as per the announcement with Senska today. That will also help stimulate that demand for our partners as well.
The single stack technology platform launch is a key milestone for us that we do believe we have the world's best solid oxide technology, and we're now at a point where we can actually bring that forward rapidly to new partners and existing partners to scale both for power first and then for hydrogen, as that follows. You know, we're starting this year with a strong cash position. We have around GBP 45 million of contracted revenue based on existing contracts from today for 2026. We're in good shape, and I think the market opportunity has probably never been stronger, particularly on the power side. I think now we need to get on and actually grab that opportunity, and we're well-positioned to do so. With that, I think we'll probably move on to questions.
That's great, Phil. Thank you very much indeed. Before we go to those online, Phil, if it's okay, I'm gonna come to the room. If you do have a question, if you just raise your hand and I'll give you the microphone. Thank you.
Hi, Chris Leonard from UBS. Maybe two questions from me. To start with, could we go into Centrica? Obviously, you spoke to the time to power and the need there. You also spoke in the presentation to the evolution of cost and what you see that it's feasible here. It would be really helpful to get a gauge on where you think your partners when they first push out these fuel cell products, where you think they'll land at on CapEx price.
Mm-hmm.
Where you think that evolution can get to?
I have to be very careful here because whenever I start forecasting our licensees prices, I get into trouble. If we talk in general terms, you know, the SOFCs that are out there at the moment are available at around $3,500 a kW. If you take that in the U.K. market context, and you look at the spark spread of gas and power, then you can generate power very efficiently in the U.K. I mean, obviously gas prices are moving around a bit at the moment, so I don't wanna be precise on this.
Given we pay in the U.K. the highest energy bills probably anywhere in Europe and even worldwide, when we map the U.K. out, you know, when we look at market attractiveness, spark spreads, cost of power, et cetera, the U.K. is right up there, then Northern Europe, et cetera. It's a very significant opportunity. To go back to your question, Chris, we think that we can significantly generate power at a lower cost, even at a relatively high entry level CapEx compared to turbines and other generation because we're so efficient, because of the OpEx, et cetera, and because of the lifetimes that we can achieve. We think that there's a big opportunity there in terms of that deployment.
And, um-
The thing I would add is I think that kind of level is a starting point. 'Cause I think what we see is a window that's opened up. People need power. I think SOFC can now fulfill that power, and as our partners scale, we expect the cost of those SOFC units to come down quite significantly.
Yeah, that was the second part. Thank you for answering that. Following up on Centrica, obviously you spoke to the contractor revenue for this year at GBP 45 million in the books, but presumably, or I don't know, but I presume that maybe didn't include Centrica's potential contribution. Like, what should we think about for engineering revenues and consultation, yeah, fees, et cetera?
Yeah. Look, the role that we're playing with Centrica is more in the advisory support side. At the moment, that's gonna be fairly modest revenue. It's not like... Don't think of this like an MLA. They're not an MLA partner. The big value add of Centrica, obviously we generate some engineering support fees, et cetera, there. Really, it's the deployment of our technologies through our partner network that drives that demand that ultimately drives royalties. That's—we see them in that pillar two category, not in the pillar one. That's where we see that. The thing that would really move the needle for us this year is new MLAs.
Hi. Alex Smith from Berenberg. Just a quick one on the next-gen kind of stack technology. You kind of mentioned it in your kind of closing comments. Kind of what the real benefit you think that could have to our firm, is that like a key milestone for the business going forward? And then second one is just kind of on new licensee pipeline, how the discussions are going to kind of bring new people in-
Yeah.
on manufacturing partners.
Okay. Look, the stack launch is the culmination of several years of efforts. Over the years, we've increased the cell footprint, we've increased the stack height. There's a lot of focus on the simplicity to manufacture. We will continue to drive that in terms of getting down the actual installed manufacturing CapEx of what it takes to build those factories. But that stack itself represents what we believe to be the building block that all our partners will now scale on. Our technology teams, our R&D teams are really focused on driving cost and lifetime. Cost as in the unit costs of stacks, but also the manufacturing cost and then the lifetime of the product. That's where we see that technology evolving.
I think it's a significant milestone for the company because, you know, we've been in that investment mode for quite a while on the core technology and R&D. I think by launching this product now, you can see from the optimized cost base, we've got the right team to keep on innovating around that particular platform. In terms of the pipeline, I think it's grown considerably in the past 12 months. I think we're getting incoming from most of the kind of players that are in the power system market in particular, because I think that's the acute need that people see. Obviously we're very strong in Asia, but we're looking at how we build out that ecosystem as well. It's grown considerably in the past 12 months.
I would say on the hydrogen side, it tailed off a bit towards the end of 2024, et cetera. I think as I look at the pipeline now, I would say it's about 70%-80% driven by the power demand side of things as well.
Thank you.
Good morning. Alex O'Hanlon from Panmure Liberum. A couple of questions from me. Firstly, well done on the Centrica deal. I'm interested if you could give some more color on how that came about, and is there scope for similar type deals in the pipeline? The second question is just on the cultural change you mentioned a couple of times in the presentation. Clearly you're shifting towards being more commercial now.
Mm-hmm.
How are you tracking that and making sure that the change that you want to see is actually permeating throughout the business?
Okay. On the Centrica deal, I reached out and, you know, I saw what was happening in the U.K. and we saw the opportunity in the U.K. market and it's like, you know, this market, you know, if this technology is so good, why are we not deploying it in probably one of the most attractive markets for this in the world? Centrica was a logical choice for that. One of the biggest LNG importers, they're looking to diversify, they're making investments in Small Modular Reactors, Advanced Modular Reactors for nuclear, et cetera. I think once we started talking with Centrica, they saw the same thing that we did, which was this acute need for power, et cetera. We were very much aligned.
I think they're an excellent partner for us in the U.K.. I think the other thing we didn't talk too much about today is not just on the power generation side, but also there is the potential to combine this with nuclear in the future to do hydrogen generation on the back of modular reactors. There's a lot of good synergies there between the two companies, and we're very excited about that partnership. As part of that process, what I did is with this one, with Centrica is they actually I took them and they've actually visited our partner factories. They've been to Korea, been to Taiwan, been to China. At that point, I think they realized this is real.
I think this is the key thing is, you know, the question we get asked time and again is, "Oh yeah, fuel cells. I've heard about fuel cells. Yeah, but is it real? Does it really scale? Aren't they expensive? How long do they last?" Et cetera. Then you go and you walk around to Doosan factory and it's like, "Oh, right. Got it. This is real." Even before they went into the factory, it's like, "Ah, yeah. Okay. We know what you're talking about now." Is the potential to do that with other partners? I don't think we need to in the U.K.. But it's interesting model. You know, we have, you know, the...
If we can stimulate demand, and then we can introduce our ecosystem of partners, I think it's pretty powerful. As part of that commercial discipline in the future, we will probably look to replicate this in maybe other parts of the world. In the U.K., it's Centrica. In terms of the commercial progress, how we're tracking it, et cetera, our Chief Commercial Officer, Filip Smeets, joined us last year. There's a lot of rigor now in terms of the pipeline progress. We've put more people in regions. We're just getting better and better at it through some discipline as well.
Also demand helps, you know, so we're getting incoming, but also people are starting to realize who we are, and I think in the industry already we've got a very good reputation. I think people, competitors, they respect our technology. I think the thing that people have always maybe had the question mark on is, well, how does Ceres scale and go to market? I think that's what we're gonna see coming through this year.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Morning, guys. Lacey Midgley here, Bloomberg Intelligence. Just a couple from me. Stuart, your comment on securing the one partnership every 12 months and that triggering the break-even point. I mean, clearly that's the place we need to be before the royalties scale. I'd be interested in both your comments really, but what in your mind is a realistic number there? Because, you know, no doubt the demand's there to have, you know, as many MLAs as, you know, as you can across geographies. Presumably your current partners won't want that number going too high given the competition that they'll likely face in certain geographies. I mean, what kind of number are you thinking there on kind of a longer term view? Do you have any thought around that? I mean, it's
Well, if you look at recent history, we've signed three in the last two years from the beginning of 2024 to the end of 2025. You know, we have set ourselves up that on an average cadence one every 12 months, we will achieve what you said, Lacey, sort of, break even and cash flow neutrality, right? But that's not exciting for anyone. That's just a stopgap until the royalties come along and it helps us diversify, build a portfolio of clients. We think there's really plenty of room to play. Phil showed a 22 GW solid oxide market by 2030. Even if Bloom have scaled to, you know, 3 GW-5 GW by that's 15%-20% of the market.
There's plenty of room for plenty of people to play with plenty of applications and with a much bigger market coming along later in hydrogen. We really don't feel like there's downward pressure on this number. It's a case of execution for us, building a pipeline, instilling commercial discipline and executing. These are big agreements, so they're very difficult to predict. But you know, we believe we've got the right team in place now, led by Filip, as Phil said, with some really strong people sort of backing his team up to give us the best chance of executing. It's still difficult to do, but you know, given our recent history and new commercial discipline, we believe we can. The short answer to your question is as many as possible.
Okay. I mean, as the royalties are stacking, that makes the commercial
Proof point easier to sell, right?
Yeah
that all becomes a lot easier.
Yeah, I think also we've done this now, you know, five times or six times. Building factories is something that we're getting pretty good at, but it's a learning curve. You know, the first time you do it, second time you do it, et cetera. We're also, what's good to see is when you know, when our first licensees came on, they had to take a fairly immature supply chain and scale that as well, and equipment builders. You know, when somebody takes a license, it's not just to the technology, it's to that whole ecosystem of partners. New license discussions now are much faster and much easier because in some ways it's, say, well, okay, this is where you would get equipment builders from.
This is your choices in supply chain, et cetera. We start off with a very European-centric supply chain, and now we've added to that, first to our partnerships with Doosan, but now with the Taiwanese and the Chinese, we're building out quite a formidable set of supply chain partners as well. That in terms of that credibility, not only do we know how to build factories and help our partners to do that, but we can also introduce them to a whole ecosystem of very willing suppliers as well.
Yeah. That's helpful. Thank you. Just lastly, on Weichai, I mean, you talked about them moving very quickly, quickest out of all your partners so far. Just trying to kind of work this out. How much of that is because maybe of the historical work that you had with the sort of legacy partnership, you know, how much of that is kind of versus your own kind of technology developments, maybe reducing timeframes there, or just Weichai's desire to get to market more quickly? Just trying to understand firstly how quickly they can get to royalties, but then I guess the timeframes from MLA signing to actually getting to royalties?
Yeah
for future partnerships and how that.
Yeah. When we're talking to new partners, we kind of give a guidance of less than three years, and we're obviously looking to reduce that all the time. Some of that's incompressible in terms of technology transfer, the time it takes just to actually build either greenfield or brownfield factories and then equip them. We roughly talk about that kind of timeframe. Now, in parallel with that, you've got not just the stack manufacture, which for us now is becoming more like a blueprint. You know, we can take people around our own facility in the U.K., and like I mentioned, we can, we've got blueprints of how you build factories and we've got an ecosystem of partners there. Then they also have to develop the product, the power system product as well.
I think we started the relationship with Weichai with a system license, and we've developed that system with them over a number of years. Now what they're doing is very impressive in terms of their own system development. I think they can go fast because their system level maturity is very good. It's that desire to get to market is how quickly you build out that capacity. I think that's what's happening extremely fast. It's a fairly typical approach in Asia, and particularly in China, where they set incredibly aggressive timeframes. They're looking to obviously reduce that three years quite significantly.
Just to follow up on that actually, in terms of the royalty outlook and thinking about Delta scaling up this year, the target was to be online end of 2026. Has that changed at all? Are you still looking at that timeframe? Doosan as well, I mean, how are you feeling about them looking into 2026? Obviously you recognize right at the end of 2025 some royalty perhaps, but is there more to come and how should we look at this year? Thanks.
Yeah, look, I think on this year first royalties are there, but they're still pretty modest, so I don't think it's that material into 2026 is our guidance. Yeah, Delta's on track, but really that's gonna be like 2027 type timeframe. And then obviously new partners coming on. In the near term we're really focused on the license fees, the engineering services still through 2026 and probably into 2027. Royalties build from that point. That's how we see it. We're not changing guidance on that really.
It looks as though we're doing well for questions in the room. We've got a couple online that we might start to tackle. The first one is regarding the Centrica deal, and given they're based in the U.K., you mentioned that there's gonna be revenue from U.K. and Europe, and what is the likely spread for revenue, be it U.K. centric or more broad?
I think that's really one for Centrica, you know, to look at. Their presence predominantly in U.K. and Ireland as well is a very attractive market. U.K. and Ireland, and then they're active across Europe as well. I think it will. Initially, their focus is predominantly U.K. and Ireland.
Another question coming from the supply chain. Given the fact that the technology transfer includes quite a bit of the supply chain upgrades, do we have any concerns for material, rare earth material accessibility or scaling up to match our partners for the supply chain potential constraints that you see in other industries at the moment?
No, we don't because the nature of our technology, we use Ceria, where the company gets its name from. The major rare earth material, which is the most abundant. We're not using Scandia, we're not using. You know, where we use other rare earths, we're using very small amounts, so we're not concerned about constraints in any of those kind of materials.
We also have a question on the pipeline, which is wondering when and if there's opportunity for US partners, and have there been any constraints of why we haven't signed any EU partners either recently?
There's no constraints. Look, as and when I can update you on commercial activities, I will, but I can't give specifics on particular opportunities or geographies at this point. I think there is interest in the U.S., I can say that clearly, given the market opportunity there. Yeah, that's an area of focus for us as well.
Switching topics slightly. We've got a question on hydrogen. Wondering if you can expand upon what the pressurized modules are, those and the balance of plant, and how Thermax is looking to scale and what the timelines would be for that.
Okay. The pressurized modules are basically taking the core solid stack technology, putting them inside a pressure vessel, and the reason you do that is, by working with OEM partners like Shell, you save a very significant compression cost. Even on first stage compression, just a couple of bar makes a big difference. As we look at hydrogen at a refinery kind of level or in an industrial application like steel or fertilizers, et cetera, it makes a lot of sense to have modules that are pressurized and can be scaled. The reason for the partnership with Thermax is two-fold really. One is they're an EPC, so a contractor, engineering contractor based in India, which is one of the key markets that we see for green hydrogen.
Secondly, compared to European suppliers, et cetera, they're significantly lower cost in terms of the engineering and actually driving the unit cost of these things down. Again, we're always looking at what's the most economically advantageous way to bring this technology to market and, that's why we have the relationship with Thermax.
Great. Stuart, I'm conscious you've already touched on it, but we've got a couple of other questions on when we expect Ceres to reach profitability or break-even point, and just wondering if there's anything else you'd like to add to clarify.
Yeah, I mean, I hopefully we've made it clear that, you know, if we can achieve a cadence of one MLA every 12 months, that's where we get to. You know, these aren't as predictable as sometimes we'd like, but you know, that would be the goal. The moment we can continually execute the pipeline to one MLA every 12 months, that's when we're gonna reach that sort of profitability level. That's not long-term sustainable profitability. That comes when the royalty streams become the dominant player in our revenues, and that's gonna be a few years out. The idea now is to have a cost base where we can maintain a technology advantage, execute the commercial strategy while, you know, preserving cash.
In the end that, you know, getting new partners on board and pushing the technology forward will drive the royalties in the long term. We think it's a really viable business strategy, as Phil laid out those three pillars, both for the short to medium term, and it also benefits the long term when we get to royalties as well. It's a really nice business strategy we're pursuing.
Great. The only final question that's come up is regarding RFC Power and wondering what has happened to that investment and are we continuing to pursue that technology?
Yeah. You know, RFC was something we supported in the middle of the year and brought it into the Ceres group. You know, we're still looking to give that really viable long-term energy storage technology life and you know, we're pursuing some opportunities to see whether we can get that business funded. We know when we've got more news, we'll share.
Great. I think that wraps up everyone. Phil, I'll hand it back to you for any final comments.
Yeah, sure. Well, yeah, thanks everybody for your time today. I think that we've got an exciting 2026 ahead of us. The company is extremely well positioned. We have a Capital Markets Day on 15 April, where you'll hear more from the industrial applications with a guest speaker, hopefully from Sensco attending from that side of things. We'll have our new product launch, and then I think you'll hear more from our existing partners as well this year as they hit some key milestones. The market opportunity is definitely very live and we need to capitalize on that opportunity right now. I think Ceres is extremely well positioned to do so.
That's great, Phil. Thank you very much indeed. We'll now redirect investor-