All right, hello, everyone, and thank you for continuing to join us throughout the day here at the Lytham Partners Fall 2024 Investor Conference. My name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner of Lytham Partners, and during this presentation, we welcome Global Crossing Airlines Group, or simply GlobalX, ticker symbol JETMF on the OTCQB. Joining us today from that company is Ryan Goepel, the company's President and Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn it over to Ryan, I just wanna remind everyone that management is available for one-on-one meetings throughout the conference here. If you've not already scheduled your one-on-one meeting and would like to do so, you can send me an email. That's Blum, B-L-U-M, @lythampartners.com, or visit the landing page for the conference. That's lythampartners.com/fall2024. From there, you can click on the Investor Registration button to make your one-on-one selection.
So, Ryan, thank you very much for your participation in the conference here today, and the floor is all yours.
Great. Thank you very much, and I'm really excited to talk about GlobalX, which is America's fastest growing charter airline, operating the Airbus family of aircraft here in North America. Here's a standard disclaimer language as far as it relates to forward-looking statements. But who are we? GlobalX is the fastest growing charter airline in North America. We're setting the industry standard for on-time performance and reliability. Our Q2 revenue was up 83% year- over- year to $57.5 million. Our Q2 EBITDA, which is the metric that's used in measuring airlines, was up materially year- over- year to $18.7 million. And when you wanna think about where we were in if you look at the U.S., $30 billion was spent in 2023 in U.S. charter flights.
We had $160 million in revenue in 2023. We have a market capitalization as of 13 August , around $35 million. We are basically trusted by government agencies, tour travel operators, professional sports teams, airlines, college and sports teams, meetings, and other tour groups to provide supplemental lift. We provide aircraft on an ACMI basis, which I'll go into, and that's basically our core business. When you look at the market size, U.S. passenger market, airline market in the U.S. is $193 billion a year. We participate in two submarkets. One is air freight and one is U.S. charter flight market, so it's about $31 billion in charter flights and about $18 billion in air freight, and we participate in both.
Where we are in the industry, and I think it's a big part to differentiate us from a scheduled carrier. Most people think airlines, say, for example, Delta, they're scheduled or ACMI, and I'll walk through a couple of the risks, and it really comes down to risk management. We do not take ticket risk, right? So we sell the whole plane, whether we have one person show up or a hundred and fifty people show up, it doesn't matter. We don't take fuel risk. Fuel is passed through to the customer. Obviously, scheduled carriers manage fuel very closely. Crew cost. A lot of our costs that we incur with the crew get passed through to the customer. Again, this is kind of the fixed cost structure that a scheduled carrier absorbs.
When you think about billings, there's no compensation for delays for scheduled. Our passengers pay by the block hour, so they pay us for however long the mission takes to complete, and that's really what happens. And well, what this means is we tend to run a lower utilization per aircraft per month, which allows us to use mid to late life aircraft, which is a lower capital cost, which is another kind of differentiator for us. When you look at who we are today, keeping in mind, you know, we started in August of 2021, so this is pretty quick. As of today, we have 18 aircraft. When you look at, we have four freighters, which we'll talk about, 10 A320s, three A321s, and one A319.
You look about where we fly, you can see it's pretty much all over the world. Since we started in August of 2021 , we've operated over fifty thousand block hours. We have a hundred and fifty pilots trained and hired, and we have a key government relationship, which has about eight aircraft dedicated, flying over a thousand block hours a month. We have key industry certifications, IOSA, which is a major safety audit certification, EASA, which allows us to operate in Europe, and Department of Defense, which allows us to operate for the U.S. Department of Defense. If you look at the growth of our fleet, we obviously started with one aircraft in August of 2021 . We were at 14 at the end of 2023 . We're targeting 20 by the end of this year. We're at eighteen today.
Nineteen feels really secure, 20 is pretty close, but that's the goal is 20. But you know, we're definitely at eighteen today, and we're very active with all those aircraft. And so one of the things we like to talk about is our focus. It's really easy in aviation to think about or get distracted by different things to do. So we really think about what we're passionate about, what's our economic engine, and what are we gonna be best in the world at. So what we're passionate about is providing forgettable flights. Our customers wanna show up on time, want us to show up on time, they wanna arrive on time, they want nothing to happen in between. When that happens, it tends to be a forgettable flight.
No one remembers a flight that does that, and that's really one of the passions we have within our organization. When we think about what we're gonna be the best in the world at, especially in charter, there's so much pre-work that goes into charter to make a charter work well, whether it's catering, whether it's logistics, whether it's the, itinerary, whether it's permitting, all those other things which go into charter. This is really where we've made a big investment in our organization to make us best in the world in that, and that's, I think, a huge differentiator for us in the North American market. And then the way we think of our economic engine, we think of aircraft profit per month.
I think of every aircraft as a store or a restaurant, and we effectively try and maximize the profit on each of our aircraft every month. And that's really the goal. That's our kind of hedgehog strategy, our way of staying focused as a company to allow us to make day-to-day decisions that I think drive the right results. When you think about our F orgettable Flights, one of the things we do is we rank our captains on a monthly basis on their on-time performance. And we do this really because the captains of our aircraft are kind of like the CEOs of every flight, and they have the best, or the most influence on whether a plane leaves on time or not. Now, obviously, we manage for safety. We exclude safety events or any mechanical events. We don't punish them for that.
But what we wanna do is we wanna incentivize our crews, and we've seen great results. We've seen huge improvements in our on-time performance as our captains really create that sense of urgency needed to get the plane pushed back on time. And I think that's something our customers have really appreciated, and we're really seeing that in our kind of growth with our existing customers and our ability to grow new customers. When you think about who we fly, currently about 50% of our work is for the U.S. government. It's on a long-term contract with them. We also do in the sports season, we do a significant amount of collegiate sports. And then on top of that, we'll do concerts, Department of Defense, and operating for other airlines.
For example, in the summer months, we operated for TUI with two planes dedicated in Europe, and we expect to grow that next month, next summer as well. So we have a pretty broad base of customers. Most of our stuff is on, you know, 6- 12-month contracts and a lot of repeat business, which is what we're really, really proud of. Going to the financials, continuous improvement, Q2 was a great quarter for us, $57.5 million in revenue, $18 million in EBITDA, operated 6,500 block hours. And a block hour is really, It's really the blocks. You know, when you put on the plane, when you take the blocks off, that's the start. When you put the blocks back on, that's the stop. That's the clock.
So we measure everything in block hours, no different than a normal service company would, like a law firm. We bill on that, on that side. Averaging 458 hours for the quarter for block hours per aircraft, 18 aircraft in the fleet, and cash and equivalents at the end of the quarter of $10.4. As you can see, everything we wanna see in finance is up and to the right, and especially in EBITDA, I think we've reached a real point of inflection where we're seeing significant growth in our EBITDA that generated positive net income for us in Q2, and we expect to kind of continue to grow on that and grow our... and as we grow our fleet, I think we'll see a lot of the incremental aircraft and capacity will drive increased results to the bottom.
Material growth, obviously, you know, we've been around for three years, you know, going from $14 million to $97 million to $160 million, and EBITDA correspondingly went from $4 million to $5 million to $20 million. To put that in perspective, in Q2, we did $18 million. So, we've seen significant growth in our results. We think, you know, one of the struggles with the microcap space is differentiating yourselves through profit. I think is the right way to put it. Our ability, you know, I think to stack on profitable quarters is gonna be our a material change and a real inflection point for the stock. We do have multiple avenues to drive growth. Again, we're gonna expand the fleet. We'll have expanded by 40% by the end of 2024.
And growing in a, you know, driving higher utilization with high-margin business. One of our largest competitors did declare bankruptcy. They had about $350 million of annualized revenue, which is on the market for us to go chase. We recently signed a government contract to account for about 50% of the fleet. This is operations for the U.S. government that basically guarantees us minimum revenue and hours. Increasing our expansion into Europe, which is currently only 5% of the fleet. We had two aircraft this year. We think we can do five next year. And then the new management team.
We had a change in management in the first quarter, and part of the mandate of the board was eliminating non-core initiatives, just focusing on our core kind of hedgehog business, which I talked about, which really is gonna drive $8 million of cost avoidance in 2024, so investment highlights, fastest growing charter airline in North America, strong financial profile, and balance sheet provides runway for growth and transitions to cash flow positive. We're well-positioned to significantly increase our market share with the expanded aircraft fleet. We expect that aircraft demand will outpace supply for the next four to five years, putting us in a fantastic position, and again, the new management team is committed to profitability, that's our drive.
You know, if you look at year- over- year, we went from, in Q2, $500,000 of EBITDA to $18.7 million, which I think is a trend we're looking forward to continuing. And with that, I think that's the... I'll turn it back to you, Robert.
Fantastic. Thank you very much, Ryan, for that presentation. Just maybe a couple of follow-up questions here because we have a few minutes left here, for sure. Excuse me. Since, you know, since your appointment as president in February of 2024, you know, talk maybe through some of the primary areas of focus, both to drive, you know, growth and profitability. I know you've touched on some, but maybe expand there a bit.
Yeah, I think, you know, it's been multiple. One is, you know, really looking at non-core initiatives. We had several kind of initiatives that kind of made sense when we launched them. But we realized our core profit was coming from charter and really eliminating a lot of those non-core product projects. So, that was an initial part, and I think another thing that's made a huge difference over the last six months is really upgrading the team. You know, we've made a real effort, a strong effort to recruit strong, operational, professional, experienced people. You know, you're operating 18 aircraft today, it's not a small operation, it's very complicated, and everything from maintenance, to flight ops, to HR, to finance...
I think we've gone through and upgraded the organization at every level, and I think that, as much as anything, is gonna drive kind of, you know, with every business, it's, I call them penny businesses, but every penny counts, every flight counts, every dollar matters, and unless you have the professionals in your organization doing their jobs day-to-day versus relying on a single person like me, I'm not Superman, and I can't do it. I'm just so happy with the team I've got in place, 'cause they've done an amazing job.
You know, you talked quite a bit about the... Well, you talked about the government contract. You know, to the extent that you can expand on some of that, maybe some of the revenue contribution expectations for that?
Yeah, so we have eight aircraft dedicated, and it's part of the Department of Homeland Security deportation program, so they are dedicated minimum revenue. There's a kind of a minimum revenue guarantee, but we, you know, we provide. They set a schedule every week. We have the eight aircraft dedicated, so eight of the 14-passenger are kind of dedicated to this business. We got three bases set up throughout the United States. As you know, you don't have to spend a lot of time on the news to realize there's a lot of work there, and it's a very busy business and, you know, there's a lot of people who are designated to go back to where, to kind of where they originally came from, and we're the single largest operator in that space.
Okay. You touched on this as well just a bit, but maybe, maybe to expand. Yeah, I think it was iAero Airways sort of ceased operations right in April. You know, what sort of impact has that had on the business that you can expand upon there?
Well, it takes a lot of aircraft out of the market. And I think also, you know, we picked up some of the government work we picked up was stuff they had been doing. And I think we're gonna see definitely in the fall, as it relates to college sports, with the conference realignment, the demand for air travel is completely different. But you've taken 30 aircraft out of the market, and we are here with young, relatively young, incredibly experienced pilots, fantastic aircraft, fantastic service offering. It's really served as a differentiation point and allowed us to secure, I think, contracts that, you know, whether it's pricing has increased, improved, but it's also allowed us to be incredibly more efficient in what we chase and what we do.
Yep . Have some familiarity with the college charter football programs there, I'll chat with you offline about. All right, you know, Ryan, you know, talking about exchanges here, you're OTCQB listed. Have you talked about uplisting to a larger exchange?
Yeah, so when you look at our market cap, and you look at kind of the fundamentals of our business, you know, a lot of our peers are valued at three to five times EBITDA. You know, if you look at our run rate, we're significantly discounted to that. We have negative shareholder equity, which is about negative 20. I'm not raising money at this price. I don't need to raise money, and I need positive shareholder equity to do the uplist. That's the only thing really missing. So the plan is execute, you know, shrink that shareholder equity, hopefully get value for what we're doing, and eventually we will uplist. You know, we can't. We're gonna be way too big for this exchange within a year or two.
Yep. Okay. Sounds good. You know, maybe closing comments here. What does, what does sort of this company look like in 12- 24 months?
I think what this company looks like is significantly larger. You know, the goal of we have a platform that is really scalable. You know, securing aircraft at the right price is a challenge, but you know, if we add five to six aircraft next year, you know, you're adding 30% to revenue, just straight. You know what I mean? And you do that two more years, you're looking at double-digit revenue growth continually and compounding, and we're at the kind of inflection point where a huge percentage of that revenue growth goes straight to the bottom, 'cause all of our fixed costs are covered. So I think what you see is a much more, much larger and a much more profitable business.
All right, fantastic. Well, look, thank you very much for the participation in the conference here. I know you have a sort of a busy schedule of one-on-ones, but, again anyone out there that is not already scheduled their one-on-one and would like to do so, shoot me an email, Blum, B-L-U-M @lythampartners.com, or again, visit the landing page for the conference website. That's Lytham Partners-