All right. Hello, everyone, and thank you all for joining us throughout the day here at the Lytham Partners Spring 2025 Investor Conference. My name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner here at Lytham, and I have the honor today of moderating a Q&A discussion with the President and CFO, Ryan Goepel, of Global Crossing Airlines, or Global X, trades on the OTCQB under the ticker symbol JETMF. Ryan, thanks so much for participating here today.
Thanks for having me.
Fantastic. For those maybe not familiar, provide an overview of Global X's business model, maybe how it's evolved since its inception, and particularly in terms of balancing both passenger and cargo operations.
Yeah. We started as an idea in February of 2020, which was, as you can say, historically was an amazing time to start an airline. It actually turned out to be a really good opportunity for us. We got our certification, which is a 121, which is our license to operate in the U.S. in August of 2021, started with one aircraft. Basically what our business model is, is we provide charters, whole plane charters, no different than maybe a private jet would be as a whole plane charter. We have bigger planes. We operate the Airbus family of aircraft. We initially launched with passenger aircraft, and eventually we added cargo to our certification and added cargo aircraft to our business. We do a mix of cargo, which is probably about four of our 19 current aircraft, and the balance is passenger work right now.
All right. Maybe talk about some of the key geographic markets that you're prioritizing today. You know, how do you sort of see the mix of U.S., Caribbean, I know Latin America is maybe newer markets as well?
Yeah. So we've launched out of Miami. Miami is our base. That naturally gives us kind of an exposure to the Caribbean market out of, you know, the North America base flying. Being a 121 carrier in the U.S. allows us full reign within the U.S. To give you an idea of our breadth and scope, though, since we launched, we've operated to 62 countries and 404 cities. We basically go to where the work is and where our customers are asking us. As I can say, our primary business is U.S. based, but we also have exposure to Europe in the summer with summer flying under the ACMI contract model. We have significant exposure to Central and South America as well.
Initially, as we grow, and one of the things we've evolved to is really focus on where our core areas are, build up scale in those areas before we go beyond that scope. I think what you've seen over the last year, year and a half, is a real focus on where we're busiest, adding aircraft into those markets, and then we'll start expanding into other markets as we get bigger.
You know, maybe sort of talk about sort of how you differentiate yourself in sort of this, again, highly competitive ACMI, maybe not familiar aircraft crew maintenance and insurance, you know, as well as the charter market, right? When you're looking to go up against some of the larger players or maybe some of the regional competitors as well.
Yeah. The way you really differentiate yourself is multiple. It's the kind of aircraft you have is a big part of it. You know, you got to have the right aircraft for the right mission. You know, some of the regional players are operating regional jets, so they only can take so many people. We automatically kind of, if they need over 100 people, or 120 people, we're good. If they need under, if they need over 200 people, then we're not good because we need a wide body to kind of do it. I think the other aspect what we have is our fleet is the only Airbus fleet in North America, which we think differentiates us as it allows us to get access to equipment that might not be available.
Our average age of our aircraft is 19 years, which is relatively very young for the charter fleet, which increases our reliability. I think the other thing that differentiates us as we go through, as we get to scale, as we have aircraft based in more locations, we can bid lower because we have less repositioning cost. As we have aircraft situated throughout the U.S., we do not have, you know, normally in a charter, you charge for the repositioning of the aircraft. Now, if you can have the aircraft based closer to where the client is, that can reduce the amount of repositioning costs, which automatically reduces your overall cost to the client, which is another differentiator we have.
You know, if I'm not mistaken, it's almost entirely leased, right? What are sort of the advantages there? Maybe it's a cost advantage, some operational flexibility to doing leasing. Are there any benefits? Is that something you maybe plan to incorporate is to purchase aircraft?
Yeah. Initially, leasing was the only way we could do it just based on our availability of capital. It requires less capital, and leasing is obviously using other people's capital. It served us really well also during the COVID years as we were able to get, I would say, incredibly good deals because there was kind of a disconnect in the leasing market as some of the lessors were a little more anxious to put planes to work. As you know, we come post-COVID, and I think rates have gone up. We're absolutely exploring purchasing aircraft, purchasing airframes. From an EBITDA perspective, it's just the way the accounting and the cash flow works. You know, we figure it's between two, depending on the aircraft leased, your leasing.
If you convert a leased aircraft into purchased, it can increase your EBITDA from $2 million-$3.5 million a year just on the accounting. I think from that perspective, combined with our track record of demonstrating strong EBITDA, which is kind of the metric they use for lending, it opens us up to what we would say are economic terms, financial terms that are more economic than they would have been when we were a startup. I think we'd absolutely look at trying to purchase some of the assets as they become available. Again, with any aircraft we look at, we have an open mind. We do not come in with a predetermined we have to buy, we have to lease, we have to do this. We just look at the economics of each individual aircraft as a deal.
Hopefully now with where we're at, we can open up the door. We're opening up the door to purchasing, which just allows us access to more assets to work on.
Okay. You know, let's talk about some maybe growth initiatives. You know, you've got some partnerships, right? I think there's a DHL cargo contract, a collaboration with United Airlines. You know, talk about some partnerships and how you're doing leveraging those to sort of enhance scale and maybe your market reach in general.
Yeah. So when you think, you know, another one I'd say is TUI is a big customer who is a customer out of Europe that we work with both domestically in the U.S. and in Europe. I think when you think about where we see our growth going, you know, over the longer term, you know, there's a market in the U.S. that's pretty substantial. I think there's a lot of room for growth in there. I think over the next, if we're looking at a four to ten-year time horizon, the real growth engines for us will be the international ACMI work, which, you know, you can argue is between two and 400 aircraft depending on how you calculate it operating internationally under these kind of contracts, which we can compete in.
I think in cargo, we've talked about the reason we have cargo is we believe the 321 freighter is the replacement aircraft for the 757. There are currently over 300 757s operating in North America, average age over 30 years. At some point, those are going to get phased out. We believe our freighter is the perfect replacement for it. When you're looking at a market that big, I think our longer term growth is really internationally. There is also a significant amount of domestic growth that we can go get and we'll capture. Beyond that, there is international growth, which is substantial. I think cargo market is a substantial growth market for us. The next step would be plane type.
Like if we wanted to go into a widebody aircraft, we can go into that, which would open up more both domestic and international work.
All right. Good. That's helpful. Let's talk about some operating metrics and benchmarks. You know, talk about some of the primary operating metrics. You've already talked about EBITDA and EBITDAR as well. Talk maybe about some of those and what the trends have been here over the last year or so.
I think from the key, one of the key metrics we talk about is we treat each of our aircraft, and I've used this analogy before, like a restaurant or a store, and we want to maximize the profit per aircraft per month. One of the best ways to do that is to get the hours, how many hours you operate per month. We call that utilization. People ask what's the maximum utilization of an aircraft. You know, you can fly an aircraft up to 400 hours a month, and that's, I guess, max. You can also fly an aircraft 150 hours a month, and that would be max utilization if you get paid the right price for those hours, right? It's everything we profit is a function of price times volume.
For us, it's always about maximizing the volume of the aircraft at the right price. It's kind of a, they kind of go inverted. The more hours that are guaranteed, usually the lower the price per hour, and then it goes the other way. I think a key metric for us, and we want to keep it simple, is how many hours we operate per month per aircraft. We put that out in our quarterly, and then it would be our revenue per hour.
You know, when you look at those couple of metrics versus the peers, how have you sort of matched up over the last, you know, year or so? Are there gaps? Are you closing any performance gaps if there are any?
You know, it's tough because most of our peers are pretty small, fragmented, and non-public. The best we can do is by tracking. I would say we significantly outperform in all those metrics.
All right. Very good. You know, just in terms of managing some of the costs, the maintenance costs, CapEx, if you have some, how do you sort of look to manage that on just a normalized basis throughout the year, especially maybe heading into some of the key travel months, maybe over the summer?
Yeah. This year we made a concerted effort to try and get most of the major maintenance events completed before Q2. In Q1, we had three heavy maintenance and 10, which I call light maintenance, but they took the planes offline that were completed in Q1. We have most of our capacity available for some of these very busy summer months flying. We've made a lot of investment in our planning team, our maintenance planning team. We're looking at a three year time horizon. We take a look at our fleet and we're planning out the next three years. Really by doing so, we know when our peak demand periods are and when our busiest periods are and try and slot the maintenance events into the periods which are lower.
All right. That's good. You know, looking at some of the performance here recently, I think it was, what, 40% revenue growth in 2024, EBITDAR of north of $20 million. I think it was in Q1 here. Are those sort of the trends that should be sustainable going forwards?
I want to get a bonus. Yeah. You know, the expectations of our shareholders is continue to grow. And I think the expectation is to grow profitably. EBITDA is the first metric, and then EBITDA, and then EBIT, and then net income. With the way our balance sheet is structured, net income is always going to be the hardest. There are ways to improve that number by improving the balance sheet, which we're actively looking at. No, underlying the business is you need to add aircraft. As you add aircraft, you grow your revenues, you grow your revenue, you grow your margin and profit. That is effectively, that is exactly what we're going to do.
Yeah. When you think about, you broke it down sort of hours of operation revenue, you know, what are sort of the higher margin contracts? I know you've worked a lot with some college basketball teams and others. How has that sort of impacted profitability and cash flow?
You know, it's one of the tough parts. I think, you know, we always get asked, why are you trading at a discount or why do you think you're undervalued? Because every small cap thinks they're undervalued. If you just look at revenue, it's kind of misleading for us, right? Because an ACMI revenue doesn't include fuel, ground handling, and other costs. A charter revenue does. As a result, one hour flying charter is almost three times the revenue of one hour on ACMI. The dollars, not margin percentage, the actual dollars earned on each hour is pretty close because a lot of the charter, that differential in revenue is kind of a small markup pass up on cost, right?
The nature of the ACMI work is it tends to be programs and more higher utilization, but sometimes at lower rates, whereas the charter revenue tends to be one-off flights, right? Like go to a game, wait for a day, and come back the next day. Whereas an ACMI, they'll schedule you to fly this one route every day, twice a day for six months, right? It is really hard to use a simple revenue as a metric or to say ACMI's higher margin or better than charter. We'll do it all. I think what it really comes down to is how many hours are you flying the aircraft per month and how can you fit that into your schedule?
Because it might be great to get a really, really high margin charter job, but if it keeps the plane busy for two days and it sits for eight, it's not worth it because you lose the opportunity cost of the other eight days. I think what you've really seen is an understanding of the sales team and prioritizing those customers who will keep the plane busy every day. Even if it's at lower rates, but because the utilization is higher, it ends up being higher profit per month per aircraft.
Gotcha. All right. Let's talk about some of the biggest risks that are out there right now. You know, when you think about, I don't know, any supply chain issues, fuel costs, broader macroeconomic pressures, what are some of the biggest risks that you see to achieving the goals that you've set forth here for 2025?
One of the great things about the ACMI model is it allows you to mitigate significant risks you normally see in aviation. For example, everyone hears about fuel as being a huge risk in aviation. It's not a risk for us because it's a pass. Everyone hears about load factor being a huge risk in aviation. How many tickets are you selling? It's not a risk for us because we sell the whole plane, right? The risk for us is really getting the aircraft, you know, getting aircraft and getting it in a timely basis, unexpected maintenance, which would take capacity offline or have an unexpected cost, and then getting crews trained and operating properly. Of course, all of this is under the umbrella of safety. Safety is first in aviation. You're nothing if not a safe airline.
Those are the kind of things that all of our, when you think about what our resources are devoted towards, is how do you acquire aircraft, do proper training, have an amazing safety culture, which I think is important for us. Then you can mitigate and plan for some of the other stuff, which is, but that being said, from a perspective of an airline, our list of risks or stuff that is less than you would think of for a scheduled carrier.
Gotcha. Okay. You know, it looks like you've sort of reached this inflection point, right? That many small cap companies are looking at gap profitability in Q1, improved utilization, improved margins. You know, what do you think it is that the market's sort of missing about the story right now?
It's hard to explain. You know, I think attention spans are short. When you say airline, you know, you say airline, you kind of go, you get put in one bucket. You say service company, you get put in another bucket. We're in a, we're a pretty unique opportunity and a unique market at a unique time. Normally everyone's looking for a comp, and that's hard to find for what we're doing. That being said, we have some investors who have spent a lot of time, done some really deep digging, built their own models and understand what we're doing. You've seen them acquiring shares. I have learned it's really difficult to predict what the market wants, what they want to see and why they buy, why they sell.
What you can control is, you know, how are your underlying fundamentals? How do you improve those every day? I think that's something we're constantly proving. You'll find we do less promoting and less press releases and less stories because a lot of that was really forward looking and kind of, I don't want to say promotey, but it was really kind of look at what we're going to do. I think there's more power in publishing a Q because you make me and read it. We did it, right? There's no couldn't be, should have. I encourage you to read what, you know, the last three or four Qs and what we've done and what we believe we can continue to do.
Any thoughts on uplisting from the OTC to a larger exchange?
Absolutely. We need to be uplifted at some point, right? It is a matter of doing it at the right time. Kind of goes to the previous question you asked is why do you think you're undervalued so much? I think feeling so undervalued and feeling there's a lot of upside based on our performance, you know, most upliftings come with some form of equity raise and some form of dilution. We do not need it, you know, the equity in that sense. Why would you take the dilution? I think it is going to be kind of a self-feeding prophecy, you know, as the business improves, as the market recognizes it, as share price appreciates, everything about an uplifting date makes a lot more sense.
We're, you know, I joke we have all the downsides of being publicly listed and none of the good sides, right? Like we file Ks, we file Qs, we file 8Ks. We have large filing requirements. The CBOE requires us out of Canada. We're a U.S.-based company. Everything's in place process-wise to do it. It's just a matter of timing.
Gotcha. All right. Maybe his final takeaways here. You just said that you wanted to stop doing the forward looking, but I'm going to ask you to do a little bit of forward looking here. You know, what does this sort of business look like in the next three to five years?
Very similar, but bigger, right? By bigger, that means, you know, with each additional aircraft, you kind of move up, you move down the scale chain or you go up the economy as a scale chain, right? You know, I think one of the things that kind of distracted us in early years is we were chasing a whole bunch of different concepts and ideas. Narrow body charter makes us money. Narrow body charter is a good business. Narrow body charter is a very big business. All we need to do is add narrow body aircraft to grow the narrow chartering party business. That is what we are going to look like in three to five years. Will we be operating in more regions? Will we be operating for more customers? Absolutely.
The core business is going to be that, a narrow body charter operator.
All right. Very good. Ryan, thank you so much for the participation here today. Greatly appreciate it. Again, if there are any investors out there that would like to schedule a meeting with management here, please reach out to me. Happy to help coordinate there. Email Blum, blum@lythampartners.com. Again, if you'd like to learn more about us, you can visit our website at lythampartners.com or follow us on LinkedIn so you can be updated on future events and webcasts and conferences here. Ryan, again, thanks so much for the participation today. Greatly appreciate it.
You bet.
All right, everyone. Enjoy the rest of the conference here. Have a great day.