Welcome to the Q3 GlobalX Management Webinar. CEO Ed Wegel and CFO Ryan Goepel. Gentlemen, great growth in quarter. We're in very mixed markets right now. I'm sure you'll be talking about that. So without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to you, Ed.
Great. Thank you, Grant, and good afternoon or good morning to everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. We are pleased to report our Q3 earnings today, in which we reported a relatively small EBITDA loss after fully expensing pilot training expenses, which totaled over $6 million, as well as significant investment in upgrading of our flight, dispatch, and document management software as we move to being 100% paperless. So we continue to invest in our business, people, systems, training, which allowed us to get to 13 aircraft on our certificate today, with at least 4 more being added to our certificate by year-end 2023.
Bringing aircraft onto our certificate is a very expensive process, not the least of which is recruiting, hiring, and training our flight crews, all of whom are on payroll and incurring training expenses for 90 days prior to them being able to fly revenue flights. Our pilot hiring pipeline is robust, with 14 pilots having started training in October and 18 who will start in November. We're currently at 4.2 crews per aircraft, and we see no difficulties in recruiting and hiring sufficient pilots to fund our growth. We're being overwhelmed with pilot resumes at this point, and we feel very comfortable where we are with our pilot numbers, given the shortage that still exists. This has positioned us well for the Q4 and for 2024, as it allows us to continue a fairly aggressive aircraft delivery schedule.
We see tremendous opportunities in front of us with the bankruptcy of our main competitor and issues with some of our other competitors. We're moving quickly to fill the void in certain market segments, and we know we will be successful in gaining more than our fair share of the market. We provide to our clients a modern, fuel-efficient aircraft teamed by great crews, and that is resonating in the charter markets. I remain very bullish on our prospects as we move into 2024, with increasing demand that we are seeing for our aircraft from the U.S. government, the NCAA, through our top-flight subsidiary , wet leases to other airlines, and we have flown in Europe, as you may have known with Wizz and TUI, and we're seeing more and more of those requests come in for next summer.
We're also seeing strong demand for our freighter aircraft, as the A321 freighter proves every day its competitive advantage over the 757 and 737 freighter. We flew a few, two freighters, to Israel last week with over 55 tons of medical supplies. This is what we do, the missions and flights that are too difficult for other airlines. We'll move through a short presentation now on the Q3 , and we'll be happy to answer questions afterwards, as always. So, Ryan-
Sure.
kick us off?
Great. Go to the next slide.
Mm-hmm.
This is the standard disclaimer language as it relates to forward-looking statements that are made. Go to the next slide. We will cover GlobalX at a glance, as a reminder for everyone, kind of where we're at as a company, Q3 highlights, Q3 financial results, an update on the fleet, an outlook for the remainder of this year, and a quick investor update as we talk about where we are with the stock. Looking at GlobalX as a group , you know, we are one of the fastest-growing-- We are the fastest-growing North American domestic and international hybrid charter cargo airline. We do service both passenger and freighter, freight customers. We operate a fleet of 13 now, aircraft, 10 passenger, 3 cargo. The third cargo was added after October fifteenth. It was added at the end of October on the certificate.
Plan to grow to 18 by year-end. We're actively transitioning the fleet towards a mix between passenger and cargo, totaling 50 aircraft by 2025. During the quarter, we were able to close a $35 million financing with a strategic partner, which has allowed us to take delivery of these aircraft and hire the staff and crew we need to make sure this works, which eliminates the need for mid- or short-term equity. When you look at our balance sheet, we've significantly reduced the working capital deficit from Q2 to Q3. We're projecting $150 million in revenue for the year, with positive EBITDA and EBITDA in Q4, 95% of which is contracted. We will discuss our customer mix, but again, we are targeting robust contracts with relationships in place and that are effectively recession-proof-type clients.
We're getting ahead of the pilot shortage. We had 120 at the end of the quarter. We're over 125 today. We're increasing utilization on aircraft. As you see, a large jump as we had in Q3 from Q2. Again, we're in the business of selling the whole plane, which allows us to mitigate many risks that are traditional for airlines, specifically fuel risk, which is one of the largest, and we'd argue we have a highly attractive valuation with around a $40 million U.S. market cap today. So we look at what we've created, you know, as a company since we started in August first of 2021, when we were certified. We have 13 aircraft on the certificate, 8 more to be delivered in Q1, Q4, and Q1 of 2024.
We have operated over 25,000 hours, 20% of which were in the last quarter. Again, 120 pilots at the end of the quarter. We've achieved key certifications. Why this is really important is, the more certification you have, the larger your total addressable market becomes. Through EASA TCO, the U.K. TCO allows us to operate in Europe and the U.K. Department of Defense allows us to operate for a relatively large market within for Department of Defense. Our IOSA certification has allowed us to significantly increase the number of flights we perform for other airlines, which we'll talk about in the next slide.
So, I just wanna comment on this. This shows a tremendous amount of progress. It shows a tremendous amount of corporate development here at GlobalX. That costs money, but we have built a very, very strong platform, which we can now use to accelerate aircraft deliveries, accelerate services for our customers, using our certifications. We have aircraft flying in Europe. We have aircraft flying for the Department of Defense, and we're getting more and more airlines requesting our services because of the certifications that we have. Excuse me. So we built the foundation for an extremely strong platform with this airline so that we can fulfill any mission that's presented to us, and we've got the crews and the aircraft, the expertise and the capabilities to perform those missions.
So we've done all of the heavy lifting now in 2022 and 2023, that sets the stage for us in the Q4 of this year, as well into 2024 and 2025. So we've built a tremendous track record of success with the regulatory agencies, with the agencies that provide our certifications, with the leasing companies that provide airplanes, with the cargo operators who need our cargo aircraft. A whole list of third parties who work with us now are increasingly buoyed by the fact that we have put all of this into place, and we have a very, very strong airline here that can perform. We're seeing more than our fair share of the market come to us because of the capabilities that we provide, the on-time service, the reliability, clean aircraft, great crews.
So, again, the heavy lifting has been done. We're now have set the stage for our success into 2024 and 2025.
Quickly running through the highlights of Q3. Obviously, the closing of the $35 million debt facility was a big hurdle and a big accomplishment for the company. We signed LOIs for two A320 passenger aircraft and one A321 passenger aircraft, all of which we're attempting to get delivered in the Q4 . Two for sure, the third one, it'll be at the very end of the Q4 . We've increased our pilot headcount from the end of last year, from 60 to 120. This is a significant investment, both on the side of the company, but also as an opportunity for us going forward. We flew over 1,800 hours under our wet lease contract for TUI, one of the largest leisure carriers in Europe.
We took delivery of one A319, which will be used in VIP configuration, which will be used for the NCAA charter market. A third A321 freighter was delivered in late September and is now flying for us. We completed the financing and signed the lease for the maintenance facility to build in Fort Lauderdale. That should be breaking ground soon and be operational by early 2025, which would drive significant savings as it relates to maintenance cost and efficiencies on that side. You'll find a lot of airlines are not only moving more into getting these facilities, not so much as to save money, but to control it. And having the control over your maintenance cycle is a very key aspect of what we want to do going forward.
Finally, we've booked over 1,100 hours for NCAA basketball, including 9 of the top 20 men's and women's basketball programs for the 2023-2024 season, which we'll see partially in late Q4, but that's mainly a Q1 activity, which we're very excited about. When you look at who we're flying for, this list continues to grow and continues to get stronger. As you see on the NCAA college sports, that's a fraction of the teams that we're flying for for this year. Concerts, Bad Bunny, Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, and numerous others. You look at the government, we discussed DoD, NASA, and Department of Transportation. You look at airlines, I think this is the biggest kind of jump we've had in, in...
We recognized it in Q3, and this is a direct result of our IOSA audit, flying for TUI, Lynx Air, Breeze, Allegiant, Avelo, Wizz, all large operators, all looking for us to come back next summer. So we're also very excited about our prospects for next summer as we work through signing those contracts in the next few weeks. Brokers and tours, tour operators, there's probably not a broker in the U.S. market that we haven't worked with, and we continue to deepen our relationships there. Then on the cargo side, we're growing our customer base as we diversify into new clients as we continue to add more freight. If you look at the KPIs that we track for Q3, it was a big step up from activity level, which we will be maintaining going forward.
You saw the block hours per month, the block hours per aircraft, the pilot pool, and the net aircraft available days per month, all growing at substantial rates. We project these rates to continue going forward as we continue to add aircraft to the fleet and operate as with the pilots we have trained. How this looks on the bar chart, you sort of see this was definitely a step change up for us. It was a huge increase in activity level. We managed to pull it off. I think it can't be understated how hard it is to double in a quarter from an activity level on flying, and I'm pretty proud of the team and what we've done to execute on that contracts and that work.
And it's basically allowed us to now establish a new plateau for where we operate from. And as of now, if you think about where we are, we're the second-largest charter operator in the United States. Sun Country would be kind of the second. It was the second, but we operated more hours than them in Q3. So, we're now a significant player in the market, and we're establishing a significant market presence, and we're only adding to that as we add aircraft.
So our ability to fly 6,500 block hours in Q3 is a direct result of the major investments we made into this airline over the course of the last 18 months, for pilots, for aircraft, training, software, systems, all of the things that are needed to run an airline. We made those investments, which allowed us to grow the fleet, which, as Ryan said, has allowed us to double our revenues from Q2 to Q3. We will continue to see that momentum moving forward with those airplanes now on the certificate, with the crews in training, with the systems in place. So again, the foundation's been built, and that allows us to be able to double our revenues from quarter- to- quarter.
That won't happen every quarter, but our ability to do that in Q3 was a direct result of the investment that we made.
Speaking of results, as stated in the press release you may have saw, $42.6 million in revenue for the quarter, EBITDA of $7.6 million, and an EBITDA unadjusted of -$1.7 million, which is a significant improvement over Q2. And if we go to the next slide. The reason why I wanna talk about this slide really specifically is what we want to do as we are growing to scale, is ultimately you wanna grow your revenue faster than your costs. And when you do that, your operating loss, or eventually operating income, to grow.
So if you look at, we grew our revenue by 35% from Q2 to Q3, and every single line item, except for maintenance, and I'll go into that, grew at a lower rate, which is what you wanna do, what you wanna see. Block hours operated increased by 81%, and what you'll find is maintenance, materials, and repairs is directly correlated to your block hours flown. So we grew block hours faster than the maintenance costs grew, which is, again, another area where we're gaining efficiency. So across the board, in every cost center we look at and every area we're looking at, with the investment we're making for the future, we are still managing to grow our revenue faster than our cost base.
Which projecting forward, and again, we will say this, if we wanted to create a $150 million revenue company, and that's it, and stay at $150 million, we would be profitable today. But we're not building a $150 million revenue company, we're building a $400-$500 million revenue company, and the only way you can do that is investing in people, processes, and systems, and that's what we're gonna continue to do. So I understand the emphasis and the desire to hit a profit number now, but we believe there's opportunity to grow this into a $400-$500 million company, and we're gonna go do that.
And so as long as we're growing our revenue faster than our cost, which we think will continue as we add aircraft, which will increase our scale, it's basically getting to scale, we think that'll bode well for the earnings going forward in the future.
It's important to note that Ryan mentioned that our unadjusted EBITDA was a loss of about $1.7 million . We did not adjust for the almost $6 million of pilot hiring and training for pilots who are not operating the airline day to day. As I mentioned earlier, it's 90 days that they are on our payroll and in training, and that's a significant expense. It allowed us to double our block hours, but we did not adjust our EBITDA for that significant expense, nor adjust our EBITDA for the expense for the investments that we've made in technology, and distribution systems, and software, and training systems, which are critical as we grow. We are extremely pleased with these results.
We've built the foundation for the future, and we, as, and as Ryan mentioned, with our revenue growing faster than our costs, this is how we win this game. So...
With aircraft deliveries, you know, when we first started, before the year started, we had a base plan, which was to get to the 11 aircraft. We've achieved the 11 aircraft. We're into the expected plan, which is our Q4. We've taken the first, the A319. The A321, which is an A321 freighter, will be delivered shortly, and then we have two passengers coming right behind it. So we are into the growth plan, which is why the revenue number grew from where we started when we first talked about the year. Keeping in mind, last year we did around $90 million in revenue. We're targeting around $150 million, and the trend on the revenue side is significantly back-end loaded, and we're seeing that continue to go.
We're very highly focused right now on getting additional passenger aircraft onto our certificate. Given the amount and the nature of the requests that we're getting for our services, we are short aircraft right now, and we're using other wet leased aircraft, one from our sister airline, Canada Jetlines, who's providing us great support, and from one or two other airlines where we need spot lift because of the unavailability of our aircraft. We are stretched very thin on passenger aircraft. That's how we get to the number of block hours that we got to in Q3, but we're very focused on getting additional passenger aircraft. We put out a request for proposals to all the leasing companies for additional A320s for 2024 and 2025.
Given all of that, and what we believe we can bring onto the certificate between now and summer 2024 flying, we will still be short several aircraft. This is our focus. Better to be short aircraft than to be long aircraft. But we're going to move to resolve these issues and get more aircraft onto our certificate as soon as we can. We're seeing demand outstrip our ability to supply, again, because of issues with some of our competitors, issues at the major airlines, in terms of seat prices, issues with, airlines being able to get new airplane deliveries out of the factory, which in some cases are delayed up to 2 years, and they've already sold seats and announced routes for those airplanes. We're getting requests every day...
from airlines in Europe and Latin America and other places to fly airplanes for them under a wet lease because they don't have their new aircraft from the factory. So, we are scrambling to try to bring more airplanes, passenger airplanes in and onto our certificate, given the strong demand that we are experiencing.
Looking at the outlook for 2023, we're confirming our guidance of $150 million+, with over 95% of that work contracted as of today. That work translates to around 17,000 hours contracted for 2023 to date, with a potential to contract up to another 1,800 hours, depending on aircraft delivery dates and our ability to get sub service to expand our capacity. Keep in mind that December is a very, very busy month, bowl season, for us. None of those contracted hours are contracted until the bowls are announced, so that's all very near-term contracting, which is pretty standard for the December period. We feel we'll be incredibly busy during that period as well. To put it in perspective, we did 10,000 hours in all of last year.
So as an airline, as an operation, we've almost doubled our business in a year. And we managed to do that with while investing and setting ourselves up, and as we look for 2024, we expect to see continued growth along that same line. So when you look at the fleet size target at the year-end, definitely 13 passenger aircraft, between 3 and 5 cargo aircraft, to get us to the 18. Again, one of the issues with deliveries is they're kind of done sequentially with us. The FAA will only approve 1 aircraft at a time. So even if we had them delivered, we still need the FAA to sign off on it, but we are managing that process.
We're prioritizing our passenger aircraft right now, just given the amount of demand we have for it right now, and we'll continue to push it into the Q1 .
Just let me make a few comments on this. So, we are, we're reaffirming our guidance for 2023 at $150 million. I believe, based on what I am seeing, and Ryan and I have working with the sales team, that we will at least attain that number and probably higher. 95% is contracted; the other 5% to get to the 150 is in process, and we have no doubts that we will get to the 150+, for this year. And that's also building into next year. A lot of these clients are coming back for additional flights for next year based on our reliability and our ability to operate, and so that all bodes well for our future.
The revenue number will be attained, and we've always talked about 18 aircraft on the certificate by the end of the year, by the end of 2023. We're impacted by the ability of the major maintenance organizations, the MROs, to get these airplanes out of heavy maintenance, be it either on the passenger side, where they have to go through heavy maintenance before they are delivered to us, or on the cargo side, where the aircraft has to be converted to cargo, which is typically a 6- to 7-month process. We're seeing that out somewhere between 10 and 11 months. Some of our passenger aircraft are for this year, particularly in the H2 , have been delayed because of MRO issues.
So, for instance, the airplane that we're taking delivery of, passenger aircraft, which we desperately need, has been delayed almost three months, because of issues from the previous operator, issues with the MRO, and then getting the airplane to us. So, we are working through these issues. We react, and we have contingency plans as aircraft are delayed being delivered to us. But it's been an issue for us in 2023. Our numbers would be even better for Q3 and into Q4 if we had been able to take delivery of these airplanes on a faster basis. But having said that, we did a great job for 2023, and that builds for 2024.
To address proactively the question before it comes with regards to uplisting, as we stated at the end of last quarter, with the Axar financing, there is no pressing need for us to raise capital. The only hurdle for us for uplisting is the requirement to have positive shareholder equity, and that can be addressed in two ways, through profitable operations or equity raises. Given that fact of where our share price is today, we're not inclined to do equity raises at this price, so we will not be doing an uplisting this quarter. To look at the cap table where it's at, this is our current cap table. We have three sets of warrants that are outstanding, primarily with our Axar, who the 10 million shares, and then other investors in different rounds.
Again, one of the other questions I get or I see is, you know, employee buy-in on the shares. Through our employee share purchase plan, we have almost 200 employees participating in the plan through payroll deductions, buying shares. So I think when you think about the buy-in from insiders and the buy-in from employees, there's a strong belief in what we're doing and where we're going with this company, and I think that can't be understated. People putting in up to 10% of their base salary into the stock, into the company, which allows all of our interests to be aligned with the shareholders to ensure we're putting in place the process, procedures, systems, pricing, everything you need to create a profitable company.
I think going to the other feedback we had is some better marketing advertising. We're gonna play a video for you here. It's an ad. Hopefully, it works on the webinar, but it's an ad that we had put together that we're using to help promote the cargo, our new cargo business, which I think has been getting some really good feedback, so if you want to just run that real quick.
Experience excellent cargo transportation with GlobalX Cargo. As the only U.S. flag carrier operating the cutting-edge Airbus A321 freighter-
... We lead the way in efficiency and capacity with up to 27 tons of lifting power, 50% more cargo space, and a rolling 77 decibels. We are the top choice in ACMI and ad hoc charters in the Americas and the Caribbean. Trust GlobalX Cargo. GlobalX Air Cargo. Experience excellence in cargo trans-
We don't have to watch it twice. I think going through it, to, to kind of wrap it up, I well, maybe go through the-
Yeah, go ahead, and then I'll-
Yeah. So if you think about where we are, we're poised for continued growth. One, we believe there's incredibly supportive market dynamics for what we're doing. Between the engine issues that some of the major carriers are having, between the delivery days, delays of new aircraft, and, and our competition, one of our largest competitors going through a bankruptcy proceeding, we believe there's some significant opportunities for us in the very, very near term to grow this business. We have significant contracted revenues. We are getting more and more booked further and further ahead, as, as we go through. We are effectively sold out, for significant portions of the year next year, so we're looking to add... With, with the new aircraft growth, so we're looking to plus, get more. Fleet growth, we've identified aircraft, we have plans for onboarding.
As we grow the aircraft, again, this is a scale business, and each aircraft, every flight they operate is on a profitable basis, contributes more to the fixed overhead to cover our investment. So as we add aircraft, as we saw from Q2 to Q3, we want to grow our revenues faster than cost. And then finally, the ramp up of cargo business. It's a significant business segment for us. We're at 3 aircraft now. We're going to ramp up to 15 over the next 2 years. And we believe there's a long-term, the sales cycle's a little longer on those, on those contracts, but once they're in place, they work really, really well, and they stay-
They stay in place.
They stay in place, which is good news, bad news when you try and enter. So, we are making huge headway with the 321 freighter, the economics of which and the efficiency of which is starting to gain the traction that we expected it to happen, and that'll really be kind of the narrative as you hear us. The passenger will be strong next year, but the cargo will be kind of what accelerates our growth. And with that, I think I'll leave it to you.
Yeah. So just taking a look at that last slide, if you can just go back.
Mm-hmm.
Let me just make a few comments. So all, all of you who are on the call, who are investors in our company, you've made a wise choice. We are the preeminent narrow-body charter airline in the Americas, and there is no question about that. We have the best aircraft, we have the best crews, we have a growth plan. We've got great strategic investor partners who will fuel that growth for us, and we have developed a reputation and track record in the industry with our clients that will keep them coming back to us. So we only see our passenger revenue, charter revenue continuing to increase, outpacing the growth of any other charter airline.
When we add cargo to that, we have diversified risk, we have diversified revenue streams, and we have a, an efficient use of our, crews, our cockpit crews, our headquarters staff, and everyone involved in making sure that these airplanes operate. So we feel extremely bullish again about 2024. We have built the platform that we can now add bricks on top of, and so we are, we are well positioned as we move into 2024. And so with that, Grant, we'll turn it back to you, and, and we'll take as many questions as we have time for.
Thank you, Ed and Ryan. A reminder to the participants, or the attendees, I should say, at the bottom of your screen is a Q&A button. If you have a question, please submit it there. And we've got seven questions already. Ed, you mentioned that demand outstrips your passenger capability, and you mentioned Canada Jetlines, and I think we'll start with that because we've got a question specifically around that. Mr. Wegel recently shared that Canada Jetlines helped GlobalX out with a plane. Could you elaborate on the GlobalX business model in this kind of setting? Is this the same cost-plus model as if the plane had been leased by GlobalX itself instead of being provided by Canada Jetlines?
So let me talk about Canada Jetlines and why we helped to create that airline. It was created for a number of reasons, not the least of which is we had assets in Canada that we wanted to monetize, and we were very successful in doing that. Canada Jetlines announced yesterday a profit for their quarter. We're very proud of them. They've done an incredible job, getting to three airplanes and getting profitable and establishing a great track record up there. So they have flown for Flair. I think they've flown for WestJet. They've flown for a number of airlines up there. They've got a great operating team, great CEO, good board that Ryan Goepel, our CFO, sits on.
We're very, very happy with what they're doing, and when we called and said, "We have got more demand than we can satisfy, can you send an airplane here?" They were able to figure out how to do that and get an airplane down here, and it's operating for us. That's one of the reasons why we helped create Canada Jetlines. The synergy between the two airlines is extremely strong. Our ability to call on them, and in the past, they have called on us when their demand has outstripped their aircraft supply. So we've flown for them to Greenland and some other places to help, to help out, to provide additional lift. So this alliance is working exactly as we envisioned it and exactly as we have created it.
We've got a great working relationship with Jetlines, and we only see that continuing to grow. We think in the future it might be possible for Jetlines to operate the cargo, and we're talking to them about that, although there are no plans in place now to do that. So in this case, we negotiate, we discuss with Canada Jetlines what rate they will charge us. And Ryan, why don't you talk about the economics of the transaction?
Yeah, so when you think about the economics of the transaction, it would be no different if we, if when we sub-service another aircraft, we basically pay them a block rate, and then we sell it at a different rate. And that's kind of if we were to fly for them, or they fly for us, that's the structure. So we're, they're operating for us, we mark it up, and we sell it to the customer. So where—what it does, though, is it frees us up, because other foreign airlines can only fly certain routes, so they can only fly international routes. So, by them flying that allows us to chase more domestic work, which there is a ton of. And so it frees our aircraft up to go chase higher margin work.
It's really the economics for us.
We give Canada Jetlines a minimum guarantee on hours, which allows them the flexibility to bring the airplane and the crews down here to Miami, and allows them to make money. When they make money, it's good for GlobalX shareholders because we own how much of Canada Jetlines?
13% .
13% we own. So, and then various investors in our company also own percentages. So we want to see them succeed because when they succeed, we benefit. When they have more airplanes, that's more airplanes that we have as a potential source of lift when we need additional lift, and vice versa. When they have increased demand in the summer and other peak periods, they can rely on us to provide an airplane to them. And so, we are—you know, this is a case of one plus one equaling five. We're very happy with this alliance. We're very, very happy with this, cross-investment. And we only see this as getting bigger and getting more profitable for both airlines as we move forward.
Questions in and around pilots and cargo. So I'll start with your aggressive investments in pilot training is built for future growth. What happens when, and I'll add, if we get a recession? You may have to lay off some of those pilots, and they may never return to the company. Don't you think the less aggressive would provide profit sooner and protect you from a potential recession?
Well, let's talk about the recession first. So we've talked about this a number of times. If you look at our list of clients, who we fly for, where we fly them, and what their missions are, we are relatively, I would say 90% of our clients that we fly for are recession-proof. The U.S. government is always going to fly. NCAA Division I teams are always going to fly. Taking relatives and family members to Cuba, they will always fly. Taking family members to Santo Domingo and the other places that we fly in the Dominican Republic, they are always going to fly. So no, we are not afraid of a recession. Our clients are recession-proof. We need to hire pilots. It takes 90 days to get them trained and on the certificate.
And as Ryan said, we're not interested in a $150 million company and slowing down growth or making growth zero, because that $150 million company will go bankrupt in several years because if you don't grow an airline, it goes bankrupt. Over the past 60 years, we've seen that repeat itself time and time and time again. So we have no interest in operating a small airline because we will not survive. We are interested in operating an airline in an environment where our clients are recession-proof and where our business is growing. So we will continue to hire pilots, and we will continue to grow our operations so that we can meet the demand that we're seeing.
Now, even in 2024, where all of the pundits, all of the economists who have who predicted 12 of the last four recessions are saying we're going to have a recession next year, right? We are seeing increased demand, increased demand for quotes, proposals, aircraft time from all of our current clients, as well as a whole laundry list of new clients. We're not afraid of a recession, we're not afraid of growing this airline, we're not afraid of hiring pilots. We're not afraid of doing what we're supposed to do, which is to create a $2 billion company.
I think on that aspect, when you look at aviation and airline industry as a whole, it tends to track pretty close to GDP, and we have the disconnect which happened during COVID. But if you draw a line of GDP from 2019 through to now, airlines still haven't caught up to that long-term trend over 30 years. So even if there is a recession in that sense, there still isn't enough supply, and that's why you're seeing the dynamic you're seeing today. So between the customer mix and the overall size of the market, again, we are 12 planes in a 10,000-plane market. We think we're really well positioned to go generate revenue.
So, take our numbers, take our numbers from Q3. Let's say we hadn't hired any pilots. Let's say we had stopped our growth on July first, right? We would have reported operating profit of what? $7 million.
Mm-hmm.
We took that money, and we invested it into the company. More pilots, more aircraft, more training, more systems, okay? Which allowed us to fly 6,500 block hours in Q3 and probably the same number in Q4. So we made a profit in Q3. We took that profit, and we invested it back in the airline. And that's what we told everyone at the beginning of this journey that we were going to do, and that's exactly what we have done. We deliver on our promises.
Well, part of this, today's Wall Street Journal says American Airlines is offering captains from other airlines a $250,000 bonus to join American Airlines. How do you compete with that? And then also, the article said that cargo volume is slowing industry-wide for GlobalX them.
All right, so let me take the first question, which is, the regional airlines that are throwing crazy money at, captains to come over to fly for them. There's lots of conditions and caveats with that money. They have to stay with the airline, I think, five years. None of those guys wanna fly a regional jet for five years. Okay? So, we've had, probably all of our pilots have looked at going over to a regional airline and getting a big check, and then they look at how much they can make here versus how much they'd make at a regional airline, and they do the math. And sometimes Ryan sits down with them and shows them the math and shows them that they make more money here over five years than they do at the regional airline with the bonus.
So we have no problem competing with that. If someone wants to go sit in the right seat of a regional jet and fly 10 hours today and be based in San Francisco when they live in Cincinnati, they should go do that. None of our guys are doing that. They do the math, they look at the quality of life, and they say, "No way am I going to do that." So we don't have any problems with that. We have guys who come, and, and I should say women, too, we have both, who come to us from various parts of the world. They're U.S. citizens, mostly. They want to come back to the U.S. Quality of life is important to them.
A 55-year-old captain coming to work for us does not want to go to United and sit in the right seat for the next 10 years until he or she retires, and spending their time in a hotel room on reserve, hoping that they're gonna get a call to fly. And oh, by the way, they're in Los Angeles or San Francisco, and they live in Cincinnati. So we have no problem competing when we show the quality of life that a first officer or a captain can have here at GlobalX, how much money they make, and what their quality of life is, so we don't have any issues with that. We will compete with them.
We've had. Just not to put too fine a point on it, we have had three captains leave for United, went through the training, called us up, and said, "Can we come back?" Let me say that again. We've had three captains leave, go to United Airlines, right? The cream of the airline industry. After 90 days, they call us and say, "Can we come back? We don't get treated at United the same way we got treated at GlobalX." So I have no problem competing with all those airlines. We know what to do to make it attractive to work here. We are rated one of the best places to work. We've been certified for that. We've got a great culture. We've got great quality of life.
If someone wants to go sit in the right seat of an RJ, I will walk them out to the parking lot and wish them good luck. I haven't done any of that, so we must be doing something right. Now, what's the second question?
It's about what is GlobalX doing on the cargo side, and are you seeing a slowdown in cargo demand?
So we've done an analysis, and we go to all the cargo and industry conferences. We talk to FedEx, UPS, everyone on an almost weekly basis. So cargo volumes are down on the wide-body international freight side, so Asia to the US, Europe to the US. Those numbers were all skewed because for two years they were flying full 747s full of masks and COVID kits and charging $3 million for a flight that they should have charged $1 million for. So everybody got fat, dumb, and happy.
Now, all of a sudden, they're all upset because all of that business has gone away, and the headlines are, "We're in a big recession in cargo, and volumes have dropped, and oh, my God, what are we gonna do?" Well, cargo volumes are at 2019 levels, and I remember in 2019, the cargo industry saying, "This is a pretty good year that we're in. Everything is going great." UPS, FedEx, everybody was making money. This is pre-COVID. Now, all of a sudden, 2019 volumes are not good enough, and we're in a cargo recession. So it doesn't make any sense to me. We're not seeing any lack of demand on the narrow-body freighter side.
We are extremely busy flying for a whole host of different customers in the automotive markets, in the retail markets, bringing equipment and supplies to Israel, on and on and on. So we see this business as growing. The pundits, the same ones who predict recessions, the pundits tell us that cargo will grow 3% to 5% next year above the 2019 levels. So we'll take that, and we will continue to build our cargo business on the back of an airplane, the A321 freighter, that pencils out performance-wise better than its competitor set, which is the 757 and the 737.
Whenever we sit down with a potential client who is flying with a 737 or a 757, and we show them the operating performance of our airplane versus their airplane, or versus a 737 versus a 757, we win that discussion every time. We just have to get that word out there. We're talking to everyone about the capabilities of the A321... We've got Lufthansa's committed to 30 of these airplanes. Japan Airlines has just announced they're gonna get 25 of these. Qantas wants 30 of the A321 freighters. They see this as the growth airplane in cargo. And guess what? We've got 15 of them coming and probably another 6 LOIs out there in the works.
If Lufthansa thinks this is a great airplane, and Japan Airlines thinks it's a great airplane, we assume it's because we ordered the airplane, and they're following on our footsteps. But they're pretty smart people, and if they say that this is the airplane for the future in cargo, then I think we've made a pretty good bet.
Right, then about the $35 million Axar debt deal, Ryan, just discuss the terms of that.
Yeah, so the $35 million is at a coupon rate of 15% with a six-year maturity, interest only paid in semi-annual payments. The proceeds were used to pay off almost $9 million in near-term maturities. So it basically allowed us to take our debt and push it back, the due date by about six years and provide us the fresh capital we needed to go do what we're doing when it comes to growth. I think when you look at the other addition was they had warrants. They had 10 million warrants at $1 over six years, so that was. It's simple. So there's no conversion, no repricing, no ratchet, and it has prepayment options after about a year and a half.
After 18 months, we can start to pay it back or refinance it if we're in a different or a stronger credit position.
So Jefferies did a tremendous job getting this, what I will call a market rate deal, perhaps a little bit under market. For an airline like us, for a company like us, where we are currently in our development, to get money at 15%, slam dunk home run for us. So we feel very, very good about that, that transaction. Axar is a great partner of ours. They're in providing financial advice and expertise. Very, very supportive of what we are doing. And frankly, we-- again, we are very, very happy with our relationship with Axar, and the deal that we put together with them.
Questions in and around routes. I'll also be, give you both of them at the same time. What routes are you operating under flag and domestic certification, and are you expanding operations in Latin America?
So we are not a scheduled airline, although we do have, and we made the conscious decision when we went through certification to become a 121 flag carrier, which allows us to operate scheduled service. So we could operate Miami to New York if we wanted to, with sufficient notice to the DOT and some other small regulatory hurdles. So we can do scheduled service essentially all over the U.S. and all from the U.S. into Latin America, Canada, wherever else. But what that allows us to do, being a 121 flag carrier, is we can fly for other airlines.
So we can fly, and we have flown for Allegiant, we've flown for Spirit, we've flown for Wizz, we've flown for other airlines, where that 121 flag carrier status allows us, through the regulatory agencies, to get these deals approved and allows us to fly. So it's a tremendous benefit to us. We made the conscious decision and certification to do that, because it was the, it would take the least amount of time and the least expense to get that done at that time. So we've got this capability. We have the certification. We have used it to expand our business lines to be able to fly for other airlines.
Like around Red Way and then perhaps in Nebraska, as you like, to remind people what Red Way was, is what unforeseen complications arose with the business model in Red Way?
The unforeseen complication is that the people who were running that did not take our advice. Is that true?
Yeah.
In all of these transactions, we take no risk. That's our mandate. We take no risk. Someone wants to go fly from Lincoln, Nebraska, to a whole bunch of places, and they pay us, we will do that. If they expand too fast or add too many cities too fast, or they don't exactly know what they're doing, and then they don't take our advice, that's the unforeseen circumstance that led to them having to shut down. Had they taken our advice, had they taken our advice, we'd be flying for them today, and they would be profitable. I guess the word is, maybe you should listen to us, because we know a little bit about what we're doing. But again, we take no risk. We were not, we were not in the equity... We did not own a piece of Red Way.
We helped them advertise it with our airplanes and our people. I went out there and met with the governor and the mayor and everyone, and we did everything we could to help them, to include giving them priceless advice, which they did not take. So that's what happened.
We have a couple of questions in and around the Fort Lauderdale facility. It's can you briefly walk through the financing, sale-leaseback of the facility, and how will the future utilization of the new facility affect expenses?
Well, every airline, when it gets to a certain size, needs its own maintenance facility. Okay? We have an issue right now, that when we need to change an engine or do an overnight inspection, we've got to go find a hangar here at MIA, and it's impossible. There is no hangar space available at MIA, unless you're willing to pay about $30,000 for an 8-hour period. So we need our own facility. By the time that facility is open, we will be at 30 airplanes. We do a C Check every 24 months, which means that by the time we get to 30 airplanes, every month we're gonna have an airplane in C Check. I need a place to do that work. I wanna do that work ourselves, with our own people and our own capabilities.
I want to control our maintenance because that makes us a safer airline. So if we look at how much it costs us to lease that facility versus buying hangar time or having to go get a hangar somewhere to do a constant nose to tail C check on, that expense would be about 3 to 4 times what it costs us to have the facility.
Right. Right. You may be having some bandwidth issues.
Fairly simple. John out there comes in and pays, I don't know what it's—what we're at now, probably about-
I'm sorry we missed a bunch of that, Ed, because looked like there were some bandwidth issues, and my visual froze, and your audio was breaking up. Hopefully that-
Can you hear us now?
Better now. Okay. How is the Cuba charter market faring? We've seen scheduled carriers pulling out from the closure of FEAM Aero at Miami base . Does GlobalX have exposure to that?
Yeah, our exposure is that, we're being asked to fly more and more flights to Cuba, so that's our exposure. Cuba is a strong market. Because of the state of the Cuban economy, what we're basically flying are passenger flights that are really cargo flights. So we fly 50 passengers and 300 bags. And those bags are filled with medicine and food and clothing and other toilet paper or whatever else that they need down there. So we could fly another 2 or 3 airplanes in the Cuba market. We choose not to do that because there are other complications and because of the utilization of the aircraft.
The Cuba market is strong, will continue to be strong, and the reason that American and others are pulling back flights is because they cannot operate the way we operate, which is we could take 300 bags, we can take tires, we can take TVs, we can take all of that stuff that needs to go down there. Those airlines are not set up to do that. So the customers come to our tour operator clients to buy their seats so that they can, they can put on everything that they can possibly put onto an A321. The A321 on that route is very, very popular. I've got everybody in the Cuba market who sells seats in that market screaming at me to get them an A321. So we're very comfortable with it.
If the Cuba market were to close tomorrow, and we have, what, 2 airplanes basically dedicated to that, those two airplanes would go immediately to fly for the U.S. government. So, we have, we have no issues with Cuba. It's a good business for us. It, it'll provide in 2024, probably $4 million to $5 million a month in revenue. And so we'll continue to fly that as long as it makes sense. And we're not worried about the scheduled airlines because they cannot possibly operate in that difficult environment the way we can.
...
No, I wanna take this question from this anonymous attendee.
There's a couple here, the one regarding Africa or regulation?
Yeah. We don't, you know, Ryan and I talk every day about what to do in getting our message out. We see some very fascinating things. We'll see an institutional investor in Canada start to sell shares, and we call them and say, "Why are you selling?" "Well, because I really don't know anything about the company." "Well, have you seen our press releases? Have you seen our filings?" "Well, no, I don't really follow it, so I don't really. What are you guys doing again?" So we have institutional investors in Canada who are selling these shares, they have no clue what we do. Ryan gets on the phone with them, tells them everything that we're doing. Everything, right? Spends hours on the phone.
Okay, got it, got it, got it." Two months later, they're selling, and we call them: "Why are you selling?" "Well, I don't really know anything about the company, and I haven't gotten any report." "Well, have you seen our press releases? Have you seen-" "Well, I haven't had time to look at them." So I don't know how to get an institutional investor to look at our... He owns our shares, but he doesn't read our filings. And then he calls us and says, "I don't know anything about your company." It seems to me that that guy ought to be fired. He's running people's money, and he doesn't know the airlines or the companies that he's invested in, what they do. I've never seen anything like this, and then everyone blames us.
Oh, you get your stock price up." Well, okay, we're out there pushing all of this information out to every investor, and we have investors tell us, "I don't know a darn thing about your airline. What do you do again?" We've got investors who call us from Canada and say, "you're not doing a gold mine? You're not drilling for oil? What is this airline thing?"... Honestly, I believe we should record some of these calls, and in the next quarterly call, we should play some of them. It just absolutely stuns me that institutional money managers who own stock in us don't know what we do. So you tell me, you tell me how to get the message to them. We've tried everything. We've tried everything.
We put out great news, and our stock drops $0.10. Tell me why. I don't know why. Do you know why? If we could answer that question, we could probably figure out a way to do this, okay? We announce we're getting more airplanes. We announce record quarterly block hours, record revenue, down $0.10. I, I-- You know, if you're asking me to explain it, I cannot.
Apparently, there were a series of questions in and around the market or trying to do a consolidation. I think you've addressed that. So one part here, on another question, do you have a plan to list the stock on, the TSX, for example, for better visibility to U.S. based investors?
So I think we—when we talked about the uplisting, it's the same hurdle on the uplisting. Going to TSX is the same issue, right? You know, the NEO is a senior exchange. We file... If you think about what we do, we are an SEC filer. We file K's and Q's as a senior listing on the timeline of a senior company. We are subject to the rules of a senior exchange-listed company. The uplisting will happen, as I said, when we can get the share price to where it needs to be. Again, how we get there, the only thing we can control is how we operate, and eventually, hopefully, the investor base will recognize the value we created. At some multiple of...
At some multiple of EBITDA or an earnings per share, it will make sense for a significant amount of investors, and all we can control is getting there. So we're going to turn this into a $300 to $500 million revenue company that generates profit on a consistent basis. And at that point, the share price will reflect it. At some point, the economics catch up, right? At some point, all our peers are trading at 5x EBITDA. When people think EBITDA is a crazy topic, but, you know, we had $8 million, you know, $7.6 million EBITDA. If you annualize that and took the valuation of every one of our peers, we're, we're at a different price point than we were trading.
It's at 5x what our share price is today.
And so we're going to add aircraft, we're going to grow our EBITDA or EBITDA, we're going to grow our earnings per share, and, and the- where it's listed and how it's listed and how it's valued will, will follow, will be one of those overnight successes that took five years, but we're going to get there.
Maybe the institutional money manager doesn't know anything about our company but owns 50,000 shares, will suddenly wake up and say, "Oh, wow! Look at what these guys are doing." So Ryan's right. We have made the conscious decision here that we're going to keep growing this airline, we're going to grow our profitability, we're going to take market share, and if nobody recognizes that with all that we put out there and all that we say and all the conferences that we go to, right, there's not much that we can do. Got to get that institutional money manager who owns our shares to pay attention. Don't know how to do that.
The good news is there are more and more people paying attention, and there's a lot of people on this call, I'm sure, who have figured it out, and they're probably as frustrated as we are. But there's also just as many people, when I present, are blown away and stunned. They... It's kind of like, "Well, what am I missing?" And sometimes that takes the time for them to see. Hopefully, they'll see continued growth, continued improved numbers, and ultimately believe the platform we've created is worth $1 billion at some point. It's not today, but we like to think it's going to be soon.
I appreciate the frustration. Large shareholders in this office, we're with you, and if we can provide some of the calls we've got with yours, which has been recording. But enough, enough said on that, and, you know, there's over 14,000 people get your information, when we distribute it on your behalf. It's not like there's a lack of audience. There's other things that work here generally in the market. Just still on the stock, is there a plan to merge the stock back into the JET shares with U.S. ownership percents have been met, DOT requirements?
Yeah. So it's best guess is they have not been met yet, and one of the tricky part is when stuff is held in brokerage or stuff is held in, you know, then we can't see the names behind it. To validate the citizenship of those owners of those is tough. I don't think we're at the level yet where we hit the threshold that DOT requires for us to collapse it, but it's getting closer every day. I think a lot of the buying you're seeing, a lot of the people adding to their positions tend to be U.S.-based, because that's where we're focusing a lot of our IR efforts for that very reason.
As soon as I can prove positively that's there, we will convert every share over from B to common and have one single stock.
The individual who submitted the question about the financing leaseback on the new facility has asked for some additional clarification. He just want to understand the $27, I, I believe it's supposed to be million-dollar figure in mechanics, if I'm reading this correctly.
Yeah. So it's the facility will cost anywhere from $20 to $30 million to build. It'll be leased back to us over a 35-year period. So when we think about the economics of what it does for us, we believe the cost of that lease facility will more than be offset by the savings we'd have and the maintenance costs we would spend while doing maintenance at that facility. And keeping in mind, we will have the capability to do maintenance for third parties, so it can turn into a revenue source for us.
There are some other comments and questions, but they're quite redundant to what is already done. So, gentlemen, any closing comments?
No, Grant, again, thank you. This was a great quarter for us. It built the foundation for the future. We got the aircraft, the crews, the assets that we need for Q4 and for 2024. We've done the hard work, we've done the heavy lifting, we've built the platform, and we're now going to continue to add airplanes and crews and continue to satisfy the demand that we cannot satisfy right now. So we feel very good about our position as we enter, as we're in the middle of Q4 and as we get ready for 2024. So, we feel good about where we are. We're very bullish. Our employees are buying stock. And, all is good here in Miami. And with that, Grant, thank you very much, and we'll talk to you-
Yep
... in a couple of weeks.
Thank you to those who attended today, and a recording of this will be available within the next 48 hours, and we'll be providing notification on that. Thank you very much to everyone. Thank you, Ed and Ryan.
Thanks.
Good job.
Thanks, Grant.
Thank you.