Welcome everyone to Rakon’s half year 2024 financial results and business update. If you’d like to ask a question during the presentation, please submit your questions into the Q&A box at any time, and we will address as many as possible at the conclusion of the presentation. I must advise that this presentation is being recorded today, Thursday, the 23rd of November, 2023. I would now like to hand over to your first speaker, Sinan Altug. Thank you, and please go ahead.
Good morning, and welcome everyone joining us for the Rakon half year 2024 financial results webcast. I'm Sinan Altug, the Chief Executive. Today, I'm particularly pleased to introduce our new CFO, Drew Davies, who brings a wealth of experience that aligns with Rakon's vision for growth and strategic financial management. His telco operator background is especially meaningful for Rakon now and in the future. In this session, we will navigate through Rakon's performance over the last six months, underscoring our achievements and how we have addressed the challenges within our core markets.
Drew will provide a deep dive into our financials, showcasing our commitment to efficiency and strategic foresight, and will provide an updated guidance. We will round off with a look at the strategic direction we are steering towards, highlighting the opportunities we are poised to capture. Following our discussion, we will invite your questions.
Starting with an overview of HY 2024 highlights. As we assess our performance for the first half of FY 2024, our financial results equal the extensive industry challenges encountered in our telecom and positioning markets by our peers and our customers. The earnings for this period also reflect the impact of non-recurring costs, which, although they weigh on our first half results, are instrumental in positioning us for future efficiency. We have launched focused initiatives for cost control, underscoring our dedication to prudent cost management and operational agility. Despite the tough market scenario, we sustained high levels of R&D activity, achieving an all-time high in design wins for next generation equipment across all our key markets. This demonstrates our capability to innovate and lead through market cycles.
Exceptional performance in the space and defense sectors, with record first half revenues and a solid order book through FY 2025 and beyond, continues to solidify our position in these strategic markets. Also, we maintained to actively invest in our growth initiatives to create long-term value. We are progressing well towards our FY 2024 goals with all key initiatives on schedule. The introduction of MercuryX marks our entry into the AI hardware space, showcasing our strategic expansion into new high-growth markets. In sum, the first half of FY 2024 has been a period of investment, restructuring, and strategic positioning, setting the stage for Rakon's long-term success and value generation. Now, going into a market segment analysis, starting with telecommunications. In our telecom segment for HY 2024, revenue decreased to NZD 34.2 million, a reflection of global telco market trends, as well as ongoing inventory normalization.
Our gross margin fell to NZD 10.9 million, impacted by reduced revenue, as well as one-time costs associated with strategic global restructuring and new facility move and scale-up in India. These are non-recurring and set the stage for future efficiencies. Our design win rate has soared to record levels, increasing by over 33% in the past year and reinforcing our market dominance in cutting-edge technologies like O-RAN and edge computing. This cements our status as the definitive leader in frequency control and precision timing within the telecom sector. It's evident that the recovery in telecom sector, particularly in terms of 5G investments by mobile operators, is taking longer than previously anticipated. However, our tier one customers remain confident in the deployment of deferred investments for the next stage of 5G network build-out. Supporting this outlook are many data points.
The Nokia report on the bottom right predicts that 5G subscriptions will continue to increase substantially through 2030. Such projections validate our strategic foresight and focus on the telecom sector. Positioning. In the first half of the year, our positioning markets revenue declined to NZD 7.2 million, a 56% reduction, but in line with our projections. This reflects the expected drawdown of inventory by our customers, particularly in the high-margin, precise positioning sub-segment, where we participate, including the emergency beacons. The gross margin in this segment fell by 67% to NZD 3.1 million, significantly affected by the end of the high-margin chip shortage business that had continued to enhance our margins in the first half of last year. And as we look to FY 2024 and beyond, precise positioning continues to be a crucial market for us.
We are engaging with our customers to manage inventory, and we are starting to see signs of recovery and increasing order volumes, while still upholding our price integrity and gross margin in this competitive landscape. Space and Defense. In Space and Defense, HY 2024 has been stellar, yielding the highest segment revenue to date at NZD 15.3 million, a significant 24% uplift. The spike in demand for our space and defense innovations is evident, underscoring the alignment of our product advancements with market demand. This increase has been across the subsegments of space, new space, and defense. Our gross margin rose to NZD 9.6 million. We foresee a continuing increase led by the strategic expansion of our space product portfolio into the higher-value subsystems and equipment.
Very importantly, this strategic shift has broadened our market scope in space and new space threefold, elevating our addressable market in new space to an estimated NZD 250 million. As we advance further into FY 2024, expectations are set high for the second half, with an already robust order book extending well beyond FY 2025, and a seasonal delivery plan that is weighed towards the second half, as we have seen in previous years. We are also aiming for substantial contract wins within the next 6-12 months, targeting major satellite constellation projects. This progressive trajectory in revenue and gross margin reflects our focused investment in this sector, marked by deliberate allocation of capital and resources as set by our strategy. Drew will now take over to delve into financial specifics and provide our updated guidance.
Thank you, Sinan. Good morning, everyone. Starting with page eight, which provides a summary of our half-yearly results. I will speak to the totals on this page briefly, and then I will give more detailed comments on subsequent pages. In the top left, we reported NZD 61.3 million in total revenue, down 30% from the same period last year. Or when you exclude the NZD 10 million of one-off TCXO revenues, which are included in the prior results, total core revenue is down NZD 15.7 million or 20% annually. Total gross margin was NZD 26.1 million, down 17.4 million in total from prior year. Or when you exclude the margin generated from one-off TCXO revenues of NZD 6 million, which is included in prior results, total core gross margin is down NZD 11.4 million, or 30% annually.
I will speak to some other factors impacting our gross margin results this year in a little more detail on the next page of the presentation. Total operating expenses are NZD 28.8 million, which is comprised of research and development expenses, sales and marketing costs, and general and administrative expenses. In total, operating costs are relatively flat on an annual basis, even with a 4.1% increase in our research and development costs as we continue to invest in activities to drive our future strategic growth initiatives, while total general and administrative costs are down 1% annually or down 17% on a sequential basis from the last six months, ending March 31, 2023. We continue to look for further reductions in operating costs, even with the high global inflationary pressures experienced in the last year.
Underlying EBITDA was NZD 5.3 million, down 81% annually. But when you exclude the one-off TCXO benefits included in prior results, EBITDA is down NZD 17.6 million or 76% annually, primarily driven by the lower total core revenues in telecom and positioning markets and offset by our strong gains in space and defense. Capital expenditures were NZD 7.3 million, which is down 25% annually, primarily a result of lower capital costs this year associated with the completion of the construction of our new Indian manufacturing facility, which opened in July this year.
Operating cash flow was a positive NZD 7.3 million this year versus 0 in the same period last year, with one key factor driving this increase in operating cash flows is due to the ongoing focus to reduce our total inventory balances, which we've done successfully over the last year. Turning to page 9. This page provides a summary of the top-line numbers, which I just covered previously. But I do want to talk about a little more detail about the decline in gross margin percentage to 42.6% in the half-year-one results. There are some one-off and temporary expenses we incurred this year of at least NZD 2 million, which is included in our reported gross margin costs.
This NZD 2 million+ in costs is driven by a few factors, including some global manufacturing workforce restructuring and redundancy expenses we incurred this year to streamline production labor activities going forward, as well as some temporary production inefficiencies experienced during the same time period when we were transitioning into our new Indian manufacturing facility. These NZD 2 million+ in costs incurred are primarily included in our largest segment, gross margin costs, which is the telecommunications segment, consequently, reducing the telecommunications segment gross margin efficiency, which as Sinan said earlier, we reported 32% this half year versus 42% last year. When you exclude these one-off and temporary expenses, our telecommunications segment gross margin would have been close to 40% this year, which is a few percentage points behind our prior year reported fiscal 2023 results.
In addition, when I look at our current monthly run rate of the telecommunications market gross margin this year, including through October results, I get comfort that our telecommunications segment gross margin has improved and is higher currently than the first half reported results, and is now in the low 40% range monthly, which is within a few percentage points of a reported fiscal year 2023 results. Another comment I would like to make on this page is about the bottom right-hand table on our hedging positions for the New Zealand dollar versus the US dollar. Since the majority of our sales to customers globally are based on US dollar-denominated contracts, we develop foreign exchange hedges up to two years in advance to mitigate significant foreign exchange fluctuations.
During 2023, the US dollar strengthened rapidly globally, resulting in the spot rate of the US dollar to the New Zealand dollar to go down to as low as $0.58 US to a New Zealand dollar. As you can see in the FX table, the foreign exchange hedges entered into a few years ago were on the average, around 65 cents US to a New Zealand dollar. Which means during half one results this year, as a result of the FX hedges, we incurred a six million-- a NZD 4 million reduction to our reported, total New Zealand, NZD 61.3 million revenues. So put it another way, if we did not have these foreign exchange hedges in place, our total revenues would have been NZD 65 million in New Zealand dollars.
On page ten, this provides a summary of our half-yearly reported revenues by telecommunications, positioning, and space and defense, which is self-explanatory and Sinan has covered in detail previously. Page eleven, which summarizes the various movements of activities to bridge from reported net profit to our ending net cash position. A few key points to highlight are: we paid NZD 2.9 million net in dividends in August, and during first half, our cash capital expenditures were NZD 6.1 million, which includes cash costs incurred globally, including the cost to complete our new India manufacturing facility. Turning to page twelve. This summarizes our focus on continuing to drive out costs of the business and look for further efficiency globally, while we still invest in strategic activities to drive future growth.
One example we did in the H1 results is make some targeted workforce reductions, and we have also reduced G&A expense, both on an annual basis and 17% on a sequential basis. As we go forward, we will relentlessly continue to look at cost categories and identify opportunities to become more efficient in all key areas of the company, while still investing to drive future growth initiatives. On page 13, this summarizes our updated underlying guidance for the fiscal year 2024, which ends on March 31, 2024.
In July of this year, we issued a market update whereby global macroeconomic factors in the telecommunications segment, as well as the ongoing inventory corrections by some of our customers, resulted in us providing a notice of NZD 10 million of risk to underlying EBITDA for the full year, which would indicate at that time that underlying EBITDA would be in the range of NZD 16 million-NZD 24 million. Based on the ongoing challenges in macroeconomic conditions, and as evidenced by recent announcements by other global companies, along with the continuing inventory corrections by some of our customers in the telecommunications positioning markets, we are providing guidance of underlying EBITDA for fiscal year 2024 to be between NZD 13 million-NZD 19 million. In addition, the board continues to anticipate that dividends are sustainable throughout our three-year growth plan.
With that, I turn back to Sinan to go over our strategy and outlook. Sinan?
Thanks, Drew. Now, slide 15. We remain confident in the medium to long-term growth drivers in our core markets. And you know our strategy, it's focused and resilient and designed to build long-term value in these high-growth markets. We remain committed to our growth strategy and undeterred by the short-term market volatility. Our aim is to come out of the current challenges stronger and well-positioned for the future. Our investments span the key areas of XMEMS nanotechnology, semiconductor chips, our state-of-the-art India facility, and our space portfolio, all integral to enhancing our competitiveness through innovation and strategic capabilities vital for sustained growth.
And connected with our strategy, we have achieved all of our FY 2023 milestones, setting a strong foundation for our three-year growth plan. We are now registering robust progress towards the FY 2024 milestones. Product transfers to our new India facility are running at an accelerated schedule.
Our chip innovations, including the successful launch of Niku and the forthcoming MercuryX, are pivotal in driving our market expansion and revenue. Investments in our XMEMS nanotechnology are sealing our position at the forefront of telecom markets, allowing us to address the toughest specifications. Our strides in the new space business are shaping a trajectory that defines Rakon as an industry leader in this new space ecosystem. As we progress through FY 2024, we remain committed to this trajectory, focused on delivering long-term value and reinforcing our market leadership in all of our core markets. Through our strategic three-year growth plan, we have laid the groundwork for significant returns on market expansion. With focused investments into strategic initiatives, we are fueling innovation and enhancing our competitive edge.
Our prudent investments have already begun to yield results, with returns ranging from 100%- 175%. This strategic capital allocation has broadened our serviceable addressable markets by 10%, reaching to $3.7 billion, and we have seen a surge in design wins, marking a period of unprecedented growth in innovation and market reach. Particularly in the space and defense sector, we have seen revenues soar, with addressable market opportunities now triple to an estimated $250 million in subsystems alone. We believe our plan will deliver ambitious goals post our three-year strategy. We are targeting an annual sustainable revenue growth of 15%, alongside greater economies of scale and enhanced profit margins.
We aim to further diversify our revenue streams for increased stability through market fluctuations, and project an expansion of our SAM by over $1.5 billion, approaching nearly $5 billion in total by FY 2025. So this is the core of our forward-looking strategy, a pledge to continued growth, market resilience, and leadership, propelling Rakon towards our vision of long-term value creation. Now, I want to highlight two of the exciting growth opportunities in front of us. We continue to outperform in the space and new space segments. Rakon boasts a notable 40-year legacy with elite space agencies and is now a dominant player within the rapidly expanding new space and low Earth orbit ecosystems. In the past year, we have mentioned our order book to hit record levels, and it's a clear signal for our growth strategy.
Our GNSS receivers, crucial for Earth observation, marked a successful launch in April 2023, and we proudly unveiled two innovative receiver subsystems in November 2023. Our strategy is sharply focused on geographical expansion, particularly into the U.S., and advancing up the value chain with sophisticated subsystems, affirming our dedication to shaping the space industry's future. We are cementing our role in a market forecasting massive growth through this decade. AI, as we recently announced, the launch of Niku marks Rakon's exciting foray into AI computing hardware, setting the stage for it to become a new core market for us. Our technology, perfectly suited for the synchronization needs for data centers handling AI workloads, is at the forefront of this. In the coming year, we are planning to introduce more next-generation products to enhance our AI portfolio, including Mercury X.
Our collaboration with the industry leaders in AI hardware is instrumental in enabling cutting-edge platforms. Through these partnerships, and with the launch of Niku, we have honed our projections for realizing substantial benefits within the next 12-18 months, including design wins, collaborations, and revenue growth. We are strategically positioned for expansive growth with high-margin products. Now to summarize, Rakon is well-placed to capitalize on significant medium- to long-term opportunities, with underlying growth drivers remaining strong in all of our core markets. In the short term, the telecom market faces challenges with inventory adjustments and delayed 5G investments. Positioning, while still impacted by inventory correction, is showing recovery signs. Space and defense market is definitely exceeding expectations, contributing substantially to our growth. We are continuing to gain market share, evidenced by a record number of design wins and new activity.
We are continuing to focus on efficiency, driving cost savings for future resilience and competitiveness, and we are continuing to execute our three-year growth plan, which is geared towards increasing market share, revenue, and margins. Armed with a clear strategy and a focus on execution, and with strong underlying medium and long-term growth drivers in our core markets. We continue to feel excited about the future. Now we will move on to Q&A and answer your questions.
Right. We have a question from Tony Morgan: Why is cash flow revenue significantly greater than reported revenue?
We'll get back to the exact answer. If you want to go to the next question, we'll answer that in a short while.
So a couple of other financial questions. What are non-recurring cash flow positive? Will Rakon be further cash flow positive with inventory lowering?
Yes, that is correct. So that's a question from Tony. Yes, we will be.
Yeah. Adam Kraakoff asks, "Is the drop in revenue to do with lost customers to some extent?
No, absolutely not. Actually, we have gained market share, and we have had more designs than ever before, and I can comfortably report that we have not lost any customers that I am aware of.
Mark Evans is asking: Who are the major chip competitors to Rakon in the AI chip market?
Yeah. So in that market, I think the competition is still forming. I can't point to any exact competition at this point. There are some that are targeting, that are working on designs, but of course, when you think of our Niku chip, for instance, knowing the design cycles, we have started working on that chip 2.5 years ago. So while we have just only now announced our foray into AI hardware, actually, we have done a lot of work in the background, and I believe we will be leading the frequency control product market in AI space.
Mark also asks: Who are the main competitors to Rakon, and which ones are publicly listed ?
Yeah, I think we have answered that question quite a lot of times. I would love to respond to Mark if he contacts me separately.
Fair enough.
Let me go back to Tony's question about regarding cash flow. So the significant improvement in our working capital as a result of lowering our inventories being one of the main drivers by NZD 12 million on a year-on-year basis, that's the key driver of our improvement in cash flow.
Alan Wong is asking: Can you comment on the comparison of the XMEMS technology compared to MEMS technology from SiTime? What are the pros and cons of quartz versus silicon and MEMS technology?
Right. I mean, I can go half an hour on that question, but there are pros and cons. But for, from our side, I can comfortably say that there are particular specification attributes in our core markets that we are targeting, and this does include the AI hardware market now, in addition to the telecom infrastructure. There are spec attributes that can be comfortably addressed with XMEMS. However, it's more challenging for regular MEMS. You could also see this as. If you were to look at our main competitors' offerings and their market position, it would be mostly and mainly on consumer products, whereas we target more of the higher-end infrastructure side of telecom, for instance. Same is valid for AI, but again, there are pros and cons.
I won't say that XMEMS categorically is better in everything, but we, in the markets that we are targeting, we are able to participate and compete very favorably with MEMS.
There's another question from Tony Morgan about non-recurring restructuring costs. Would you like to comment on those?
So as I said earlier, we look at our operating costs, and we will continue to dive. I've been here exactly a month today, so I'm spending a lot of time going forward, you know, really understanding the drivers of our cost of production as well as operating expenses. And as we uncover, you know, what really ties directly to revenue growth, strategic growth, we'll continue to have opportunities for optimizing our operating efficiency. So we don't have anything in plan at this point for further restructuring, but we'll be looking at things as we go forward.
There's a question from Mark Evans again: Does Raycom deal on an agency basis with buyers in the U.S., Europe, or directly with customers? I think, yeah, it is.
Mostly direct, but we do have agents in some cases as well.
Yeah. We have some other questions here from James Lindsay. Can you talk through the growth you're seeing in the space and defense industry segment?
Sure. As I mentioned, it's across the sub-segments. Space, new space, and defense have all shown growth for us in this past half year.
And how is there progress with contracts for the LEO constellations that are planned?
Yes, we cannot report anything at this point, but there is definitely progress. We are participating. We have bids almost in place for some mega constellation contracts. We are looking forward to the coming 6-12 months to bear fruit for these, but we'll report when we have news on it.
Could you explain the weakness in the positioning where we called out on slide five, non-shortage revenue down, the chip shortage revenue down from NZD 12 million to NZD 7 million or -42%?
Well, I mean, there are factors on it. The chip shortage revenue that we had the prior period, that we don't have is one. Yes, but a big factor, as I mentioned, is the inventory correction that also impacted the positioning market. But as I also mentioned, the numbers, although they look substantially down from the prior period, have followed our forecast until now. And at the moment, although I would definitely not call it a trend, we do have some signs of recovery, specifically in the positioning market.
I think there's another couple of questions there of interest. Can you talk us through the new chips being developed for the new space applications? And also in that connection, what are the major priorities with R&D over the next year?
Sure. For the new space, chips, because we have not formally made an announcement, I will refrain from giving too much specifics, but let me put it in a way that we have been developing space chip and space chips, actually, for addressing higher volume new space applications. That will be also unique. We are talking about chips that will likely be unique in the world, but that is coming soon, so I will leave it there. The other part of the question was our R&D priorities. So, I think it's very important to understand how Rakon thrives in these high-growth markets. We actually always try to lead by technology. So in every single market, so I'm going to make a categorical statement rather than doing a market segment analysis.
The categorical statement being that in every single market that we participate, we engage with our customers to determine their next generation requirements, work with them on their next generation requirements, evolve our R&D, allocate, and reallocate rigorously during this development period to develop the right technology and products to offer to them when the time comes. This winning recipe is what we apply to space, what we apply to telco, what we apply to positioning, and what we have applied and we are applying to AI hardware as well.
We have a new question now from Fergus Brown, regarding any impact forecasts for FY 2025, when the earnings normalize and the benefits from the new Indian plant flow to the bottom line.
Thanks, Fergus. So, at this point, we haven't released our FY 2025 guidance, but we do absolutely believe in the efficiencies at the Indian plant, the efficiencies as we ramp up production there. So yes, in fiscal year 2025, we look for benefits to be materializing there.
Got a new question here from, sorry, Ross Bailden.
Mm-hmm.
When will the AI business contribute to revenue and EBITDA?
Yes, we have, as I mentioned also earlier, we expect to have tangible benefits visible in 12-18 months. I won't say earlier, but let's keep it as 12-18 months, but we have active work streams on that front.
Ross is also asking, where to where do you see gross margin? When do you see gross margin normalizing over the course of anywhere, over the course of the three-year strategy?
So gross margin, obviously, by market segment. Clearly, the telecom and positioning are affected, as we talked about earlier. We are focused on in terms of, you know, with the Indian plant, how to get better gross margins going forward. Space and Defense is doing phenomenally well and will continue as we go forward, and so that is the margins are stable in that particular segment. But we do look to gain efficiencies again as we increase production out of India.
We have a question from Matthew Hokson regarding whether the board has considered implementing a buyback in relation to the, you know, given the depressed share price?
I can only say, that all, tools in the toolkit has been discussed and is being discussed there on the board table. I'll leave it there.
And the further question from Alan Wong: Do you see sort of further reductions as, with revenue and profit are falling?
So, thanks, Alan. So, as I said earlier, what I'm really looking at is all costs, especially in cost reduction and total operating expenses. So we'll look at all drivers, and we'll you know, continue to evaluate what supports our revenue growth, what supports our strategic growth, and what's essential. So, we're very, very focused on it, and we'll continue to report on it going forward.
There's a question here again from Mark Evans: Is Rakon's business affected by seasonality?
Yeah, that's another general question. The general answer to that is no, except space and defense. But again, I can provide more some other time, but yes, let's leave it there.
From Tony Morgan: How are we to look at CapEx for the rest of the year? Do you see it changing from last year?
Well, thanks, Tony. The key difference from last year to this year is with the fit-out and the build of the Indian manufacturing facility, which went, which opened in July. That's the major decrease from year-over-year. We're still investing in our strategic initiatives, so we'll continue to, you know, to invest CapEx as we see the best return on investment.
Just looking for more questions. I think I answered most of the questions I have here, and any more detailed questions, we would deal with you directly via email.
Okay. Sounds good. Well, then, this ends our broadcast today. Thank you very much, all, for participating.
Thank you, and that does conclude today's presentation. Thank you all for attending. You may disconnect.