Hello and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. My name is Cecilia, and on behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you've joined us for our next live presentation from AAC Clyde Space. Please note you can submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings through the Schedule Meetings tab found on the conference platform. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Luis Gomes, Chief Executive Officer of AAC Clyde Space, which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol ACCMF and on the Nasdaq Stockholm under the symbol AAC. Welcome, Luis.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for your interest in AAC Clyde Space. I would like to introduce you to the company today and also to discuss a little bit what our plans are for the future, what we are currently doing, and also how we see our business evolving over the next few years. So we are a company that has operated for more than 25 years in the space domain. We have launched more than 35 satellites over the years. Currently, we are present in five different countries, and we have roughly 200 employees worldwide. And we own and operate nine satellites at this stage that are operational. We own a few more that we have launched.
Some have reached end of life, some have reached end of life, but we also have new satellites going up continuously, and those are used to deliver our data business. So we do not only space products. Those are computers, power systems, batteries that other people use on their own satellites. We also make missions. So we build the entire satellites, and we sell satellites and operate them for our customers. But we also have our own business delivering data and services from satellites, from in-orbit assets, and that comes very much from the fact that over the last few years, we saw that as a society, we have faced several challenges around the world. We have increasingly seen the need from users around the globe, from companies, organizations, governments, that actually require more data and more information about what's happening on Earth.
That has actually driven very much growth in the need of more satellites, of more systems in space that can actually monitor the globe, that can monitor Earth as a system. We are no longer looking at what happens in our direct neighborhood, but many of the effects that we feel on climate, with the environment, are actually dependent on what happens on the other side of the world. We want to actually be able to monitor Earth as a system, and the best vantage point to do that is in space. Over the last few years, we have seen an increase in the demand for data, not only for the quantity, but also the quality of data. We have seen a growth of our market in data, providing the provision of data, information, services from satellites in orbit.
And many customers are happy to actually own their own satellites and operate them, but many aren't. We have seen an increase in the demand for just a service, people that just want to know what's happening. They just want the information. They don't actually want to own their satellites, and as such, we have moved our business from just delivering parts for satellites and satellites to also delivering data and services from our own assets, and you can see on this slide a few examples of what we are doing with that data, so we have a service that is starting now where we are monitoring forests around the world, particularly looking for stressed forests. What we have seen is with our climate changing and evolving, what we are seeing is quite an increase in the number of diseases and stresses on trees, and these are affecting our forests.
What we are doing is a service using satellites that will allow the owners, the managers of those forests, to be able to actually say what's happening, to see what's happening in remote areas. Some of our satellites are being used to provide information for the farming community, for the agriculture industry, looking at how the crops are evolving, helping with things like precision farming. We also have a fleet of satellites that deliver ship tracking information, tracking vessels around the globe on our oceans. We are starting to use the same technology to help managing offshore wind farms, offshore wind production units. Some of these new up-and-coming wind farms are in remote areas of the oceans, in areas quite exposed to navigation, to threats. As such, we are actually starting to use satellites to provide information that helps the owners manage their assets globally.
We are doing this, as I say, as we saw more demand for data and services. What we have started doing is putting in place the mechanisms, not only the physical assets in space to get the data that we need and our customers' demands, but also the business models to deliver to them what they are looking for. We have basically three models of operation. We have subscription models where customers just subscribe to receiving a certain amount of data over a period of time. Regularly, usually, these are contracts that we renew every year, or there might be multi-year, but usually they are renewed every year. The customer receives the amount of data they need when they needed it. We also have pay-per access.
In some cases, customers just want to access data on a specific time, specific day, or they want to access our archives. We have quite big archives of data. Sometimes they just want to access that. In other cases, customers are coming to us for what we call secured capacity. And this is customers that really want to have secured, over many years, access to a data stream. And in these cases, we tend to actually build dedicated assets, dedicated satellites for these customers, and they will usually have 100% capacity on one, two, three satellites over a period of several years. And this is a model that we have been using quite a lot in the past, but more and more we are seeing us moving towards the subscription and pay-per-access data models.
Just to give you an idea of where we are in terms of financials, we are listed in Stockholm, so we report in Swedish krona. If you divide roughly by 10, you'll get the same number in U.S. dollars. But we have been growing as a company over the last few years, but also we have been making a big effort in growing towards profitability. So in the last quarter, we grew our net sales, but we also were a profitable company over the quarter, and we continue to have a very large order backlog that we are working through. So these are actually quite good signs that the company is evolving in the right direction that we have been taking it. And together with these, we have a strong cash balance at the end of October 2024.
We closed an acquisition of another company, so we acquired a specialist image data processing company that will help us in developing our Earth observation business, and we continue to maintain our targets, revenue, and EBITDA targets for the year. These are part of a trend that we, as I mentioned, we have been working not only to grow the company, but also to become increasingly profitable, so our objective over this last year or so has been to actually move the company not only continue to grow it, but move it into a profitable position, as we believe that delivering sustainable, profitable growth should be the core focus of the company. This is something that we have been focusing very much over the last few years, and partly, our move towards data and services is part of that.
We usually see higher margins on data and services, and that is part of the reasoning that we are pursuing that, but it's also a growth opportunity. We see that the market for data and services is growing faster, that the market for hardware. So we continue to be a hardware company with a strong basis in satellite technology, but mostly we are now using it to grow our data, our data business. Just talking through a little bit of what we are actually building towards the future, we are currently working on a constellation called Cyclops, and we have actually looked at where are the growth opportunities.
Looking at the climate and societal challenges that we see, we have identified areas, particularly on the Earth observation side of the business, where we can actually bring along something that actually supplies data to what is now a gap, an area, a part of the market that is not serviced as well as it should. We have designed a satellite, taking advantage that as our technology has improved, cameras have become smaller, satellites have become more compact. We are now able to actually produce a satellite that delivers the same performance that much larger satellites used to be required, that we were delivering satellites that were delivering performance they were delivering 10 years ago. We can now do a much smaller, lighter, and cheaper satellite to produce.
By using that, we are now able to actually deliver a constellation of satellites, a small constellation of satellites, delivering the same performance that much larger satellites were delivering a few years back, but at a fraction of the price, the fraction of the cost. As such, we are starting this constellation. We are currently building the first two satellites. The first one will be launched in 2025. They will deliver 1.5-meter resolution. This is important because it starts allowing us to, for instance, manage individual trees. You can actually see and manage one individual tree at this kind of resolution. The idea is to have four satellites in this constellation that will deliver daily revisit of targets. That is, if you have a field that you want to manage, we can actually image it every day, depending, of course, on clouds and weather.
But if the weather is good, we can actually image it every day. And this is quite important when we are looking at some applications in the farming sector. And for those of you that are a bit more familiar with Earth observation, so the way these cameras work is that they break down the image in different colors. And we matched these colors that we see on the satellite into the same ones that are used in the European Sentinel-2 data, the European Sentinel-2 system. And what this allows us is that our data, although it's higher resolution, so you can see more detail. It uses the same algorithms and the same processing techniques that are already available on the market and that many people, many users, many customers around the world are familiar with.
This is quite an important aspect of making a seamless introduction of better data into models that already exist. What we are seeing already is quite a strong market demand for this data. As I say, we identified a gap in the market. We identified an area where there aren't that many systems delivering data right now, this kind of resolution, this kind of spectral bands. The systems that either have much higher resolution and they are very much focused on security and defense applications, or the ones that are focused on civilian applications tend to have worse resolution. We identified the gap. We placed our design system there. What we are seeing now is an increased demand for these operations, for these types of data. The way we are addressing the market, we have divided the market in three different ways.
So we are addressing it in some cases. We are going straight to the end user. We are providing them data, and we are providing value-added services. So we are extracting information from that data. For instance, in the case of forestry, and I'll give you that example a bit later, in some cases, we are identifying the areas of the forest that are under stress. So we're not just selling pictures from space. We are actually extracting information and providing that. So we see that as an opportunity. We are working with several customers right now, particularly in the forestry industry. We can value-add, we can add value to the data that we are generating quite substantially by doing that and go straight to those customers.
In some cases, we work with value-added service providers, people that already have businesses delivering information, and then we are just providing them the data that they need to deliver the information. In some cases, we will have partnerships with them. We partner with them. In other cases, we are just selling them data, and ultimately, we also, in some cases, we are just making our data available to others, and part of the reason to do this is because several of these customers, or many, the market in some cases has thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers around the world and can be quite difficult to access directly. So rather than actually creating a very costly and very large customer access machine, what we are doing is basically working with distributors and resellers that already have that system in place.
And so through them, we access that much larger market. Of course, if we are addressing end users directly, we keep more of our profit. If we are just using direct distributors and resellers, we make less profit, but we address a much bigger market. But nevertheless, we are addressing the market through these three different channels. And the first one, the first contract that we have signed a few months back, is for provision of a service for the Scottish Forestry that is responsible for managing forests, many large areas of forests across Scotland. And we have actually proposed to them that we would replace what is currently monitoring done with aircraft and helicopters. We do this from space. So currently, we don't yet have these satellites in orbit, so we are currently using data from others.
But what you can see in here is actually an example of how we extract this information from satellite data. So the two images you see on the left are what the satellite is actually seeing. The image on the left is a true color image of a piece of forest. The next image from the left is a near-infrared image. And what we have developed are then the algorithms that, using this information, using what you see on the image, can actually not only identify areas of the forest that are under stress, but more importantly, they can actually then generate maps. And this is what you see on the right, identifying what areas are actually in danger, what's the level of risk. And what that tells is that the managers of the forest identify areas where they need to take action.
So this is not just about a nice pretty picture. This is actually something that the managers can use. And in this case, it usually means going and cutting trees and burning them. But in other cases, it might mean that the forest needs a different type of management. So we developed this service. This was the first one, the first contract we developed for using Cyclops data. And now what we are seeing is quite a large number of organizations that are approaching us and asking us, "Can you do this? Can you recreate this?" Because this is of actually quite a lot of interest for the forestry industry. Another thing, another area that we are also investing and that we have been working on for several years is on the maritime domain. So as I mentioned earlier, we already have a business tracking vessels around the globe.
We can monitor the oceans. That data is used by coast guards, by shipping companies. The example you've got, the image you've got on the top right, each red dot is a ship that we detected. This is then provided for a variety of customers around the world, and this has been very much what we call a listen-only system. So the satellites go over and they just listen to messages that ships around the world are broadcasting, and that allows us to see where ships are, who they are, what they are doing, and where they are going. And we have started using also, as I mentioned, we are starting to use these for also looking at how we can help the offshore wind industry, for instance. But this is a system that exists, has existed for a few years, has been successful.
We have a successful business running around this, but we have been looking over the last two years, two, three years, at the next generation. The next generation is a system that evolves the AIS listen-only system. It is a system where you can communicate back to the ships. This will be a revolution in the maritime domain because not only allows you to track ships, but allows you to, for instance, verify that they are who they say they are. It allows you to actually broadcast emergency information, information that is useful for ships. It allows you to actually activate a control, a much bigger control of navigation lines, increasing security and safety at sea. It also opens the door for many applications around monitoring, live monitoring, and telecommand of ships.
For instance, allowing you to monitor engines in the high seas and see how they are and remote control them to actually operate them in a better way, but also finding faults and solving faults. So we see this as something that is growing in interest. It's a system that currently the International Maritime Organization is discussing to make possibly mandatory in a few years' time. But what we are seeing is an increased interest from shipping organizations, from coast guards around the world for this system. And what we have done was launch a spacecraft. We launched a spacecraft with our partner Saab in Sweden and ORBCOMM in the U.S.. And the satellite called YMIR-1 has now demonstrated, and we believe this is the first one to have demonstrated in space, that you can actually use VDES.
You can communicate to the satellite back and forth from the satellite using this technology, using this standard. What that does is it opens the door to actually have the first operational satellite system for VDES in orbit. Our second VDES-enabled satellite, YMIR-2, is awaiting launch. It should be launched in December, January. We are currently working with a customer on a constellation of 12 VDES satellites. Effectively, we are starting to build quite a lot of experience and, to some extent, a standard on how to do VDES in space. We see this as a great opportunity to grow our maritime services business, not just from tracking, but now introducing also communications into our offering to the market. As a summary, what we are seeing right now is a substantial growth of our data and services business.
So we have an opportunity to turbocharge it both through our Earth observation for agriculture and farming system solutions, but also for our maritime services business. We are very much at an inflection point, particularly on the maritime domain, where we are going to see a large technology shift away from the existing AIS system that only tracks to the VDES system that allows us to communicate back. We do have the engineering. We are a very experienced company. We have been working for many years on this. We have the engineering, but also the business models and the vertical integration necessary to deliver these, to deliver this successful data and services business. And through Cyclops, we have an opportunity to build a large, profitable Earth observation business. And through our satellite VDES capability, it positions us to develop a world-leading maritime services business. So I'll stop here.
I'll answer some questions now, and I'll go through some of the questions that I see coming through during the presentation. The first question was if we are providing revenue and earnings guidance for 2025. Not yet. That is something that we will do in the beginning of the year. The question, what are your expectations for Cyclops over the several years? The Cyclops introduced new revenue streams to AAC. Yes. So that's why we are doing it. So what we are doing is developing our Earth observation business. We are developing new services. Part of the reason why we acquired Spacemetric was to actually improve our ability to get the data from the satellites, process it, and distribute it to our customers. Yes, we see that as a growth area for us. The objective is to grow data and services through Earth observation data.
There is a question, what is the competitive environment for your services and how do we market share? So it's an obvious question. We have competitors in this market. Separating the markets in Earth observation, as I mentioned, we very much targeted an area of the market that has fewer operators. There are few people operating in the kind of resolution and spectral offering that we are doing, that we are building.
We believe that not only because of our experience of building satellites and our in-house ability to actually bring the design to what our needs are and control that design and control that IP, but also through our downstream, our value-added capability through Spacemetric, but also through our in-house team to process data and to stand out to work with customers, we actually offer a very unique solution for customers looking for Earth observation data, particularly in the forestry and the farming sector. On the maritime side, very much we see ourselves as pioneers on the VDES from space. So there we think we have a first-mover advantage. We are, of course, not alone in this competition in this area, but there are very few people right now that are as advanced in demonstrating in space a working system that we have now done with our partners.
So there we think we have a strong competitive advantage over other competitors. There is a question on milestones for 2025. I think some of them are already presented here. The start of Cyclops data delivery in 2025 is something that we are very keen on achieving. The increase of our VDES capability through the launch of another satellite and a few other initiatives we have are our big milestones for the year. In terms of other milestones, and particularly financial milestones, we'll set them at the beginning of the year. But the operational milestones are very much about continuing to grow our business. And as I said, start the services from the Cyclops constellation and grow our VDES capability. I think these were all the questions. So I don't see any more questions coming through. So I'll stop here. And thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your attention.