Hey, welcome back. We shall now go over to rymden. We have AAC Clyde Space, and their CEO, Luis Gomes, on via Zoom here. Hi, welcome.
Good morning.
Yeah. You can start your presentation.
I start my presentation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. I would like to talk to you about AAC Clyde Space in general, but also in particular about giving you a summary of where we are and with the last results. We are a company that operates in the space industry. We build hardware, we provide services from satellites, we own our own satellites, and we operate in an industry that is growing very quickly. It is predicted that this industry will be worth more than $1 trillion by 2040, and we are seeing that growth path right now. Particularly in the last few years, we have seen a very strong growth in the sector.
This is being driven by the need for data and the appetite for data. The fact is space data and space services underpin a lot of the activities that we do on Earth. We sometimes forget how important the data that we gather from satellites and from spacecraft is actually for our daily lives. We're all familiar with things like weather forecasting and satellite navigation and satellite TV. We tend to forget that actually space data underpins things such as farming monitoring helping our farmers to actually deliver better crops, better yields, or it allows us to track ships, to track assets all over the world. There is a variety of things that we do from space and for that we need data.
Because we need data comes from satellites. The increasing need for data is driving the need for more satellites, more complex networks, more complex constellations of satellites. We have been growing with that sector. We are part of that industry. We started by supplying subsystems and components for satellites, but over the years we have been building our own satellites. We've built our own constellations, and now we are actually delivering not only the hardware, but also the services and the data that people want and need. The group today has been built around exactly that. We have a group of companies that include companies in six different companies in five different countries, three different continents.
What we are doing is actually building a set of companies, a vertical integration, a vertically integrated group that can actually deliver not just hardware, but also the services and the data. We have companies that specialize on components, building on-board computers, power systems, batteries, all those things you need to build satellites. They sell those to other companies, but we also use those on our own satellites that we build, mostly in Glasgow and in Fairfax in the U.S. We then integrate those components, those subsystems into one satellite. We test, we design, we test, we build, and then we organize a launch. In some cases, we sell the satellites to some of our customers, so what we call turnkey missions. Come to us, and we deliver you a satellite.
In other cases, we keep the satellites. We actually will then control them, we'll exploit them. We will bring down the data that they produce, and we will sell that data to customers worldwide. We have been growing quickly, so we are now about 170 staff, with SEK 20 million in revenue, and we have approximately $40 million in backlog. By building this group in the way we have built, we have actually built some unique capabilities. For instance, on weather and climate, through our acquisition of Omnisys in Sweden, we actually own one of the most important types of instrument for weather prediction. Microwave sounding technology is one of the pillars of what we do nowadays in terms of weather forecasting.
We own a company that's specialized in that. They've been developing those kind of instruments for many years. They have many years' experience of building those, and they are probably one of the world-leading producers of microwave sounder instruments. They are part of our group. We control that IP, and we are working with the European Space Agency and OHB Sweden AB to deliver the Arctic Weather Satellite constellation. In the maritime and energy sector, we are working with Saab and ORBCOMM to develop the VDES. This is the VHF Data Exchange Service or System. This is the follow-on to the AIS system that we are already operating in space.
This will allow a revolution in the way we manage the seas and the traffic, vessel traffic around the world. We'll be able to not only track ships, but we'll also be able to communicate back to them, we'll be able to send messages. This will increase the safety at sea, and it will make our oceans much more safe, but also much more optimized. We can now control ships, we can tell where to go, where they should go. We can start using autonomous navigation solutions. All of that will be enabled by these new solutions. Through our work with Saab and ORBCOMM, we are pioneering this new technology. Then of course, there is our own technology. For many years we have developed space technology, we have demonstrated it in space.
We know it works, we have experience, and we have the track record of delivering solutions that work. This is very important because it's fairly easy to launch a satellite into space, but it's very difficult to make sure that it actually works. That requires experience, requires many years of experimenting, many years of actually gaining the experience of operating satellites in space, and we have that. These are some of our unique abilities. With this in mind, we have been looking at how can we grow the company? What are the big growth sectors? What are the things that will drive our company forward?
We have identified that we can accelerate that growth through Space Data as a Service, what we call SDaaS. This is when we basically build the satellites, we own the satellites, and then we just provide the data or the services to a customer. This is, of course, not the only way we'll grow. Our hardware business continues to grow. Where we see a very large potential for growth is in the Space Data as a Service. With the technical skills and the experience we've got on the group, and the fact that we have our own designs, we are able to actually build our own spacecraft, design our own payloads, we are able to actually address that market very well.
We identified three main markets where we are working already, and also where we have the capability to actually operate. One is farming and forestry, the other is maritime and energy, and the other one is weather and climate. As you might see, these are all connected to some extent. Weather is connected to both the maritime and energy sector, and the farming and forestry. Of course, things like farming and forestry use ships to actually move around large quantities of their product.
What this means is that actually, not only there are these three areas where we will be building satellites or we are already building satellites to support these industries, but there is also then the opportunity to start interconnecting the data that we are producing, the data and the services we are producing. This takes us on our growth path. We have worked a plan from 2022 up to 2030, and this we'll see as increasingly doing more work on the Space Data as a Service. It will become increasingly dominant in our business. And if you look at our backlog, you already see that a large part of it is already in the form of services and data that we are providing to customers. And this we'll see us starting to actually grow our constellation.
Currently, we operate four satellites. We have another 18 in build right now for ourselves. These are satellites that we will then launch over the next year or so. What we will be doing this year and next year, and what these satellites will do is start to produce data that we will then provide to customers. That's the beginning of our constellation. What we are doing is growing a constellation of satellites to provide data and services to customers worldwide. Many of these customers are not traditional space users. They need the data, but they would not usually be buying data from anyone.
The fact that we are enabling now them to access data easily without them having to buy satellites or without them having to commit to a to some of the operators that just want to sell them information rather than data, we are able to actually attract to the sector other users of data that traditionally have stayed away from the industry. Of course, to do this, we have been organizing our group. We have expanded our management team last year bringing in new talent bringing in talent from outside the the company and the group to actually strengthen our ability to address these new markets and our ability to actually manage our companies and deliver the products and services to our customers. You'll see, for instance, on the on the right of this slide Dr.
Andrew Carr, he joined. He's our President for Data and Services, and he's coming to actually bring. He brings the experience of many years delivering data from space to companies and organizations worldwide. He has come to actually ensure that we have the capability to do that we have actually built, that we actually build that capability to deliver data and services to our customers. We have a very strong board, comes from different areas. We're talking about people with some with financial background, some with some with industry background. The objective is to actually support and advise and generally help the management team in delivering our business plan. Just to give you a summary. In terms of net sales, over the last two years, we have been increasing our net sales.
We have been approaching a positive EBITDA. The company has been growing consistently over the last two years. That is seen in our earnings. For instance, our net sales increased 83% between the end of 2020 and 2021. This shows that not only the market is growing, but we are actually being able to grow faster than that market. This is very encouraging. Of course, in terms of what we look at in terms of the different quarters, there are always variations, and there are always some factors in the market that actually might change, that might go up and down a little bit.
What we see is we operate in a market that is very much at our projects are one a year, one year and a half. It's very easy to actually move certain of the milestones, and that is seen on our quarterly results. If you look at the quarterly results for Q1 this year, they were worse than what we would like. That comes down to the fact that we are seeing quite a lot of industry-wide shortages. We have had issues with suppliers last year, and what that then does is an impact our current work. If we couldn't produce certain components last year or certain subsystems last year because we did not have the parts, we then have to delay launches.
Launches usually, although they are much more frequent these days than they used to be, what we see is that if we miss a launch in March, the next one is June or July. Because of that, what we have seen is quite a lot of movement from one quarter on to the last quarter. At the same time, we have been actually doing quite a lot of work internally on the organization to make it more efficient and to make it more responsive. What this is doing is that actually there were some costs in the early part of this year. Our target remains to be EBITDA positive and operational cash flow positive this year.
Our order backlog has grown quite a lot last year, continues to be strong. We continue to actually sell quite a lot of components and subsystems. We see that our backlog has remained strong, and we find that very encouraging. In terms of key takeaways, we are operating on a market, the market for small satellites that is growing exponentially. This is being driven largely by the appetite and the need for data that the world sees. We are ideally placed to take advantage of that. We have the technology, we have the capability, we have the experience to actually grow that, to grow into that market.
We are developing a group, or we have developed a group, and we'll continue to develop that group of companies that have all the necessary knowledge and the necessary abilities to actually address that growing market. We have a clear path to growth, a clear plan. We are building our constellation. We already have four satellites. We have another eight in the works, and we have plans to grow that constellation even further. The objective is to actually be able to deliver the services and the data that people expect and need from space. I see this as a great opportunity with things like climate change. We are seeing that our weather is changing, our climate is changing, our weather is more unpredictable.
Our crops are not faring so well. All of these things we can help to deliver an improvement to these. We can deliver the knowledge and the information people need to manage better these impacts of climate change. We are on our way to become the world leader in data and services from space, and I would like you to join us in that journey. Thank you very much. I'll take questions now if there are any. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Luis. I will take this in Swedish.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you for presentation. Of course, we have a couple of follow-up questions.
Mm-hmm.
What kind of risks do you see when it comes to your forecast of reaching profitability this year?
Well, as I said, we still expect to be EBITDA positive this year.
Yeah.
There are some headwinds. We know that over the last year, or particularly over the last three months, we have seen the headwinds growing with the war in Ukraine. We have been solving the issues with suppliers, so that has actually been improving. Part shortages continue, and of course, the world economic situation is changing quite quickly. There are always risks there. From our part, we don't expect that to have a major impact in our business, but there's always a risk.
Yeah, of course. I think supply chain is something you mentioned as well.
Mm-hmm.
How is that affecting your this present situation? I think it's on everybody's lips when it comes to bottlenecks and so on, cost inflations.
We have seen that actually now for almost two years, starting. It didn't affect us much until last year. It didn't affect us directly until last year. We had some suppliers, some suppliers, assemblies and subsystems that were late. That was a problem we have. What we have seen since then is actually an issue with getting secure dates for delivery of components. That is now affecting us, like affects the rest of the industry. The main problem is that it's very difficult to plan forward when you can deliver products to your customer because your supplier of integrated circuits cannot guarantee to you when they will supply those. That's the risk.
It's not so much that it's not available, it's that you don't know if it's gonna be available next month or in three months' time. If you are trying to plan forward, that can be quite challenging. Of course, we have taken measures to reduce the impact. We are looking at alternatives. We are changing designs, so we are moving, in some cases, to parts and components that are more widely available. It's always a challenge, yes.
Yeah, of course. It sounds like you're managing it, and your customers are used to this disturbance, right, at the moment?
Yes. Unfortunately, it's industry-wide, so everyone is seeing that right now.
Yeah. I think you have an impressive backlog, which you mentioned. What's the time for you to deliver on that backlog?
It's a mixture. We've got some of that backlog is in six months. Some is in one year. Other is longer action.
Okay.
It's a mixture, and you'd see probably more or less equally distributed through time, that backlog. The short term, medium term, and long term.
Yeah, okay. You can't say anything, concrete or, no?
Well, I that is a forecast that we usually don't give in detail. It's also a mixture and it's also quite dynamic. It depends very much if we are getting components. Components and subsystems are usually at about six months to a year delivery. If we are talking about satellites, you are talking one year to two years delivery. We are talking Space Data as a Service, we are talking several years delivery down the line, so.
I understand.
It's very dynamic.
Yeah. Thanks. We move over to your strategy. You mention that you're looking for bolt-on acquisitions. What kind of companies are you looking at?
As always, if there is a good company that brings in some capability to the company that we don't have, we are very interested in hearing from those companies. If I had to guess on my crystal ball and look into the future, what we would be looking for is more companies in the downstream, so in the data and in the information. The data can be data management or extraction of information from data. Those are more the companies we would be looking for now. As I say, if there is a good company always, we're always interested.
Yeah, it's on the ground, right? You're looking-
Yes
...for company. You don't want to widen your service offering, if I understand you correctly. You want to increase the service offering, but not, like, an entirely new vertical is not on the table right now.
No.
So-
Yeah. We have identified three verticals that we see as growing, but also we see as actually something that we can address, a market that we can address because we already have some capabilities in that market. This might be the technology, so we might have some unique technology, like in the case of weather. We might already have a first-mover advantage, like in the case of VDES. We are identifying those technologies and identifying those markets, and because of that, we want to develop those verticals. Of course, the future. The future is the future and might change.
Right now, again, going back to my crystal ball, I would be looking at going where we will be going is in these three verticals. Farming and forestry, maritime and energy, and energy in this context is maritime domain, so it's things like offshore wind farms, and weather and climate. Those are the three areas that we are specializing our service offering.
Yeah, I understand. Is it a fragmented market, or how is the market for that kind of
They are three very different verticals. In the case of forestry and farming, this is a very well-established market from space. I've been personally working on these ones since the early 2000s. It's a very well-established market. It's a very large market. It's forecast to be worth about $1 billion a year in a few years' time. Some people say it's probably going to be worth even more than that, four times that. It is a market that is very competitive. We have some technology capabilities there, and that's why we enter that market. We are able to deliver into certain areas, into certain parts of that market. In the case of the maritime domain, it's not very fragmented.
There are very few companies actually working on it right now. We believe we've got an advantage over them, and that's why we are pursuing that. In the case of weather and climate, that's a new market. It's traditionally been by governments, but governments have been changing their mind, and they have now starting to actually acquire data, buy data from private companies. We have the first contract in the U.S. awarded to private companies about three years ago. We had the first contract this year already in Europe. It is changing. Again, our technology is quite more advanced than what our competitors are doing at this stage. Because of that, we can actually take advantage of that change in the market.
Yeah. I think when it comes to geopolitical tensions and I think we have some bad news starting this year with high inflation, recession worries, and also the war. How has that affected your clients or their willingness to invest in your kind of products?
So far, we haven't seen a change from our clients. Space projects usually are longer term.
Yeah.
It wasn't usually about long-term. Long-term, they are a long-term thing, so people usually are invested for the long term.
Mm.
You don't see an immediate effect from things that might be transient, we all hope, and they're fairly short in time duration. Of course, if things continue for long periods, then things change, but so far we haven't seen a big impact from that. Actually some of the stresses that the current situation is causing will probably require more data from space. For instance, with increasing prices in food production and the difficulty in actually producing food, our ability to monitor and to do precision agriculture has never been so important.
What we are seeing now is a move from farmers saying, "Okay, I need to improve the way I do my farming. I need to use less pesticides, less fertilizer, less water," because all of those things have become very expensive. We can help with that. Actually our products for farming and forestry are about reducing the use of those kind of things, so pesticides, fertilizers, all of which are extremely expensive. We can actually help that. We can help with improving things.
Yeah. I understand. Efficiency. Thank you very much, Luis, for your presentation.
Thank you.
We're going to take a pause here.