[Non-English content] Warm welcome, stage is yours.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for your time and thank you for coming and hearing me talk a little bit about what we are doing at AAC Clyde Space. Today I will talk to you about satellites, but mostly I'll be talking about data. The space sector is growing very quickly. This is a sector that has been driven by the need for more data, for more information. Because of that, it is growing at a rate that is higher than other industries. It is predicted that it will be worth about $1 trillion by 2040.
This is driven, as I say, by all the applications that we sometimes don't think about, but that are based on space technology and space information, space gathered data. Many of you will have used your card, bank cards to do some transactions today, to pay for something. The timing for that comes from satellites. The way that we synchronize our world is done via satellite. The way we actually monitor our crops and we make sure that we've got enough food for everyone is very much driven by space and space information. Because of this need for more data, this increasing need for information, we are actually growing the number of satellites. We are building more and more satellites nowadays. We started with having very few, very large satellites in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s.
Nowadays, we are actually doing very small satellites, but lots of them. Rather than a few satellites, rather than one or two, we are doing thousands of satellites. What that is doing is that is driving the market, that is driving our industry. It's making it grow. You see on this, on this plot, you see the growth, the exponential growth expected for the satellite numbers. That, of course, is very good news for companies like ours. What AAC Clyde Space does is we build satellites, we design satellites, we sell components for satellites, but mostly we sell data and services from those satellites. Because of the growth in the number of satellites, because of the growth in demand for information and for data from space, we are growing with that demand. As a company, we produce everything.
We design our own components, we design our own satellites, and then sometimes we sell those components and those satellites. But we also actually build our own satellites. We've got our own sources of data and information, and then we sell data and information to a variety of customers. This is a great opportunity. The space industry is growing faster than it ever did. This is actually the time to invest in space. This is a time where we are actually seeing the future of how we will monitor, how we manage our planet, how we manage all our lives from space starting to actually develop. Companies like ours, companies that actually can design and build and implement and deploy satellites, are in a particularly good position to benefit from that growth. As a company, we have grown quite substantially.
Over the last 18 months, 19 months, we went from having two sites, our headquarters in Uppsala and our production facility in Glasgow in Scotland. We are now present in five different countries. We now have six companies in the group, and this is done in a logic of actually bringing capabilities, different capabilities that we needed to service our markets. You'll see there that we now are present in three different continents. Some of this is about geographical footprint, but it's also about unique capabilities. Some of these companies brought in technology, some brought constellations. For instance, SpaceQuest in the U.S. that we acquired last year actually brought already some satellites delivering data and delivering services. And recently, more recently, we actually expanded into South Africa.
The objective there was to bring into the company not only a specific capability to develop new technology for instruments and payloads, but also to actually give us geographic footprint in Africa. Africa is a continent that will benefit immensely from space and space data. The challenges that, as a continent, Africa faces are very difficult to actually manage in any other way. It is a continent that has a huge potential for growth for the space technology.
Not only we are actually bringing in-house capability, a technology, and a capability that we didn't have in the form of advanced radio communication systems, but we are also actually expanding our footprint. That has been very much our strategy in terms of expansion, is this combination, this mixture of bringing a more advanced capability, more technology, some specific technology that we didn't have, but also bring in, expand our geographical footprint, bring in more people with different types of knowledge and different types of. That way opening different types of opportunities. 2021, despite all the challenges that the industry faced, was still a year of significant progress for us.
Not only we acquired a few key companies, and particularly a company in Gothenburg, Omnisys, that brought in advanced instrument capability for weather forecasting, but we also won several new contracts and extended some other contracts and some other grants that we had. We continue to work on, particularly on the public-private partnership we've got with the European Space Agency. But we also actually extended our offering of data to hyperspectral data. This is data that will be used for farming, for actually monitoring and detecting issues with crops around the world early on. This was, of course, done in parallel with our new enhanced management structure. As we grow as a company, we have to actually develop our management.
We have to improve the way we manage the company. We have to actually ensure that we have all the capabilities, we have all the capacity, we have all the knowledge inside the group to actually manage this extended, more capable group of companies. Recently, we actually introduced a new management structure. We brought in a few new people to our team, strengthening several of our areas, so mainly the commercial, but also operations management. We introduced, for instance, a new HR Director, something that we didn't have at group level. This is a management for the group, for all the companies in the group.
I apologize for not having a picture of our new HR Director, but she started very recently, so we don't have an official picture yet. There is an unofficial picture on our website. One thing that we actually decided that we needed also inside the group is a new VP for Future Programs. You see there on the right. In reality, what Andrew is doing is developing our future offerings in terms of services and in terms of data offerings to the market. He comes from that background. He was CTO of a company that did exactly that.
He's actually in the group to strengthen our data offering and manage all of that side of the business. Of course, we continue to count on our very strong and very experienced board. We have a mixture of different capabilities, different experiences and backgrounds to support the work we do every day. Just because we recently released our Q3 report, just to give you a summary of that. We have still increased our revenue in relation to last year. It's better than last year. We are more or less in terms of EBITDA. We are worse than last year, but we are approaching our, we are working on our plan to actually be EBITDA positive for next year.
The last quarter, of course, we suffered the same challenges that many others in the high technology sector have suffered. We have some issues with delays from suppliers that has actually delayed some of our revenues and as such has reduced our EBITDA for the quarter. This is something that we are still expecting to improve for next year. We are still maintaining our guidance this year for SEK 200 million overall in terms of revenue. We are still maintaining our plan to be EBITDA positive next year and operational cash flow positive. This is part of our continued evolution as a group.
We have announced some time ago that we intend by 2024 to be delivering about $55 million in revenue, actually about SEK 500 million. That was the number. This is driven very much by growth in space data. This is the Space Data as a Service. This is data and information that we sell, so from our own satellite to customers around the world. Of course, our product and our hardware, our satellite business will continue to grow. We continue to see that growing. But a big driver for the development of what we are doing is exactly this Space Data as a Service. Actually that grows even faster after 2024.
Something I would like to talk to you a little bit about is where are we going? What is the next stage for our company? I mentioned this on one of the investor reports, and I've been asked for this frequently. What we have been looking is how do we actually accelerate the growth of our company and taking opportunity of, as I mentioned at the beginning, of a sector that is growing faster than many others, a sector that is actually becoming more and more critical for everyone. We have been looking at how do we actually go from our ability to build and operate satellites, deliver services, and how can we actually achieve a much bigger growth going forward.
We have identified three main areas of growth in the service side, in the data supply side. These are not the only ones. These are the biggest ones that we have identified and the ones that we are focusing. We are focusing on these ones not only because they are good opportunities, but also because these are opportunities where we are already operating. We already are offering solutions to the market on this. If you look at these in terms of the markets, the farming, the agricultural monitoring crops, precision agriculture is a market that is growing. The expectation is that this market will grow to over $1 billion by 2030. This actually is a conservative estimate. This is just about data.
The services associated with delivering information to farmers, delivering information to people that manage forests, particularly in an environment of climate change, of environmental challenges, the growth is actually expected to be much bigger. At the same time, weather forecasting is also growing. The need for better data for weather forecasting is growing exponentially. As we know, with the changing climate, we are being confronted with increasingly challenging weather patterns. Statistical models that we have used for many years for weather forecasting are not working anymore. We need to be able to actually forecast weather much quicker, and space is the tool to do that. Through our acquisition of Omnisys, we actually now have a unique technology for advanced weather forecasting and weather prediction. That market is also growing.
The other market that we see growing very fast is on shipping monitoring, not only for safety at sea, but also and particularly for better routing of ships around the world using less fuel, less exposed to weather storms. All of these things are actually leading to big growth in the market for information and data for shipping. Then of course, there is autonomous shipping coming along. We have identified these three engines of growth. They are, as I say, not the only ones. There are several others around machine-to-machine communications that we are working on, and that will be part of this mix. Those we see more as a tool to allow us to grow these other services.
As a plan, our plan has been very much already in 2020. You saw some acquisitions from our side. I mentioned there particularly Hyperion and SpaceQuest. These are companies that brought new technology for our group, things that we needed. Hyperion, for instance, brought laser communication technology. This is something that will be key in the future as we have more challenges in using bandwidth and spectrum. SpaceQuest gave us that geographical footprint in the United States, but also brought Space Data as a Service. It also brought satellites already delivering services to customers. We focused very much in growing the company last year, growing by acquisition, some organic growth, but mostly by acquisition. This year, in 2021, we have been focusing on consolidating that growth.
Not only we have to bring the companies in-house, we have to actually start rebranding the company, making sure that all the systems and all the management of the company is now integrated. We focused in terms of growing our capability in payloads. Weather payloads with Omnisys, advanced radio payloads for communications with AAC Space Africa. Very much this year was a year of actually bringing these companies together, working them and rationalize our group and actually improve the management and our ability to actually work together. Then to start developing new Space Data as a Service offerings. Now that we've got these companies, now that we've got these capabilities, we are starting to develop the offerings for services and data from them.
Just to give you a little bit of a picture of what we have done throughout the year. I already mentioned. Actually, developing our advanced organization to better develop our new group management. We added the new members to our management. We also have done a lot of work in terms of our image, in terms of our sales process. We have now three strong heads of sales. They are actually heading each one of our divisions. We have introduced a new website. Many of you might have seen it. We've rebranded. It is a light rebrand of our group, but nevertheless, we've rebranded many of the companies. At the same time, we have actually increased the way we reach out.
We introduced a few months ago something we call Space Talk. This is a publication that we do every few months to actually tell people what we are doing and focus on specific data. This was very much a lot of the work we have done this year. Of course, we focused on acquiring new capabilities and also developing new contracts and new types of data offerings, as I mentioned. One that I always reserve a little bit of time for is expansion. This is the public-private partnership we've got with European Space Agency.
This is very important to develop the next generation of offerings and services. We are doing this in the context with the support of the Space Agency, with the UK Space Agency, and the European Space Agency. That's very important in developing that capability. It's not just about designing satellites and put them in orbit, it's what do you do with them? How do you actually make the data available to people? That is extremely important. Looking forward, the next few years and the next year in particular, in 2022, we want to expand the offerings on Space Data as a Service. That's the acronym, by the way, SDaaS stands for Space Data as a Service. The first one, we have our demonstration of our VDES service. This is a maritime safety and communication system.
We are building it here in Sweden, in Uppsala. We are building a satellite. This is a demonstration together with Saab and ORBCOMM. This is the prototype for a future service. The idea there is to develop a constellation that will offer that service to the shipping industry around the world in the near future. At the same time, we are offering our AIS, that's the existing safety at sea system, so that allows you to track ships all over the world. We are developing other offerings of data services. Of course, looking forward to 2023, 2026, we want to actually grow our VDES offering. We want to expand our hyperspectral. This is for the farming industries and for the forestry, and we want to start our weather data service. We want to introduce larger platforms.
We want to start growing our constellation. We want to have a constellation of satellites delivering all these services. We believe we can do it, and the objective is to actually take our evolution or to evolve the company, not only to meet the EBITDA, the positive EBITDA and operational cash flow, but also to grow our revenue to SEK 500 million by 2024. Actually by 2030, we believe we can grow this to SEK 2.2 billion. About 250 million of revenue per year. Our mixture of products will grow very much towards Space Data as a Service. That will be the driver, the engine that will drive our investment, our revenue for the next few years.
What this will see is us having a constellation of satellites, several tens, that will be delivering a variety of products to our customers all over the world. In conclusion, thank you very much. I'll conclude here. Thank you for your time, and I don't know if there are any questions, but.
Sure
I'll be very happy to answer them.
Great. Thank you very much. As we said before, please send us your questions if you want me to ask them here. I have one. First question is, what's the competition like? If you want to give us some more of the whole industry, and where is AAC, and what's the competition like?
As a fast-growing sector, there are plenty of other companies actually delivering components and satellites in the world, some of which are actually listed here in Sweden also. There is plenty of people delivering satellites and delivering components for the space sector. Services, delivering Data as a Service, that is not so common. We are probably, if not the first, one of the first companies to actually develop that, to actually offer that full service where we design, we build, and we put the satellites in orbit. It's very important for many customers, particularly those that are not from the space sector, to have access to the service only. They're not interested in owning satellites. They don't own.
They don't want to own the ground stations, the people that operate those satellites. They just want the data, the information. For that, offering that for them is very important. We are one of the first ones to do that, if not the first one.
What's the sort of unique capabilities that you have there? Because I guess the other players that you have in the industry, they are also looking at this, the data part of providing that to the users. If you want to elaborate on that.
Our uniqueness is the fact that we actually design our own components and payloads and satellites. We are able to actually create custom designs that actually answer the needs of the customers for data. We are not selling just one type of payload. We are not selling just one type of data. We can actually customize, and we have that ability to do that in-house. The other thing, and that also, we have that is not that common is experience. The ability to actually do these things reliably in space requires time and experience. We have been around for quite some time. Some of the companies in our group have been operating since the 1990s.
The majority are a bit younger, but some of them started in the 1990s. You have a huge amount of experience of how to build and design successful spacecraft.
How many satellites have you right now in space?
Ours that we own, we've got five. We've got another seven in production for ourselves. In total, we have done about 29, 30 satellites over the years, and we have launched them and operated them successfully in space for other customers. Many of those are done for third parties.
Then one question on the financials. You mentioned very briefly what we'd like to elaborate a little bit on. When you talk about sales in your business model, that's how do you recognize the revenues in this kind of business?
We recognize revenue as we make progress on the project. We have a full process to do that. Sometimes people say that we are even a little bit pessimistic on the way we recognize revenue.
Yeah.
We are prudent, and we actually do it in a very good way, I would say. In a way that is very prudent and very efficient. Our CFO that is in the room, he will actually do quite a lot of work with the projects to make sure that we only recognize revenue when we actually have done the work.
Yeah
that we are supposed to do. In terms of the projects, most of our projects are. If it's a satellite or Space Data as a Service, we are talking about projects that last for five, six, seven, eight years.
Mm-hmm.
It's a long-term relationship with our customers. Satellite is more a two-year project. Components is a few months 'cause you are selling.
The business is you need to have a look at sort of the order book.
Mm-hmm.
You sort of realize that by developing the projects.
Yes.
It's that way to-
Yeah.
Okay. Could you elaborate a little bit on the last quarter you mentioned that you have some late deliveries?
Mm
... on materials or components from your suppliers.
Yeah.
Sort of what's the magnitude of the problem and what can be done to
The-
mitigate?
The magnitude, I prefer to speak about the impact.
Okay
The issue we've got is that, particularly on two projects, we've got deliveries from suppliers for payloads that are late. What that means is that the rest of the project has to wait for those. The impact is bigger than the actual magnitude of the late delivery. It's just 'cause we can't actually continue the project, we can't deliver.
Right
The project. That hurts us a little bit because of course we are having to wait, and we have to have teams actually waiting for those equipment to arrive. They are complex equipment. They are of course subject to everything working fine. Last year, particularly one of those suppliers had to interrupt production because of COVID. So it has. The impact is bigger than probably the magnitude of the actual late delivery.
What you are sort of, is this still something you need to take into consideration or is it, do you see that starting to normalize? What's the
It's starting to normalize. We actually saw this is actually working. Things are working a bit better now, so we are seeing some normalization of the sector. Of course, the issue with the delivery of semiconductors and particularly integrated circuits is starting to have some impact across the industry. We haven't suffered much about that yet, but we have seen some impact. We expect some normalization throughout 2022.
Yeah.
It's what we are expecting.
We have a question from the audience, and the question is, "Is there any more plans for more M&A the coming years?
The answer I've given to that is we are not looking for, but if there is an opportunity that actually strengthens the group and actually brings in a capability that we don't have, yeah, we will do it. It's not something that we are looking for. We are not scouting the market. If there is an opportunity, if someone comes to us and says, "Okay, I've got this capability that is unique, and it will strengthen your group," then yes, we'll look into it, of course.
Okay. Would like to mention something about how is the owner, the ownership of AAC?
I can mention just to say that we've got a large number of shareholders. We've got about 14,000, I believe, shareholders. It's a very dispersed ownership. We do have a few investors that have larger amount of shares, but it's a very spread ownership. Yes, we would like sometimes to consolidate that a little bit.
Mm-hmm.
It would probably be a bit better for the group, but that's not our decision.
Sure. One final question then. How much is owned in the management team?
In the management team, there is a certain amount that is owned. I get that question many times. We do have some shares. We do have a certain amount of shares. Actually, right now, one of our biggest single shareholder is part of the management team. That's Dr. Dino Lorenzini. He actually owns, I think about 14%, I believe, of the shares of the company. He's actually sits on the management team. The rest of us have a few shares. I believe that we buy as and when we can.
Yeah. Okay, great. Our time is up. Thank you very much for-
Thank you.
... the presentation and answering our questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Thank you for your time. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.