Welcome to today's event, where we have the pleasure to present GomSpace. Today's topic, the Q4 2024, and of course the full year report, the results fresh from the press this morning will be the subject, and of course ending with a Q&A. We already got a lot of questions in, so perfect. I think we will get us very wide around in your business case. To today's presentation and answer questions, we'll join the CEO, Carsten Drachmann. As always, you're very welcome to in the box down below to give to ask questions during the presentation. We will take the main part in the end. As we already have gotten a lot in, you can try and see if it's answered in some kind of way already. That would be nice, then that would make a better flow.
For now, I will hand the call over to you, Carsten.
Thank you very much, and welcome back to our Q4 and 2024 results here. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody. It's today, so hope you've done what you needed to do for your family and your closest. We will today talk about, okay, I can't get that presentation to move, so it should be moving now. Here we go.
Perfect.
A little bit about investor communication. We'll talk about the journey. You've heard it before, but I'll keep repeating it. It is a journey we're on. Highlights, of course, from the past quarter. A bit on the market guidance that we sent out before Christmas and restated here, repeated. Denmark, Arctic, and surveillance. I've seen there are questions and speculations online about what about that and GomSpace, so I'll talk a bit about that and then a summary. First, clarity and communication, my main mottos. Investor communication, a little service here. Remember, we do our, we of course have quarterly reporting, but we're doing Q1 and Q3 as short as trading statements. The reason is to get the information out faster to you, and we feel the information we give there is quite good guidance.
New this year, 2025, is we will be guiding on revenue, EBITDA, and free cash flow. Remember, in 2024, we only had guidance actually ever since back since 2023, we guided on free cash flow. Now revenue, EBITDA, and free cash flow is our guidance. Also remember, I will give immediately release press releases when there's something major that happens that can impact the share price or your valuation of the company. Just remember, I am obliged to do that. Whenever you're looking for information, wise guys don't say anything. I'll say something for sure because I have to. Also other press releases of information that I think might be helpful for you to know.
If you want to follow us with other messages, not everything is suited for a press release, follow us on LinkedIn, on Instagram, Facebook, et cetera, then you'll get an update on what's happening on certain customer projects, releases, launches, et cetera. Remember this. Okay, remember this one, 2023, we had to create some clarity. We made some major decisions on the turnaround of the company. There was a big reduction of costs. 2024, much more clarity. We are working towards having business units, product business units. It's in place now, and now you'll also see that we can start reporting much more specifically on that. We have a program business that is set up, and we have North America. Basically, this is what we have been working towards.
It's been working all through 2024, and now also for the market, we are going to report a bit more directly on those two or three business areas so you can follow that. We'll talk about cash later on also. There are some questions on that, but for now, my judgment is can we afford to be patient because some of this stuff takes time, and the answer is yes. I would also say we're pretty well on the way. We have a more than 25% growth on the top line. That's not bad. Okay, highlights. Free cash flow in a quarter plus SEK 17 million. That's great. It's actually making us positive for the quarter, but also for the full year. Remember, that's a milestone. I'll get back to that.
It's a little bit less than last year where we had 21 million, which actually was our first positive free cash flow quarter in a very long time, more than two years. Our cash position has increased to SEK 82 million from SEK 61 million, so we had a good positive increase there. EBIT, and I'll speak slowly because it was a bit complicated to read. I understand that. Our EBIT for the quarter is minus SEK 21 million against SEK 26 million in Q4 2023. However, we have made approximately SEK 19-20 million negative adjustment due to two things. Warranties in relation to contracts and products and deliveries. Why? Because I feel that this is good business practice. We have a lot more contracts than we've had ever before. They are more demanding requirements. It's normal evolution.
We are now installing a practice of we should actually put some numbers or some figures to the balance sheet. There is no cash involved. It does not impact our cash flow, but we put it in our balance sheet. The other one is we are a bit harder on our inventory. We have deemed that items that are not moving, we strengthen the requirements for how fast an item needs to move or how slow it can move before we take it out. We also have done impairment testing that altogether between SEK 19-2 0 million. If you want to compare likes for likes, we did not do that in 2023. You can argue that our real result was SEK -2 million against SEK -26 million for the quarter. Take it as you like.
It's good business practice, I think, and we are trying to do this better into the future as well. Autopack lock went up.
I guess the question is always here, when one-time items become always, and that's why people can sometimes mind that. There's no indication here. It's a cleanup on your inventory, which a lot of companies sometimes do, and the warranty will now be progressing as normally. I guess that when you innovate contracts, you will make a warranty, a normal standardized warranty claim for that. Is that correct?
For certain deliveries, that's exactly right. We have warranty periods, et cetera, and we need to actually need to make a reserve for that. It's exactly what we have done.
Really nothing changed in the way you make contracts or anything because there's a question there. It's not something new. It's not a problem that you have found some problems in any of your satellites you send out. Like, let's compare it with Vestas, you know, where when you find a fault there, it's simply because you now want to have a better standard as a lot of big auto producing companies. Is that correctly understood?
That is correct. That is correct. That is why we, as a service provider, the adjusted EBIT, to say there was actually SEK -2 million, just as a service to you so you understand our operational performance. Auto backlog went up SEK 53 million to we now have SEK 363 million in auto backlog for opening for 2025. That is good. Key order intake during the quarter, we had Unseen Labs ordered now two satellites, microsatellites. That was SEK 61 million. This is an add-on to a contract we signed earlier in the year. We also signed up a new customer for microsats in Singapore, SEK 31 million on December 8. I think worthwhile mentioning that we actually had a record quarter for order intake on products that did really, really good. We had SEK 33 million there. That is actually very good.
Q4 is often good, but this was even better than before. These are the key highlights on the order intake. Okay, a little bit diving in as usual to the numbers. The total order intake was SEK 138 million in the period. You can see less than Q2, but more than some previous quarters here. Good trend. Our revenue was SEK 83 million for the quarter. What you can look at as a guidance is that it is always good if your order intake is bigger than your revenue in the quarter. That basically means that you keep accumulating more and more revenue for the future. This is a good comparison right here.
We talked about the EBIT, SEK -21 million against SEK -26 million, same period last year, but technically we can argue for SEK -2 million if you had not made the adjustments, which I think are the correct ones to do. One hundred seventy-six employees right now. It is the orange curve, and then the other ones are sort of the average over time. We have increased our staff, but we have increased our staff with the increase in orders and work that needs to be done. I know there were some questions on how do you operationally prepare yourself. It is part of it. We are ramping up the resources, but we do not do it in anticipation of maybe something great happens next year. We do it because we need the people and resources here. We are quite busy. We have a quite high utilization rate as it is right now.
Okay, let's look at the full year, 2024, cash flow, free cash flow, as I said, SEK 17 million in the fourth quarter, and total for full year 2024, we are plus SEK 23 million. Excellent. Major milestone for us internally as well. Big celebration when we reached that. This is a guidance, if I may remind you, that we set back from March, April 2023 when we started reshuffling the whole business and said we're going to focus on this or that. We started canceling orders that were not profitable, and we reduced our costs and started managing our costs. We said we would be actually free cash flow positive by the end of the second half of 2024. We were, and also actually for the full year. For GomSpace, for the people in GomSpace, you take it as you like. This is actually a major achievement.
We achieved what we set out to do more than 18 months ago. Okay, another strengthening here. If we look at end of 2023, the fourth quarter, we had SEK 153 million in order backlog going into the year. We are now at SEK 363 million. It is quite a significant improvement. We have SEK 210 million more in backlog. Not only is it SEK 210 million more, everything we do now, we are really focused on profitability and contribution and risk management. It should be a profitable backlog more than if we go back to mid of 2023. Quite an achievement. If we look at where that backlog is coming from, obviously it is from programs where we have these longer contracts, contracts running for one, two, three years. Therefore it is building up bigger, and you can also see it is moving from SEK 93 million to SEK 303 million.
Obviously this is where we have the biggest increase. You say, hey, why is it not going up in products? The nature of products, remember, is very much quarterly. I do not expect the backlog to be a lot bigger than this. We like to grow up a bit, but as soon as we get the order, we actually are practicing on delivering faster. The better we get at delivering faster, every time we get an order, we get it out. We get an order, we get it out. That means good cash flow. That means good profitability. It also means that the product backlog will never go a lot higher.
It is the order intake we should follow year by year, that should go up, if I should understand you correctly, more than the order backlog.
Correct. Yes, correct. The order intake needs to go up, but the backlog will never grow a lot. If it grows a lot, it's probably not good because then we're not fast enough in delivering and collecting.
The lead time is below one year. That's why it's the order intake you should look at and not the order backlog.
Yes, it's actually 3-4 months is the delivery time. North America, we should be able to do better there. I also firmly believe we will because it's the biggest market. You can see we are more or less status quo on the order backlog, and we delivered about SEK 20 million of order intake. When I give the guidance, I've given you some indications on what I expect for 2025. How did we achieve this? Why is it going up now? What's happening? Of course, there's a lot of things on how we structure ourselves and we focus and we think we're good at what we're doing. A lot of it is in trust and reliability that we have reliable products. You've been around for a long time. The heritage is there.
The customers know if they come to GomSpace, there's a pretty good chance that they can deliver and the quality is there. That's our track record. The other thing that's changing in the market is that whereas eight, ten years ago, our customers did not have a business case, which means they didn't know how to make money. This was just testing and seeing what happens. Now they have service contracts. Our good customer, Unseen Labs, they have millions of euros coming in in service contracts and obligations. It has to work when they launch a satellite. It's no longer science fiction. Maybe it will work. Maybe. No, no, it has to work. They stay with us because we always make it work. Trust and reliability is important.
The other thing I want to highlight, we have about SEK 250 million of the order intake is in this microsat space, so the slightly bigger satellites. We never launched a microsat before, but guess what? We're still winning ahead of our competition. Why? Because of our heritage, because of the trust and reliability and our very high customer focus. These are parameters that are helping us drive up the backlog here. Okay, revenue and EBIT, also a small celebration, but we should deliver that every year. We are SEK 257 million. We have another record year growing from SEK 238 million last year. We're keeping our average growth over the year since we've enlisted of about 22%. Market compound average growth is somewhere between 15%-20%, depending on which report you read.
If you want to read something into that, we are still ahead of the market. I want it to be much bigger, and you'll also see the growth for next year. We are anticipating to be quite a jump. EBIT we talked about, so I'll move on from here. Now let's go into the market guidance. What's going to happen in 2025? We have now, we are now guiding, as I said, on revenue, EBITDA, and free cash flow. If we start from the bottom, actually, the cash flow, we are planning to be positive. The free cash flow for 2025, I don't think it's going to be very high necessarily positive. It can be depending a bit on how big orders we get and prepayments.
I do foresee fluctuations, and I'm also, we are indicating here that I think the first half, it could be a negative cash flow. Why? Because we have been pretty good in closing orders, big orders, and negotiating contracts with a strong prepayment, allowing us to have a good cash flow in the project. This is deliberate what we have done. Now we need to close more projects and take more prepayments over time. Of course, we have to start delivering. It's about working capital as well. It's not really necessarily a bad thing that it's dropping below zero. We want it to be positive, but there's a very good reason. It's because we've gotten paid last year, and we are very focused on the way we do our contracts and making sure that they work for us. We don't want to work for free.
We want to get paid before we do work. That's good business practice, but it's also now, of course, impacting a bit the free cash flow this year.
Yeah, now it's the working capital for delivering on all that. Where you had some of the prepayments, now you need to build up capital to deliver on that, and then the payment will come after that. That makes kind of sense that we should expect that.
Yeah, and of course, we're expecting to close more business all the time, and we will also negotiate a good cash flow there, and it should equal out. Just my prediction for the first half is that we will potentially see a negative cash flow, not necessarily. Good, let's go to the top on the green bar here. SEK 320 - 380 million in revenue is our guidance. If you take the low number, it's a 25% increase over last year of the SEK 257 million. That's pretty good. It's well ahead of where we have been before. Obviously, when we give a range, our ambition is not to hit the lowest number, but to hit somewhere further up the scale there, and then you'll see a plus 30% growth probably.
Talking about profitability, which of course is important, and I keep saying we are looking at that all the time and improving everywhere we can. With the swing in revenue, we are somewhere between -2% to +10%. If you go to the upper end of the revenue, or we also have, for example, more product sales than we had anticipated, it is going to contribute well to the bottom line and the EBITDA. We will be tracking that over the year and reporting on that. Why are we so relatively confident on the revenue? A lot of it, you saw that before. We have more than 70% of what our program business units contracted. It is already in contract. It is already working. We are no longer relying on we have to sell something before we can turn it into revenue.
That gives us a reasonable confidence to hit a higher number. It's very different from last year if you look at that. We had an opening backlog of SEK 152 million. We delivered SEK 257 million. We actually had only 40%-45% in backlog going into 2024. Now we have 70%. Big difference. What do I expect from North America? A double-digit growth, I like to call it that. That's certainly what I expect. Why? The pipeline is growing, and it's also a market where we have to grow and we should grow. The market is big enough. I do expect to see a double-digit growth. Product is a low double-digit. It's a business that's growing moderately over the year. It's very profitable. I am expecting a low double-digit growth from this, which is good. Every million euro earned there gives us EUR 600,000 on the bottom line.
That's great. We want to push that up, and of course, we are focused on growing that. Revenue and EBITDA, what's driving that? Products and North America sales, as I just said, if that goes up a bit, a million, for example, euros, it's going to increase the revenue. That's obvious. We wanted to push it as high as possible. However, because of the profitability, it has an even bigger impact on EBITDA. Our EBITDA will fluctuate probably a lot with how much we can push the bar for products and North America sales. Custom, why don't you just predict how much it is? Because it's, as I've explained, it's a quarterly business. When we get orders, we ship it out within a quarter. We can't predict the 12 months.
I can't know for sure what's going to happen over 12 months. Of course, there's some volatility in that. We are getting much better at key account management. We're starting to have some product combinations, if I can call it that, that we're selling, which has traction in the market. Of course, we are influencing the market here. The program delivering on its backlog, as I said, 70% is there. This is a lot about execution. It's within our own control. To close the gap for the year, we need to close a few more deals, which I definitely expect that we'll do to hit our targets here. Worthwhile noticing, if you sum it up and you do a little math on that, you'll see that we actually have more in backlog.
Since it's a two or three-year contract, some of them that we are running that we are executing this year, but we also have backlog for 2026, and we even have some backlog for 2027 as well. We won't be able to pull it in because we just can't execute it any faster. There's a certain time for execution. These are the parameters you can look for also and see where is GomSpace going? Is it up, low, middle? You have an idea here. Included in our budget here, we have anticipated some level of digitalization, including AI into our operation where we can. It's partly answering some of the questions about operational readiness, how to do things better. We're definitely focusing on efficiency and reliability. That's very important for us. The quality and reliability has to be perfect in a market. That's a big driver.
We will use whatever we can in terms of IT, digitalization, AI, whatever we can, we will use to improve the efficiency because that is a criteria for how we stay in the game here. That is the guidance for next year. Going up pretty well, more than 25% on the top line, hopefully a lot more than that, and a good chance of hitting a positive EBITDA. Happy with that. The cash flow, we keep monitoring and trying to drive it to a positive. I do not necessarily want it to be a lot more than that because I also want to spend the money on evolving the business and invest more in sales. It is not a goal to suddenly have SEK 200 million on a bank account. It would not be in your interest and not in my interest. I am going to reinvest that.
Like for example, we do in North America, we are growing organically, but every time we do more and more, we're going to invest in more salespeople to accelerate the growth. Okay, excuse me, let's have some fun talk. A lot of questions about Greenland and Denmark. I've refrained from too many political comments and showing where I stand on all of this, but I can give you some examples. A repeat, key strategic for us is marine domain awareness. Marine domain awareness is looking into what's happening in the oceans and seas around us, including Greenland as an example. Why? It is quite urgent. There's a lot of sea cables. 97% of all internet traffic at one point or another is actually going on the sea cables that are somewhat vulnerable.
We probably did not think about it when we put it down, but they are actually quite easy to sabotage if you want to. There is an urgency for that. There is enough unrest and wars, and people seem to have trouble understanding which side of the fence they should stay on and somehow think it is okay to play in a neighbor fence. Many states do not like that, and we need to monitor it ourselves. Oh, and by the way, the people that might want to walk into your backyard are the ones that are selling you the pictures of what is happening in their backyard. That is not a good idea. You will see a trend towards knowing yourself. We will get back to Denmark, what Denmark needs to do. There is definitely traction. Indonesia is an example. The deal is not yet closed.
I'll get back to that in a second. It is already showing the need for this. Scaling, there are more than 150 countries when we talk about oceans and seas that have water that has this interest and wants to control the ship traffic in and around their sovereign territory. It is addressable for us. We know how to do this. We have all the technology and all the solutions. No matter what the speed in Indonesia, we have designed the solution. We know how to put it together. We are basically ready to repeat that wherever, for example, in Denmark and Greenland. It is the exact same system that is needed. It is actually not very complicated. We know how to do it. There is definitely a long-term growth. This is continuing also to regulate, for example, ship traffic. The middle icon here, 80% of all goods transported are by sea.
We want to optimize that for climate reasons, for efficiency, for cost reasons. Also, monitoring fishery and all the protein. 15% of all protein is coming from our oceans. We need to take care of them. This is also what we can do by satellites. That is why GomSpace's main strategic focus right now is marine domain awareness. We are good at it. We see a market growth, and we are going, we're actively positioning ourselves for more and more countries here. Now, this Monday, together with colleagues from Northern Jutland, I was at the Christiansborg. Some of you might have seen it on LinkedIn, and we had a little bit of heart-to-heart discussions. There were not as many politicians as we wanted, but it was a good debate. There were about 120 people. Our story, slightly provocative, is what's next, Denmark, or in Danish, South Denmark.
Space is a battleground. Nature has already defined that in 2018. Space matters. Space is the new frontier, also in defense. Denmark has an obvious need for maritime surveillance. We have all of Greenland as our responsibility. There is also the Faroe Islands, of course. There are many places, and we have a lot of water around just little Denmark and our smaller islands. We do need this. We do need this. We cannot just rely on other parties to supply us with that. We do not really have much today. We have an industry in Denmark, and this is where this is very peculiar. We are actually, as Denmark, and I am referring here to a larger group of companies, not just GomSpace. We have competitors, friends, partners, sub-suppliers, what have you. We have a pretty strong space industry.
The most peculiar thing is, considering that we have such a strong space industry, we have close to zero investment from the government. How about that? Any other nation that says, "We want to be a space nation," or "We have an industry," they're actually going to get a lot of investment and interest. Somehow in Denmark, we're a bit slow. However, thanks to some other people I'm not going to mention by name, they've put this on the agenda and saying, "We better watch out. We need to know what's going on, and this is our obligation." The message, given very clearly to the politicians in the parliament, is Denmark and the Danish defense really need to step up. We have the technology in Denmark. We have the need. We don't need to do some kind of EU follow-on kind of processes for tendering, etc.
It's national security. The Danish government can decide to buy directly from the Danish industry. We are ready. We know how to do it. We just need to get started. Some of you have been asking about that. I see there are discussions on the different fora. The answer is yes, of course, GomSpace should be involved in that. We're ready. We just need the politicians and the defense to move forward. Having said that, they are. They are. You do see that more budgets are coming. We don't have eight years to figure it out. It has to go faster than that, and I'm sure there will be solutions. The message is, we are ready. Let's go.
Maybe to just clarify all this, you're meeting with the politician.
Everybody, of course, want to know, is there any pushback from the politician, or is it on the military side, you know, where it's a slow-moving process? Do you need any pushback from anybody saying, "This should be drones that do this," and how we would ever cover that larger space of drones? I guess, is there any pushback? They can't have any pushback to that this is the smartest way of surveilling such a large land area as Denmark. So can you give us any no pushback?
No pushback. The challenge is we need to educate the politicians a lot more. I think we have what I said to them, you know, one thing is my opinion as a professional in the space industry of what we can do.
As a citizen of Denmark, I'm somewhat disappointed that the politicians are not more caring about our national security and actually utilizing the technology we have to secure ourselves and our waters around us. That's disappointing. I think there is a high level of education for politicians to understand that. The other thing is that the defense, I think they know that they can do this. They're just not geared, and this is a political thing also. They're just not geared to buy this kind of equipment. We've met that several times. There's a big step forward. I think our defense knows what they want and what they need in order to be able to buy it. They just don't have a mechanism for buying this right now.
No, no, no.
Do you need a stepping partner that delivers the data into some system, you know, for integrating this? The second part, have you made any calculations showing, you know, if you want to fly the drones, how much can they survey, what do they cost, and how much can you actually do this for? You know, I think everybody is now aware that we apparently in Denmark cover most of the world. If you take the Arctic sea, I do not think everybody knew that. I am not sure I knew that. Have you given any estimate on how cheap can that actually be surveyed and how good can it be surveyed?
No, this is all complementary. You cannot with drones cover everything in a way you can with satellites. It is simple math.
You fly one satellite that can look 20,000 km left or right, or you fly a drone much lower that can maybe look 50 km left and right. Do the math. It's simple. Of course. However, what you can do is that when you have the surveillance, so let's talk about other investments. If 35 jet fighters is one thing, we're also building patrol boats that are supposed to sail around. Of course, we need that. The radar has a range of 50 km. You have to sail a long time up around Greenland to figure out where the ice is thin or where the troubles are. We can see that from the satellites, and we can easily send signals and say, "Go there. You save time. You save fuel, diesel. You will have early response, early reaction." This is what it's about.
It's the same thing with the drones. I did see the, okay, now getting put in a little bit. We're not going to talk about the serious patrol. Oh, about the Greenland, but at least we can guide the serious patrol where to go, right? They do not have to travel the whole Greenland to figure out what's happening. I think it is completely obvious, and it's not about us making a business case, "Oh, buy satellites instead of drones. Buy drones and buy satellites and build a patrol boat and then multiply everything by a factor of 10, and things are much better." That's where we are. For those of you who say, "What is GomSpace doing to position yourself?" We're doing a lot. We're doing a lot, I can assure you. Check.
Let me just leave all the questions at that.
I think we went deep enough into it to understand.
Take it later. Don't get me started. Let me show you what beep are we talking about here. This is for our good friends Unseen Labs. It is actually our satellites here. The white dots you see is a ship saying, "This is me." Sending out a signal saying, "This is me. This is who I am. This is where I am." White dots, we know, we like. The red dots are no ID, which means they've turned off any kind of identification signals that they can send out. We still know they are there because they have a radar, they have what we're talking, they have some kind of radio equipment. We know they're there.
The yellow thing that you see there, this is the undersea cable going up from Finland down to, I guess it's going into Poland, I think it's there, or Germany maybe. This is a pretty important cable. There's a lot of traffic going that way. If I remove all the white dots, how interesting. Where are the red dots? I'm going to help you with geography. We have Finland up there. To the right-hand side is Russia, Estonia. There's a lot of white dots in there. Why are they red dots? Why are they red? Why don't they want to be known? Go figure. You can see also out up along Denmark, north of Zealand there, there are a couple of ships that are sailing without identifying themselves, which they are right to do. They have to do.
This is what we're talking about with the surveillance. We can figure out who is honest and who's not as a starting point, and then we can track them. I'm going to show you, I wanted to find there was an incident outside of Bornholm with this cable actually recently that was cut. 25% of the traffic was damaged. There was a Chinese vessel sailing there. Unseenlabs saw it. That same Chinese vessel was later spotted down around Gibraltar doing the same thing. What you're seeing here is that we call it suspicious movement pattern. A ship would normally sail in a straight line to save fuel and because it has an objective to get from A to B. A ship would not do, like you see here, stopping and then actually going in random circles.
Even if they want to wait, they would either lay for anchor or they might go in a more logical pattern. They did not. Why? Because all the cables between Africa and Europe are going right through this strait here. Guess what? They are probably out dragging an anchor and trying to do that. This is what I mean. This is what we can do with satellite networks. We know all of this information, so we can send the patrol boats and we can do whatever and say, "Hey, what is happening here?" Even more so, if you discover something after the fact, which was a case with the Chinese vessel outside of Bornholm in the Baltics, it was sort of understood afterwards. We have all the images, so we knew who they were. When they came to Gibraltar, we also knew it was them.
You see this, how you can use that. And then it's up to your imagination, how do you apply that information and knowledge? You can stop a ship further out. You can stop it immediately or have real-time information, but you can act on it. Information that you wouldn't have without a satellite network. You're not going to get this without a satellite network. Therein lies the advantages. Okay. Oh, and yeah, by the way, when we talk about marine domain awareness, the first thing we do is radio frequency signals that I just talked about, the red and white dots.
The next thing is when we have discovered something that looks mysterious, we send in a satellite with a camera, a high-resolution camera, whatever we have, saying, instead of taking pictures of everything to look at all the pictures, which is a huge amount of data and data processing, we say, "Look at this point." You get very good images very quickly. That is part of the marine domain awareness. It's a combination of different technologies at GomSpace, AllMasters, and we understand how to get the data down and analyze it. This is from our little satellite flying right now, random pictures, obviously. Just to understand that. Okay. Getting to the end, let's sum it up. Full year of 2024, free cash flow, SEK 23 million. We increased our cash in the bank from SEK 61 million to SEK 82 million. It has gone up.
We have an order backlog of SEK 363 million, which is an increase of SEK 210 million since last year, including delivering a record revenue year. That is pretty good. Pretty good. Further, we talked about the EBIT, minus SEK 65 million compared to SEK 84 million. There was a SEK 19 million adjustment. If you like, take 65 and add 19. I leave it to you. I think we are doing the right thing here, but of course, it could have looked better. Key highlights I thought were worth mentioning from the year is SEK 250 million in microsat contracts with three different customers. Very good. This is a new business area for us. We got approved by IFO for SEK 650 million export guarantee for Indonesia. That is great. Let's pause at Indonesia. Discussions are still ongoing. There is, you know, say, you keep saying the same thing, Carsten. Yes, I do.
Because there's a political situation also out there. We are still in. We have a contract. I just got off the call with the ambassador in Jakarta, our ambassador in Jakarta, and probably going to go there in a couple of weeks to talk more with them. It's a process that's ongoing. I cannot tell you when it's going to close. We have all the agreements lined up, all the good rationale for why we work with the Minister of Fishery. I'm probably going to meet the Minister very soon. I just cannot tell you when it's closing. You need to be patient. Good news. Good news. The forecast, the guidance we are giving for 2025 does not include Indonesia. That is not because we don't think it will close.
Remember, I am obliged to tell you if I get information that leads me to believe that it will not happen. I will tell you, and I'm not telling you now. It is not included in the market guidance. Basically, even if Indonesia delays another six or eight months, which I hope not, but you never know, we are still committed to the numbers. We do not need Indonesia to achieve the numbers. Obviously, if it comes in, we can probably push it even higher, but that is not how we work. We are working with what we know, and we are working on closing the deal during 2025. We launched the Juventas Deep Space Mission. Our baby is flying out there. I think it has turned Mars to accelerate a little bit. It still has another two years to fly. We speak with it regularly.
We get the little beeps and updates, and everything is safe and it's warm inside of the main spaceship. So far, so good. That was a good, it was really, it was a big project for us, right? Four years of work. We are very proud. We've learned a lot, and I think we will repeat it. We didn't make as much money as we should have. It's okay. Now it's completed, and we can move on. We actually have deep space knowledge, which there would be more growth coming in that area in the coming years. We're executing in business units, and the last bullet, we have laid the foundation during 2024 for at least 25% growth in revenue with a reasonable safe assumption, especially due to the backlog. Altogether, I think it's a great 2024.
Perfect. Should we jump to questions?
There's a lot and some you have answered on. I think we can lay down the Greenland. There's a specific question. Have you invited the politicians to your facilities in Aalborg that we maybe fast can close because that's a yes or no answer?
Sorr y, I had a lot of noise in the background. Ask me again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a question. Have you invited the politician up to see your equipment and your capabilities? You know, that's always a good way to.
Yeah, we're getting regular visits, and right now we're working with Simon Kollerhoff. I hope you were out. Thank you, Simon, for saying that maybe we should not use the EU procurement processes because this is about national security. Absolutely, we are working on, politicians are coming all the time.
Perfect. Now I think we'll go a little bit up in the helicopter.
I think you answered some of it. There's someone saying a Danish expert says if you're too small in a technology company, you need to grow 100% or else you will never catch up on the R&D and you will get eaten up in the competition. Any thoughts about whether you are too small to survive that needs to consolidate this sector or maybe the answer lies in that you don't wish a big positive cash flow right now because you actually know that it's important also to grow to a certain size.
There are a lot of leading questions. I think I'll let that guy argue for himself. What I can tell you, what we are doing, I'll repeat it. We've done clarity around our product business units, our program, and our North America.
We are really driving on the product side because we know it's high profitability, increasing the margin and the efficiency there. We're driving for much bigger contracts. We have stabilized our cash flow. What we need to do now is grow the top line. It doesn't really matter if it's growing. It's great if you're growing 300%. I actually don't care. What I care about is that we see the step-by-step improvements. Of course, eventually we get more and more cash so we can reinvest because you need the cash to accelerate. I think we're on the right track. I don't want to comment on what that guy thinks about.
If I should, and maybe it's a leading question also, you know, normally I would say it's correctly if you're Bang & Olufsen and you're fighting Philips, you know, it might be a problem.
I guess you're the leader in this industry. You know, who should take you over? Is there anybody much bigger than you? You know, of course, I know the industry and there's someone a little bit bigger, but there's not a big leader and you are a small one that will always have to catch up and run R&D. Is that correctly understood or is that also how you see it?
My focus is to take the company from where I took it in trouble, but lots of good people, lots of good technology, a growing market. My job is to now build the value for the investors. I do that by what I just said, that we are very focused on how to understand how to make money. We're getting things under control and we are expanding the market. We do marine domain awareness.
The market is growing a lot there. There is a need, national security. That's my job. Whatever else is going on out in the world, I leave that to the world to come to us if they want to talk. It is not my focus.
There is fierce competition. How do you distinguish GomSpace from the rest? Is this marine domain surveillance that you want to distinguish yourself on?
Marine domain awareness is an area that is growing and it fits well to what we know and what we can do. Therefore we are focusing on that. We are not going out to something that we do not know. We know how to do this. That is why we are focused on it. Our competitive edge is definitely our heritage, our knowledge. We have been around for a long time.
We have a lot more components and subsystems than any other of our competitors. We actually build a lot of it ourselves. That is giving us an advantage right now. The customer focus and the trust and the reliability that we have in the market and the credibility is what we are building on.
Perfect. I think we can kill the Greenland and then there is the Indonesia. I also think that there is something about why cannot you settle next meeting? I think you already indicated that what you have set up in the future with meeting them. I think that is over there. There is a question about GomSpace and America. Any thoughts about new administration, tariffs, how it is going in this region?
I have a lot of thoughts on that, but I will tell you what we think about it at GomSpace. I think it is great.
It's actually doing two things. I think Trump is going to make sure that there's going to be more investment into also in his national security. We are present there. We have partners. There's no particular reason why we couldn't continue and we will continue to build our business over there. I think the U.S. market continues to be great for us. I don't see any major challenges in that. The other side is that because of the rhetoric and the way that, let's say, North America is behaving right now and the uncertainty in general in the world, it is also, unfortunately, I have to say, unfortunately to our advantage because it does call for the solutions that we can provide via satellites. If it was somewhat interesting and maybe a little bit urgent before, it's become really, really urgent.
Altogether, it's, you know, whether I agree or disagree doesn't really matter, but it's not a bad thing for GomSpace.
You're building, if I understand you correctly, you're also building a lot of your presence in the U.S. through partners, right? I know you're also building your own presence, but it's partners, right? Which is, I guess, often American companies.
Yeah, we partner and we do that. We can just spend 30 seconds on that. How do you do business in North America? There are some commercial customers you can try and win. That's one thing. That's fine. The other thing is a lot of what we're doing is going to be with government contracts, DOD, Department of Defense, Pentagon, CIA, FBI, if any of them are left in a year. I don't know about that. They are the people that need this.
In order to have those U.S. government contracts, it is not so simple for a small Danish company to do that. We do need partners. Those partners that we are working with are having so-called IDIQs and contracts of reference. When we team up with them, they already have access to the government. That is why it is a smart strategy for us. If we really grow and, you know, North America becomes the biggest part of our business, which could happen over time, maybe we want to build our own factory. Maybe we want to do something else. Right now, I think my job for the organization, for everybody here, for U.S. investors, is to step by step, taking all the fantastic technology we have, turn around the cash flow, which we have done now, and then gradually building up the order backlog so we grow.
That's my job. Let's see in two, three years what the world looks like.
Perfect. There was a last question. I think you clarified very clearly what was inside, you know, the habit and why you showed this. There's a related question saying, did this disappear in Q4 or building up through the year? You know, and if I understand you correctly, it's normal that you go through your inventory and it's not something you suddenly have built up. It's just a new way for you to report that you want to take these warranty provisions in. Is that correct? It's not something that is built up. It's just simply you changing standards.
Yeah. The warranty part is more about being more of a warranty contractor. I don't know where the button. Sorry? Now? Yeah. Perfect. Thank you. That's great.
It was a trick that gave me a chance to think about your question. What was your question, by the way? No. We're freezing here also. Can you hear me? Yeah, now I hear you. Yeah, perfect. Perfect again. Yeah.
It was more, it's not something that has built up. It's not something you've seen built up or suddenly. It's simply a change of principle to take in more seriousness when you make larger contracts that are more complicated. Is that correctly understood?
Yeah, larger or smaller contract. Yes, it is a warranty, which is basically the service you provide, the guarantee you provide to your customers. We haven't really used a balance sheet for that before. You need to make a software provision for that. We're doing that as a good business measure. In terms of the inventory, no, it's not something that just happened.
We basically go in and say, okay, but there are certain parts and components. If they do not move within a certain time period, we should consider them, you know, obsolete. They may not be, but we are being a little bit more stringent on that. That is why we have this SEK 9.6 million adjustment on that part. It is no drama, but we think it is a good thing to do. Yeah.
Then there is a question around the cash flow. It is nice with that, but there is also, is there any problems in the contract at all? IFO is a guarantee, you know. I think the question is asked because we have heard from some large auto producing companies that if you have a prepayment, it is not necessarily on your book yet. It is in your bank account, but you also need to deliver something.
The banks might not see it as, you know, as you have a stable bank account. Can IFO cover this when you need to make guarantees and so on during the large contracts? Are you comfortable with that?
Let me answer what's happening. I think it's somewhat convoluted, making reference to other things that I don't know. When we get prepayment from our customers, it goes to our bank account. End of story. It sits there. It's not got nothing to do with whether the bank thinks it's our money or not. That's how it is. I did say to you that the working capital has built up. Yes, we've been really good in having good contracts and collecting money.
Last year, we'll see some impact on that because, of course, we're delivering and payments will come maybe in second or third quarter, the next payments on a contract. That is okay. In terms of putting out guarantees, etc., we need to do that on certain contracts. So far, we are managing that.
Perfect. The question is around the solidity, and you need, of course, to make sure that you are a solid company when you make these big contracts because you want guarantees. IFO is a good coverage of that. Is that correct?
No, I think it's a misunderstanding. IFO has got nothing to do with that. IFO is doing export guarantees so that we make sure that we get paid from the other side. It is a guarantee. It is a help to us.
In Indonesia, it's a government-to-government direct loan, which is a little bit different. IFO has got nothing to do with doing guarantees for us. What they're doing is that they're making sure we get paid. Two different things. I think you're mixi ng it up here.
Perfect. What measures are taken to improve operational scalability? I think you touched a little bit upon it using the AI. If I might say it, you have some swing factors on the Indonesian order. How do you prepare for, and it will always be like that in your company, for an uncertain timeline? You don't know when things will accelerate. Some thoughts about how you build up to handle this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll answer that with light hedgehogs are mating carefully. I told you before that we are not overhiring.
We're not saying, "Oh my God, we're going to have, you know, this huge contract next year. Let's hire 100 people and see how it goes." No, no. Of course, they put some demands and requirements on us that we are improving our processes. We're looking at how can we quickly scale up with manpower if that's the limiting factor, which typically it is. That's how we are handling it. We are also very conscious about our demand supply planning. We're looking at, I told you earlier, I said earlier, we're very busy in the first and second quarter here. We actually, we don't want too much more work. We like to have more work in the second half of the year. We are very conscious about how we're building it. It's tempting to just go ahead and hire a lot of people.
I hope you appreciate when I say this. It's tempting if you get the contracts. I think that has been perhaps some mistakes of the past going a little bit too fast. We don't want to go too slow either. A lot of it is in the process. It's in the training. It's preparing for that big uptick that will come eventually so we can handle it.
I think there's a good question here. What is the most important factor, one factor to win a marine domain awareness surveillance contract? Is that the technology behind it, or is it that you have proven track record? You need to choose one. If you only had to say one thing when you were negotiating with states, what would you point to?
Yeah, very good. Now, I'm not a politician, but you know, trying ourselves to a politician.
What we are doing is trust. You're building trust with the customer. We have a reliable story. We have the heritage. Again, remember the brand is playing for us. Then it's knowledge about the end-to-end solutions because it's correct. When you go up to these marine domain awareness end-to-end, it's not so much about the technology. It's the ability to use the technology and put it together and make it function as a solution. This is where our strengths lie, and that's how we approach the different markets. Typically, different nations buying, you can't expect that they're experts sitting on the other side saying, "Oh, I need, you know, this, this, and that," and then I put it all together and it's working. They don't know that.
They're looking for somebody who can help them define what they need to solve the pain points that they have defined. For example, climate or pollution or managing fishing control, etc. Trust, being that reliable partner with the heritage that we have, and then understanding solutions end-to-end because that's really what the customers are buying. They're not buying a satellite. They're buying a solution to a problem. That's where we're focused.
There's a very specific question regarding something you don't guide on, so I'm not sure you want to say it, but talk about it. If you adjusted gross margin, it reached 30%, actually a bit minus two, but adjusted, but it reached 30% in the quarter. Is that a level you are satisfied with? Is the 30% enough, you know, in total to deliver on your EBITDA guidance, or will more be required?
Do you need more top line? I think the question is, are you satisfied with 30% in gross margin and maybe a little bit trying for you to guide on it? I'm not sure how you want to do that.
Thank you for asking the question. Am I happy? No, I think it's not that I'm unhappy. I think we can do better, but you'll also see that it's quite an improvement. Even with not doing the adjustment, you'll see that our gross profit, if I remember correctly, was 8% in 2023, which is 29% in 2024. That's pretty good. That is a consequence of the focus we've had on profitability and managing cost. Should it be better? Yeah, that would be good. I think it's trending towards the right level.
It is a question of scaling the top line because we can stay at that percentage as long as I can grow the top line. Our overhead costs will not grow at the same rate as the top line grows. Therefore, do the math, you will have more profitability. As the CEO, you'll never be happy. You always want to make more money. I'd say we're trending in the right direction. We're trending in the right direction.
Perfect. A little bit up in the helicopter again. How would you describe your current tender activity in the programs? You know, it should, all the macro is pointing to that that should increase, but is that also something you see in the tender activity?
By tendering, let me translate it as we are working out of opportunities and making proposals for customers all the time, of course.
We are increasing our sales force. I do not guide on pipeline as such, no, but we are absolutely, we are busy nonstop. We still need to win. Of course, a better winning combination is, like I said, trust, reliability, solution knowledge, and then also, of course, being competitive in the market price-wise, which is what we are working on.
There was a little bit about what is included in your guidance. I think you stated that the Indonesian order is not a part of your guidance. That would come on top. This is your normal business. You expect to drive the guidance.
Let me answer it this way: when we, of course, have done the budget, we have exact numbers for top line and bottom line that we use to guide the organization and make our actions.
That can go up and down or upside, downside. When we give a range, that's because things can go up and down. I can't control everything, but of course, we are working towards a specific target. What I'm telling you is that in that internal budget, we have not included Indonesia. We haven't factored it in. That's a better way to look at it. The ranges I've given you are, of course, because things can go up and down. If Indonesia comes in early enough in the year, yeah, great. If Indonesia comes in in December, who knows? It really depends. The message is, without closing Indonesia, we can deliver the guidance I have given to you. Check.
Do you see a need for being more than a component supplier, i.e., integration with other systems in marine awareness, you know, moving more into a larger part of the value chain to be able to do that? Or do you feel comfortable letting Unseen Labs and all the other ones do this and you being the component supplier?
Yeah. Let's divide it up. Component supplier is somewhat, it's a broad question. I said marine domain awareness is about solutions end-to-end. That's where we want to be strong and we understand how to build it. We have some of the building blocks. We don't need to have all of it. We don't produce cameras ourselves. We buy cameras, but they're also part of the MDA. Working with Unseen Labs, they're running a service business. Will I go into service business anytime soon? No.
I don't want to step on the toes of my customers. That would be stupid. We are going to work with them and evolving it. Would we do a partnership with Unseen Labs to build marine domain awareness somewhere? Maybe. Would we partner with other companies to plug the holes? Maybe. We are a provider of subsystems and products for satellites. We are a provider of satellites, and we also provide broader solutions. Going into service business is different.
Perfect. I think we are running out of time, so let me end up. Thanks for doing a great job and explanation looking forward for the upcoming rocket year and the future. I think we will end with that comment. I don't think you need to answer on that.
Thank you, Carsten, for taking us through your results and answering a lot of questions and getting us really a walk through your company once again.
Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for listening and enjoy your evening.