Welcome to today's event where we have the pleasure to present GomSpace joining us today to answer questions. Of course, we are joined by CEO Carsten Drachmann. Today's agenda: big market change last year, which strategic direction, and which action is needed to kind of go into to try and catch those opportunities. And of course, followed by your 2026 guidance that kind of gave us some indication on where the financial figures should also go released this morning. So this is the topic for this event. As always, ask questions in the box down below. Do it in Danish. I'll try and translate to the best of my ability. We have gotten a lot in. So see if your question is already answered, but do feel free to ask questions. But for now, I will hand the call over to you, Carsten.
Thank you, Michael, and welcome to this Q&A with an update on our strategic outlook as well. I will take you through for 2026. You saw that this morning. I hope you all had a chance to read it. Nice growth. I want to put some more words around the strategic outlook. What do we see? We've had some years of, let's say, creating a new foundation for ourselves, doing a little bit of a turnaround on the company. But now that we have sort of done that, we're looking further into the market. We can look at how do we make a difference in the market, how are we winning market engagement in 2026. We have created some changes in the organization and how we run the business. That was also announced earlier today. So I'll walk you through that. But first, a couple of highlights from 2025.
First quarter was very much about strengthening of the balance sheet. We took in just short of SEK 200 million from Peter Hargreaves. That was absolutely fantastic, helping us solidify the balance sheet and preparing us for what's coming, what we need to do. We had good commercial momentum in Q2, good year-on-year growth, quarter to quarter, year-on-year, but also this big contract for 18 satellites that we won there. That was great. Transformation and positioning for scaling in Q3. Again, there's the financial stability, the money from the rights issue that we did earlier in the year came in, and we have a very strong cash balance in Q3. Q4, we saw just at the very end, we were working hard, as you can see, over Christmas and New Year, we got a contract, a development contract with a defense provider. Really great. We're very, very happy about that.
It shows that we are moving into the defense area, and there's definitely market opportunity for GomSpace there. And also, we upgraded the outlook for the year with a strengthened profitability for 2025. So all in all, I'm very pleased with the year. Obviously, I can't give you all the numbers yet, but the highlights are there. This is all something that you have seen. So I think we have created a good foundation for moving forward. Interestingly, also on the right-hand side of your screen there, noting that, of course, we are influencing as such, but we are, of course, now in the First North 25 Index. So out of close to 500 companies, we are in the top 25, and we'll be part of creating the index for Nasdaq next year. And also, we were on the top 10 traded shares on Nordnet.
I would call it capital market recognition is good, thanks to you, all our investors, loyal investors also over many years. We are now in a situation where we are being noticed in the capital market, and this is good for us, and it is good for you. Now, let's take the 2026 outlook. First of all, we're guiding SEK 540 million-SEK 640 million, relatively big span. It's a dynamic business. It's up more than 30% compared to take midpoint to mid-point compared to our guidance that we gave you in Q4. I would say very decent growth here. The CAGR, the average growth, market growth is around 14%, depending a bit what report you're reading. We are well ahead of market here. EBITDA margin, 5%-12%. We are on an absolute basis, of course, increasing that percentage-wise, roughly as we guided last year.
We could probably have done more, but we also want to grow. There is an uptick in the market. There is increasing demand. That means now is the time for us to make sure that we scale and invest correctly to capture that uptick. That does cost a few margin points. So we've chosen to be in this range, which I think is very healthy and should also deliver the necessary operational cash flow for us. Lastly, free cash flow. We suspended it last year, and I've seen there's some questions. We'll talk about that later. It will be negative. It's really about we need to invest more. We have now gone two and a half, almost three years saying cash is king. It's the only thing we are focusing on. We have not done a lot of investments to now. We have a solid balance sheet.
We have a solid cash balance. We will invest more. We have to invest more. You're not going to capture the uptick in the market here and those of you who are following a bit more intensely, there's a lot of investments going into the market. Of course, our customers, our competitors, our suppliers, a lot of investments are going into them. Simply because there's a big expectation for market growth, we are, of course, also going to have to invest into either building more technology, capturing market, expanding production capacity. This is a necessity for us. Therefore, the negative free cash flow. Don't see it. I obviously don't see it as a negative. I think I actually see it as a positive. It's not negative because we're not performing. It's negative because we want to grow, so all of that is fair.
When with the capital market interest that is there right now, it is absolutely the right time for us to step it up and be a bit more aggressive in terms of spending more money to grow. Okay, moving on from here. Let me give you some bullets on strategic outlook. First of all, why would you invest in GomSpace? I think investing in GomSpace is about investing in the future of space. Space is growing. Small satellites are redefining how we secure, connect, and observe our Earth and understand our world. And GomSpace is right in the center of this transformation. I would a little bit bold statement saying GomSpace has been around for 18, 20 years in a relatively immature market. A market is still trying to figure out how is this going to work? Is there really a business case there?
Can we really use it? It's becoming very evident now. Yes, absolutely, we can use space, and we are right in the middle of it, and we are prepared for many years, so now is the time of GomSpace. So strategic outlook. Give you one bullet, bullet by bullet. So pay attention here. So space is now frontline defense domain. So space is acknowledged as being a strategic part of defense, specifically also driven by all the unrest that you see right now and Trump doing what Trump is doing and Putin doing as well as he's doing. There is absolutely a race to space for defense that is an absolute key. Two, governments are shifting from services to sovereign assets. I've said this before.
When I travel around the world, we see more and more where in the past, perhaps as a service was something that we wanted, it's typically from the telco sector. Everybody is buying services. That was the initial thinking. But it's becoming clear that as a sovereign state, you want to own those assets. It is too critical for your infrastructure. It's too critical for your defense and security not to have a reasonable level of control. Therefore, we see an increase in actual hardware investment that will, I think, outperform the need for services. That is to our advantage. We see end-to-end solutions create value. We see a move towards we will still sell individual satellites and technology to some customers who want to do something themselves, but we also see a need for more solutions, end-to-end solutions. Our case in Indonesia, there was a question on that.
It's a very good example of end-to-end solution. We're delivering everything that you need to monitor illegal fishing, not just the satellite and the customer. Indonesian government does the rest themselves. We're actually doing it end-to-end. This is a key. We also see that there will be more and more constellations coming up. Constellation means 20, 50, 100 satellites plus. This typically will drive also a larger contract that's running over several years. This is nice to have that you have contracts that can run longer. We see deep space and lunar missions evolving. We just saw we took a contract. It was only the initial part of a contract for a new lunar mission coming up. There's definitely more investments out into space. Let's see what's out there. Let's see what's on the moon. Are there minerals that we can explore? Somebody wants to take a Greenland.
There's a lot of ice to get these rarest minerals. Can we find them in space instead? Is that an option? So this is something that's evolving. We see an increasing share of products revenue. Also, we see our product business growing. Why is it growing? Well, as the whole industry is growing and our competitors and our partners, colleagues out in the world are building more, they also need more products to build their satellites. So we believe that will also help us. Volume scalability becomes a competitive advantage. We have to be able to scale fast. Our 18-satellite project that we won earlier has really helped us a lot. We understand very well how to scale. We have a nice production facility out here with parallel production lines. We need more. It's becoming a competitive factor that you can scale relatively quickly and you have capacity.
Customers are no longer waiting, say, "Okay, I can wait three, four years until it flies." They wanted it within 12 months-24 months. So it's a very different game that's coming up. So that is a competitive advantage. Last but not least, we do see roll-up and consolidation will happen in the market. There are a lot of players out there. Yes, the market is growing. Yes, the demand is growing. But there are also a lot of new companies coming into the space. We see a roll-up, consolidation, mergers, etc. We believe that's going to happen in the coming years here as well. So this is our strategic outlook. Eight very, very important bullets. You can see the slide sets. I recommend you read it, try to understand it, because this is the essence of what we're trying to do now at GomSpace.
CAGR, I mentioned that about 14%. This is extrapolated as the space and market growing to more than $9 billion by 2031. These are for satellites less than 500 kilos. We have a certain addressable market out of that, but it's still pretty good, the 14%. So how do we make a difference? Well, you know a lot of it. Moreover we have defense and national security is growing. We definitely cater to that. The Marine Domain Awareness, in general, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance is important. This, by the way, also covers Arctic and Greenland. Yes, we can do that. Yes, we can do it in 48 hours. There's governmental and civil agencies, illegal fishing. The example is in Indonesia. Deep Space missions we have just closed. We definitely see that growing also, and we make a difference.
Commercial constellations, for example, monitoring of airplanes, maritime monitoring for civil services, civil purposes is there. Global connectivity networks. And also environmental and climate. So CO2 emissions, I've said before, it's about 50% of the climate parameters we are measuring us against for 2050 can only be measured from space. So definitely, there is a future there as well. There's also the wildlife and resource, all the forest fires, all the flooding, etc., that's going on. All of that we can see and observe from space. And with a combination with AI, we can predict what's going to happen. And we can definitely save lives, and we can hopefully also avoid the devastation that we've seen in some areas. For example, the forest fires in California, a lot of that could probably have been avoided with more information. Okay, so how are we going to win?
A couple of things. We have a very strong momentum. Right now, we have a unique heritage. And also, we have a very clear path to scale. Now, we're digging a little bit deeper into what you can expect to see from 2025 or 2026 and onwards. Let's first look at why do I say strong momentum? We have actually grown a lot. You can see sort of flattish around SEK 200 million for five years in a row with negative or just around zero EBITDA, except for one year that wasn't good. We are now going in the right direction. We are delivering a positive EBITDA. We see a continuous growth for us here. So we have a strong foundation here. Also, if we move on, I want to say the positive EBITDA.
One thing to note here is that actually, it's quite unique in this industry to make a profit, to have a positive EBITDA. There are many, many of our competitors. They do not have that. They may be projecting it next year, maybe two years, three years from now. They're burning a lot more money. So the fact that we can grow like this and make money at the same time is quite an achievement. This is also why I say we could probably have made even more profits for this year, but we don't want to because we want to make sure that we invest enough into growing even further. But it's a unique position right now. We have a strong lead investor. That is very, very good, which means he has supported us in the past when things were difficult.
He supported us last year where things were very positive. We needed the cash to bolster our balance sheet, and he's 100% behind us. Also, the strong capital market recognition we talked about is helping us. So all in all, we have a platform now that allows us to say, well, we have a growth on the top line. We have a reasonable EBITDA. We have momentum with a strong lead investor that is here to support us and help us. We also have a recognition line in the capital market. This is what I would call a really, really good platform for growing in a market that is growing. Okay, unique heritage. Many know this already. We've been around for quite some time. We have satellites, more than 75 space missions. We are shipping more than 2,000 products per year.
We've been in orbit for more than 100 years. So all of that has led us into the position of a trusted supplier. So people that buy from GomSpace trust GomSpace. We have a lot of recurring customers. They know we've been around for a long time, and they know the things they buy from us are working. And this is a key. So it's building that trust in the market. You don't get that trust as a startup. You get that trust because you've been around. So they're in the uniqueness. It's also quite unique that we probably have the largest product portfolio in the market, so all the products and subsystems. So that is also creating a unique position for us. And we have production facilities here. They're right behind me. We can do a lot, actually, with the growth we are foreseeing.
We probably need to have even more capacity in the near future. Track record examples, the majority we haven't talked about this before. The majority of signal intelligence services are using technology from GomSpace. Unseenlabs, obviously, but there's also a company called HawkEye 360. This is the biggest competitor to Unseenlabs out of the U.S. We delivered half of that, their technology in the beginning until the American says, "Oh, we need to buy local." Wish the Danish government would think the same one in the same way, but they don't right now. But so we've delivered by far the most amount of signal intelligence technology to the market. Also, technology examples or acceptance, Rocket Lab, Lockheed. We've sold to many bigger customers. So we do have a track record here. We do have a unique heritage. Also, the first deep space mission for, remember, Juventas, it's still flying.
It's been flying for more than a year now and still another little bit less than a year to go, so flying out to that asteroid to see what it's all about. This is unique also. Nobody has done this before, and also first to launch SatCom, SIGINT, and AIS, so the airplane monitoring or ship monitoring over Arctic. We were the first ones to do that in 2018, so we have a lot of credibility. We have a lot of heritage. This is a key. This is a key. As the market moves into, I know what my business case is, or I need to protect my country. I don't want to take a lot of risk because either I know my return on investment or I know if I don't have the surveillance of my country, I'm going to be in trouble.
That leads to, I want to buy from somebody who can deliver quality and something that works the first time. And that's GomSpace. Clear path to scale. So how are we going to do that? Very good, Carsten. A lot of talk looks good, but how are you going to do it? Well, first of all, we already have a strong footprint. So we are in more than 60 countries and more than 200 customers. So we have a very wide reach. Whatever we do, we can reach almost any country that has any interest in satellite communication or satellite systems. We see acceleration in budgets globally. So one thing is that there is this average growth of 14%, but we see some very specific budgets in Europe in particular right now. And also, with the market growth, 14%.
We grow 18%, 80%-80% from 2024 to 2025, now growing at least 30% here. We are well ahead of the market, and the market keeps going up. A couple of mega trends. Resilience from space. Using space as an alternative for internet communication, data communication. It's quite easy. You've seen that it's quite easy to disrupt the data connection on ground. You can cut a cable on land. You can cut it at the bottom of the ocean, so looking for resilience to space is there, for example, for communication. But in general, any kind of defense would like to have an alternative, also alternative data. So resilience from space is here to stay, then we also see this moving from prototyping to industrialization.
So an industry that has been, let's try this, let's try that, let's see how this works, is going into industrialization volume and saying, now it needs to be more standard and mainstream, so these are big trends in the market. How are we going to do this? How are we going to address the market? We have identified now four specific market segments. First, system integrators. System integrators are companies that are building satellites or helping other companies building satellites. They can often be our competitors as well, so that's a clear target segment for us. Satellite operators, so operators who are launching their own satellites and services are interested. It's a very interesting market for us. Institutions, for example, European Space Agency, European Defence Fund, Lunar Deep Space Missions, etc. We see that also as a very specific, distinct market, and last but not least, nation states.
These are the four key markets that we see. How are we going to address them? That is that we are starting to align ourselves around that. Let's dive into the system integrators. Here, our focus is to increase the product business. These customers are buying power supplies, battery packs. All our products and subsystems are there. We have a good platform. We want to leverage that here. Focus area number two is the satellite operators. They want to have satellites in high volume. You cannot operate satellites if you only have one or two. You need more. Here, we need to focus on qualifying ourselves and capturing that market and being able to deliver in volume. The 18 satellites from last year's order is an example of that. We need to create these international solutions. For national states, security is there.
Illegal fishing, I mentioned before. So really looking at these end-to-end solutions is a key. And we see that as a specific market segment focusing on nation states. And last but not least, we are into these institutions. By that, we mean European Space Agency, EU, other defense budgets that are now increasing. So there's a very clear market now to capture part of those budgets to be part of the trend and movement in Europe to use space also for defense and to increase the budgets. Recently, we heard EUR 35 billion over five years is what Germany is investing in space only for defense. So there's a lot coming, and other countries are following that. So these are the four distinct segments. We will address that. Oh, sorry, I have more here. So other strategic outlook on the market, GomSpace market priorities.
European competition is fierce, but the budgets are also there. So there's a lot happening in terms of more budgets. There's also a lot of competitors in Europe. It's fine. We can grow with that. U.S. continues to be the largest single market. We will continue to grow there simply by presence. Our market share is nonexistent at the current level, so there's plenty of opportunity to do more. And we so far do not see any rejection as us being a Danish company. It doesn't matter. We have traction there. Asia-Pacific is a faster growing market right now in terms of CAGR. Here, we have a very strong and unique position. There are space companies like ours in Asia-Pacific and Southeast Asia in particular, but not very many. And there is a big demand. It's a big area.
A lot of surveillance monitoring is key out there, also communication. And here, we can outperform the market. That's clearly our goal. We have a unique situation over the next two, three years where it's our playing field. And many of our European colleagues are very focused in their own countries, and they're not very export-oriented. That's an advantage for us. And then Africa and Latin America, they're evolving. They're definitely evolving. Latin America has some bigger ambitions and budgets right now. Africa starts evolving, wanting to invest in space. We see more and more cases coming in. It can also be supported by Danida. It can be water projects, other things where we can contribute from space. So we see that as evolving. Our ambition here is to lead the development in those markets, and we are also starting to hire people in that direction.
So, organization for 2026, we're going to have four business units plus one, so five. We went from three. We had products and programs, as we call it. So, product business, transactional business, programs, contract business, and North America simply because it's the biggest market, and we wanted to be there. In 2026, we will continue to have products or change. We will have satellite systems. Satellite systems is a little bit what was called programs before. This is contract-based, but this is very much about standardizing, building capacity to deliver 20, 50, 100 satellites with a very short period of time and really focusing on the operators' system, or system material, sorry, should say satellite operators here. National Defense Solutions is business unit number three, obviously focused on nations. It can be for defense and security purposes.
It can also be for civil purposes, monitoring our shipping ship traffic and other things. So this is a business unit in itself. The last one is we call it advanced missions. It's catering and addressing the many budgets that are now especially in Europe, but also looking at a bit more sophisticated missions, for example, lunar missions that we are just starting now, orbiting around the moon to try and figure out what kind of minerals is there, what is the water there. And also, there's something called VLEO, very low Earth orbit LEO, where the satellites are flying even closer. It's great for having better image quality, but it's very difficult because the gravity of the Earth is pulling in the satellites. These are very specific missions where there is a lot of money in the market today.
And then the plus one is North America continues as before. So four distinct market segments, four business units plus one: products, satellite systems, national defense solutions, advanced missions, and then North America. You will see when we go into 2026, when we start our first quarter reporting, we will start reporting in those business units. Here's the team that will be running the executive team for 2026. I am still there. Troels is here as our CFO, Thomas Pfister, our Chief Commercial Officer. We have Søren, Søren Therkildsen. He's been with GomSpace for, I believe, nine years now. He's our Chief Operating Officer. He's been acting in that role during 2025, and now he's full-time into here. So he's going to help us with a lot of the execution and organization that's required inside the company.
And then you see at the bottom here our four, sorry, five business units. We have Lars Alminde, one of our co-founders, who's going to drive the solution business. He used to do strategy and business development. Now he's totally focused on national defense solutions. Oliver, who has been here for almost two years, will be running the satellite systems and our contract business. Slava Frayter, who started just before summer, is going to run North America as he did also during 2025. New kid on the block, very, very happy. I hope you saw the announcement earlier. We have Jane Rygaard is joining us as vice president for products. She's coming from Nokia, many, many years at Nokia, 20, 25 years at Nokia, I believe, working in very senior positions and also really helping the execution within Nokia. And I know Jane from the past.
Some of you know that I have also spent 20 years at Nokia, so I'm very, very pleased that Jane is here. Jane is a homegirl. She's from Aalborg. I don't think we can get any more lucky that we have an international profile with lots of experience, a lot of street credit, lives in Aalborg, and can start here at the 1st of April, so this is good news, and we have Edgar, a very strong leader, very experienced in space. He's been our Luxembourg director last year, and he's now stepping into the role as Vice President for Advanced Missions, so I believe we have a strong team. I believe we have the right team to execute our plan into 2026, so it's clear we have a foundation for success is established. We have the balance sheet. We've shown growth, and the market is there.
We need to execute with discipline. Hence, also Søren is our Chief Operating Officer. It's really, really important that we now execute. Things are getting more complex. We grow with ambition. Internally, we are laughing about we're taking a guerrilla approach. We really have to be ambitious in our growth plans. It's a very unique situation we have right now. We have to be ambitious enough. We have to be ambitious enough. If you're too cautious, it's not going to work either. So we are ambitious, and then we need to continue, and we will deliver value for our shareholders, customers, partners, and employees. It's definitely a focus, and before I finish this off, a little news flash here. We are, as part of our grow with ambition, also changing our website. The website is getting a bit dated.
Monday, 26th at 10:00 A.M., the new website will be launched. It is so much better. We are so happy that it's coming out. I know it doesn't mean a lot. It means something to us that I think you'll see a very different image that we've had for some time, but it hasn't been reflected in our website. It is also enabling much better our customers to understand what we're doing, and it's helping us engage better with the market. New website coming up. If those of you following us on social media, I believe there's a countdown, so you will have a little bit of a sneak peek every day in the next week. With that, transforming space into operational impact, this is what we do.
I think we can say with some pride, we are turning a page to a new chapter in the GomSpace storytelling. Keep telling good stories, but we're really at a crossing point now where we've got a lot of our financials under control. We have a baseline now, and now we need to start developing and capturing growth, so thank you very much. Thank you for your trust, and thank you for your investment.
Carsten, shall we jump into some questions?
Let's do it.
I will try and group them. There's a lot who is surrounding the same. So I will group some, and then we can go into the more specific ones. But I think there's a lot here questioning negative cash flow, negative cash flow maybe next year where you haven't guided on this year. Can you contain these investments with your current balance sheet? Are you going to seek further investment? So I think the question here is, is it possible to do the investments in general without seeking more external funding with the current plans you have led?
Yeah. So, first of all, with the plans that we have right now, we have sufficient cash and a balance sheet to execute during 2026. So that's not a worry in itself, but what I need you to look at is that. Look at the market cap we have today. Look at the things that are happening in the market, and I referenced earlier also that there's a lot of investments going in. Our competitors are getting hundreds of millions euros in. Why? Because there is a very, very strong belief that this business is growing. So of course, we should do the same. Otherwise, we will not win over time. When or if we need capital will come, but I would say I think you should be not happy with me if I wouldn't utilize the market cap we have right now.
Access to capital is relatively cheap for everybody. That said, we can execute the plans we have right now inside the development we need to do, the increasing our capacity, et cetera. If you want to do more things over time, we'll see. But I would say that you should encourage me to utilize the market cap. That is actually the right approach for a company like GomSpace.
Okay. Then we have a general question about the defense sector and the talks you had with the government, maybe smoking cigarettes. I think that's the new one with Lars Løkke Rasmussen, not drinking beers with him. Can you elaborate a little bit on it? You had some big presentation in the government. That's the first one. And then I will have a part question to that. But can you elaborate a little bit on these talks and, of course, not outcomes, but what you're feeling about those talks?
I guess we can divide it up into, I've been speaking a couple of times down in Brussels around EU security, European security. It is a focus everywhere, and as I've said also before, EU has four different key, they call them flagships for what Europe needs to do, and in two and a half of those, mention the word space. Space is involved in that, so space is definitely there. On a national level, I've been out saying it before that we have solutions, not just GomSpace. Denmark has a very, very strong space industry, and there's no particular reason why Denmark could not increase their capabilities, for example, surveillance of Greenland and Arctic, which is already up and running. We can do it very, very quickly with our Danish-French technology, so that's running there.
As to what Denmark will do and the talks, we'll see how it plays out. We were in contact with the government directly last week. I spoke with Lars Løkke Rasmussen also. So they know what we can do. I think right now, and thumbs up for Lars Løkke Rasmussen for the efforts in Washington, I think they're very preoccupied with how to handle the immediate situation, and let's see what Denmark will do in the near future.
And then there was a kind of a question here. Do you have a hard time to integrate with the defense technology systems that are already in place in our defense sector at our military? Is there any issue there without integration with other technologies and maybe mindsets and so on? There's a question regarding that. So maybe that can be elaborated a little bit.
Yeah. So two things on that. First of all, Denmark does not have its own satellite system. So it's not a question of integrating with. It doesn't exist. There is information coming from other places as to how it integrates into the existing systems. But this is part of evolution. This is part of why Denmark will be a little bit behind Europe. And it's not just Denmark. Europe is behind, right? Underinvested in the defense for more than 10 years. So the systems that are there are perhaps not the latest and greatest and up to date, and perhaps not geared to accept the wealth of information you can get from space. So I don't see. It's not a problem per se, but it's an evolution that needs to happen.
But having said that, we will be able to deliver from space quite quickly data that can be turned into operational assets very, very quickly for the Danish defense.
Perfect. And staying a little bit in the defense, there are some questions surrounding seeking partnership with some of the big defense companies. And of course, someone is asking who is the most likely to buy you. They are investing out in those new technologies. Defense tech is super hot. So a little bit about partnerships, where you might get a front door in because they are used to talk to defense contractors and military, where that might be a little bit longer out for you. And yeah, I know you're not going to elaborate on specific things, but any thinking about that being a faster way into the market and our defense contractors, are you feeling they're kind of looking at you for a new area?
Let me give you some concrete examples. Our strategy in North America is that we are not going to sell directly to the DoD, Department of Defense, in the U.S. We will go through contractors. System integrators or other larger companies who hold those contracts are referenced. It's called IDIQ, different kind of American contracts. We can contribute into that. That's our approach there. The announcement just before New Year with a big development contract with a defense contractor is great. This is just part of that step. Yes, we will, of course, benefit from working with defense contractors that do not have necessarily satellite capability as we have. We'll be seeking more and more partnerships there.
Perfect. I guess you don't want to comment on whether someone has hung a sign on your door and wanted to buy you.
What do you want me to say? Why don't you send me a list of who you think should buy us?
Yes.
But actually, what I can say, what is my job now, and also my job in relation to you as investors, my job now is to make sure that we do the right thing. And the right thing is to grow with the market to make sure that we capture all the opportunities and prepare to capture opportunities. Who might or might not buy us in the future? Maybe we will buy somebody and we won't get bored. Who knows? But the best thing we can do right now is to keep increasing our value, our market share. That is absolute number one. The rest will come by itself and will probably be very good for everybody.
Yeah. You opened one of the questions. M&A, is that interesting to you? Is there something out there or are you more focused on your own technology and scaling up actually your production capacity than looking for new technologies?
Yeah. I would put it this way. As I said, we now have a much better financial platform to stand on than we had earlier. We have a much stronger balance sheet. We have the traction in the market. We understand how to make money, meaning a positive EBITDA. So looking out into the market, I did tell you one of the strategic outlooks we have is this roll-up and consolidation. We do see that. And we are, of course, looking into whether that makes sense. Now you can look at it in many ways. We can expand by adding more of the same. Maybe that's not interesting. We can look at supply chain. It could also be looking at supply chain to secure resilience of supply chain. There are many ways to go.
But there's no doubt that demand is going up, but there's also a huge supply coming into the market. And of course, we're looking at how does that make sense? We don't have that as a separate ambition per se, but we're definitely looking at whether it would benefit us as a company and the shareholders.
You mentioned the scaling up. A big part of it was also announced last year. You mentioned it here, the outsourcing partners. Let's not talk about M&A. Are you satisfied with that? There's a question here. Is that working for you for your way to scale up? Has this shown to be a good way?
I think it's the way we have to go. There is no doubt. Unless we want to build a very huge in-house production to follow the growth, which we don't want to, we still need to want to have the agility. It's been a good learning experience last year. It has solved some of our capacity problems, but we have also learned, and that learning is invaluable going into 2026 and onwards, and we will do more of it. We are working on who do we want to use as partner, not for outsourcing per se, but for capacity increase is really important, so we've learned a lot. It has helped us, and we will do more into the future. We have to. It's the way to go.
There are some questions, of course, always surrounding Indonesia and whether you have anything you can give us an update on that one.
Yeah. So you can almost say it for me. You know how I'm going to answer that, right? So I'll tell you when there's good news, and I will tell you when there's bad news. I have to. And when I tell you nothing is because everything is the same. Having said that, though, the question I believe we did see it before was along the lines of, do we know what's missing in order to get it closed? Yes, we understand what's going on. We're following it on a very close-up weekly basis. It is a political process in Indonesia. You can look at Denmark. How many years have we not been trying to sell satellites in Denmark? It's a long time, and they still haven't bought anything. Indonesia is a political process. For them right now, it's more a matter of, well, there's some national security.
There is environment. There is the fishing industry, and they are discussing how to best move forward, and we are right in the middle of all of that, so they still need to sort out the last, let's say, political agreements. Our commercial contract we signed by the end of 2023 is still valid. It's not gone away, so we have a commercial contract. We have the commitment for financing from Denmark via IFU, and we're waiting for the final political decisions, but I can tell you we are following it very closely.
And then there's a couple of questions surrounding the guidance. And you're saying you won market share. I guess that's 80% growth in a 14% growth market. But all this scaling up, there's a question. Is this what you already seen coming in from customers? Is it customer reporting into you that you need this and pointing to orders in the future? And a little bit about the telltale signs from that.
Yeah. So if you take a look at Unseenlabs, Unseenlabs is a good example over the years of a customer who started with being not so sure about the business case, so actually having a very strong business case. They kept ordering, and we are now at satellite number 21, 22, something like that. So that in itself shows how this works. Once you're in with the customer, you build a trust. And remember, we are a trusted supplier. Then as the customer's business case are evolving, we should also benefit from that. It can also be in relation to national security. Some of the programs that we're doing right now is related to that. And as those demands go up, we should also see a repeat business.
So the answer is, yes, we are working very closely with a number of our customers to understand their ambitions. And so far, I have not met any customer who doesn't think that they will do more into the future. I think that's the best way of answering it.
Yes. There's a question surrounding maybe the whole business now set for higher growth. You'll probably see scaling up. You mentioned they are actually out and trying to recapitalize with hundreds of millions euros. Is there anything in the back of your mind fearing that short- to mid-term that the industry is now scaling too fast up? And that could be a problem in the short to medium term on the expectation that there will be too much competition about all those orders. So kind of a feeling about that.
Yeah. So what we see is there will be, as you just described, there's more and more coming in. There's a lot of capital flowing in. The market will eventually divide itself up a little bit. There's going to be, let's stay in a new space. It's going to be three, four, five major players who really make a difference. There's going to be a range of customers or suppliers that will be in a so-called niche market. They found a little things that they're really good at, and they have a good market share. Probably not going to grow from there. And then there's a race to the bottom on price, meaning you haven't moved forward. So you look like a lot of others, and you can only compete on price, nothing else.
We have a very, very clear ambition, and we have the foundation to go for the bigger, saying we want to be one of the three, four, five larger ones that can continue in this market. So that's a very clear ambition. And it's ambition we should have. But the market is called a bowling alley. It's called Crossing the Chasm. You can read the books. This is exactly where the market is. There will be some people that kind of some companies are going to be bigger. It's going to be some niche players, and there's going to be some monkeys, we call them. So at the bottom, we're not going to be at the bottom. We might be a very, very good niche player, or we want to be. Our ambition is to hit the top.
So I think that explains a little bit to say, yes, there's a lot of money coming in, but not everybody can win. Only the best can win. And I think we're well positioned to be the best.
Perfect, and then there's a little bit of a technical question about the drones and the satellite technology. I think everybody is talking about drones. Right now, it's radio-controlled. Could it be satellite-controlled? Are you starting to see anything? And are you allowed to tell us if you are starting to see anything about satellites, actually extending the range of these drones and maybe making it more hard to interfere with those radio signals through satellites?
Through satellites. I think the simple technical answer is yes. I would rather refer over to this. This is exactly why we set up our national and defense solution business. They're exactly looking at this space and say, what's coming now? How can it be combined with something else? Drones, for example. How can we utilize different kinds of technologies and sectors to something new? We are very much, I would say, and the world is taking inspiration from Ukraine. Ukraine right now has the highest innovation index in the entire world, and they are super fast. They're looking at where things normally take a couple of years to do. Out of pure necessity, they do it in a couple of months. They find financing. They test it out. If it fails, they'll try something else. So anything is possible if there's a need and there's progress.
And the need in Ukraine is there. So then you'll find a way forward. So I would say that the drone communication is just an example. Yes, I think there's something there. Need to understand the full solution. And there are many other solutions that you can think of that make sense.
Then scaling up, always a question. Can you attract the right people? You already mentioned you have attracted one for your C- level. But can you attract the right people to do this scale-up?
Yes. Yes, we can. And why? Because we have a really strong brand. And it's also rumored that we have a very much focus on people. For me, it's all about people. It's all about values. It's all about how we treat each other and how we work together. And people have seen that, and it's not spreading in the market. So if you want to, if you're techie, which most of us are, this is a great place to be. I mean, how much more fun can it be to build satellites and make a change in the world and impact the world? It is really, really cool. And then I believe we have created a strong working environment based on respect, based on values that we use as a main driver for how we interact with each other.
I will say that we are hiring up here in Aalborg. In total, we have more than 25 nationalities around the world. In Aalborg, a lot of the people that we are hiring are from outside, and they gladly come up here to work. We have from Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, all over the world. They gladly come to Aalborg to work for us. So while we not always can find everything we need in Denmark, we still don't have a full space education, we can easily attract people from the rest of the world.
Perfect. And a very simple question. Will you report on the new business segments? You always talked about that you should be able to see where the value is coming from and how it performs. So will you also report in the future on those 4 plus 1 business segments from now on?
Yeah. We will do the 4 plus 1 business unit that we have set up, which are reflecting the segments. You will see that in the first quarter report when that comes out, so we'll change the reporting a bit there so you can track that, and you'll see that we have made a couple of changes to better measure the performance of each business unit.
I have the final question from the audience. I think it's a good one to end off on. I will let you go after that. What is your biggest strategic dilemma right now in the long term? Is that being able to scale up to win this race? But if you can mention one, maybe two strategic dilemmas that you are seeing from your positions, besides all the goods, the positive coming, then we could end with that question, Carsten.
Yeah. Well, I took you through the strategy, gave you some of the highlights on the outlook, where I think the dynamic is. Strategic dilemmas, I would say we need to grow. The market is growing. I don't think you can have a reactive approach to the market and thinking, I'll grow anyway. You have to be ambitious to outgrow the market. This is not a market that's saturating right now. It is a market that is absolutely running very, very fast forward. So the strategic dilemma lies, of course, between playing it safe and making sure that you deliver a good profit that we now finally have, which is really, really great, as I say, unique. Keeping that versus, okay, but actually, I should spend more money. My competitors are spending more money.
Hence, that's why I said we could probably have done the EBITDA a couple of percentage points higher, but we chose not to because we think we have to be more forward-leaning in order to be an even bigger and more successful company into the future, so therein lies the dilemma. You actually have to invest. Everybody else is doing it. At the same time, we want to, also for the benefit of our investors, we want to keep a decent result and our operational cash flow. It's probably the biggest dilemma we have. I can tell you it's full speed ahead. We definitely want to grow, and we will also invest into that, as you can see from the negative free cash flow.
Check. Carsten, I think that was the main part of all the questions we got collected in. Thank you for showing us kind of what you're thinking about the strategic direction and what strategic advantages you have. Also, thank you to maybe the best well-known private shareholder audience in Denmark on one share, so it's always an honor.
Cheers for that. Thanks, guys. I mean, it's really, really good. Thank you.
Thank you very much.