Good morning, and thank you to everyone to join us, both in person and those connecting via webcast. We sincerely appreciate your presence. My name is Albert Matousek, Head of Investor Relations and Communications at Aimia. On our agenda today, we have presentation from Aimia's executives, as well as insightful discussions from the management teams of four of our portfolio companies. If you're joining us remotely, the full presentation is available on our website, and you can also follow along through the webcast interface. After each presentation from our portfolio companies, there will be an opportunity for a brief Q&A session. I will host a more comprehensive Q&A segment at the very end. For those on the webcast, you're welcome to submit any questions at any point using the platform.
While these questions will only be visible to us here at the company, we kindly request that you log in with your full name should you wish to submit any questions. A heads-up for everyone, our speakers today may provide forward-looking statements with respect to Aimia and its portfolio companies. These forward-looking statements are based upon our current expectations, beliefs, and assumptions, and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties. For more details, please refer to the forward-looking and cautionary slides in our various presentations. Additionally, our speakers today may provide non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the non-GAAP financial measure slides included in our various presentations. Without further ado, I'm honored to introduce our first presenter, CEO Phil Mittleman.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our first Investor Day. We appreciate everyone who came here in person. Some of you came long distances to get here. We appreciate that, and welcome to everyone on the webcast. So today, you're gonna hear an update from Aimia, on our first Investor Day, and more importantly, you're gonna hear from our portfolio companies directly. Our CEOs and CFOs are all here in person to, to speak to you and to answer your questions directly, and to explain to you what's going on at these companies directly, so that you can share the level of excitement that we have, that we've been trying to convey to you. And while our stock sits here at a near a 52-week low, our excitement level, and our, our confidence in these investments is at a 52-week high or an all-time high.
We hope that by the end of today, you're gonna share that, that feeling. All right. Our key objectives today are, we're gonna give a much deeper dive into the value of our companies. We hope that by the end of the day, you're gonna understand what these companies are worth. We know it's difficult sometimes to value, especially the minority stakes, but you'll be hearing from them directly, and I think you'll, you'll share our level of excitement and confidence in them. And we're gonna be providing guidance for the first time for some of our companies, and you're gonna hear from our recent large acquisitions, the operating businesses, and I think you're gonna have a lot more clarity and color and confidence in them as well.
You're gonna see how we're executing our strategy and seeing early momentum, and we're gonna get into a lot of detail there. You're gonna see how we're strengthening our corporate governance, our expertise at the board level, and we are aligning ourselves with investors and trying to resolve the thing that everyone cares about most, which is getting our stock price to close the gap between where it is today and what it's worth, which is significantly higher than it's trading at. Then we're, last but not least, we're talking about capturing and sustaining value. We're gonna explain to you how we are doing that at both the minority stakes and our control stakes. Our strategic vision, as we've stated, is to build a portfolio of investments that are gonna deliver long-term value for shareholders.
You know, we're not here to make a CAD 3-dollar stock a CAD 4-dollar stock or a CAD 5-dollar stock. We're here to double, triple, quadruple the value of these investments and have a CAD 30-dollar stock or a CAD 40-dollar stock. That's our goal. Our focus currently is to maximize the value of our portfolio holdings. So obviously, we constantly strive to improve and maximize the value of the things we already own. We're focused on the future, which is building these two verticals you've seen us acquire, possibly adding a third. We're prioritizing liquidity events at the minority holdings.
That means, doesn't mean we're forcing sales or doing anything that with an artificial time horizon, but we are focused on doing what I think shareholders want, which is being able to value our holdings clearly, and that means not having, you know, small stakes in companies that maybe they don't have the same information access. And we can't control providing the kind of granularity that you need to value them. So going forward, you'll see less minority stakes, more controlling stakes, bigger controlling stakes, and two or three large holdings. And that's our strategic direction as well, as you're gonna see companies that you can clearly value. The cash flows are gonna be running through our balance sheet. You're gonna see them clearly.
You can be confident in valuing them, and that will reflect in our stock price, because you can, you know, obviously pay a price that you're confident is a significant discount to what they're worth. This is a little history on the transformation of Aimia. This has actually been a very complex and difficult journey, and one of the main reasons is that when you own a airline loyalty company or you're partners with an airline, there's only one buyer, really, and that's the airline. Airlines are a very volatile business. They have to be willing and able to buy your stake, and you have to be willing to take the price they're willing to pay. So it's very difficult to navigate through those sales.
We have done, I think, an incredible job of transitioning to where we are today. And just some of the highlights are, when I, you know, joined the board, there was a contentious battle with Aeroplan. There was talk of selling it for $1 with the assumption of debt. We wound up getting over $500 million for that. We've moved on, we took control of the company and management. We made a lot of significant moves, including merging our loyalty assets into Kognitiv. We had a 20% stake in AirAsia's loyalty program.
At the depths of COVID, we made a great transaction with them, whereby they purchased that holding for stock, and we put some cash into a rights offering side by side with management, and that's yielded a really exciting investment that's now a 3% stake in Capital A, the holding company. We then, as recently as last year, late last year, we sold PLM, which is the loyalty company for Aeroméxico. Aeroméxico went into bankruptcy, making it even more difficult.
In spite of the fact that, you know, we were a team of three fighting, you know, Apollo in bankruptcy, we managed to not only save the airline by using PLM's balance sheet to loan $100 million to Aeroméxico when they didn't have a good financing, but we actually yielded a tremendous outcome, over $500 million in tax-free cash, which utilized $130 million of our tax losses. We'll get into more of that later. Then we quickly reinvested a lot of that capital, buying our first two large verticals, which was Tufropes and Bozzetto. We quickly thereafter did our first tuck-on for Tufropes, which is called Cortland. We'll get into more detail on that later.
But this was all—you know, just to remind everybody, this happened, you know, very—it feels, you know, when your, when your stock's at its low, it feels time goes slowly, but this has all happened in, you know, 6-8 months. So it's been, it's been a very rapid transition. And, you know, we haven't even owned these companies for two full quarters that we've reported. So I think coming—this coming quarter, for the first time, you're gonna see a clean representation of what Aimia owns and the type of cash flows and revenues and EBITDA that's flowing through our balance sheet without any of these one-time charges and all the different things that have been obscuring that value in the past. Our portfolio today is Tufropes and Cortland, which we're gonna be rebranding as Cortland Industries.
I think, we will not be losing any of the brand equity that Tufropes has, but the parent company will be named Cortland Industrial and rebranded. It's a universally known name in the business. And so we think that after... You know, when we bought Tufropes, for some reason, people, you know, had a negative take on India and said, "Oh, you bought an Indian company." In reality, Tufropes is a company that manufactured in India, but over 70% of their sales are outside of India. They're a worldwide company. Cortland is a U.S.-based company. Both of them utilize or will utilize our NOLs, our operating losses. We immediately redomiciled Tufropes to Canada, where we now run all the exports through Canada, so we get to shelter those, that income with our, our operating losses.
Cortland will allow us to utilize some of our U.S. NOLs, which are significant as well. We acquired the Bozzetto Group, which is a 100-year-old company, a leader in the chemical solution space, incredibly well managed, great company. They have navigated difficult times incredibly well, as you'll see and hear from them directly. They, too, are on the verge of completing their first tuck-on acquisition, which is going to provide them both an accretive transaction that we're excited about, but also provide them a new platform, which will allow them to sell into the Americas for the first time in their company's history, which we think is a game changer.
I can tell you, they think it's a game changer because they put 6% of the money up personally, side by side, Aimia, with us in the transaction, to underscore their commitment and belief in this, what's happening at Bozzetto going forward. Kognitiv is something that many shareholders have written off for dead more than once. It's become one of the more exciting holdings we have, and I think you're gonna be blown away by what they're doing and how they're doing it. They went from a company burning, you know, CAD 50 million a year in cash to a company that's on the verge of profitability, and the phone has started ringing with potential acquirers. It's a much different time than it was a couple of years ago.
Tim and his team have done an incredible job, our new CEO there and CFO, sitting here as well, Julia. Fantastic job turning this company around. You'll hear from them as well. Capital A, we touched on. We own a little under 3% of that holding. Stock is hitting new highs, the business is hitting new highs. We did that deal alongside management. They put up a lot of the money with us, and so they put their money where their mouth is, and that's paying off, and we were right to make that bet. Clear Media, fantastic business. It was difficult timing for us because we invested at the depths of COVID, and we thought we were geniuses in terms of the timing.
We didn't know that they were going to shut the country for another two years for zero COVID, so that's been a delayed outcome. We feel the same level of confidence we felt before. In some ways, they've strengthened the company during this period, as did a lot of companies that endured pain, like even Capital A. At the depths of COVID, they renegotiated leases, they shed different types of burdensome financial elements that are akin to kind of a prepackaged bankruptcy without having to do that. Clear Media has renegotiated leases. They've shut down unprofitable panels, but we basically have a partnership there with the leading outdoor advertising firm in the world, JCDecaux, Jack Ma's company, Ant Financial, who's obviously strong ties in China and in Asia, and the Chinese government themselves are our partners.
So this is something that is going to become a very exciting investment. They're gonna digitize these panels, and it's gonna go from, you know, kind of the 10x multiple that we thought it was due. We paid 5x normalized EBITDA when we bought it, to a higher multiple kind of sexy tech play that is backed by some of the top people in the area. We think has a strong likelihood of being an IPO on the A-share market within a couple of years. And TradeX is doing a lot of unique things. You're gonna hear from them today. They had a couple of missteps along the way, hiccups as they grew too fast, acquired too much inventory.
They've spent the last six months refocusing their model into what it is today, which is, which is an inventory-free match. What they really should have been doing originally, frankly, which is just matching buyers and sellers into very unique trade corridors that no one else is doing this. So, and they're on the verge of some significant transactions that I think you'll all be excited about. We've, as I mentioned, we've been strengthening our governance. We added three new board members. Two, Kristen is sitting in front of us. She's fantastic. She was the head of IR at BlackRock, and, and she's been a great addition to our board. Linda's fantastic, specializing in international finance, and Tom recently joined, just a, a fantastic all-around operator, and board member. So we're, we're strengthening our board.
We continue to actively do so. There'll be more news to come on this front, and we're really excited about the changes that are happening at the board level as well. So we're gonna touch on these in different slides, but we have a disciplined investment criteria. You know, we treat the money like it's our own. We're very careful about what we buy and how we invest. We're very opportunistic. You're gonna hear that every investment we've made has been, would be difficult for a large entity to do. For example, when we bought Cortland, there were three other suitors, large industry players that were pursuing them. We met them, and 30 days later, we closed all cash. And before the competitors knew what had happened, we owned it.
So, you know, it's very difficult for anyone to be that nimble and quick, but that's the way we are. We're, you know, a team of three people, and we, with the help of Paladin, who's our partner on these transactions, and Eric Hauser, who's here, who's done incredible, incredible work on the M&A side. And, we're, we're grabbing these companies before people can, you know, finish their diligence. We've, we get in there, we dive in, we spend 20-hour days, and, and we're very opportunistic in, in the things we do. And we're also, you know, brave when people are scared. You know, when we bought Bozzetto, their fund was shutting down. Chequers had owned them, and they had to auction that, that, company, and the world ended.
You know, the debt markets went crazy, raw materials markets skyrocketed, the supply chain was in disarray, and we said, "Perfect, let's, let's go." And we went in, and we, we bought it. We paid... You know, we didn't even have a, a debt contingency. We went in, we committed all cash, and we bought that company, and by the time we had closed, things had already started to normalize. And I can assure you right now that if Bozzetto was for sale today, they would be getting a much higher price than we paid. We have an effective portfolio strategy. We'll get into more detail about that today, but obviously, the proof is in the pudding. And we have a lot of structural advantages. Our company is a holding company structure now.
We have significant tax losses, both operating and capital losses. Just for those of you that may not know what that is, operating losses shelter income from our companies, and our capital losses shelter any gains we make in the portfolio. Anywhere in the world, if we sell, you know, something, we will shelter with those capital losses. A good example is PLM. Last year, we burnt 130 million of our losses to make that a tax-free transaction. Had we not done that, shareholders would have paid taxes on $130 million, which is a significant amount of money. This is just kind of the disciplined criteria that we follow. Companies have to have durable economic advantages. We wanna make sure that they've survived full economic cycles.
We want a long track record of that, and we have that in both of the companies we just acquired. We want strong management teams. It's. We're not here to run the companies. We help in every way we can, but we really want a management team that is both capable of running the company, is aligned with us in terms of ownership stakes, upside in the business, and obviously, that we trust. We have a lot of growth opportunities at all these companies, both organic and M&A. And you can only do so much organically, but we have seen these companies transform via M&A, and we're gonna continue to focus on what is a very fragmented industry for Tufropes. You know, we're the second-largest player with 5% of the business.
The largest player has 20%, so it's a highly fragmented business, a lot of accretive acquisitions out there. Bozzetto has done incredibly well in the past by doing smart M&A, and this deal that we are doing now has been long in the working, but it is transformative. To allow them to sell into new markets, especially the Americas, is a game changer for them. And obviously, they agreed because they wrote checks personally for as much as they could. They wanted to invest more, honestly, but you know, we capped it at 6%. We have a permanent capital approach. We don't have an artificial timeline. We don't have any gun to our head. We have no debt maturities. We are...
You know, that permanent capital ability is a huge benefit because, for example, if Chequers could have waited a year instead of sold Bozzetto when they did, they probably would have gotten two or three turns higher in terms of the multiple that they got. And there would have been a lot more buyers because they could have waited till the smoke had cleared. So that's very important, that you can be patient, when you wanna be. We invest globally. You know, there's a lot of opportunities out there. You never know where they're gonna come from. You know, we thought originally we'd be buying in the U.S. and Canada, and we wound up originally buying a company that was primarily based in India and then one in Italy. Did not anticipate that, but those were where the opportunities arose.
We utilized tax losses wherever possible. In the case of Tufropes, we immediately, as I mentioned, redomiciled in Canada, utilizing them there. Bozzetto, we don't use any tax losses other than sheltering gains there with our capital losses, and that's because we had to weigh, you know, is it better to wait for a company that could utilize these or take advantage of an opportunity for such a discounted price of such a great company? And it weighed heavily towards take the opportunity and buy Bozzetto, which we did. You can see here that Bozzetto and Tufropes and Cortland both check all the boxes. Cortland, as I mentioned, is the first acquisition we did. It's accretive. We paid about CAD 26 million. It allows a lot of opportunities for both companies to cross-sell.
The first day that we introduced these companies, and we had a town hall, the first question I got was from a salesman at Cortland saying, you know, "Can I sell these 2,000 products to my, to my, my customers?" And the answer, obviously, is yes, and vice versa. So there's a tremendous. You're gonna hear from both these companies, and you're gonna hear tremendous opportunities that are there. This is a textbook acquisition. It's a really exciting one, and we've already seen the fruits of that here as we speak, and as you'll hear about. We're opportunistic, and we look at everything as day one. What's the best place to put our money today? Is it in a new acquisition? Is it a tuck-in? Is it a buyback?
Right now, we're seeing the best opportunities in our tuck-ons, but we remain committed to buybacks, always have. We bought back over 45% of our stock over the past few years, so it's something that we obviously are committed to. But also, you know, long-term cash flow and value creation for our shareholders is, you know, the most important thing and most likely the biggest creator of value. But we will continue to aggressively buy back our shares when we can. As I mentioned, we've repurchased over 45% of our stock. We utilize the NCIB, which allows us kind of a more nimble and aggressive targeted way to repurchase shares.
In the event that we fully tap that, we would utilize other types of things like a SIB, Substantial Issuer Bid, things like that. So on the longer term, and, you know, hopefully not that long a term, once the smoke clears, and we're confident and shareholders see the cash flows that are coming through on a consistent basis, we intend to start a longer-term regular dividend. So that's something that is on the list as well, and I think will help narrow the gap also between our share price and our NAV. So you know, one of the things you're gonna hear today is not just about our companies, but how do we plan on narrowing that gap?
You know, it's unfortunate, but it is the way the world is, that people, for some reason, you know, don't wanna buy a stock that's low. They think something's wrong with it. You know, they prefer to pay for stocks that are hitting highs, and it just makes them feel better. But obviously, it should be the opposite, but I think by the end of today, you realize that there is not only nothing wrong, but our stock is trading at a price that, that is just inexplicably low. I mentioned we focus on businesses with proven track records. We, we're not gonna hold these forever. We know that, that shareholders want us to monetize things, and we will. I would say, you know, we share a similar view.
Private equity has three to five years, is kind of the likely outcome for some of these larger investments. We are focused on growing these as quickly as we can. And like I said, we're focused on making two, three, four, or five times our money on these. And when you do the math on the equity with some debt on them, that's how you get, you know, a stock that's closer to CAD 30 than CAD 3, and that's what we're focusing on. As I mentioned, we're prioritizing liquidity events at the minority holdings. So, as companies mature and get to the point where we think we can get really good prices for them, we will, and you'll see that cash reinvested into the larger stakes and into things like buybacks.
We've generated over CAD 1.3 billion in the past few years from legacy positions. And we have, you know, reinvested a lot of that capital, whether it be through acquisitions or buybacks, and we should expect to see more in the coming year or two, especially from our minority stakes. Each investment we make is a ring-fenced entity, so, you know, if you had a disaster at one of the subs, it wouldn't reach the holding company. We only put debt at the subsidiary level, so, each entity borrows money, and again, that's secured just by the entity itself and doesn't reach beyond that. We're conservative with leverage.
You know, our target's usually 3, maybe at most 4 times, but we target 3, three times, and if we went higher, it would be really for just, very accretive opportunities and, things that we, we'd be confident would not put that, entity in jeopardy. We invest in companies with strong management teams. We don't wanna run these companies, but we do provide regular, assistance to them. We, at least weekly, talk to all the management teams. We get reports back, not to be intrusive, but to, be productive and, and helpful. We are constantly providing strategic oversight and guidance. We, you know, make sure that, that everything's heading in the right direction. We are very involved in capital allocation decisions, whether it's direct or indirect, it's our money, so...
It's your shareholders' money, so we make sure that the money is spent on the right thing and, and something that's gonna provide the best return for shareholders. We provide access to new opportunities in combination with our partner, Paladin. We have found many M&A opportunities. Eric at Paladin here has himself brought us Cortland. This was an opportunity we would not have heard of. It wasn't for sale. It wasn't public. It was sold from a public company that was quietly trying to unload it, as I mentioned, with numerous competitors coming after it. So we provide these opportunities, and we make sure that the companies are aligned with us, and we're not gonna jam something down their throat they disagree with. But we have a lot of...
A laundry list for each company of targets, and you're gonna see more of the same going forward. We provide access to capital, which is very important when, for example, with Cortland, to close in 30 days and to wire that money in and not have to go to a bank or to raise debt or to go to 32 different committees. We were done with that within 30 days, wired, closed, and made an acquisition that we very quickly heard from other people, "Damn, we wanted that. I can't believe you guys got that." You know, great company. So that, that's an important thing to have access to. And we always track, do efficient tax structuring.
So whether it's the way we structure it, in terms of tax treaties or things like that, or, making sure that we can utilize our NOLs, and always, obviously, our capital losses. We talked a little about this, but we are a permanent capital vehicle. No debt at the holdco level. We have perpetual, perpetual preferred, equity, and that's important, especially nowadays as, as rates skyrocket, because it's not just about the rate you're paying, it's about when the money's due, and the money's never due for us. So that's a, a very rare, thing to have. It's valuable. It's why we don't buy them back, because there's no due date, and that pressure can cause you to make, business decisions that could be, could be wrong.
It could force you to prematurely do things to anticipate those due dates. So it's really nice not to have those. A very valuable asset for Aimia. And as I mentioned, we have very sizable tax losses, so we're gonna be sheltering a lot of our income on both operating and the capital side. Over CAD 660 million remain. There's CAD 130 million we used last year to repatriate the PLM assets, very valuable for our shareholders, and you should see more of that in the future as well. So we ask ourselves, you know, what are the challenges we're facing? You know, we're still in the early stages of our transformation.
As much as, you know, I get complaints all day about the stock price, I try to remind people that we just sold PLM, you know, late last year and got the cash. We just made our first acquisitions a few months ago and, you know, it's a tough market for, you know, for value stocks in general. I mean, you can point fingers all over the place, but we just have to keep continuing to execute on our strategy, and I think the stock price will always follow the value one way or another. It's a question of when and how. I've, I can't tell you how many times I've suffered in stocks that I knew were worth triple what they were trading at. Sometimes it happens in a week, sometimes it happens in a month, sometimes you have to wait three years.
But when the value comes, when the value is there, well, you'll get the stock price. So we're just gonna continue to execute, and we're not, we're not just assuming that the stock will follow. We're doing everything we can to proactively help it follow. But it's most important that we execute on the strategy. People have said it's difficult to value our holdings, so, you know, you're gonna hear a lot today from companies, more than you've ever heard before, especially from our minority stakes. But we're trying to provide you with more KPIs and details for those companies, so you can value them.
It's very important in terms of our stock price, that you can buy the stock knowing without question what it's worth, at least in your mind, and be able to value it, because it's, you know, both difficult and annoying to just hear it from me all the time. So today, it's gonna be refreshing to hear from CEOs and CFOs directly, and hopefully, that'll help you feel the level of confidence that we feel at the company and about these holdings. We are trying. You know, we're always aligned with shareholders. I mean, we, we've done nothing but insider buy stock, and our bulk of our liquid net worths are in the stock, and we obviously are aligned there. But we have to get new investors in the stock. You know, it doesn't take a lot.
Our stock is relatively illiquid, especially during good times when people are trying to buy. But, you know, at the bottom is usually when the most supply is available. Again, it's the way the world is. And so we are actively recruiting and getting new investors in the stock, and I think you'll see the results of that in the pretty near term. I also think that once you see somebody decide, you know, it could be somebody in this room that says, "I want to buy a few million shares," and that's all it takes. And next thing you know, people are fighting over, you know, stock, and there's nothing offered, and instead of CAD 3, you're at CAD 5, and it's a whole different ballgame.
So we think that will happen, and we're doing everything we can to help that happen. And then we're trying to help in terms of the liquidity of the shares. We're right now listed on the TSX, and we're on the pink sheets in the US. In the US, we intend to ultimately wind up with a dual listing, but because of the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and a lot of complexities there with our new operating businesses, we are in late stage approval process to uplist to the OTCQB. So it's a step up, a significant step up from the pink sheets, but it's a stepping stone towards a dual listing. These are, you know, as I mentioned, our companies here, and I just...
As though we've touched on them all, and I want you to hear from them directly. I wanted to just give you just a short little blurb on how, on each of these things and how we got them. You know, Tufropes and Cortland, you know, we acquired. Tufropes wasn't for sale. It was a company that our partner, Paladin, had nurtured a relationship for a few years. They were talking about buying them at 14x EBITDA. The lead competitor, Garware, trades at 25x EBITDA, and we wound up getting it for a little under 10x. But again, that never hit the market. This wasn't an auction. This wasn't something that other private equity firms ever got to see.
So, you know, that's the kind of thing that we can opportunistically do, others can't. Bozzetto, as I mentioned, was, you know, and was gonna be an auction. They put it off because of what was happening in the markets. We swept in and bought that. And it was just an incredible opportunity at the right place, at the right time, the right business. An incredible management team that you'll hear from as well. Kognitiv, you know, people have been very skeptical on Kognitiv, and it's not really their fault, because we had merged two significant cash burning loyalty companies into them when they started, and that required a lot of right-sizing, and it required a lot of work to get to where they are today. That wasn't entirely- they're doing.
So they've done an incredible job of getting there, and, you know, from a huge cash burner to something that's on the verge of profitability with new products, AI powered, and not just saying that to use the, the buzzword AI, they really are doing incredible things there, and you'll hear how it works and, and what they're doing. But that's something that, very few people, give any value to, and I think, that's a big mistake. Capital A, we think it's worth significantly more than it's trading at, but it is, rising. This is the kind of holding that if you had to gauge what would be sold first, this is kind of in the, in the front, just because we're not, you know, long-term investors in airlines. This is a unique situation. It's a holding company.
It's not just an airline. Tony Fernandes is a fantastic CEO, who put his money where his mouth is, put up 30% of the money personally, when we did the rights offering. So this is, it's an opportunistic, unique situation, and it's a holding that we think is gonna yield even more gains for us than we've already achieved. And also, this will be a tax-free opportunity because we will be selling and utilizing our capital losses when we sell it. Clear Media is, you know, delayed. I think that it's. We're starting to see improvement now. You'll see some, although they're not here, they did provide us with a video, and you're gonna hear some of the financial statistics and how we're starting to see things turn around there.
You know, it is tied to the Chinese economy, so we're kind of prisoner to that, but I wouldn't bet against them or the country, and or I wouldn't bet against this, this, investor group. So we think this is gonna be a great outcome for Aimia, and it's something that is, again, being discounted, to numbers that don't make any sense. TradeX, you're gonna hear from as well. They have refocused their model, and they're doing a lot of exciting things, and we think they're on the verge of some significant developments that will be game changers for them, and you'll hear a little bit from them about that as well. Now, I want you guys to hear from the companies themselves. So Mike, wanna come up and introduce them? Thank you.
Great. Thanks so much, Phil. Good morning, everyone. My name is Michael Lehmann. I'm President of Aimia. Welcome to our 2023 Investor Day, and thank you so much for your interest in Aimia. We're now gonna start hearing from the management teams from our portfolio manage, portfolio company, so let's get to it. First up is Kognitiv, who's going to tell us about how they inspire loyalty with world-class global brands. I'd like to welcome Tim Sullivan, Jisun Hahn, and Julia Wehmeyer. Welcome, everyone.
Good morning. Kognitiv provides innovative software and services to design, build, and manage loyalty. The work that we do with global brands, some of them including Nordstrom, PetSmart, HSBC, Avis Rental Car, means that many of you have interacted with our technology already. We design and manage some of the best loyalty programs on the planet. And our technology is underpinned by powerful artificial intelligence and machine learning models that drive optimization and automation. They remove the complexity of managing large global programs that are multi-region, multi-partner, multi-currency. The brands we work with continue to partner with us year after year after year because we're able to drive value for them. What we bring to them is not a quick-hit revenue promotion.
We drive customer lifetime value over many years for them, and, and because of that, many of our brands that we work with are recognized as leaders in their industry. Some highlights on the company, where our addressable market is global and it's growing, forecast to reach $23 billion over the next few years. We have proven product-market fit. We have a strong foothold in that market with the global brands that we work with, with incredibly high retention rates, 100% renewal rate in the first half of 2023, which means our core product is sticky. They also stick around a long time. Once we get in and we start adding value, they continue to re-renew year after year. Our average tenure of our customers is over nine years.
So we have a very strong foundation to build upon, and now that we're delivering on an innovative AI machine learning product roadmap, it's unlocking incredible growth opportunities, both from our current customer base as we upsell and expand our footprint with them, but also attracting new logos into the business. And all of this is being managed by a world-class, highly experienced executive management team, and it's starting to have an impact. We've had incredible progress in 2023, as Phil mentioned. In Q2, we closed with $20.12 million in revenue, and that contributed to our $42 million recurring revenue run rate and growing. And with a new opportunity sales pipeline of $23 million, we will continue to add to that run rate in the coming quarters.
On the cost efficiency side of the business, we've made incredible progress with a 48% improvement year- over- year of our EBITDA, and an incredible 12-point increase in our gross margin. We're a global company. We have a global footprint. We're headquartered here in Toronto, Canada. We have operations in North America, EMEA, and APAC, and we're global because our customers are global. They demand a loyalty provider that can provide global solutions, and this is just a handful of an incredible 70-plus blue chip global brands that we work with. They work with us because we're very good at what we do, and we've been doing it for a while. We know our stuff, but they trust us because we can deliver advanced loyalty at scale.
We're currently serving over 28,000 stores and locations with 230 million members, and the advanced technology that we provide for customer segmentation and intelligence that drives highly personalized experiences to those 230 million members equates to a $20 billion revenue impact for our customers each year. And that's one of the reasons why they're recognized as leaders in their industry. Two of our longtime customers, Nordstrom and PetSmart, were named the best loyalty programs in America by Newsweek in 2023. I'm relatively new to this role. I'm just finishing up my ninth month in the CEO role at Kognitiv, and I was attracted to this opportunity for a number of reasons. The company is filled with very talented, committed people, a few who you're gonna meet in just a moment.
We have great product market fit. We have a blue chip customer base with enviable renewal rates. But as importantly, based on my background and my experience, I believe that I could add value, I could have an impact here. I've been in technology for my full career, almost three decades. The past 20 years, I've been focused on B2B enterprise SaaS in sales and marketing leadership roles, and this company had all this great foundational work. It really needed to get back to growth.
In my last role, when I joined the C-suite as CRO, over a three-year period, I, my team and I increased our annual recurring revenue by 80%, which was instrumental in attracting growth private equity to the business, and a majority takeover, at which point I became CEO of the company, and over the next three years, we proceeded to double the revenue, both through organic growth and strategic mergers and acquisitions. So very similar to the trajectory that Kognitiv is on, and, I felt by taking this role, I could have a real impact at the company. Now, all of those results were only made possible by having an incredibly strong executive management team.
I believe my probably number one job as CEO is to make sure that we have the right people in the right seats to execute on our plan, and we have an incredible executive management team, world-class, decades of experience at many of the leading companies in our space, and everybody's 100% focused on delivering cost efficiencies, driving EBITDA margin expansion, and most importantly, profitable revenue growth. When I started in January, we got this team together, and we got very focused on how do we win and what do we do best, and that is to deliver innovative software and services to design, build, and manage loyalty, full stop. Anything that didn't fit that vision, we've decided we're not gonna do, and we've proceeded to take that approach.
It resulted in the divestiture of legacy assets, the rationalizing and right sizing of our cost structure, the implementation of a SaaS operating model, software as a service operating model, from what was traditionally an agency model at the company. But as importantly, also protecting our mission-critical investments in our AI machine learning-driven product roadmap and in rebuilding our commercial team and our go-to-market acceleration, so we could get the company back to growth. That all started with the recruiting and hiring of an incredible Chief Revenue Officer named John Hott. He started with us in May, 20 years experience in the industry, spent a decade at Salesforce selling marketing cloud and their data management platform. Most recently, he was at a customer data management platform company named Amperity. Incredible guy.
Within 30 days of starting, he had the full North American teams fully staffed with high-performance sellers who followed him to Kognitiv because he'd worked with them before. We also brought over, Dena Escobedo to manage our global account management team, and she's done an incredible job of focusing that team on revenue retention and expansion as she's transformed our account management organization. These folks are having an impact already. In Q3 alone, we closed a global luxury automobile manufacturer on our entire platform, and we were able to sign on a current customer and a new logo customer to our, our first launched AI-driven product, Pulse, which you're gonna hear about more in just a minute. At the same time, we're focused on protecting our base and expanding our base. 100% renewal rate in the first half of 2023.
These were multi-year renewals with price increases, and we have 15 active opportunities within our base to upsell to our AI-native Kognitiv Pulse product. I'm also really happy to announce that today we are launching the next product in that suite. It's called Ignite, again, another AI-native product, and that will just continue to expand our upsell, cross-sell opportunity within our amazing customer base. So without further ado, I'm gonna turn it over to Jisun Hahn. She's our Chief Strategy Officer. She's gonna take a few minutes and take you deeper into our platform and why we're so excited about it and why it's resonating with our customers and with our target market. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Tim. So excited to be here. I'm gonna take a few minutes right now and talk about the broader market in which we operate, which is essentially the loyalty management market. What's interesting about this industry, now, it's been around for a really long time. However, there's a ton of growth and opportunity anticipated within the sector. If you really sort of, you know, think about why that is, it's actually quite simple, right? Brands are always trying to find ways to connect with customers, and oftentimes, when brands are looking for ways to connect with customers, what do they look for? They look for loyalty solutions, and essentially, that's what we do. We deliver loyalty solutions. What's interesting, however, is I think we're at a very important inflection point within loyalty.
For those of you who've been operating in this market, you will know, right? There's a ton of noise in terms of what's worked in the past, no longer works for the future. I think we've been in a very privileged position because we've had a front seat in being able to observe what these challenges are. You know, we strongly feel that we are in a position to capitalize on the growth that is gonna happen within the sector, because we have a platform, and I'm gonna take you through that shortly, that can really solve for the challenges that the market is actually facing, including a lot of our clients. Bottom line, you know, we feel very strongly at Kognitiv that the loyalty market, the way it's operated, has to evolve.
What we mean by that is it can no longer just be about delivering a loyalty program. It has to be about driving loyalty outcomes. I'm gonna take you through exactly what we mean. Before I go a little bit deeper into our suite of products and services and our platform, I think it's important to just, you know, to understand the why we exist. We exist because we're essentially here to help brands build deeper relationships with their customers. The how we do that is very simple, and Tim mentioned this, and that's by delivering software and services to design, build, and manage loyalty. That is delivered through one singular platform with a suite of software and enablers across three core categories: advanced loyalty, data activation, and partner collaboration.
Now, for those of you who may not be as intimate around the, you know, how you manage a loyalty program or the inner workings of how you design and build one, I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Starbucks Rewards program, right? And, you know, many of you would have... You know, every day you wake up, and you commute to the office, you get your grande Americano, you earn a few stars, and eventually, you have enough to be able to redeem for a free one. That is essentially the rules of engagement that you set when you manage a program, and one of our solutions under advanced loyalty does just that. It delivers on a loyalty management program itself.
Imagine, if you will, that program owner who is responsible for delivering that program also has, at her fingertips, a real-time insights and activation tool that can tell her that customer A, let's call him Stuart, who used to go into Starbucks every single day and buy his grande Americano with a shot of hazelnut, suddenly decided, "You know what? I need to cut back on caffeine. Like, this is not working for me. I gotta go decaf." Historically, what a marketer would do, they would work with their data teams, they would negotiate getting the data file pulled. By the time they discovered what that key insight was, that Stuart's no longer drinking grande Americanos, by the time that marketer got organized and send out those communications, Stuart realized he made a huge mistake.
He needs caffeine in his life, and now he's back to drinking grande Americanos and wondering, "Why is Starbucks sending me these offers for herbal teas? Makes no sense. I love my caffeine." This is what we have to change, and this is what we mean by redefining loyalty, right? It's going beyond just delivering on these programs, but giving the marketers the tools to understand when these consumer behaviors are shifting, and not just understand how they're shifting, but how the needs are gonna shift in the future. Enabling all of this is the middle layer in our platform, which is Kognition, our artificial intelligence and machine learning engine, as well as our data hub. Now, this is a really important component of our platform. It's the brains, if you will, behind our products.
And a lot of organizations are talking about, you know, having AI as a part of what they do. It is embedded in what we do, and that is why our products are AI native, as Tim had mentioned. And lastly, you know, for our clients that need a little bit of extra support, we also have services that help bring some of our technology solutions to life.... I'm gonna take a second and just dive a little bit deeper into the platform. We have the first all-in-one omni-audience, omni-channel loyalty platform. I'm gonna unpack that a little bit. When we say omni-audience, really what that means is all of our tools help our clients go beyond speaking to their best. A lot of brands are really good at that. When it's very easy to identify your best customers, it's very easy just to speak to them.
Our tools help our clients understand who else to prioritize. Might be harder to find them, but the insights will help them identify where to go. From an omni-channel standpoint, what we're talking about is helping our clients not just activate on those insights with their, within their own channels, like email and mobile, but to go beyond their own walls, to paid channels like social. We talked a little bit about loyalty management software. The other product that Tim had alluded to that we're really excited to demo for you this afternoon, so hopefully I'll, I'll see you at the booth later on today, is Kognitiv Pulse. This is a real-time insights and activation tool that we launched earlier this year.
We're really excited about this product, and we really want to spotlight this for you today because this is a great testament to how we listen to not just what our clients are struggling with, but what we know the market is struggling with. You know, our clients have been saying to us, and, you know, we also have a ton of partners within the industry that speak to brands all the time, and the common statement or the struggle is: "Look, we have a ton of data, we have many data sources across the organization, but we have no idea how to harvest it in one place, and we have no idea how to leverage it for the right insights to deliver personalized experiences. I am struggling with not just understanding where customers are today and what they're doing, but how those behavior changes shift over time.
I can't predict how much revenue is actually at risk if I don't understand how behavior is gonna change." Most importantly, and this is something that I've heard for probably the better part of a decade, is, "It's costing me too much to acquire new customers, and I don't really know where to focus." That's why we created Kognitiv Pulse. This tool is self-serve. We put it in the hands of marketers. They can monitor the health of their customer base, they can track how it changes over time, and this is the part that I'm really excited about. It actually predicts where the customer is gonna go next.
This essentially uncovers opportunities, identifies risks, and this is also the part that I'm very excited about, is we then link back those insights to what you should do with those insights and link it back to the predefined business outcomes. Again, ultimately, what this does is it allows a lot of clients to go from incomplete data sets to daily updated records, to rule-based decisioning, to customer-level modeling, and to go from generic reporting to prescriptive, actionable insights. Our new clients can be up and running within 7 days, and they're generating intelligence at their fingertips within 24 hours. You know, what we're also excited about with this product is it allows marketers to do what they love to do best, right? Be creative, be strategic, drive innovation. Bottom line, for organizations, it means an increase in revenue, improving customer lifetime value, and minimizing churn.
So again, please join me this afternoon, and I will show you the product in action. At this point, I would love to welcome our CFO, Julia Wehmeyer, and she's gonna take you through our financials.
Thank you, Jisun. This is very exciting. I'll take you through our financials. So over the last 18 months, as Tim alluded to it, we're focused on the right sizing of our organization, cost containment, efficiencies, and process simplification. One of the most important initiatives was divestiture of our non-core assets, being travel operations and hotel technology businesses. I'm pleased to say that both of these deals closed earlier this year, first one in Q2 and the second one just early in Q3. The divestiture of these assets generated immediate cash proceeds of over $9 million. It cut our EBITDA by three million and reduced our headcount by a hundred employees.
All the results that you see on screen, that I'll present today, are on continuing basis and do not include the results of our divested assets. So we also focused on stabilizing our revenue from the existing customers. We retained majority of our customers and renewed contracts for our top two clients, both large financial institutions, each on a three-year contract. We signed another large three-year deal with a leading cannabis business as well. So recurring revenue represents approximately 90% of our total revenues. It includes revenue from our SaaS product, enterprise customers, and professional services on long-term contracts. A strategic focus, as both Jisun and Tim talked about earlier, is on growing SaaS ARR, ARR.
Our projections have SaaS at over 75% of total revenues in 2025, with our total recurring revenues at over 95% in 2025. So in addition to the divestitures, we executed on a number of right sizing initiatives, as I mentioned. On a continuing basis, we cut over 20% in our adjusted operating expenses year-over-year in the first half of this year. With that, in Q2, our adjusted EBITDA was 48% better than the same time last year, and we're targeting profitability by the end of the year. By 2025, we're targeting sustainable EBITDA margin of 15%-20%, based on, you know, revenue growth and continuous improvement in our operating efficiencies.
Rule of 40 is a goal for long-term for our business, with revenue growth of 25% and EBITDA margins of 15%-20%. This year is a year of rebuild and laying the foundation for us. At the beginning of the year, we made a decision to take advantage of a lower cost region in Sri Lanka and relocate some of our IT services to Sri Lanka. We set up a new center of excellence there, and we're now well on our way to substantial savings in IT costs. We have already realized $2.9 million in the first six months of the year in savings, and are targeting $7 million in savings for the full year. As a result of this, we've improved our gross margins considerably.
Our adjusted gross margin in Q2 was 62%, which is 12 points better than the same time last year. For the full year, we're targeting 65% in adjusted gross margin. Over the next couple of years, as our revenue mix shifts to more SaaS ARR with higher margins, we're going to expand our margin to 70%. As I mentioned earlier, we made significant progress in our cost structure in the last eighteen months, and I mentioned that our OpEx was already 20% better year-over-year. Aside from relocation of IT services, we also simplified our processes and carried out a number of organizational structural changes. All of this resulted in significant savings to our operating model.
We're estimating our adjusted OpEx to be 85% of revenue by the end of this year. And it's estimated to fall to 55% of revenues by 2025 on the significant progress of all of these improvements over the last 3 years. This is all down from 120% just a year ago. So all of this is key to our goal of Rule of 40 by 2025 and beyond. So in summary, we've made a number of foundational accomplishments with substantial savings in our cost structure and headcount this year. We've completed the sale of our non-core assets. We've moved our IT services to Sri Lanka, which added double-digit points to our gross margin so far.
We have a new CRO and commercial team that are laser focused on the growing SaaS ARR. Our divestitures brought in over CAD 9 million in cash proceeds this year. However, to achieve our operating plan for the year and to achieve profitability before the end of the year, we are raising more funds. We're currently holding a capital raise for newly created B1 preference shares. So far in the process, we've raised over CAD 4.5 million in cash and converted over CAD 15 million in debentures to equity on the same valuation as the cash raise. These pref B shares are attractively priced in this current market, and would be happy to provide any more information to any interested parties at a later time.
Now I'll pass it back to Tim to close us off. Thanks.
Thank you, Julia. Thank you, Jisun. So look, I think you can start to get a sense of why we're so excited about where we are with this company. We have the right team, we have the right products, we have the right plan. We know how we win, and we're laser focused on what we do best, adding value to our customer base. Being focused has allowed us to stop anything that does not meet our core vision and our focus strategy, which includes divesting of the legacy assets, but also stopping outdated processes and ways of doing business that don't align to our go-forward strategy.
That's all allowed us to rationalize and right-size our cost structure, while at the same time, most importantly, protecting the investment we made in our future, which is our artificial intelligence and machine learning-driven product roadmap, while also bringing on the right commercial team to sell those products, both into our base and into new logo expansion. All of this is happening on top of a very stable and predictable revenue retention from our blue-chip customer base, and we just grow from there. So we've never been more excited about the company. We're excited to be here today. We're proud to be a Aimia portfolio company. Wanna thank Phil and Mike and Steve for their guidance and leadership as we continue to drive Kognitiv into the future. Thank you for giving us the time to tell you a little bit more about our business.
Thanks so much, Tim, Jisun, and Julia. That was just wonderful. So we have some time for Q&A after each of our portfolio companies' presentations. So we'd like to turn to that now. I'd like to remind everybody, everybody online, if you have a question, please answer, type your question into the text box. One of the colleagues here will get it to us. And anybody with questions from the audience, please raise your hand, and one of our colleagues will bring you the microphone. Please wait for the microphone for it to get to you. The first question from online is: What does Kognitiv need to do to reach EBITDA positive by the end of this year?
Julia, you wanna answer that? Yeah.
Thank you. Look, we need to continue delivering on the initiatives that I've spoken about. There-
... all in flight, and we need to deliver IT services from Sri Lanka and, you know, organizational structure changes that are already in flight. We also have some revenue growth that's coming, that's backed by our CAD 23 million in the sales pipeline, and so largely all of that is already in flight to get to the dot positive.
Great. Thank you. We have a question from the audience.
Hi, this is Logan Schuh with Jefferies. So you guys have a pretty high renewal rate, and I was just wondering how significant are switching costs for your clients, and how does that impact your ability to win clients that are maybe on other platforms? Thank you.
Yeah, I can take that one. Thank you. Great question. Switching costs are pretty significant within our space. Once you design and roll out and are managing a global program, they're fairly complex programs, so we get in there, and we're adding value, driving those programs to expand globally. Some of these programs have tens of millions of members in them, so they're big scale. On the flip side of that, as you mentioned, so that makes it harder to come in and unseat someone. What's so brilliant about our product strategy, and we have an incredible Chief Product Officer, Anthony Wintheiser, who's driving our AI roadmap, is that we're building these lightweight, easy-to-install modular products that sit on top of our established loyalty management product. Now, we can be agnostic in that sense, so we have great expansion opportunity.
We can go into a customer... We're not coming in saying, "We have to rip and replace everything that you've already invested in." We're additive. We can come in, we play with all of the tech companies in our space. We have connections to Salesforce, Adobe, to Braze, to Shopify. We can connect to that. You don't have to take it out. We're just gonna add intelligence there. So with a lightweight, lower-cost product, it's a land and expand opportunity to come in, show value, and then continue to build that relationship over time. So when that loyalty renewal does come up in three or five years, we're in a great position to be providing more modern tech and a more modern point of view on how they should be addressing the market.
Great, thanks for that question. Next question from online: As you've spoken today about Kognitiv's innovative products, but revenue remains flat. When will you start to see an acceleration of revenue? And maybe you can talk a little bit about your pipeline.
Sure. We're seeing an acceleration of revenue now. Yes, we have been flat over the past few years. I think I mentioned in my talk, when I came into the opportunity, it's like we have this great team, we have great products, we have great customers, but we're not growing, so job number one was to get us back into a growth posture. That doesn't happen overnight. We hired a great Chief Revenue Officer. He's hired a great team. Just because you put a salesperson in a seat doesn't mean revenue flows in the next day. So we will see that continue to ramp over the next quarters, and you saw some of our forecasts for 2024.
This was really a foundational rebuilding year for us to get that team in place, which is setting us up for outsized growth in 2024.
Great. Another question online: Can we get some a bit more clarity on the capital raise? How much have you raised? I think Julia spoke to that a bit. And, has Aimia converted some of its debt to equity, and what is the valuation pre-money that you've raised?
Yeah, I mean, as Julia said, we've raised over CAD 4.5 million to date. We converted over CAD 15 million in debt. Aimia did convert some of their convertible notes in that process. Look, the shares are attractively priced in this current market. If anybody's been paying attention, it's been kind of a tough year or so for technology companies in this space. The valuation, we don't have a qualifying transaction right now, really, but based on recent comps in our space of what B2B enterprise SaaS companies are trading at in current market conditions, we kind of peg the enterprise value anywhere from CAD 125 million to CAD 175 million.
In a healthier market, as we hit profitability and our growth curve starts to have an impact, we see that going up significantly in the next 12-18 months.
Great. Thank you very much, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Kognitiv. That was terrific. Thanks for kicking it off for us. Next up is our first major acquisition of the year, global ropes and nets leader, Tufropes. I'd like to introduce Jack Wang, Stuart Janke, and Brian Pettipas. Next up.
Good morning, everyone. Hi, my name is Jack Wang, and I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Tufropes and Cortland. I'm joined by my colleagues, Brian Pettipas, who is our Chief Financial Officer, and Stuart Janke, who is our Chief Commercial Officer. We're here to present the exciting business of Tufropes and Cortland.
... Have you ever noticed the many applications of ropes and nets in our daily lives? And did you know that synthetic ropes can be stronger than steel? By the end of this presentation, you will know why the ropes and nets industry presents a fantastic opportunity for growth and investment. A quick overview of who we are. Our combined business has extensive market reach, serving over 400 customers from world-class facilities in India and North America. We boast a diverse product range, targeting applications in growing sectors such as marine and shipping, offshore energy, and fishing and aquaculture. We're well-positioned as market leaders to deliver strong financials and healthy cash flows. When we studied the industry, we found that it was fragmented with regionalized players, and we saw that an opportunity existed to create a strong global leader.
First, we acquired 5 modern, highly automated facilities in India, and then we added one of the industry's premier brand names, Cortland. Leveraging this multinational platform, we're targeting strong growth in several end markets driven by secular tailwinds. The team is working to develop innovative products and enhance processes with the aim to provide excellent value proposition with great customer service. We're confident that we will accelerate the growth and deliver attractive returns. In our Tufropes business, we have 5 highly efficient facilities certified by global accreditation bodies such as ISO and DNV. We supply world-class product to customers in over 70 countries, and as a testament, and we have a long track record of customer-driven product developments. As a testament to our capabilities, we have a large proportion of our customers have been with us for more than 10 years.
In our facilities, we have the ability to continue to grow as we have more than 30% capacity that we'll be able to leverage to customers around the world, as well as for our Cortland business. Moving on to our Cortland business, this is an opportunistic acquisition, which is a perfect fit for Tufropes, and it is consistent with Aimia's value creation strategy. We completed the acquisition in July, and we're making good progress in integrating the business. The Cortland business not only brings a leading brand renowned for technical leadership and engineering expertise, it also brings us an enthusiastic team across two manufacturing sites in the U.S. Together, Tufropes and Cortland make a fantastic combination in terms of people, product, and capabilities. Tufropes brings quality and efficiency at scale, while Cortland brings premium performance for the most demanding applications.
We are perfectly positioned for exponential growth across multiple markets globally. To provide a view of our global reach, from our headquarters here in Toronto, our senior management team oversees seven facilities in the United States and India. Our geographic spread is strategically positioned to serve customers all over the world. We have strong customer relationships across the key markets of North and South America, Europe, across Asia, and into Oceania. Our team possesses solid supply chain experience to deliver goods to every region, and we believe there is still significant share to capture in the primary markets of the Americas, Europe, and Asia. To give you a perspective on the size of the global ropes market, it is a $12 billion industry consisting of steel wire and synthetics.
Looking specifically at the global synthetic ropes market, it is a $2 billion segment consisting of standard fiber and high-performance fiber ropes. Our combined business offers the full range of synthetic products, targeting specific high-value end markets, and we are well poised to substantially accelerate growth in the years to come. So why do many customers choose synthetic ropes over traditional steel wire? Well, on the same weight basis, it is 7-9 times stronger, and it also provides improved safety and increased durability, given proper usage and inspection procedures. It also offers additional efficiencies and labor savings by being lightweight and easy to handle. All of this leading to a lower cost, lower total cost of ownership. We believe that high-performance ropes will continue to displace steel wire across a number of applications and further grow its share.
We are very well positioned as global leaders to capitalize on this trend. As part of our growth strategy, we're particularly excited to target specific end markets projected to grow significantly. In marine and shipping, rising global trade is expected to drive underlying demand. In aquaculture, increasing population and higher demand for sustainable sea, sustainable food sources are being served through fish farming. While in offshore energy, traditional oil and gas industry is pivoting to renewable energy with a lot of government support and significant investment from private sectors. With ropes and nets being used across all of these exciting sectors, we believe successful execution will accelerate the growth at Tufropes and Cortland. Now I'll hand over to Stuart to provide more details on end markets as well as the innovations.
Great, thank you, Jack. Good morning. Marine and shipping is an extremely attractive market, particularly for the combined business of Tufropes and Cortland. The industry continues to evolve, increasing cargo capacity volumes to meet the global demand. Vessels now need larger and more technically suitable high-performance ropes to safely moor the vessels, as well as maneuver them in and out of the busy ports. LNG and other fuel carriers have set the bar in terms of safety, which include detailed rope specifications as well as inspection and retirement criteria. Tufropes sells Class One ropes, along with the relevant certifications into the mooring segment of this market, and Cortland sells high-performance ropes into the tugging side of the market. What is really exciting about this combination is that we now have the combined portfolio of certifications and track record to expand the business in this market.
The next exciting market for us is within the offshore energy segment and focuses on offshore wind. The global momentum focused on developing floating offshore wind has certainly picked up over the last several years. To meet global targets for renewable energy generation, floating wind has to move to deeper waters for larger scale. Since these structures will be floating instead of fixed to the sea floor, it presents significant opportunities for us. Synthetic products will be needed to tow and transport the structures to the field. Ropes will also be needed to assemble the structures onshore, offshore, or in place. Ropes will also be needed to secure the power cables from the turbines that run down to the sea floor to the power substations. And here's where the opportunity really starts to get big.
Each of these structures are gonna be, need to be moored to the sea floor, which presents a very large opportunity for synthetic mooring ropes. All of these applications will be able to utilize Cortland's experience in both oil and gas and offshore wind, along with Tufropes providing scale and access to global markets, which was previously difficult for Cortland to serve. To give a sense of the scale of the mooring line opportunity, what this would look like to achieve 46 gigawatts of electricity by 2035.
If we use an estimated water depth or an average water depth of about 60 meters for each wind turbine, then we estimate the number and size of high-performance mooring ropes that would be required for each of these turbines, we get a total volume of about 4.6 million meters of rope that would be needed to moor these turbines, which has a market value of $140 million-$180 million. This is another opportunity to leverage Tufropes's scale and Cortland's experience to capture this market share, not only with the mooring lines, but all of the ancillary synthetic products that will be required for this market.
In addition, we're fortunate enough to have a board member who has extensive mooring experience in the oil and gas industry. He's now currently the CEO of a floating wind technology company and is helping us navigate entrance into this really exciting market. Turning from transportation and energy, we now look to aquaculture and sustainable food supply that's gonna be needed to meet the growing demand. Clearly, global consumption of fish is growing. Everywhere you look, you see salmon in restaurants, at the grocery stores, whether it's lox, smoked salmon, canned salmon or sushi. Even though fish farming has been around for a while, technology continues to adapt to overcome the challenges associated with this activity to improve both fish quality and output. For us, improvements in netting are related to materials and constructions.
These improvements help the cages withstand the changing ocean conditions of both above and below the sea surface, particularly these cages go deeper. High-performance fibers used in the nets help to repel predators and other damaging organisms, as well as protect the fish and minimize damage to the fish as they come into contact with the nets. Looking at the graphic here, you can see this will give you a good idea of how much of our product goes into a typical aquaculture cage. From the suspension ropes, to the mooring ropes, to the sea lice nets, as well as the bird nets, each one of these nets has a specific function, which requires different materials and different constructions.
Bringing in the use of high-performance materials in combination with new partners and channels into this market, provide great opportunities to both double revenues and allow for EBITDA expansion. As we look at the market to achieve this growth, we're gonna be focusing our areas in the areas where high volume aquaculture markets are. These are gonna include the major salmon-producing countries of Norway, Scotland, Chile, and Canada, which represent over 85% of the global salmon production. In addition, we'll be focusing our areas in the Mediterranean region, where most fish are either gonna be sea bream or sea bass, and this is also a market that we currently serve with our existing netting products.
We're well known in the industry for our quality and service, and are working on opportunities to improve our position, taking advantage of the fragmentation that exists in the market. We're already in discussions to establish partnerships with multiple system integrators. These are gonna be companies who design and make the complete cage systems for their own farms or sell them to other farmers. We are looking to execute this, leveraging regional resources as well as the technical capabilities of the newly combined businesses. Moving from markets to innovation and what this means for the combined business. Along with a 40-year history, Cortland brings an extremely experienced technical team with a deep understanding of fiber technology, as well as end user applications.
When it comes to high performance products, we've developed a Plasma 12x12 high performance rope, which utilizes a fairly unique manufacturing process. This is easily identifiable by our purple color and has set industry standards for high performance ropes. We are also the only company to have patented a rope, which has overcome the challenges of switching from steel to synthetic, and is operating in 3,000 meters of water depth on a regular basis. This rope has been actively used in Brazil, allowing them to be able to do deep water construction for over 10 years. Part of our capability also lies in designing hooks and other hardware that interface well with our synthetic products. This allows us to provide highly technical solutions, that allow our customers to overcome unique operational challenges, particularly subsea.
Accurately determining the condition of a synthetic rope has been the single most sought after technology for end users in applications ranging from utility constructions to vessel mooring. This can be achieved through multiple means, which include digital sensors, which monitor both the elongation and/or compression, and relay data back to the end users, indicating usage and wear. In addition, proprietary inspection technology using cameras, physical inspections, testing, help develop AI that provides information on a rope's condition and make sure the information is easily accessible via applications or other technical interfaces. Our teams are working to help implement this technology together with some of our partners. In addition, Cortland has developed IP that accurately determines the health of a high performance rope at any point in its length, and it can be done in real time.
This is the type of technical capability that, with investment, scale, and expanded access to markets, has the potential to provide significant organic growth in our targeted markets. Jack?
Thanks, Stuart. All of the aforementioned strengths come together to provide strong value proposition. In parallel with elevating the customer experience above our competition, we are well poised for growth, both organically and strategically in this fragmented industry. Turning to financials, we have successfully integrated the Tufropes business. Tufropes has a long history of stable profitability and demonstrated resilience through challenging periods, such as the 2008 financial crisis, and most recently, through COVID. We are on track to delivering a strong second half in 2023, and going forward, we're aiming to achieve over 20% EBITDA from executing our growth strategy. At this point, we're still integrating the Cortland business, and we have not prepared consolidated financials at this time.
I would like to highlight that Cortland did not receive much attention from the prior ownership, and we saw an opportunity to buy a non-core, underappreciated business from a large corporation, and we will be giving it the full attention and make investments to unlock its full value as a key piece of our global platform. In summary, we are very positive about the growth prospects, and we're confident on our ability to deliver. The team will be working hard to exponentially grow this business to at least double the EBITDA, as well as add on accretive acquisitions to increase shareholder value. Thank you very much, and for those who are attending with us, attending in person, I'd invite you to go over to our booth to really touch and feel our products. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Jack, Brian, Stuart. That was terrific. Again, we have questions, a time for some Q&A. Anyone in the audience, please raise your hand. I know we have a few questions that have been sent in online, so we'll start there. What do you expect to extract in terms of financial impact related to synergies with Cortland? And can you provide any examples of the synergies that you're seeing? Expense, top line, you name it.
Okay. I'll ask, Brian, as well as Stuart, to expand on operations as well as the sales side synergies that we have identified.
Sure. I'll let Stuart handle the sales side of it, but I think on the operations side, I mean, it is still early days for us, and we're still putting our plans together, and quantifying kind of the impact of those. But in terms of areas that we have identified, I think a key one for us is combined raw material sourcing. This would be, you know, in terms of access to certain kinds of materials and fiber we're looking for for use in our production. Availability, you know, by having more than one vendor that's supplying us, and then obviously, in terms of pricing and terms. So that's a really important one for us that we're quite focused on at the moment.
Another operational item, I suppose, would be for Cortland to have access to expanded fabrication capacity and capabilities. Just a really quick example there would be: there's a product that we make in India called baler twine. This is something that Cortland, if they required that as an input in their process in the past, typically they would buy that from a third party, but now that we've got access to the excess capacity in India, it's something that we can provide to Cortland at a much lower cost. Then I think in terms of back office functions, certainly we do think that there are some synergies to be had in the typical areas you'd expect: finance, IT, legal, and HR.
But perhaps, you know, for us, I think in the team on the stage here, one of the more exciting things is being able to bring together the R&D teams from both of these businesses. And together, already we've had some meetings, kinda run by Stuart, actually, so I don't mean to steal your thunder there. But, you know, they've come up with some really exciting ideas, and, just with different backgrounds and different level, levels or areas of areas of expertise, I think that, you know, we've got a lot of very exciting new product innovations under development, and expect to continue with that. So with that, Stuart, if you want to talk about the sales side.
Sure. So as on the sales side, there's actually quite a few opportunities for us, to you know to work through synergies. As Phil mentioned, literally on day one of the integration, our top marine salesman was ready to sell every item that Tufropes makes out of India into the market. So we certainly have opportunities there on the cross-selling side, to add Tufropes products to the Cortland products in certain markets, and actually reengage and win back some business that we may have lost from U.S. manufacturing, with some of the Indian-manufactured products. In addition, we've also got an opportunity to leverage some of the sales channels from India with the Cortland products into the international markets that have been fairly hard for us to serve, just as Cortland on our own.
The other side is there's some quick wins that we've identified, which is really starting to manufacture some of these products for Cortland, Cortland branded products out of India. So, the list is quite extensive and continues to grow every time we have a discussion and talk to some of our customers about what it is that we want to do. But, these are the ones that we really identified as some early on pieces.
Great. Thank you, guys. Question from the audience.
Yeah, Brian Morrison, TD. Two operational questions, maybe two financial questions. So does Cortland have an installed base in the deepwater wind market right now? And maybe secondly, in the aquaculture market, what percentage of the concentrated customer base do you currently have relationships with?
So maybe I'll answer the first one. Cortland doesn't currently sell to an offshore wind company. However, we have extensive experience in the oil and gas industry, which a lot of these capabilities extend over to. And we're in discussions with a couple of the offshore wind energy providers. A lot of them are still sort of testing their platforms, rolling out their designs, improving their designs, but we're definitely working and discussing developments with them. Okay. And sorry, your second question was?
Just in terms of the aquaculture market, it says it's very concentrated. I'm wondering,
Mm-hmm.
What percentage of the top 10 customers you currently have relationships with?
Yeah. So in terms of the top 10 customers, we work with our partners to access, to sell to these end customers, the, the people who actually farm the fish. And I would say that through our partners, we have access to more than, you know, six or seven of these top fish farmers that operate not only in Norway and the North Sea, but also globally, you know, for example, down in Chile as well as in the Mediterranean.
Then maybe just on the financial side, in terms of your free cash flow, will this all be kept in-house for capital allocation, or will any of it be repatriated back to Aimia? Secondly, where do you stand in the process of placing leverage upon the balance sheet?
I'm sorry, what was the second part of the question? Was-
Where do you stand with leverage upon the-
Yeah, I'll start with that one. So we think, and we've always thought that, you know, this is a highly financiable transaction. You know, we've got a great story here. Hopefully, you'll agree with that after seeing the presentation today. We've got strong financials. You know, it's a decent-sized business. It's got good margins. We've got a new professional management team in place. And so we would expect to be able to achieve at least 3x EBITDA leveraging on this business, and that's what we'd be looking for. I think, you know, I hope I'm not speaking out of turn, Phil, here, but I think earlier this year, the activist shareholder actions that were taking place, you know, made some people nervous.
I think lenders wanna know who the, the actual sponsor is at the end of the day, the owner behind this. I think if we're able to put that behind us, we'll be right back in the market looking to leverage the business. Yeah.
Great.
For the first part, I think, that's probably more appropriate for when the Aimia senior team come on to answer questions later on.
For, I can get a little bit to that. For the most part, the cash flow and free cash flow is gonna remain at the subsidiary levels to grow. We see a tremendous amount of synergies. We see a lot of pipeline with regard to accretive acquisitions. So the cash flow is gonna stay there for the time being. Another question in the back, please?
In Phil's presentation here, I think it's on slide 20, it says, "Tufropes exports rerouted through Canada enables use of Canadian tax losses." Seems a rather awkward way to be running your shipments. Can you explain that?
Yes. So Tufropes exports about 70% of our, of our revenue from India. So a lot of that, a lot of those transactions that were previously invoiced from India, we have simply set up the invoicing through our Canadian entity and converted all of our international customers over to doing business directly with our Canadian entity, rather than through our Indian subsidiary.
So essentially, what we've done is we've re-domiciled the management of Tufropes to Canada. We're running with the executive team within Canada. We have the sales force concentrated there and globally. So we're nearshoring our sales and marketing folks to exactly where the lifting and the aquaculture netting and rope customers are. So and we're keeping our manufacturing in Anacortes, Washington, Houston, Texas, with regard to Cortland, and the five facilities within India. So you can think about it as manufacturing in India and the operations and the executive management team within Canada, and that enables us to utilize some of our tax losses.
I think one more question online, I can see.
Can you explain how synthetic ropes and nets have a positive ESG impact?
Yes. So, synthetic ropes and nets have a distinct advantage of being much lighter weight and easy to handle, as I have highlighted in the presentation. And this lighter weight, you know, in terms of, either marine vessels or any of the applications that, that, carry these ropes and utilize these ropes for lifting or for any of these, any of the connection, purposes, essentially, just by the fact that we are utilizing less energy and thereby, less, you know, a lower carbon footprint to carry and, and to utilize these ropes, we end up with a much lower, much better, and lower in ESG impact.
Great. Any other questions? Wonderful. Thank you very much. We're now going to take a slight break. We're gonna pause here. We're gonna take, I think, a 10-minute break. So we're gonna come back at 10:50 A.M. For those that are joining in person, we encourage you to speak with the portfolio companies in the adjacent room, where they're demonstrating many of their products. And those of you dialing in, we'll begin at 10:50 A.M. Thanks very much. Good morning again, everyone, and welcome back from break. Two of our portfolio companies were not able to be with us today in person, Clear Media and Capital A, but they were gracious enough to put together some videos for us that help illustrate the value at each company. Clear Media operates the most extensive bus shelter advertising network in all of mainland China.
The company has over 70,000 advertising panels covering 22 of the largest cities in China. They've digitized almost six hundred of these panels to date, and as the Chinese economy regains its footing, the company will continue on its digitization plan. While Zero-Covid has certainly put a damper on the Chinese economy, Clear Media continues to report improving revenue both year- over year and sequentially. As many as you will know, the southeastern part of China accounts for 50% of the landmass, but it represents an amazing 95% of the population in the GDP. And this is exactly where virtually all of Clear Media's advertising panels are located. Further illustrating Clear Media's dramatic footprint, this is the list of the largest cities in China.
As you see, they have the most dominant market share of each of these cities, ranging from 54% in Shenzhen to 100% in Shanghai and Nanjing. Clear Media has a long history of substantial growth in panels, revenue, and cash flow. Even during the past two years, as the country was marred by COVID and COVID-related shutdowns, the number of advertising panels were able to increase from 58,000 to 70,000, an increase of 20%. A core tenet of our investment thesis is the conversion of many of these panels to digital panels that you can see on the right-hand part of your screen. Digital panels generate considerably greater value per panel, often over two times revenue and a substantial jump in EBITDA margin.
The company's digital panels have increased from 150 at the first time of our investment to 600 today. Let's pause there and see what the world looks like as the company continues on its digitization plan. We continue to see a tremendous amount of value at Clear Media, and we remain highly focused on the continued digitization plan of their panel portfolio. The transformation from Aimia Loyalty to Aimia Holding Company wouldn't be complete without a discussion of Capital A, the holding company formerly known as AirAsia. When we first arrived at Aimia about 3 years ago, Aimia owned 20% of Capital A's loyalty program, Big Life. The company was growing nicely, but we were a bit trapped.
We owned a minority stake in a subsidiary of a holding company, we had few shareholder rights, and we felt that we had an even smaller probability for a value crystallizing event. But along with COVID, came an opportunity for us to help recapitalize and revitalize AirAsia through a combination of new equity and by contributing our ownership stake in Big Life for a 3% position in the public shares of Capital A. This is a terrific transaction that put us in a strong position to win in the future. Fast forward a bit, and all 4 of Capital A's businesses are thriving. AirAsia, the aviation business, is Southeast Asia's number 1 airline by market share. They recently won the award for World's Best Low-Cost Airline for the 14th year in a row, which is just amazing.
This quarter's revenue was 95% of pre-COVID levels, and they were able to accomplish this by flying only 70% of their planes. As travel has stormed back, they're finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and they now have a plan to get all of their planes back into service. Within the aviation services, ADE is its maintenance repair business, and Santan, its food catering arm. Each are having record years, showing growth of over 100% year-over-year, and a very healthy 24% EBITDA margin. ADE also recently raised outside financing of $100 million to dramatically expand its MRO business. Maintenance repair is a terrific business, very sticky, great customers, and we're very much looking forward to this substantial expansion.
Teleport, its logistics and cargo business, is now number one in Southeastern Asian cargo shipments with a 15% market share. This is up from just 2% two years ago. Move is Capital A's digital offering, which includes its super app, which enables cross-selling of things like flights and hotels, food and travel, and BigPay, their fintech app, which enables banking all across their spectrum. Lastly, we anticipate that Capital A is working with its long-haul airline partner, AirAsia X, which it owns 13% of, and may be evaluating a combination of these two aviation businesses. Before we turn to the video, just note that the numbers used in the video are from Q1. Now, let's see what they have to say.
We are halfway through 2023, between Teleport's. Today, we're operating 178 aircrafts with 229 routes activated. Our segmental revenue is at MYR 2.2 billion, with an EBITDA of MYR 501 million, with an average load factor of 88% at an average fare of MYR 210. It is up 60% year-on-year. For ADE, we have a segmental revenue of MYR 103 million, up 84% year-on-year, with EBITDA MYR 18.6 million, an improvement of 97% year-on-year. Teleport's revenue is at MYR 152 million, up 3% year-on-year, with EBITDA year-on-year improvement of 277% at MYR 9 million.
Its e-commerce has a daily average of 63,000 deliveries, up 502% year-on-year growth. Overall, Teleport has a market share of a high at 14% in March 2023, from only 2% in January 2022.
...Super App has monthly active users of 12.9 million, achieved the highest quarterly revenue, and remained EBITDA positive for four consecutive quarters. It reached MYR 159 million and MYR 24.4 million, respectively. Non-AirAsia flights contributed to 5% of total flight revenue. Our delivery vertical doubled its conversion rate from 14% in the previous quarter to 28%. BigPay's revenue of MYR 11 million is an improvement of 79% year-on-year, with 1.4 million carded users. Phew! What a recap, and we still have the rest of the year. All of this would not have been possible without all of us who dare to dream. Let's stay on course and close 2023 with a bang.
As you can see, Capital A is no longer just an airline. It has grown into a dynamic investment holding company. With that, let's get back to hearing from our portfolio companies. Next up, we're going to hear about the world of automotive trading. I'm very pleased to announce Eric Gosselin, CEO of TradeX, Eric Wells, Chief Sales Officer, are here to talk to us. Thanks very much. Oh, and sorry, Brent Sawatzky, the CFO, is also here.
All right. Thank you, everybody, for coming to the Aimia Investor Day, and thank you, Aimia's team, for us to present TradeX. We're super excited to be here. So, first of all, I'll go over the structure, the TradeX structure. I think mine is not working. So for the TradeX group of companies, first of all, there's TradeX. It's a global trading company. There's also Techlantic. Techlantic is a pioneer Canadian enterprise who facilitate all the transaction that TradeX is doing. It can be logistic, finance, cash, letter of credit. And, there's Wholesale Express. Wholesale Express is a auction platform, mainly operate in Maritime, Quebec, and Ontario. So here's the revenue breakdown by companies.
So you will see in 2020 and 2021, there's almost no revenue for Wholesale Express and Techlantic because they have been acquired late 2021. And you can see the revenue decrease from year-end because we changed our business model to really focus on profit and revenue. So we decided to pivot, do a strategic pivot with TradeX. So we decided to sell Wholesale Express, and it's expected to close by Q4 2023. So the transaction, it's a $40 million sale, so there's $30 million in cash and $10 million in VTB and non-cash consideration.
So for TradeX, it's a really nice return 'cause there's a 25% return on the sale of this asset. So who we are? First of all, there's Ryan Davidson, who is the founder. He would love to be here, but there's an important meeting that he cannot miss for a big partnership that we are working on. So, Ryan was doing this, those transaction from Canada to China, and the idea was to create a platform that can support all those corridor, but on a scale. So that's why he create TradeX. So for me, I'm Eric Gosselin. I'm the founder of Wholesale Express. I started from scratch in 2012, expanded and sold it to TradeX in 2021.
I moved from Wholesale Express to TradeX in 2022, in July, as SVP, Business Development. I took on the operation in January 2023, became the CEO of TradeX in March, and now, since June, I'm the CEO of TradeX. So Eric, if you want to introduce yourself.
Thanks, Eric. Hi, good morning. I'm Eric Wells. I'm the Chief Sales Officer at TradeX. I have 25 years experience in the automotive industry. I spent 15 years at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, EHI Holdings, and then I was at Copart for 8 years, another global company, much like Enterprise, and I was part of their senior leadership team for Canada. I came to TradeX, just under 2 years ago, and I started as the VP of Global Corporate Sales, where really my primary focus was on opening up Caribbean market with rental car companies, dealers, et cetera, and became the Chief Sales Officer in April 2023. Introduce Brent.
Sure. Morning, everybody. My name is Brent Sawatzky. I've been with TradeX for approximately one year. My background is in automotive, retail automotive, structured finance, quantity tax consulting, and non-prime lending. Those pieces all add up quite nicely to support the TradeX team and help them move forward with their new endeavors.
... Thanks, Frank. So take a look at TradeX at a glance. We are the first global cross-border B2B automotive marketplace. So really, we're connecting buyers and sellers, so buyers that are in an underserved market to sellers that would have surplus of inventory. And we're also able to solve the complexities of this type of trade, cross-border trade, in a seamless process. So, we're able to operate in a home currency. We break down the, you know, the trust issues that may exist there, as well as language restrictions.
Why TradeX exists, it's mainly to secure the transaction because we're doing cross-border transactions. For example, you have a buyer in Africa, and you have a seller in Canada. The buyer in Africa doesn't wanna send his money in Canada without knowing who the seller is. So, all the buyer and all the seller are dealing with TradeX, and we secure their money, handling logistics, and make sure that we have a secure transaction.
So take you through some company milestones for us. In 2018, we were founded by Ryan Davidson. We went through a $3 million seed round. 2019, transactions were starting through beta testing. 2020 was an important year because we opened up our Canada to US corridor. In 2021, $25 million in convertible notes, as well as $45 million in Series A funding, opened up another couple of corridors. Two major events that occurred in 2021 was the acquisition of Techlantic and also the acquisition of Wholesale Express. In 2022, $12 million in Series B funding, as well as $9 million in convertible notes, continued to expand globally, opening up new corridors.
Then in 2023, we focused a little bit more on the Caribbean market, just with our relationships with rental car as well as some of the dealers there. And also Wholesale Express is expected to be sold, or will be sold. So our global reach, this is a great illustration of the countries we operate in and do business in. It's really represents import, export, or demand and supply countries. We're able to service these countries and the dealers, rental car companies, et cetera, that are in them through right-hand drive and left-hand drive opportunities. So really some markets themselves could be a supply country. They could also be a demand country, but we see that really in Canada and U.S. and the UAE, where we see both the supply and demand being in those countries.
We have three specific target audiences. Retail and automotive dealers, that would be a franchise dealer, independent dealer, online retailer. We have another institutional consignment, which would be rental car companies, OEMs, so original equipment manufacturers like Stellantis, Ford, GM, some of the import makes as well, and then fleet and leasing companies. We utilize auction and wholesale platforms to not only procure cars in certain situations, but also sell some cars.
And if I can add something on it, because we have our footprint globally, we start dealing with government, and the government trust us. We've been there for so many years, and you can see later in the slide that we have already a MOU signed with government. So that's a really good target for us, and in the future, we'll keep going after a government contract.
Yeah, so we provide a full inventory or a full solution, full circle solution, inventory. We're maximizing pricing by moving vehicles that are surplus in one country into another country that's underserved, trying to minimize the loss of countries that have surplus of vehicles. So we're not creating a saturation point there. We're moving those vehicles to underserved countries. We're increasing the turnover, so end-of-cycle inventory, preserve residual values in that source market, and then just automotive sourcing overall. Platform capabilities for us, we have the TradeX Brain. Really, that is helping us. It's run really through machine learning and AI-driven technology. And so what that's doing is that is allowing us arbitrage opportunities that exist through filters, previous procurement or activities, and we're able to ensure that there's a secure trading environment in there.
The TradeX Marketplace is really what we're using to connect buyers and sellers. Again, we do provide some financial support in the event that a seller or a buyer needs help just dropping a deposit, and then we would finance the rest of the money and then collect that 80% remaining through financial support. So getting into our business model, our original model is on the left side of my screen. And really, what we were doing in our original model is we were buying vehicles on speculation, so they didn't have a home. We were buying distressed inventory. If we were presented with opportunities to buy vehicles in large quantities, we were taking advantage of that.
We were using that inventory to open up new markets internationally, and what that would be is a DDP-type model, which is Delivered Duty Paid. So we would procure the car, we would then export the car, we would import the car, we'd keep the car at a warehouse that would be one of our entities, and then we would sell the car. So the car wasn't actually sold when we were buying it. And it... What we were able to do is really expand internationally using that model. However, it really—we're only really able to do a minimum 6% take per rate, or rate per transaction.
On our revamped model, which is our model that we've just pivoted to, any car that we're buying is gonna be pre-sold, and so it's more of a CIF model, which means that it's Cost, Insurance, and Freight. So we're eliminating that overhead expenditure of having an entity in a country and having, you know, 10s or 20s of support staff in that entity, whether it be legal, accounting, territory managers, and we're able to then use one market expert, a territory account manager in that market, that could go and effectively go door to door to dealers, rental car companies. We then utilize a centralized inside sales team.
The inside sales team is then creating more stickiness with that customer and being able to really suss out what they're looking for and paint the picture from an inventory standpoint. And that's what would generate an instant request on our end, so that we could go out, use the brain to identify arbitrage opportunities in order to buy a car, help control our profitability, and then sell the car essentially to the end user. So using a fully offline sales approach, as well as what we're doing is we're taking a 20% deposit from that buyer, and then we're financing the remaining 80%, shipping the car. That remaining 80% is paid 10 days before the vehicle arrives at the port.
In North America, when we're doing a transaction within North America, it's a 7% minimum return, gross profit. Then when we're in our global corridors, we're using a 10% minimum return.
And if I can add something on the original model, during COVID, it makes sense to buy inventory because the demand was super high and the supply was super low. So, during the time that you buy the inventory, move it to the country, your inventory was gaining in value. But in a market like last year when everything had changed, that the demand is lower and the supply is higher, all the inventory that you support lost in value. So, a lot of business lost money on their inventory. So that's why we need to change the model to really focus on pre-sale and not supporting any inventory moving forward.
So these are four great examples of arbitrage opportunities that were presented, where we were able to take advantage of a situation to control the profitability of it. Using a market that was identified through an instant request, we found a seller, we were able to buy the car and actually hit home runs on these ones.
How we can define arbitrage is quite simple because as a buyer, even if you're buying from U.S. or Africa or Europe, you always base your price on MMR with the U.S. market. So, and the brain, when you have an instant request, the brain will tell you: "Oh, for this type of car, you need to buy this car in, for example, in South Korea." So... And on the buy side, it's all based on MMR, and on the seller side, the brain will tell you where to buy those cars as cheap as possible to bring more revenue into TradeX.
So a typical transaction journey would be a seller connecting with a buyer.
Mm-hmm.
This is where an instant request would help us identify the seller, find the car. We would make sure that we had a condition report for it to eliminate any issues on the back end. It's going to go through if there's any homologation processes that are involved, to make it right for that market, for admissibility standards. Connect with the buying dealer, confirm it. We're going to do a 20% deposit if they need that. They can, of course, pay upfront if they wanted to, but we take a 20% deposit with finance rate, and then we collect that other 80% before the vehicle arrives there. We prep the vehicle for export. We have an extremely amazing logistics team that's able to handle licensing requirements, homologation, as well as getting the vehicle prepped to ship.
When it's being prepped for import, we're supplying the buyer with any of the import documents that they would need to clear the car at their port, and then they're paying us 10 days prior to it arriving at port. So we're not clearing the car. As we mentioned before, we're able to, in the revamped model, eliminate any of that overhead expenditure and just have one territory account manager who's familiar with the market, going to dealers, hand-to-hand combat, signing the dealer up or the rental car company, and then we have the inside sales team helping to build the stickiness, generate an instant request that starts the whole process with the selling dealer and connecting the buying dealer. KYC, this is an important... Know Your Customer.
It's an important part of our, you know, when we're uploading or onboarding a dealer or a rental car company, we want to make sure that we're screening them, we're getting them to upload documents, and then this is helping to protect us against corruption, anything that would be, you know, that would open us up to illegal activities. And not only do we screen them, but we're continually checking in the background. So if there is something that pops up down the road, we're able to circle back with that customer and deal with it.
So we did some analysis just to make it clear, 'cause there's a lot of people who ask me: "So you guys are like Carvana?" So and I just want to show you on the screen that Carvana is dealing with consumer, and TradeX is only a B2B. It's a retailer, so they they are buying inventory and and on our new model, there's no inventory that we need to support. There's a KYC instant request, so it's a totally different thing. But we just want to make sure that you understand what TradeX is doing. And there's AUTO1 Group, it's a platform in Europe, and they're not dealing with instant requests.
They're selling to, to consumer, and they're dealing only with left-hand drive. So as you can see, TradeX is handling everything from start to the end. It's a complete service.
So there's some unique capabilities and relationships that exist through, you know, our ability to open up new international markets. And so what we're really good at on the back end or on the front end is the licensing requirements, our ability to ship vehicles, homologation, matching vehicles to criteria, knowing the admissibility of certain countries, because it may be one thing to identify a buyer and seller, it's a whole other thing, to be able to get the car that would meet the admissibility requirements of that country. So as we evolve and continue to grow in different markets, globally, we're using relationships that are already established with, you know, auto dealers, manufacturers, national and local governments, which we've been invited to RFP on, transportation companies.
Again, logistics, being partly a logistics company, we have to always be checking our freight forwarders to make sure that their rates are competitive so we can help control costs on that part, because the moment you start shipping a car, there's certain things that are out of your control, you know, weather events. However, the things that we can control, we want to make sure that they're buttoned down, and that includes costing of freight forwarders.
...And then there's a new venture that, we are really excited, to talk about it today. It's, two of the biggest, company in China, one of the biggest, battery company, do a JV with, the biggest, commercial manufacturer all together to deliver the best, commercial electric vehicle, possible on the market. So, we already start, working on proof of concept. We have LOI, LOI signed with a couple government in, in Africa, and it will has, an impact on our, revenue in 2024. So it's a really exciting project for, for TradeX, and we've been working on it for, for a few months.
Because we have a footprint globally, we can have access to the government, and we use our connection globally to leverage this project.
So some key takeaways. We've talked about our international footprint. We're gonna continue to evolve that. However, we're gonna have a better handle on our profitability, meaning that we're not having those huge overhead expenses. We have one territory account manager to open up a market. We also have a key auto sector and regulatory relationships worldwide, and a deep understanding of logistics and how to get vehicles from one place to another, with admissibility being taken care of. Obviously, we've just talked about an exciting new venture that we're looking into. So there's those types of things we'll explore in the future. And obviously, as we grow, we're gonna have more exposure to these types of opportunities. So I just on behalf of myself, Eric, Brent, everybody at TradeX, just wanted to thank Aimia, obviously, for the opportunity to be here.
Phil, Mike, Steve, everybody else, thank you very much for allowing us to come and talk to you about TradeX, and we look forward to any questions you may have as a result of our presentation.
Okay, any questions from the audience, or we can wait until some questions are posted online?
Hi, Logan Schuh with Jefferies again. So over the next 3-5 years, how many corridors do you think are feasible for you guys? And then what does the long-term operating margin profile look like? Thank you.
So, I'll take this question. So, with our new business model, it's really scalable, and we can open up as many countries as we can. So we're targeting at least one country per month. And yeah, it's a lot. And it's more about, before we open a country, we have our compliance team, who's making sure that, first of all, there's an arbitrage, and it makes sense to open this country. So we don't wanna hire someone and open this corridor, just to open a corridor. We just wanna make sure that it bring revenue to TradeX, as fast as possible. But one country per month, it's doable.
For the margin, because it's globally, we're looking for a 10% gross profit per transaction, 'cause if not, we're not doing the deal.
Wonderful. Questions from online? They're not showing up here. If you could hand them to me, maybe.
Good question.
Pavel.
Just walk it down from gross profit to operating margin when fully scaled.
So, like the gross profit margin, it's always when we buy the car, for example, in South Korea. I'll just talk you in USD. So we're buying it for $20,000, and we know that we can sell it for $22,000. Our logistic team will give us the breakdown, what's the cost to ship it there. And so we're just if we're not making $2,000 profit on the transaction, we're just not doing the deal. So we will go to the buyer saying, like: "We can sell it for $22,000, plus shipping is X number." So and we'll have the green light from the buyer, yes or no, and we can do the transaction.
Also, there's an opportunity there with logistics. So if it costs $5,000 for a container, you got two cars in there, you can also add a little bit of profit on that as well, a smaller amount, say, $200, $300.
Yeah.
There is an opportunity when you ship the vehicle to make a little bit of extra money there, too.
Okay, great. Next question: Can you expand a bit on the electric vehicle opportunity?
Yes, of course. So, as I said, the biggest battery manufacturer in China did a JV with the biggest major commercial manufacturer. So, what we do, we start doing proof of concept with a different government in Africa. And why Ryan is not able to join them? Because he flew with two government in Africa to China to show them, like, what's the model, what we can offer them. And so this is end-to-end with the government. I cannot go over, like, the detail for which government it is, but it's a really exciting project for us.
Great. Thank you. Why are you selling Wholesale Express?
... because we really want to focus on the core business, and the core business is global trade. And as you know, also Express, we mainly operate in Maritime, Quebec, and Ontario. So, that's the reason why we are selling this asset and really focus on global transaction.
Mm-hmm. Great. And last question: Are you fully funded for profitability now?
We'll be profitable by 2024. With all the new business model and reducing our overhead by changing the structure-
Mm-hmm.
2024, it's a profitable year.
Wonderful. Any other questions? Great. Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Thank you.
Really appreciate it. And for our final presentation this morning, we're pleased to have Roberto Corigliano and Stefano Rizzo from our chemical solutions business, Bozzetto Group, in from Milan, to talk about Bozzetto. Welcome, guys. Good morning, everybody, and-
I'm Roberto Corigliano. I'm the CEO of Bozzetto Group. Today with me, there is Stefano Rizzo, CFO of the group. We are very excited to have this opportunity to explain to you and to give an introduction into our company and the way we make business. Let's have a quick recap at some key facts and figures that you've seen in this introductory video. We have over 100 years of history, which we believe is something unique for a European-based company in the chemical industries. Today, we think we are well positioned to be considered one of the leaders, especially in the ESG, in some selected niches of textile, dispersion, and water, and I will come into that in a few minutes. We do it through 600 employees, out of which over fi...
10% of the workforce is fully dedicated to research, development, and innovation. We serve 90 countries with over 2,300 products, and over 50% of our turnover and margin comes from ESG-focused products. A quick look at our history. Born in 1919, in the north part of Italy, in an area that is still considered as a reference for the textile industry, this company in during the 1970s goes into its diversification into surfactants world, and during the 1990s goes through its first international expansions. 2002, 2008, the first M&A.
Then there is a period between 2008 and 2013, where the company is living a kind of sluggish mood, delivering top-quality products, but having a profit that is not the one it deserves. With a great deal of courage, there's a change in top management, major investment in R&D supply chain, and especially, this is when, in 2013, we started our ESG story. I think we have been a kind of first mover in this respect. Then we have earned the fortune to be to work with the financial shareholders, which, for us, is our best fit, and we had the opportunity to restart making inorganic acquisitions and to have a faster penetration in our markets.
If you look at this slide, in 2020, in the middle of COVID, we completed our largest acquisition of our history with buying Asutex, and in 2022, we consolidated our global leadership position in viscose fibers, buying the business from Levaco. In 2023, we had the pleasure to welcome Aimia as our main financial shareholders, and we are particularly grateful to them because they gave us the opportunity to invest 6% and to own 6% of the share at the same conditions. Going forward, how do we ensure the global presence? Global presence is not just about a single site, so we have a capillary presence with six own, fully owned assets and four JVs, and a bunch of commercial offices in the and collaboration with distributors.
But the good thing is, what I want to draw your attention on is that the main plant, the main corporate function, is still in Italy today. Why? Because this is where we want to control and make sure that we engineer the best products and technologies, that then are exported globally at each of our sites. Because we have to ensure, in order to have a responsive service that is still top quality, we have to assure that these European standards are applied everywhere. You might have noticed that there is a gap in Central and North America, something that Phil anticipated. We are very excited, and we are gonna sign, and we're gonna announce in the coming days, a major acquisition, probably the second largest of our history, which is gonna fill this gap in Central and North America.
What is this bringing, this acquisition, to us? Is the possibility to have an industrial platform over there to implement our technologies, to implement our ESG value proposition in a market like Central America, that is the fastest growing in this respect, and to have the possibility to have a faster penetration in this market, something that would be very difficult if we have to cross the ocean to deliver our products. We said this company changed the kind of its skin, giving a fresh look from 2013. So let's have a look how this went from the financial point of view. This graph show EBITDA and sales revenue development. In 2013, this company was generating only EUR 10 million EBITDA, which is not at the level that this company deserves.
So all this implementation of the ESG story, together with the careful yield management and cost control, led us, in 2022, to have our world record history in EBITDA with over EUR 31 million, with a growing, continuous growing pattern. This positions us in a specialty chemical chemicals, because we... This is about 14% EBITDA margin. I want to focus now on what happened between 2018, 2019, and 2022.
We managed to have a CAGR growth rate of about 14% in a period, given our complexity that, that you have seen, globally, so as fighting against COVID, maybe the worst raw material and logistic crisis I've seen in my entire life, and then energy spikes, the Ukrainian war, which is impacting any European company, and last but not least, inflation that we imported and a recession outlook. Despite all this, the company managed to grow nicely, in, in this way. Going forward, a quick look at current trading. Today, at the moment, we are living a very difficult situation for European companies. There is a... Macroeconomic environment does not help. The confidence of consumers is limited, and also the liquidity, the interest rates, and the inflation limits also the liquidity available for companies to invest.
So, we are, at the moment, having an EBITDA; we expect to exceed the EBITDA that we generated last year, or to be at least as good as last year, in such a macroeconomic environment. Going forward, we have presented to our shareholders a business plan that says that we're gonna have a CAGR growth rate at between 6% and 8%. That is something that is lower than what we have already achieved, but this growth rate does not include current and future M&A initiatives. So if we and when we implement the acquisition I'm talking about, we will be well positioned to exceed these figures. So it's a resilient model. We have demonstrated it, but how do we do it?
Using our five pillars, what we have built over time and over the next, the last decade. First of all, we clearly choose our strategic market downstream. We focus on ESG, and I will come to that in a minute, of what this means for us, and we focus of that portion of which market depend, regardless where you are in terms of end, end market application, that is aligned to our value proposition, that is able to understand and eventually to pay a premium for this. And we target those segments that have a very high sustainability, not only from an environmental point of view, but in terms of also growth rate and margins.
Of course, second pillar is diversification, which is common to any industry and any company that wants to faster penetrate markets and reduce the risk, but we have to be careful, and we want to do it finding a good compromise between a very strong Italian branded entity, which is a factor, especially in textile, I can tell you, and the need to delocalize in order to have a very responsive service in a proximity source logic. But if you want to serve 90 countries, and you want to serve over 2,000 customers with over 2,000 products, you have an issue. We...
You have to manage complexity, and the way you can do it is to design a supply chain, a buy, make, and delivery process that is able to take full control of every single chemistry and every single product that is produced in order to ensure saturation, lower industrial costs as much as possible, and maximize profit, and this is what we have done. You cannot do it in a chemical company without a very strong and dedicated R&D team. Not just looking at innovation, but being hands-on and looking to give a top-quality service to the market, and to collaborate with the purchasing team also in selecting the best raw material available in the world.
Last but not least, we need a capillary management information system that allow us, and today we're able to do it, not only to monitor the profitability at product/customer level, but also chemistry level and at asset level, in order to take the best decision on a weekly basis on which market to push and which market to step it back. ESG. There are a number of companies talking about ESG. I've put in the three boxes on the left-hand side the three macro trends of ESG. The remaining two are the increasing use of biological polymers, something we are working on, and also anything related to circular economy. These are, at the moment, in my opinion, more of a blue sky projects.
Where we are focused on in the last decade is especially the first box, sorry, developing products and processes, not only for our company, but also for all the downstream industries that go into the direction of water, energy, and hazardous chemical reduction. Why? Because the urgency was there. This is where there was a tangible possibility to do something tangible in terms of ESG. ESG is not just an internal claim. We have invested millions of euros, and it gets the recognition of the international leading bodies in terms of certification, who very often, on a yearly basis, conducts rigorous audits at each of our plants, checking everything from the environmental point of view.
This, as you can see on the right-hand side, led us to have over 1,000 ESG products today in our portfolio, and especially the contribution that this gives to the profit was 39% in 2018, and is as high as 71% and growing in 2022. A quick look now at the market. My intention is to make you understand where our differential advantage is. Quick snapshot, with textiles, say, textile dispersion and water solution. Textile account for about EUR 120 million, with 18% gross profit and a geographical balance in terms of sales, it is well-balanced between 50% of Asia and 50% in the rest of the world. The Americas is going to grow significantly as we will make the acquisitions.
Dispersion and water solution are a bit more of an M&A story because of historical reason and because of the nature of the business itself, because it's more European and Middle East based. They account, respectively, for EUR 78 million and EUR 26 million revenue, and they bring a higher margin in terms of percentage, 26% and 35%. Textile. I could say a lot of things of textile, but just to set the scene, ESG, in terms of water, hazardous chemical, and reduction and energy is what we have targeted among the macro trends. There is a difference in the value chain of textile, but perception of the green pressure.
If we synthesize and pick three clusters, the textile mills, the brands, and the consumers, we can clearly say that the green urgency at the consumer level is nearly zero. When you move up to the brands, it's a completely different story. They have lived with an enormous pressure from the green market. So much that some of them have decided to launch their own campaign in terms of zero discharge policy, in terms of elimination of contamination or tracking of the contamination system at the supplier chain. And this is where we step in, because the evidence campaign, they've launched it, but they need a chemical partner in order to develop. And our latest developments with Nike, with Uniqlo, with Stone Island, with Diesel, just to mention a few, go into this direction and creating some bonds.
At the end of the day, what is good news for us is they create the derived demand going back to the textile mills. When you go to the textile factories, the ones supplying the brands, is again, a different story. Because, okay, they've got the green pressure from the brands, but at the end of the day, for them, it's just about lowering cost. They have an enormous usage of water, energy, and consumption of chemicals and hazardous chemicals. They wanted to go into this direction, they didn't know how to do it. So this is where we step in, designing products and processes and stepping in into their processes in order to decrease their environmental profile, including improving the product quality and improving the efficiency.
This, at the end of the day, has the effect, the nice effect, to move their perception from a price-sensitive market into an holistic approach at cost, and they accept a premium price through us, from us. How do we do it? With a combination. First of all, as you can see on the left-hand side, we are present in every single step of the textile market, from fibers up to down to garment treatment.
We do it with the broadest, one of the broadest broad portfolio in the market, with over 1,000 ESG products, and with the technical service, with customized solution, depending on which, which is your need, and where you are in the, in the value chain of the, of the textile, and with the technical department and with a technical service team that have on average more than a decade of experience in our customer plans. So hands-on, they can work with them and develop solution. Dispersion. In a quick summary, a dispersion particle is a substance that usually maximize, minimize the dosage and maximize the performance of an active particles, just to make a long story short. As you can imagine, this, the dispersion chemicals can find a variety of application in many industries. This is...
We started here from building on our heritage. Historically, we have a dominant position in terms of industrial platform in Europe and Turkey, and we were selling nicely in plasterboard and concrete, having some differential advantage already. But a game changer, a step change, was when, a few years ago, customers like Nike, Saint-Gobain, so the global leader in plasterboards, came to us and said, "Look, we have an urgency to eliminate from our products formaldehyde, quinoline, and other nasty chemicals present today. We cannot live without this." So we made major investments in terms of technology in our plants and in the chemistry, and we developed the lowest environmental, the highest environmental impact in terms of technology and products. Today, our products have only few PPMs of formaldehyde.
So we increased our gap versus competitors and created bonds with the global leader of the markets. Today, we are the only one registered, for example, at NAF. Also, the versatility of chemistry, and this is the beauty of chemistry, open up the opportunities in crop protection world, in agriculture. So we engaged, using the same logic, we engaged into collaboration with guys like Bayer, BASF, and Solvay, and we managed to enter into the crop protection business and to move from being just an ingredient supplier with top-quality products to a partner for them that intervenes and steps in when deciding formulation and application, and is, at the end of the day, their preferred their preferred partner.
The story on water is similar to dispersion, that is, moving from ingredient to a formulation supplier, but is a pure chemistry and pure innovation this time. Historically, we have supplied, needless to say, that the macro trends on water go into, in, into the quality of the wastewater and its reusability. This is, this is a need of the market. Historically, we have been suppliers in the water chemicals of anti-scaling, products, working as anti-scaling or corrosion inhibitors, supplying Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Reckitt. What happen if you are locked in with those customers, they try to put you in a price war in terms of pressure with global tenders every year. So what we did is we intercepted a need of the market to develop one of the lowest phosphorus content in terms of anti-scaling agents, and we engineered...
This time, it's pure chemistry. We engineered chemistry that has been patented, and it put us at the top of the level in terms of technology leader. So today, we enjoy a long-term relationship. We are number 3 supplier in Europe in terms of phosphate-based, phosphorus-based, sorry, anti-scaling agents, and we have this technological leadership that nobody has that is going to be deployed. Another nice thing about this is that it allow us to develop in any other segments where all these problems are. One of those is, for example, personal care that I listed there, where we are developing, and we have developed a market, it's still early stage, on skin care and hair care, using again, the same logic and the same versatility of our chemistry.
This market, for example, brings gross profit that is an order of magnitude higher than the others. So the potential is already there. You've seen the margin is one of the highest, but in terms of future opportunities, is never ending, actually. How do we manage complexity? Before talking about supply chain, let's have a look at the chemistries. When I joined this company, I find a big variety of chemistry being handled. This is not necessary in our company, because at the end of the day, our customers buy a combination. Our products is a combination of 5-10 ingredients. Customers don't know what they're buying. So what we did is we rationalized the building blocks of chemistries that then drills down into a number of SKUs.
Today, we can say that with 20, 30 chemistries, we can handle all the products. And if you think that textile, dispersion, and water solution have nothing to do to each other in terms of, chemistries involved and in terms of assets, this is not the case. This slide shows that some of the chemistries overlap and can be used in dispersion, in water, or in textile, and we have made investments in our plant, in all our plants, in order to increase the flexibility and to make sure that all our plants and our assets are able to produce any grades in any of those divisions, regardless of the conditions. Supply chain, efficiency and effectiveness.
A wrap-up is, today we are able, on a weekly basis, to control the supply chain globally and to establish which product is going to be produced in which plant. So this allow us basically to cruise over any turbulence upstream and downstream in the market, and at the end, and to pick the best and most profitable market for that, in that moment. And maximize not only the, the contribution margin per products, but also per chemistry and per asset. And then I talked in the last slide about the rationalization of the chemistries, but also I need to mention the quality, consistency, and upstream market scouting.
We have built a global market intelligence that allow us, and this was thanks to the purchasing department, but thanks also to the collaboration with R&D, that allow us to cherry-pick who is the best supplier at the moment in, depending also on the macroeconomic situation. Today, for example, it's very convenient to, for us to buy from China for a number of reasons. In 2021, 2022, it was the other way around. We were preferring European supplier. Of course, our supplier have to comply to the best standards in terms of environmental profile, and this is a plus I think we have versus our global competitors. I talked already about the importance of R&D in upstream. I will not touch into this.
Having an R&D that is able to work both on synthesis and formulations give us enormous flexibility and increase the know-how of the company, because most of our competitors just do formulation. They mix ingredients. But last but not least, on the downstream side in the market, we have applicative laboratory at each of our sites that not only give a responsive service to the market, but they are able to replicate under industry-like conditions what is going to happen at our customer level, in our customer industry. Technical service, last but not least, we don't have salespeople. We have technical salespeople. We do basically implement our sales on a technical basis with people working in our customer plants and developing their solutions for them. And when you do this, the sales is there, and the margin is there.
If everything works fine, then you have a growing pattern in terms of sales revenues, in terms of gross profit, and in terms of EBITDA. You can see that EBITDA, over the last five years, has grown at a higher rate than the sales revenue. Going forward, today, current trading, I just mentioned we're gonna be at least as good as, but my ambition is to be better than last year, and this is thanks to increased margins in a market that has been, in terms of demand, very, very sluggish. Consider that our competitors are seeing a situation where they are between 15% and 20% down in sales. Last but not least, I want to give you an overview of our priorities going forward.
Of course, we're not—we think that we are on the right track. We will continue the geographical expansion, both organically and inorganically. We thank Aimia. We are grateful to Aimia because they are supporting us into the acquisition, because acquisition allows a faster penetration in the strategic market we want to address. We will continue to be the ESG solution provider. If anything, apart from the environmental profile, it gives us the opportunity to always apply a premium to the market that we have selected in terms of price and margins.
As we go forward, especially when we make acquisition, and we know this because we have made the recent acquisition and integration, it's very important to keep this agility of the supply chain and to integrate companies into our platform and keep this possibility to choose on a weekly basis which product to produce, and continue to invest on the versatility of our assets. Last but not least, we do not compromise. We don't want to compromise on our reputation, because at the end of the day, this is a recognition in the market that we have gained and we want to protect, because it has led to outstanding results. My presentation now is over. I want to leave you with another video. If I'm asked today, what is the...
What are the segments within the textile industries that have a massive consumption of water? Say, cotton, denim, and the dyeing process. In denim, we have launched last year with a collaboration with Uniqlo, something unique in the market, the possibility to have a stone wash effect without the usage of water. Some of you might be familiar. Today, I'm going to present our waterless dyeing process. This is something we launched in a trade show. A number of companies have tried to do this. We were the first one to do it, and we are patenting. I think the video is self-explanatory. Thanks for your attention.
Thank you both. We have time for questions now. That was absolutely terrific. Anyone in the audience, please raise your hand, and we're happy to get to your questions. Logan?
Hi, Logan Schuh from Jefferies again. Could you just touch on, like, how much of a headwind the current macro environment is for or-organic growth? And then also, could you touch on the cyclicality of the business in terms of growth, maybe outside your 6%-8% target? Thank you.
Okay. I mentioned already in my presentation that, the macro environment we are living at the moment is maybe the most difficult, okay? I, I split the world at the moment in two clusters. Western part, especially Europe, where you have high inflation and interest rates. This is creating, problems to the, the consumers because it's decreasing their buying power, and to companies, because it's limiting their availability to credits and, as a matter of fact, investing and to create volume. On top, we have laid a very difficult situation in terms of energy over the last years for a number of reasons. In China, the... In Asia, the situation is different. Asia is influenced, influenced heavily by China's situation, and China is living a deflation.
Domestic market is down, and if this gives up tremendous opportunity in terms of growth, and in terms of, especially exploiting the raw material supplier, is influencing all the rest of the market. But at the end of the day, this is not going to impact our growth organically and inorganically, because this is what has happened over the past five years, and I think we have demonstrated our resilience in this respect. There is a... This is the beauty of positioning at the high-end level of, of the market. We are not into any price wars.... We honestly think we're gonna exceed this, CAGR that I, I put on the, on the slide, both organically and inorganically, especially the acquisition that we're about to announce will give us a boost and an incredible immediate value and incredible opportunity to grow.
Great, thank you. Next question from— Oh, in the audience. Brian?
Sure. Sorry, can you just explain to me, with your manufacturing facilities based in Europe, how you were able to maintain your EBITDA?
Can you speak up, please, because-
Sure. I just wanna know how you were able to maintain your EBITDA and your margins with such, a major headwind with respect to energy prices in Europe with the war in Ukraine? And then secondly, can you maybe address... I think there was an announcement this morning that all plastics will be banned from personal care and cosmetics products by 2030, and I'm wondering if that's gonna be a big boost for you.
Okay, first question, thanks for asking. It was the same question Amir asked when we start talking about this, the possibility for them to buy us. When it comes to energy, 80% of our energy consumption is in our Italian plant. This is the way we have designed. We have a capillary control, thanks also to this guy and his team. We are able to track what is the energy impact in every single reactor, in every single reaction, in every single chemistry. Our salespeople, on a weekly basis, in end of 2022, on a daily basis, were informed by our controlling department, and they could decide which part of the cost to pass through to the market to keep the margins.
The beauty is that if you focus on the high-end part of the market, which I hopefully have been able to explain why, they don't really care about this. They care about other things. They care about the product quality, they care about the environmental profile, and they care about the impact that you have on their cost. I mentioned the fact that you managed basically to move away from a price war mechanism at the low end of the market and to convince them about a holistic approach to the cost. There is one example where we collaborated with the one of the world leader of the aramid fibers. They were buying benzyl alcohol, which is one of the nicest chemicals you can find. We managed to sell them a replacement that is three times as much in terms of pricing.
Why we did this? Because we went there, we analyzed their wastewater treatment plant, we analyzed with them all their plants and their supply chain in India, in Salvador, in Europe, in China. We sent our experts, and we basically convinced them and managed with them to lower their cost, even though they paid the price that it was three times as much. This is the way we do.
If I can add on this, basically, we treated the energy like any other raw material we manage, 'cause raw material represent more or less from 55%-60% of the total of our costs. So basically, by having this capillary way of measuring things and being placed in many markets on the high end, combination of both allow us to pretty much pass through those energy costs. In parallel, we also put in place some measures to save cost, to increase our efficiencies from an operational side and also with some small CapEx investments.
On, on the second question, of course, on cosmetics is an opportunity, but I have to say that on cosmetic, we are still a small player, and I'm actively looking with Damian, hopefully, help with the possibility to add inorganic growth in this respect.
Mm-hmm.
Because, as I said, using the versatility of our chemistry, at the moment, we start selling in cosmetics with a margin that is in order of magnitude higher than business. It's not the league, but you've got to be there. You've got to have a critical mass presence. You've got to build your brand name. We can do this with acquisitions.
Mm-hmm.
So it's, in my opinion, the value will come from other... in cosmetics.
Great. Speaking of acquisitions, there are several questions about speaking about how attractive the acquisition sounds, that you referred to. And if you can add talk to the timing, valuation, impact of the Central American or Americas acquisition.
Timing is pretty much immediate, will be announced in the coming days or weeks. We're about to finalize, it will be signed. On the valuation, you will discover. What I can say, that there is an immediate value added, an increase of value of the company, by the fact that this leading company is incorporated into the world. But the opportunities that this acquisition is giving us in a market like Central America and U.S., at the moment when we want to serve, you have to cruise the ocean, is absolutely never ending. So in my opinion, will be one of the game changer for our company.
Great. Who are your major competitors? How do you differentiate versus your competitors?
Depends on the business we're talking about. In textile, I can mention a few global competitors. I can mention CHT, Rudolf, Arkema maybe-
Mm-hmm
... in some cases, DyStar, but it depends on which geographical location we are. The way we differentiate, targeting the high-end part of the market and targeting the ESG, of course, someone might say that we reduce the possibility of a wider textile market, but with this combination and the service level, we eliminate immediately the low-end part of the market. It's not—it's just not us, it's not our market, and it's not their market. The differentiation, in my opinion, versus global competitors, is something that I know by heart, because before Bozzetto, I was working in three global players, ICI, DuPont, LyondellBasell, and I know about their strengths, but I know also about their vulnerability, and it's all about agility, being quick, speed of response.
What I described awfully well about our supply chain is something that you don't find at these global players. Now, and then the level of service, of course, that we provide, something that global players do not want to provide anymore. They just want to look at big deals with very few customers, buy big volumes, and accepted the limited service.
Mm-hmm.
In dispersion and in water, again, it's different. In dispersion, our competitors are a few European players in building and some Turkish. In agrochemical, I can mention Nouryon, Solvay, although Nouryon contacted us in order to supply them here in the U.S., but at the moment, we have a bottleneck capacity, which we'll unbottleneck next year, so it will be possible. In the water chemical, we are number three in Europe behind Italmatch and Solvay. But with this, step up in chemistry and product portfolio, we target that. So I think we're gonna catch up.
Wonderful. And finally, EBITDA growth has been pretty substantial over the past five years. Can you talk about the free cash flow conversion and how much CapEx is required in the business?
Questions, Stefano?
The cash conversion, and so the ability to generate cash, it pretty much depend, in our case, from the level of EBITDA, as our CapEx historically range 2%-3% of revenues. Taxes are 24%-25%, and interest rate at the moment are between 7%-8%. So I mean, if we grow the first line with the right profitability, we will be able to continue to deliver what we have delivered so far.
Mm-hmm. Wonderful. Any other questions from the audience or online? We thank you very much for your time, gentlemen. Wonderful. Thank you. Phil, would you like to join me up here for closing remarks?
Thank you, everyone, for your presentations. I hope that everybody can see now how excited we are and why we're so excited about these holdings. These have been recent developments, and we know we've only owned these companies for a few months, so we've come, you know, right out of the gate. As you've seen in Tufropes, we've already done a tuck-in acquisition. We have yet to see a quarter where we've owned both of these companies for a full quarter. So that's how early stage it is.
So it's, it's understandable that people have a hard time valuing us, and the disconnect between our stock price and the real value of these companies is significant, and I hope it's been underscored today by the confidence you should have in these businesses, and that we share, and the excitement we have going forward. We're not just here to, you know, buy companies at good prices and hold them and hope for the best. We are actively, on a daily basis, looking to turbocharge these businesses to accelerate their growth and increase value for our shareholders. It doesn't take a lot to move the needle on, on a company like ours. We're small. There's not a lot of shares outstanding.
You know, moving these companies forward the way that we are should have a profound and meaningful effect on the stock price, and we hope that you get to enjoy it as kind of an early look into what I think people should see, but they don't. You know, people don't like to do the work. They don't like to dig in. They don't like to fly to investor days, as some of you have done from other countries and listen to this. But once you hear it and you see it and you experience it, and you hear it from our incredible CEOs and CFOs and management teams, I think you should leave here with incredible confidence about being an investor in Aimia.
Just some of the highlights we've gone through, and just to quickly run through them, you know, I think you agree, we have a portfolio of really exciting assets, each one exciting on its own, each one capable of, you know, representing the entire market cap today. So there's a lot of those, and I think you should have heard today, and you're on this. We all agree that they're very exciting. We have an accretive growth strategy. We're going forward. We're gonna be acquiring, you know, control positions in these companies. We may have a third leg. Right now, we have two. You're gonna see us focusing on growing those. We have an exciting permanent capital structure, as I mentioned.
It's no debt at the holdco, sizable tax losses, the professional preferred equity, and that enables us to also enhance our returns to shareholders. We have an experienced management team. We're completely aligned with you. Our entire focus is creating shareholder value. That's all we do every day, and that's all we focus on. We've recently deployed, you know, $450 million into these investments. You know, it was less, I would say, a little over a year ago, our stock hit, you know, $6.50 intraday, and it looked like the market was starting to realize the value of our holdings. And I asked myself: You know, what has changed since then? And we've made better investments, new investments.
We have cash flowing investments that you can touch and taste, and the drop from CAD 6.50 to where the stock is today, there is no explanation, other than optics, people not understanding the value here. So this is an incredible opportunity. You know, these things don't come along every day. I've been a value investor for a long time, and it's rare that it can be so obvious and so clear, and there's such a large margin of safety as we have at Aimia today. With that, I think we can, oh, you know what? Just what you can expect for us next, in the next year. You're gonna see, organic and M&A growth at both of our companies. You've heard of some of the acquisitions we've done and been planning, but there are also others.
You're gonna see that continue. You're gonna see accretive acquisitions that are not just accretive on a cash flow basis, but provide platforms and opportunities for the company to grow, just like Cortland did for Tufropes and the upcoming acquisition that we've referenced for Bozzetto. You're gonna see increased transparency. You know, we're focused on letting you guys see as much as we can. We can't control all the minority holdings and what we can see. At companies like Clear Media, we're involved with, but we can only reveal certain things. So we're trying to get you guys increased KPIs and transparency in both the subsidiaries and as being completely transparent, obviously, through the operating companies. Because we...
Those are something we're gonna run through our balance sheet, and you're gonna see every dime coming in. You're gonna see the cash generation, you're gonna see the EBITDA generation and the growth. So with that, I think we can turn it over to Q&A.
Great. Thank you, Phil. For our final Q&A session, you, everyone will have the opportunity to ask the Aimia team, as well as any of our portfolio holding company management teams, any additional questions. Questions from the audience? Yes, sir.
You know, it was great to see the components of Aimia, but the elephant in the room is probably your bun fight with the dissident shareholders. One explanation of your move from CAD 6.5 down to below CAD 3 is that fight. Can you give us a little color on that, please?
Yeah, it's, you know, it's an unfortunate distraction. It's been an expensive distraction, but we try to... Well, obviously, we hope on an amicable resolution, and we'd like to do it as quickly as we can, obviously. But in the meantime, we've just focused on executing our strategy. I mean, through this, through that noise, you've seen multiple acquisitions, and we've been very active in propelling our business model forward. I've always believed that the stock will follow the value at some point, and obviously, you don't want that point to take too long. But we can't control the behavior of shareholders or the noise around it. All I can say is that we are trying our best to both execute on our model and to resolve that situation as quickly and as amicably as we can.
We have a question from online: With Aimia's stock price below CAD 3, why are you not repurchasing every share right now?
Yeah, you know, we've been obviously very active with share repurchases. We last year, we maxed out our NCIB, about a little over 8 million shares. We bought over 45% of the shares over the last 3 years. We planned on a very aggressive buyback. It was required for us to complete a Tufropes financing, which is approximately $100 million that we had were about to close. The increased activity with the activism raised concerns with the lenders because they wanna know who's controlling the asset.
So that kind of set that aside, which unfortunately set aside our ability to buy back shares, because as Mike alluded to earlier, and I think, Brian, you asked the question, you know, in terms of cash and available cash, we have to budget for, and we always have budgeted, for our companies to have at least two years without us needing to take cash out of them. And obviously, there's, you know, even the banks require that to a certain extent in terms of their amortization schedules, et cetera. So we don't want to, you know, We don't want those companies to have to be burdened by our cash needs, so unfortunately, we have to hold off on our buybacks until we facilitate a transaction, financing transaction to Tufropes.
As Tufropes mentioned, you know, it's a very financiable entity, and we think that will happen as soon as we can resolve some of the noise around the negative stuff.
Great. Yeah, Brian?
Earlier in the day, you said your phone was ringing off the hook with respect to Kognitiv. The presentation today and their success in moving towards profitability, I'm wondering what the potential avenues are, or what your holding is, or what you think the path is with going forward with Kognitiv?
Sure. I mean, it's obviously early, but in the last week, I received three different serious expressions of interest in acquiring them. Obviously, there's a long roads of diligence and discussions ahead, but it's very different than the phone calls I used to get, which were, you know, "Is Kognitiv going out of business?" And, "Why do you keep holding Kognitiv?" And, "Why do you keep you know, putting money in it and supporting it?" And I think that question's been answered. And now this is the fun part, which is growing the business and fielding those type of emails and calls. I think, as Tim told you, this is a growing sector, and the client base that Kognitiv has is incredibly valuable, and they're all blue chip customers.
You can't get in their doors without years of courting and going through all kinds of processes and 6,200 committees. And when you buy Kognitiv, you're right in the door, and that allows huge cross-selling opportunities. One of the potential buyers told us that they think they could triple Kognitiv's revenues just by cross-selling their own products to those customers. So huge value there. We own half the company. I think that there's a great opportunity here to create value where no one really expects it. And I think what you've seen from Kognitiv is, will explain and justify where that, the interest is coming from.
Next question from online is: What keeps you up at night?
... You know, honestly, honestly, I am kept up by excitement. I just lay in bed, and I'm just thinking about all these things that we're doing, and it's so exciting to me. And then I remember where our stock price is, and it makes me feel a little sad, but I know that that's gonna change. But the things that we're doing, I would expect, you know, in a perfect world, to be hitting a new high every day. And I know, you know, you don't focus too much on stock price, but I feel the pain, and when I look at our stock, I feel physical anguish. It really just... I just don't understand how it can be there, but that, it is what it is.
But it's an opportunity, and all you can do is take advantage of that, whether it be by getting investors like yourself in to take advantage of it, allow you the opportunity flow, or it's buying back stock or, or insider buying, as I just did a couple months ago again. So it's a combination of giddy excitement about executing on these deals. I don't feel... You know, you always have a healthy fear of anything going wrong in your companies, but right now, I don't fear anything for the companies. I see, I see nothing but green sky, blue sky ahead, and green in our pockets, hopefully. And I am just cognizant of having... Our job is to not only execute, but to make money for people.
I mean, you guys are here for the stock price to go up. That's what you want. It's not, you know, something that drives the bus, but it has to eventually. So it's a focus for us. It's very frustrating, but I think you'll be happy with some of the stuff we're doing to create that and manifest that. We're not just sitting around saying, "The stock will work itself out." We understand that we wanna catalyze that and help it and do whatever we can. So part of it is this, you know, talking to other significant investors that want to take large positions in the stock. Like, it just takes one of those, as I said, and changes the whole dynamic. So we're hard at work on all that.
It does keep me up pretty late, and I do take some sleeping pills sometimes. But it's from excitement.
Great. Thank you. I think this one's for Steve. You previously said Tufropes and Bozzetto would generate approximately $70 million of EBITDA annually. The numbers shown today are in local currency, USD, and euros. Help me reconcile these.
Yeah. So you saw in the Tufropes presentation, I think they gave somewhere landing between $16 million-$17 million for the year, and Bozzetto holding around where they delivered last year, around EUR 31 million. When we disclosed the CAD 70 million, the Canadian dollar was a little weaker. You know, that's always gonna impact our Canadian reported results, but we're holding to the numbers that we originally projected. We're just getting a little stronger Canadian dollar is gonna have a little bit of impact on that number, maybe just below 70, but in the neighborhood.
Great. Next question is about the NAV. Are you ever gonna publish your NAV?
So, you know, we have an internal NAV. It's conservative. We always look at kind of the worst-case scenario. Our worst-case scenario would be very exciting to you. We don't reveal it because it's really just for competitive advantages. You don't wanna say you're valuing something at something, and then you try to sell it for, you know, 3 times that. People point to what you just published. So we don't publish it, but we do obviously follow it. And, you know, our most conservative estimate of NAV is, you know, more than a multiple higher than where the stock is, with significant upside beyond that. And as I've said, our goal is not to make a 3-dollar stock a 5-dollar stock, is to make this a 30- or 40- or 50-dollar stock.
That sounds crazy, and it sounds hard from CAD 3, but it doesn't take that much to move that needle. When you do the math on these acquisitions, you double or triple the equity value of one of them, and, you know, you're talking about CAD 10-dollar share increments. So that's the focus, and that's what makes me so excited, and we're doing it. There's a clear path to executing it. This isn't figuring it out as we go. There's a roadmap. It's just a matter of how quickly we execute it, and just getting there, but it's all coming.
Another online question: Recently, the share buyback stopped, and focus has been on investments. How does management think about this aspect?
Well, you know, every day is a reevaluation of where to put money. You know, what's the best place to put capital? And one day it may be into to tuck-on, tuck-in acquisitions, another day it may be into buybacks, and someday we hope that there's enough excess cash flow to do a regular dividend, as I mentioned. So it's just a, it's just a daily thing. When we see opportunities all the time, we just look for the highest return of capital that we can find, the best thing for shareholders in a given moment, and we focus on that. Today, we have a large group of potential acquisitions that we are pursuing for both entities.
We see a situation where if things work out in the liquidity front, and we resolve our activist situation, and we can get the Tufropes financing done, we could see a path to a third leg of the stool, and a control position. We are evaluating some of those opportunities as well. So it's case by case. I would expect... I could tell you that if our stock is anywhere near where it is now, and we complete our financing, you will see very aggressive buybacks of shares, and I will buy every share that is available to me as fast as possible.
If I could just add to that, our investment strategy has been very clear from the get-go. When we arrived at Aimia three years ago, there were a host of legacy assets. This was not where Aimia was going. It's where Aimia, what Aimia was. We set forth a path to, as diligently and appropriately as possible, to monetize the legacy assets, to ring-fence assets that were perceived liability and actual liability. Once we got through the process of monetizing the primary asset, PLM, obviously we were in the market to go shopping and to create this, the foundation, the fundamental nature of what Aimia Holding Company was going to be.
And we've made several investments now, and over the past year, we've made three sizable and substantial foundational investments, and that's who Aimia is today. And as Phil mentioned, and Roberto commented on, we have another acquisition that is in the later stages, we think that we'll be able to execute on. That, again, is it, it expands the foundation and the platform of this wonderful company. It's a company that has focused geographically over the past 10, 20, 100 years, actually. And their products and their product set are such that there is a terrific opportunity to distribute their products to different geographic regions.
And we're gonna take advantage of that, and there's already exceptional demand within the Americas for the products that they make every day. It's just getting, getting them here. As Roberto said, traveling the ocean, well, we're not going to travel the ocean. We're gonna acquire an asset, and we're gonna grow that asset into the Americas. So that's the, that's the next step of who Aimia is, and, and we're there. Next question: Which of your portfolio holdings do you feel are closest to potential monetization?
Well, it's hard to handicap always that, that question, but I would say that the, the Tufropes and Bozzetto are, are the furthest away, I can assure you of that. We've got building to do there. We, we are, we are gonna apply a, you know, a private equity mentality to those and, and target a 3-5-year exit. We're not planning on holding everything forever. We know people want to make money, so, but our plan is to aggressively grow those. In terms of the minority stakes, you know, if you have to handicap those, I would say, first on the list is probably gonna wind up being, Capital A, just because it is in, you know, full growth mode, stock price reacting mode. There's a lot of upside, and they're executing, and it's liquid, so that's probably up there.
And then it's just kind of a question. I would say, you know, Clear Media is low on the list today because you don't want to sell something at a depressed valuation when, you know, the market is not recovered yet. As we've seen in China, there's a very quick recoveries have happened there before, happened originally after COVID, before the zero COVID again. So I think you could see a rapid recovery there. So hard to handicap the others, except to say that while we're not pushing or forcing it, our focus and our priority is to create liquidity events in those minority holdings and recycle that capital into the larger stakes and the controlling stakes through other acquisitions.
That was terrific. Thank you. Next question: If you achieve your 15% pre-tax, your 15% goal of pre-tax returns, my long-term returns as an investor would be less than 10%. Is this a topic that you can address directly?
Sure. You know, we just—we're not looking to lock in a certain rate of return. We are making sure that we have a minimum rate. We're trying to make sure that there's a bar, but our goal is significantly higher than that. We're just not gonna come out and say, you know, how high it is, but that's a minimum return, and that's just to make sure that we're not, you know, buying something that's not gonna create a decent return to shareholders, in this environment, but our goal is much higher than that.
Next question: Will you continue to deploy capital to public equities, or are you gonna focus on private?
I would say, listen, we're, we're opportunistic and never say never, but, if there was an incredible opportunity in the public markets, we have made, significant profits in that area-
Mm.
Over the past few years when opportunity arose. If there was a new pandemic and the world ended and stocks, you know, dropped hugely, maybe we would consider it. But I think, you know, investors are not here to watch us, you know, be a mutual fund. And you can replicate our stocks, and you can replicate that type of strategy. You don't need to own Aimia stock. So we want Aimia stock to be something that has unique holdings, as you've seen we have, that you have to own Aimia to own it. And so while never say never, it's a very low probability you'll see us-
Mm-hmm.
Engaging in public market activity, unless it is a focus to make a full acquisition or initial purchase that leads to an acquisition.
... And as you've seen, we are opportunistic. We want to be opportunistic. We are value investors at heart. We want to buy assets that are either undervalued or we see a substantial path to increasing value dramatically. That, that's what we've done, that's our pedigree, so that's what we're going to look for going forward. I think what you're hearing from today, from not only Aimia, but from all of our management teams, is we have a terrific pipeline of capital asset allocation that exceed, well exceed 15% targets. And those are the companies, the investments that we're evaluating currently. But capital allocation is all about deciding where to allocate that capital, risk adjusted and with appropriate targets.
And that's what we do every day. That's what we feel our job is, to increase shareholder and stakeholder value. Next question: How does Aimia plan to address valuation discount from sum of the parts to the market price?
Yeah, I mean, I touched on that a little. I think it, it really comes down to increasing the shareholder base by increasing your confidence in, in the stock, buying the stock. It just takes one or two people to come in that wanna take a significant stake to turn this around. So we're actively talking to people and getting the story out, and hopefully, events like this help do that. But we're, we're actively working to, to close that gap so you don't have to suffer and stay up at night, like I do, thinking about the stock price.
Okay. With that, we're out of questions. Thank you everyone for your questions and taking the time to learn more about Aimia and our portfolio management companies. Thanks again to all the presenters. People have traveled near and far, so thank you very much for your time and commitment. We hope everyone's found the presentations informative, learned something about each of the holdings. Hopefully, we've given you enough information to further not only understand them, be able to value them, ask us tons of questions about them. We're an open book. If we didn't get to some of your questions today, or if you think about questions afterwards, please reach out to IR or to Steve, Phil, or I, and we're happy to answer any questions always.
And for those in the room that can stay a little bit longer, we have lunch available, and then, and of course, our portfolio holding companies are gonna be outside, presenting all of their products. So stick around and mingle. Thank you very much.
Thanks, everybody.