All right, everybody, I'd like to introduce our next presentation here at the Planet Microcap Showcase, Toronto, in partnership with Microcap Club. Joining us right now, fresh off the morning traffic here in Toronto, which, man, is that crazy, is Leighton Carroll from Baylin Technologies.
All right, hey guys, thank you. Yeah, I'm probably about one minute late. I actually had to run the last two blocks. I was worried about Robert because he was talking so fast at the beginning of that. I didn't understand him. Hopefully, you guys did. Baylin, a really interesting company. At this point, we do three things. We do satellite connectivity, doesn't see any antennas. We do infrastructure antennas and embedded or really networking antennas. Headquartered in North York, three locations in Canada, three in the U.S., China. We produce in Vietnam, have folks in Brazil, the UK, and customers all over the world. Baylin is actually a bit of a turnaround story. I got hired four years and a quarter ago to dig the company out of a really bad situation.
When I walked in the door just for the first half of 2021, and I joined at the very end of June of 2021, first half of 2021, the company had negative $15 million in operating EBITDA and $40 million in debt. Other than that, it was great. We had four business units at that time. As I go through each of these, I'm going to talk about the changes in what we've done. In fact, if I pop back here, I talk about four business units. We actually used to have a mobile phone unit putting antennas into Samsung phones. It was in Korea, facilities in Vietnam, no pricing power, no intellectual property, other side of the world, and Samsung held all the cards. The divesting had actually improved the balance sheet, simplified the business, and allows us to focus on the North American roots.
Everything we do is based on RF technology and engineering, and we have a bunch of patents and good intellectual property now. Infrastructure is kind of the biggest part of the turnaround story. When I started, this was by far the smallest business. When I was getting interviewed, I was like, when's 5G going to happen? I'd been doing it for three years at my last company. It was already happening. Lots of problems to go to market. What do we do about it? We focused on competitive differentiation.
It's a webcast.
Oh, it's a webcast? Okay. Sorry, it's a webcast. With wireless infrastructure, we focused on competitive differentiation and finding places that matter. This first antenna, it looks like a frisbee. I actually have one at home. I show on conference calls. That thing works terrific for in-building wireless. It's hotel room card key thick. You can paint it, you can skin it. It's patented. Why does that matter? MGM Resorts, Hilton Hotels, they're currently being installed in Disney properties. Why? Because the end customer cares about the aesthetic. They want good RF, but they actually don't want salad bowls everywhere, right? We've sold thousands of those. This little stick-looking thing, it's, again, it's an aesthetic play that matters. Picture on the far right, that's the Empire State Building in New York. That is an outdoor small cell, not the cans that you're used to seeing.
It's two inches in diameter, and you see it sitting on top of a light pole. On the strength of that product, we were awarded by Crown Castle exclusivity for small cells in New York and all five boroughs, and that has allowed us to expand nationally with Crown Castle, who had not been a customer when I walked in the door. Last one that's really interesting is this multibeam antenna. Multibeams are really specialized for high-density, high-traffic applications, right? We've all been in a stadium or somewhere where it's just freaking crowded, and you have no cell coverage. That solves that problem. How well do they work? When we started this, we had one in late 2021. We now have 35 with more coming. The important thing on that, this business never sold to Europe at all.
Up top, that's 80-something thousand people in a Harry Styles concert in a European field covered by one of those. Deutsche Telekom just ran a trial of that product in the Hockenheimring at a music festival with 250,000 attendees. They liked it so much, they did a press release as Deutsche Telekom mentioning this is our sub-brand, Galtronics, mentioning Galtronics, a Canadian company, produced that. They had amazing coverage. They took it a step further and shocked us. They did a YouTube video as Deutsche Telekom about the success that they had of that product. In fact, you can find it on our website. I've been doing this a long time. That never happens. This business will likely be the largest of the three businesses in 2026. By the way, when I joined, this business was running gross margins in the low 20%.
Even after tariffs, this business is running above 60% gross margins now. Competitive differentiation and getting to use cases that matter to wireless operators, 3POs like Crown Castle, American Tower, Boingo, Bolden. This is the biggest part of the turnaround story and is our growth engine. This business grew 40% in 2024, lowest capital spend year in North America for wireless infrastructure, grew 40%. Means we're taking market share. Guess what? It grew ahead of plan 25 and the plan was set higher. We expect further growth. The next business, this is kind of steady Eddie. We create custom-engineered antenna solutions that are embedded or part of other people's products. Like you see home network on the top, that's an easy one. That second box, both of those are boxes. That second box is for Charter Communications in the United States. That has 14 different antennas in it.
If you want a cheap antenna for an application, you can buy from a couple of Chinese guys, Quectel, Fibercom, excuse me. We get chosen when it's difficult or the RF quality really matters. Another great example is that body armor camera. That's from a company called Axon, formerly Taser. If you're familiar with that, that's critical communication. It has to work. They chose us so that when a police officer turns that on in an incident, it gets the video to the cloud for storage, it gets to the command center, and it works. That's why we get chosen. This is a nice business. It never hockey sticks up or down, generally grows at about a 7% to 10% rate per year, but it has a good margin profile. This was actually the first of the four businesses to make money after I joined.
Our last business is our satellite business. I think we do a lot of cool stuff, so hopefully this rhymes with that. We don't put things in space. We don't make dishes. We make high-powered gear that makes that work. If you like football, if you like golf, when you see the Super Bowl, Monday Night Football, the Masters golf tournament, everything you're seeing on TV is powered by our gear. The NATO early warning system for NORAD up in northern Canada, that's our gear. A lot of NATO work. Why is that interesting? A few things. That right there, that's manufactured in Quebec. That package of amplifiers is for a U.S. DOD classified applications. That is a $3 million purchase order. Okay, that's cool, but why is that interesting? We built four of those. There are a minimum of 14 more that have to be built.
We don't have the purchase orders currently. That is a government program. They have to upgrade the entire infrastructure. By the way, that will be part of Golden Dome. You know they're going to spend the money. You know that that's coming. By the way, since we are the standard, we're not rebidding that. We know that that's coming in our future. A lot of the government work and defense spending Europe has, I mean, with everything that's gone on geopolitically, Europe has really woken up to defense spending. We are seeing tons more activity in Europe. That doesn't happen overnight, right? We saw this in early 2025. We actually changed our sales structure in Europe to get ahead of a lot of this. Anytime you're dealing with government entities, the sales cycles tend to be long and slow, but the opportunities are real and programmatic.
I will tell you, of the businesses, this is the one that we've spent the least time improving its cost structure on because particularly 2023 and 2024, very solid revenue, decent business. 2025 has been a bit of a downturn. What happened? At the beginning of the year, you have a new U.S. administration, and the U.S. is a huge spender for satellite technology. You have the administration change, then you have DOGE. You have layoffs. You have changes in the U.S. government procurement practices. You have tariffs. This spending, and you have the big beautiful bill on top of that. The spending, we saw the purchase order volume coming down. That was like the starter spell for us. It's like, okay, we see this coming. We are going to restructure. We are going to take out costs.
The other thing that we have been doing, this business came to us through acquisition via my predecessor. The legacy products were insanely difficult to produce. The supply chain was complex. Even within a same band or power package, you could have different components inside. That means, unfortunately, our team in Quebec was more of a job shop than a manufacturing assembly line. We have gone to what we call a component architecture inside that allows us to simplify our supply chain, simplify our manufacturing. Everything's generally the same in boxes. In other words, we are actually expecting, as we hit to 2026, we've retired numerous legacy products. We are reducing our staff size. That is going to drive margins because we'll be able to produce at the same levels with significantly fewer people. We already have very significant improvement in our book to actually produce and bill for customers.
This one is very underway. We have customers, and hopefully, you guys can recognize some of the names here. I'm very proud of the team and what we've been doing to improve this. There were customers, when I walked in the door, there were customer relationships that were, to be honest, broken. There were customers who were missing, who should have been there. We have really done a good job of getting new customers and driving value. Great examples: Telecom Italia, Vodafone, Crown Castle, American Tower, Google. In the U.S., people who get Google Fiber from Google, 70% of their gear is our stuff. Those are great examples. This is a view on the spending, right? You can kind of see what happened in that capital spend year.
Our business, you know, I'm being asked to do a turnaround here when I walk in the door and spending's rising, but the company was not set to take care of it and had tons of debt. We start to go into a significant downturn in spending. Guess what? Dog doesn't eat your homework. No one cares. Fix the business. By the way, interest rates got a lot worse. That was fun. We took share. Oops, wrong button. This is kind of the financial progress. Through Q2 of 2025, and this is, by the way, this is pro forma for the three business units we have left. We did $6.6 million in positive operating EBITDA. Keep in mind, I walked in in 2021, half year, we were negative $15 million. With four units, we were negative $14 million at the end of the year.
We started digging out, but you can kind of guess, seeing the metrics, why we chose to divest that mobile business. By the way, I haven't met a banker who doesn't like this slide. I started talking about the debt and saying how much debt we had on hand. We have really worked to improve the balance sheet of this business. Where do we go from here? I've talked about new markets. The infrastructure business is expanding in Europe. That is greenfield for us. We have competitively differentiated products, organic growth, and margin expansion. That is something we focus on. We are strengthening relationships with existing customers, and we're adding new logos, new products. This is actually where it gets kind of cool because everything I talked about was rearward looking. Infrastructure, as I said, is really going to be our growth engine.
We have a new derivative of that multibeam coming out. Have you ever driven on the Trans-Canada and you hit a dead spot? I think we all have, right? You may have even thought, man, that dead spot used to not be here, but now it's here consistently. Why is that? Wireless spectrum, as more and more data usage happens, contracts. It loses its ability to propagate to the edges. The phenomenon is called rural cell edge exhaustion. Why does that matter? It's not just a customer experience issue for wireless carriers. It's a regulatory problem for wireless carriers because every carrier in the U.S. and Canada has a regulatory requirement for covering rural parts of the countries. We have a derivative technology that solves that. My CTO and I were meeting with the Senior Vice President of T-Mobile in the U.S. for networks.
We're presenting this, by the way, it's already patented. We're presenting this technology to her, and she interrupts my CTO and said, I'm sorry to break in, but if that does what I think it does, that's genius. That's going to save us so much because what was the alternative? You have to build more cell towers, or you have to put more stuff up or find other frequencies. Spectrum is expensive. You can replace existing antennas on existing towers with this, have coverage in the middle, and still broadcast to the end. We had seven tier-one carriers ask us for trials. That doesn't happen. We're starting in home field. Bell is our trial carrier. They've received our first two units.
We believe this is our next growth leg because that opens up literally thousands of sites to drive more revenue and growth into this business with a very strong margin profile. New products are important. Finally, inorganic growth in M&A. I haven't really talked about my history or background. I'm sparing you. Over the course of my career, I've personally bought or sold 17 companies. For anything we bought, those integrations were done successfully. I have a lot of experience doing it. I used to run the merger and integration function for AT&T Mobility back in the day. We have not had this opportunity. With a balance sheet that looked like ours and the amount, you know, you can imagine what my second half of 2021 and 2022 looked like. We were all working our butts off. We didn't do any IR. Why?
We needed to do a lot of stuff to fix this business. We are starting to get the growth. We have real competitive differentiation. With an improvement in balance sheet, we can actually think about, do we just grow organically or can we actually do something in terms of M&A to add revenue diversity and customer diversity to our business and ultimately create shareholder value? Guys, that was the presentation. Happy to take questions.
I think I'm new to it. I thought you mentioned T-Mobile?
Yeah, it's, T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, Rogers, Bell, Telus, everybody uses this antenna. It's a derivative of that, that all three U.S. carriers, all Canadian carriers, and some European carriers where they have this issue, this solves a particular use case for them in a meaningful way.
How does it do the work? Do they change power levels?
Yeah, it's the technology. Effectively, we're doing this with beam stability. It really depends on the frequency, but effectively, you have very high gain if you're an RF engineer out to the edge from the top. Traditionally, if you did that, you'd have a donut hole because you're not broadcasting down. Most towers are on highways or in small towns or cities of small cities. This solves that. It does both with multiple beams, with stability. They just add the radios and they've got the coverage. That's the concept.
Would you work with a string?
I'm just really that smart. No, that is not the case. I work with a lot of brilliant PhDs in RF electromechanics. My CTO is in Canada outside of Ottawa. He's a freaking genius. He's awesome.
[audio distortion]
Yes, sir.
Everyone's profitable. Is it sustainable? [audio distortion]
The question was, you know, he's looking at the most recent P&L, and you know, we are now profitable, and we had good operating income, good at, you know, whether you like adjusted net income or actual straight net income. Is this sustainable? I think in the short term, by the way, you guys will figure this out about me. I'm pretty freaking transparent. In the short term, it's going to be a little choppy because of this downturn in the satellite business. Our margin % has been going up because infrastructure is continuing to grow. I think when we hit 2026, yes, it is sustainable, and infrastructure will continue to grow. The margin improvement in Satcom will have taken hold, and Satcom will have had significant improvements in its cost structure, which is an important thing we're doing and have done this year. We started in April. Yes, I do think this is sustainable over the long term.
[audio distortion]
Competitors. Absolutely yes. If I'm in, I'm going to, I don't know where I put the thing. Anyway, meaningful competitors in infrastructure. No, it's upside down. That's why I didn't see it.
Okay. In infrastructure, and it depends on the segment because we do small cells, we do stadiums, we do DAS. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are all putting multibeams now on cell towers. We compete with, if you know who CommScope is, they're now called Andrew. It's part of Amphenol. They are a competitor, JMA to an extent in the multibeam space. This is part of why we did this. There was only one solution for multibeams before. There's a company called MatSing, M-A-T-S-I-N-G. They're these giant globes. The problem was they're giant globes, and they were crazy expensive. I didn't have to have the smartest sales guys to say, I've got a product that works just as well, weighs half as much, it's a panel, so it takes up much less space, and by the way, it costs a quarter of the price.
Satcom, yes, it's a bunch of companies never heard of. I'm happy to talk about it. On the embedded side, AirGain is probably our biggest competitor. We do compete with Amphenol as well.
Obviously, the preferences for customers, what would you say is the customer concentration versus what your top five is? What?
I don't know it off the top of my head. The question was on customer diversity and concentration. When I walked in the door, infrastructure was dominated by AT&T. Now it's AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Crown Castle, Graybar, Tesco. It's pretty diverse. Satcom, it's Viasat's number one, but then there's a ton of customers behind that. Thales, the European, we work with a lot of large defense contractors depending on the program. On the embedded side, I would say ASCII and Axon are probably one and two, and then it's just tons.
[audio distortion]
The question was, it's about $2 million-ish on R&D. How should we see that going forward per quarter? We have really held the line on that. If we see, we've actually taken down some things in Satcom because of what's going on in that business. It's the right thing to do for the cost structure. Conversely, the horse and the growth engine with the margin profile is infrastructure. We're investing more there, right? This is investing respectively in Quebec for Satcom and more to the point in Canada for infrastructure.
[audio distortion]
The question is, are there opportunities in Satcom in 2026, or is this really a competitive space? Given what we're seeing in Satcom and that this downturn is not unique to us, there are a number of companies who we actually suspect are going to bow out. CPI, as an example, stopped something called their ClydeStrom business. They just couldn't do it anymore, and that was a competitor for us, particularly in Asia for amplifiers for broadcast. I think the herd will thin, and the new Genesis products that I talked about, it's not just the modular architecture, that's more of a financial piece. They are higher functionality, software-driven. Again, that's going to lead to competitive differentiation against our competitors. It will still be competitive, but we think we're going to take a bigger share of the pie because we have more advanced technology within that space.
[audio distortion]
The question is, what moves did we do in supply chain? What were the major things that we did when I got there? Are there any future opportunities? To frame this, when I walked in the door, four business units, we had four ERPs. A logical person would think that's one per business unit. No, no, two were sharing and one had two. By the way, the one that had two couldn't close out a bill of material on a product they had. I couldn't get profitability by product. A lot of it was estimated. I was losing my mind. We run on data. A lot of what we did was clean up our systems infrastructure, really focus on what we're doing with vendors and suppliers, try to simplify.
We do exercises now, particularly within infrastructure and embedded, where if we're using a supplier to manufacture something or to build a subcomponent for us, we don't just get three bids and say, which is the lowest? We reverse engineer what we think their cost structure is, add a little bit of margin on this. We're not paying more than that. That's what you got to hit, right? It's helped us drive those costs down. One other thing, April was hell because of tariffs. I'm about to get yanked. April was hell because of tariffs. We actually worked with our auditors to do transfer pricing. Even though we should be paying around 35% because of the HSC codes we use and because of this transfer pricing in infrastructure, our margin impact is only about 6%. That's pretty dang good. Guys, thank you. I appreciate it.