Everyone, now we're gonna move quickly into our next presentation. We're a couple of minutes behind. We're going from last presentation, subsea robotics and synthetic aperture sonar. Now we're talking about space-based robotics and synthetic aperture radar.
Exactly.
And other, all other things space. So, here on behalf of MDA, which we're happy to have at our conference for the first time as MDA proper, and not as Maxar.
Yeah.
Mike Greenley, the CEO. So Mike, I'm gonna turn things over to you, and hopefully, at the end, we'll have time for Q&A.
Sure. Yeah, I'll just give a quick jog through of us and take any questions people have. So, MDA, pure-play space company, that's the story we're gonna talk about. We're about 55 years old, in a strong growth trajectory at the moment, sort of growing, as it says there in the bottom left, at about 25%-30% a year at the moment. We expect that to continue for the next 3-5 years. The space market is expanding rapidly, and so we see a global space market of about CAD 500 billion a year these days, tracking towards at least CAD 1.8 trillion a year by 2035, using the most conservative estimates that are out there from primarily the United States Chamber of Commerce.
We're connected into that space market in three key ways, in terms of the reasons why people go into space. The market is expanding because the cost of launch continues to decline. As a result, there's increasing opportunity for companies to have commercial business cases to operate in space, and there's a growing number of governments. There's now 90 countries that have space agencies and wanna have space programs, and can start to afford to do so. Especially when governments interact with commercial companies, which are growing in the space sector, there's more opportunity to do things in space. In terms of the main reasons why people go into space these days, one reason is to observe the Earth. To go up with satellites, observe the Earth, and track different things.
In our Geointelligence business, which is one of our three business areas, we are experts in Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites. Radar satellites can see day, can see night, can see through clouds, can see through weather. We primarily have a defense and intelligence customer base around the world, primarily government-based, some commercial, but the big anchor customers are government defense and intelligence customers to use our radar-based Earth observation data, and that's going. Our largest investment in the business is in a capability called CHORUS, our next generation Earth observation satellites, which we should be launching within 18 months, and that's our largest historical investment in the business. Another reason to go up into space is to build communication networks.
This is the fastest growing area of the space market, as primarily commercial customers put up space-based networks for three reasons: broadband communications, to bring the internet to people, direct-to-device communications, to talk between satellites directly to smartphones, and for the Internet of Things, to be able to talk machine to machine, to assets around the world. So we have a large pipeline of low Earth orbit commercial network customers that we are selling satellites to, and we will endeavor to continue to grow that business rapidly, selling those satellites. The third reason to go up in, into space is to live and work there. We've had a space station in orbit for 25 years, that six countries, including Canada and the United States, have been a part of.
Now that's gonna go out of business over the next five years, by 2030. There are four commercial space stations under development, in addition to a number of commercial enterprises to have spacecraft in space to service other satellites, to build things and assemble things in space, to remove space debris removal, to be able to then go and work and live on the Moon. We have 43 countries working with the United States to go and live and work on the Moon. 11 countries are working with China to live and work on the Moon. There's a bit of a race. It's competitive, so there's a strong, growing economy in space as a result of these three things, and we have three business areas that are attached to the three reasons why people go up into space.
So I think I've talked about, like, a bunch of those trends. We have lower cost of launch. We want global connectivity in these space networks. There's renewed interest in space exploration, living and working in space. With all that activity, there's an increased military aspect to this space activity, to be able to protect and defend the assets that are up there, in addition to ensuring that everything that the world relies on from space is protected and maintained going forward, into the future. So all of these things continue to drive a pervasive economy. This is not a blip. This is a sustained economy moving forward. MDA Space has a mix of government and commercial customers. In the commercial sector, we work with established 50-year-old space companies like ourselves and all kinds of new startups that are coming into the space sector.
We have a diversified global revenue base as we move forward into the future. With this performance, we're experiencing significant growth. We IPO'd in 2021. In the 2020-2023 period, we've doubled in size. We're in the middle of what we call our second double at the moment, and we will continue to grow at this 25%-30% top-line pace, like I said, as we go through the next few years. These are the types of results that we see from that, as we have dramatically increased our backlog, which is now sitting at about, right now, this second, probably closer to CAD 4.8 billion, with expectations that this number will start with a 5 by the end of the year.
Our revenue is being converted from that backlog at a sustained 20% EBITDA margin rate. And we are, now entering into, we convert well that EBITDA to operating cash. We've been investing that in growth initiatives strongly over the last few years. And, now a number of things are coming together, whereby we will be net cash flow positive this year, one year ahead of schedule. At least net cash flow neutral next year, so we're coming into a good cash position as our EBITDA and cash conversion continues to grow. So we have increasing number of options available to us as we move forward into the future. Our backlog continues to grow, but our pipeline is very strong. So you see here on this chart, an over CAD 20 billion pipeline.
These are specific named opportunities in our business that we are in conversations with, that could place orders over the next five years. You see that the largest portion of that, the CAD 13 billion+, comes from commercial, primarily satellite systems opportunities in low Earth orbit and medium Earth orbit constellations, for us to sell our digital satellite product, which we call MDA AURORA, into that market. Second piece of the pipeline is in Geointelligence, for us to deliver Earth observation and space observation satellites, primarily to government customers. That's what's driving the large numbers in that pipeline. And Robotics and Space Operations has an increasing opportunity to sell MDA SKYMAKER, our commercial line of space robotics, into commercial customers for commercial space stations, on-orbit servicing, and on-orbit assembly, like I mentioned. So strong positions for us moving forward through the next five years.
This year, we're guiding to about CAD 1 billion of revenue, maintaining that 20% EBITDA margin rate that we are performing at, as we move forward into the future. So that's really good, and then expected to, like I said, to lift at least another 30% as we head into 2025. Our Geointelligence business, I've mentioned, is all about Earth and space observation. You can see that we're involved in sensing, putting satellites up that observe the Earth, building and operating ground stations for people to process all of that information as it come down from Earth. We have an analytics team that creates information products about ice reports or deforestation reports, or the state of ships in your maritime economic zone as a country. A number of analytic reports and tools that we deliver into our customers.
The biggest activity here for us is MDA CHORUS, which is our internal development of our next-generation Earth observation capability, that will be launched, like I said, within the next 18 months. That's a two-satellite constellation with two satellites working as a team. One follows the other, and we can detect things, and then zoom in the trailing satellite to get more information as we orbit around the Earth constantly every day. I already talked about that. In Robotics and Space Operations, it's about sensors for proximity operations, so that we can come up to and approach spacecraft or objects that we've never met before, in real time, 3D image and scan them, use robotics to engage and interact with those. That opens up all of our opportunities around space station operations, the use of robotics on space stations, servicing satellites.
There are military applications that are growing for this, to build spacecraft with proximity operations sensors and robotics, to approach other spacecraft, inspect them, repair them, move them around, whatever military people may wanna do. In that type of business, that's a growing thing that will come in the military version of on-orbit servicing and assembly. There are rover projects now that are growing for the Moon. We're on a team, down-selected as the finalists, working through with NASA to deliver rovers to the Moon. That will be an as-a-service business, sort of Uber on the Moon. So countries will land, they will lease their rover services for the weeks and months that they are there. We're on another team in Europe, by the way, to do the same thing with the communication networks on the Moon, again, as a service.
So on the space robotics and infrastructure business, that's what we get involved in. Canadarm3 is the biggest project there. We just got a billion-dollar order there in the last quarter for the final design and construction phases of Canadarm3. That'll be the space stations on Gateway, the new space station that will orbit the Moon, and we will operate those from our control centers in Toronto. That's MDA SKYMAKER.
And then Satellite Systems, like I mentioned, is all about MDA AURORA, our new digital satellite product, which we are selling to an increasing number of commercial customers for broadband communications, direct-to-device communications, and the Internet of Things. So that's the story. That's MDA Space. A growing pure-play space company in a growing space market that we're connected well into, and expect to maintain this performance framework that I talked about. 25%-30% annual growth, 20% profit, 75%-80% of profit thrown off as operating cash, and choices that come with that as we go through the next few years.
You really got us back on track in a hurry.
There you go.
Yeah. Let me ask you a couple questions that I get a lot.
Sure.
One of them I asked you last week, but I'm gonna do so again in this forum.
Maybe I'll answer better.
Yeah. Embarrassment of riches with respect to backlog. You've had a lot of big awards.
Yeah.
Some of it's for newer technologies that you haven't maybe built before or sold before, and so I get a ton of questions about de-risking that program, how you feel about your ability to execute, and helping people understand as you start to ramp up this digital payload facility in Montreal.
Right. So some key things from that, in terms of the risk and then or the de-risking side. In the Low Earth Orbit constellation market, we're coming into a few things: digital satellite solutions, produced at volume. Those are the key phrases. In the Low Earth Orbit business, we're on our fourth or fifth constellation now at volume. And so over the last 6-7 years, we've gradually grown up through a number of different constellations, where we had a few dozen to then a few hundred satellite subsystems to deliver. So we were responsible for all the antennas or some of the electronic systems for these customers on their satellites. That allowed us to get used to converting ourselves to a more productized solution. It allowed us to introduce additive manufacturing, so we had more 3D printing, less components, less subsystems.
And then, using robotics-based assembly and robotics-based testing, to be able to produce at higher volumes and higher production rates. This all went very well, but was a very gradual process. Now, we're delivering full satellites at a current pace of one satellite per week, and with the MDA AURORA product, we'll convert to two satellites a day, with a new building extension that we're adding on to our facility. But the important thing with this is, it's been a gradual transition. So we're using all the skills that we learned as we've grown up here the last few years, to now be able to produce at these volumes, which makes us comfortable with what we're doing. There is some new technologies in terms of the digital satellite product that we're delivering.
Again, that's grown up over time, through historical investments in research and development, in Direct Radiating Arrays, which are the digital antennas, the on-board processor, which is the computer on the satellite that makes the digital satellite work. That has not been just a bid it and build it. That has been the results of a whole series of internal research and development, that has given the customers the confidence that the technology is, prime time ready, and therefore, they've placed these orders with us. So I think that's a key thing. The conversion to performance, we are staffing up well on our staff. We are on purpose training our people.
We are converting our organizational structures to be more product-based, to deal with this, this product and these volumes, and then we're putting the additions to our factory to be able to have the 2 satellite a day production, and that's all staying on schedule.
You talk about the ramp-up to a facility that can deliver two satellites a day, like CAD 400 a year.
Yeah.
A few business days, and all that. You've sold so far about 200, give or take?
Yeah, 240-ish or so, yeah.
And that's to be delivered over five years or some t ime.
Yeah, 3-4 years.
So there's a big gap between- what you've sold and what you could produce.
Yep.
So, I mean, walk me through how that ramps. And, and I guess I also wanna drill down on why, with this new product, why are people coming to MDA versus the establishment, which has been there for decades?
Yeah. So there's a few things. The conversion to MDA has come from. It started the second we announced our divestiture from Maxar. That was announced on New Year's in 2020, and by February, we had started being invited into competitions as satellite prime. So contractors immediately worked that. They would not have given us that opportunity as a member of Maxar, 'cause they produce satellites in California. So the second it was announced, we were coming on the street, bam! People started calling. The reason is that we're a strong performer. We have 50 years of experience with strong heritage. We have good technical solutions. We have competitive prices. We work firm fixed price, that de-risks them. We're comfortable at that. All of our projects are firm fixed price, and people really like our people.
CEOs, and that particular CEO that called us back then, said, "My people love working with your people." And everybody says that. So a very good collaborative team that people like to work with. That's allowed us to start picking up these satellite prime contracts. So in the Globalstar competition, it was against, whatever you called it, the historical 50-year satellite club, which we're a part of, but not at the satellite prime level, and we beat our competitors. That is, Telesat Lightspeed was with other members of the 50-year club, all those competitions. We ended up picking that up as satellite prime, replacing them as the prime. There are a number of other competitions that are underway right now, where people are asking for historical, analog-based satellite quotes. They're against the historical performers.
They're inviting us into the competitions, and we are quoting analog, but then we are showing people what a digital satellite looks like, and what that means for their constellation, their space network business model, and it's getting their attention. Because we're technologically a bit ahead of the market, potentially up to two years ahead of others in this digital satellite field, we're in a good position. If we can disrupt a competition and make it go digital, then we're in a strong position to be able to win the opportunity, which is causing a high pipeline conversion into orders situation for us in the market. So the process of the technological advantage is causing us to be able to pick up, you know, more of these, more of these in the competitions. Yep.
The win with Telesat was, obviously very notable. It was a big number, over CAD 2 billion.
Yeah.
Also, I think turned a lot of heads, because of the amount of money Telesat is saving, not what they're spending.
Yep.
Maybe you could just talk through why that is and how that is, you know, impacting your pipeline going forward.
Sure. In a digital satellite, you can save a bit of money on the satellite itself. In terms of sort of price per performance, you end up with the digital things, you can change your use of power. And if you change your use of power, then you change your mass, your weight of your satellite, which can reduce the size of your satellite, which can reduce the cost. So there's a whole domino effect there in terms of the price of the satellite itself. But the bigger impact is on the efficiency of the satellite. When you build an analog satellite, it can go up and fly, and it will have a very fixed antenna pattern. So it's sending communication beams down to the Earth off each side of the satellite in a set pattern.
Pretend that satellite flew up the coast, say, of the United States. So on one side of it, it's shooting out into the ocean, not making any money, and the other side, it's going Washington, New York, Boston, whatever, and it's making money with that side of the satellite. In a digital satellite, we have Dynamic Beam Forming. So the beams are fully aimable as you fly. So all the beams, in my example, would be pointing at land, at the cities, and then the beams themselves are fully reconfigurable, so we can merge them together. We can increase the power, density, and intensity of any communication pipe that we want to where the customers are. So the operating and money-making efficiency of a digital satellite is much higher.
As a result of that, you can get more money-making performance out of your space-based network with fewer number of satellites, which can reduce the number of launches that you have to do in your constellation, which saves a lot of money again there. So you're saving money in production, and you're making more money in operations because of the increased efficiency of a digital satellite.
We've got about five minutes left. Any questions from the audience?
Yes, sir.
Yeah, I'm just curious about, like, do you think there's launching too many of these things and, you know, becomes a problem where it's, there's just no use to continue to add them?
There will be some limit whereby the world will have global networks. There's a lot of room to grow to get there. I think that the opportunities, once we ever got there, though, is that the interesting part of this is that once you have established space-based networks for broadband, you got communication, for direct-to-device communications to mobile phones, for Internet of Things, which has huge growth to all the objects on Earth, to have the Internet of Things connectivity, there's a lot of growth to get there. We still have a third of the world that's not on the internet with cell phones today. Like, there's couple billion people here to light up, and so there's a lot of room to happen in the next 5 years to get to that point. Then, you have networks with customers from space.
Very efficient, just as high performance as a space-based terrestrial network, potentially a lot cheaper, potentially to install and operate, and you can access the whole world. And so, with commercial success, customers are gonna wanna add more satellites to expand their network capacity, and the satellites will have about, let's call it a 7-year average operating life. Which means within 5 years, you've got to replace all your cell towers in the sky.
And so for me, for us, we've got 2, 3 constellations now as Satellite Prime. I'd like to get up to a good 6-pack or more of those, and then you're in a situation where you've got solid customer base, you've got expansion revenue to add more satellites to their networks, you've got replacement revenue to replace those satellites over time. You've got a great, sustainable business model. That's what we're angling for at the moment. Yes, sir?
You described the military applications and the kind of evolving conversations on that front.
Sure.
Can you repeat on the Geointelligence, and especially, on the Robotics and Space Operations?
Yeah. So in all aspects of our business, you end up with military applications. So we just touch real quick on communications. Historically, militaries have used geosynchronous satellites. So you put a satellite up, and it covers a third of the Earth. So you have two or three of them, you've got full global coverage, your military has a global space network. That's been the past. Now, the militaries are moving to low Earth orbit, just like the commercial market, to have hundreds of satellites, 500 km, 600 km, 700 km up off the Earth's surface. The reason is you have higher speed, you're closer to the Earth, so your latency is lower, so you got higher speed communications and resiliency. If the enemy shoots out one satellite in geosynchronous orbit, you can lose a third of the Earth coverage.
If they shoot out one satellite in low-Earth orbit, it's just noise. You've got hundreds of them, and you just saw the guy shoot down one of your satellites, so he's about to get blown up. And so it's a very much more resilient network for the military, so a lot of transition to that. And so as a result, there's a growing business in that, the sensing and the communication side. On the Earth observation side, governments, militaries really benefit from Earth observation, whether it's camera or, in our case, radar-based Earth observation. The Ukraine war has really brought attention to that, especially in terms of the radar side.
It's not the best weather over there, and so the ability to be able to monitor day, night, through all kinds of weather conditions, earth observation, especially using radar, has been profiled in that regard. One of the biggest things, though, that's come is that militaries globally, especially led by the United States, is increasingly turning to commercial services. Space is one of these few aspects of the military where you're really partnering with industry. Industry does not build an aircraft carrier and offer you a service. You know, you buy an aircraft carrier. Whereas in space, if industry like me owns an Earth observation satellite, you can sign a services contract with me and buy data services for wherever you want pictures, day and night, of the things you want.
So the United States Department of Defense has established a commercial policy for Earth observation data. NATO has announced that by the end of Q1 next year, they will publish a commercial strategy for NATO for Earth observation data. So folks like us that are investing in Earth observation satellites that have fully taskable, unique sensors, like synthetic aperture radar, have an increasing commercial opportunity with militaries around the world to sell them Earth observation data as part of their military operations. Folks like us that are experts in maritime domain awareness, tracking ships in the oceans, you take something like Taiwan, maybe a few years from now, which will be all naval, you could be in very high demand in a few years to be able to provide that type of a service. So that's going on.
In proximity operations, where folks build spacecraft, like we do, things like TriDARs, laser-based sensors that you use to in real time image an unprepared object, a satellite you've never seen before, so you can have a 3D image of it in the brain of your computer on the satellite, and then use things like robotics to be able to interact with that. All of the features of the commercial market, which are used to inspect, repair, replace, change the orbit of a satellite to provide services, would have a military application, to be able to either protect your own satellite and keep a neighboring satellite away or to go and poke and explore the other guy's satellite.
There's an electronic aspect that exists and will logically emerge in space where people would want to jam or, you know, disable or mess with somebody else's satellites in another country. And so, with increased intensity and increased competition, there is increased militarization of space. And as a result, the military spend, you'll see, is increasing. We see now in the United States that, I believe the defense budget just hit $30 billion for space and surpassed the civil or NASA-related budgets at $25 billion, so the military is passing now. There's more activity that's needed for capacity in military operations, and we're seeing that around the world. In Canada, even in Canada, the military spend will surpass the civil spend as we go through the next few years. So that is a pattern that is continuing to grow. Yep?
Is your backlog fully funded?
Yeah, when we have backlog, those are signed, funded contracts. Yes.
Just, just a quick one. In terms of if Thales merges with Airbus and Leonardo, any positive impact for you in terms of winning work? And secondly, that CAD 100 million ATP, what is it-what are you missing for that to convert to a CAD 750 million contract?
Yeah. If I take, so if, if there's mergers in Europe, there'd be, like, another large space company. I don't see any particular pros or cons with that. Those players are good customers of ours, for us to sell, you know, satellite components, subsystems, and the like, too. In addition, as we've now scaled up, they're all asking if they can supply back to us, and we're starting to now contract from them to provide us with subsystems that we need for our full satellites. So we have a good back-and-forth relationship with those European space companies. And so, yeah, I think that if they merged, that that would still continue. Like, we get along well with them all. And Europe's only so big, so, you know, that helps them just deal with the European market. Sorry, what was the second question?
On the ATP there.
ATP, yeah.
What's the timeline that you can do it?
Yeah, so we have a customer. That customer is fully funded. We can't name them. They want to build a low Earth orbit constellation. They are building it. We're building it. Normally, you'll often get a small authorization to proceed, maybe 10% of a contract value or something, just to get going on your early work while you finalize the contract. That's very normal. In this case, we got turned on an authorization to proceed that was bigger. It was CAD 180 million out of, say, CAD 750 million, and then it just last week got extended to around CAD 300 million, so that we can keep going with the pace of the project. So we're basically executing a low Earth orbit constellation.
We've got CAD 300 million out of at least CAD 750 million in authorized funding, so we're moving. But it's a unique situation. They have to create some commercial structures and do some things that they need to finish, so they can award us the full definitive contract. So it's on them to get their work done, but they're clearly behaving with us as if we are delivering the full constellation at pace because of what they're doing with this authorization to proceed. They're giving us commercial coverage, and they trust us, so that we can just get these satellites built. Sometime this year, they'll finish their commercial setup, we'll get our contract, and it'll all go into backlog. But right now, only these authorization to proceeds are in.
You will name the customer?
Oh, yeah. When that comes out, they'll be all organized, they'll be comfortable, that everybody knows what's going on. Yeah.
I got to cut it off here.
Okay, thanks.
Thanks very much to MDA.
Thank you.