My name is Greg Conrad, SVP of Aerospace and Defense and Equity Research at Jefferies. Welcome to the Annual Jefferies Industrial Conference. Very excited to have MDA Space with us, and Mike Greenley, CEO. He will give a quick presentation, and then, followed up by some Q&A. Thanks, Mike.
Get my clicker. Here we go. Good afternoon. Just some remarks on MDA Space, then. So MDA Space is, from a matter of introduction, for those who might not know us, a pure -play space company, fifty-five years of history in the space sector. So I always talk about the space sector in terms of those of us in the fifty-year club. On a strong growth trajectory these days, we have about three thousand employees, up almost double, actually, from several years ago. Three business areas in a strong, growing space economy. I think an important thing to think about in the space economy these days, I always try to start with the fact that the space economy is real, that there is a space economy, that it is growing, consistently and steadily.
And as a result, there are legitimate opportunities in the space sector. The cost of launch in space continues to decline. As a result, companies and countries can access space and do whatever business they choose to do there, and there are legitimate reasons to do business in space. MDA Space as a company that is connected into three of the big reasons why people go into space. So people will launch into space to be able to observe the Earth and put up Earth observation satellites. MDA Space has developed and used radar-based Earth observation satellites. We're in our fourth generation of those now, and we're world leaders in radar-based Earth observation. We operate RADARSAT-2, and we're currently developing CHORUS, which is our next generation of radar-based Earth observation satellite, which is the single largest investment in the company.
A second reason to launch things into space is to build space communication networks. These days, people are building space communication networks for three reasons: broadband connectivity, to bring internet equivalent access to the world, direct-to-device communications, to connect satellites directly to mobile phones, and for Internet of Things, to connect up satellites with objects, you know, cars, tractors, shipping systems, logistics systems around the world. MDA Space builds in our Satellite Systems business area, the satellites for space-based communications. It's the highest growing aspect of the market these days and our highest growing business area. Third reason to go into space is to live and to work there.
Up the middle of this particular picture, you can see things like the Space Shuttle, which we provided the robotics on and flew 100 missions, the space station, where we provided the robotics and supported them for the last 25 years. And so we've got a lot of experience in providing sensors and robotic systems for space infrastructure and providing the operation support for living and working and operating in space through robotic systems and robotics working in line with humans. So as a result of this experience, we have access across the space sector in our three business areas in everything but launch. So Geointelligence for observing the Earth, Satellite systems in the middle of this chart for communications, and Robotics and Space Systems, space operations for space infrastructure. The space sector is growing decently.
It's about a $600-odd billion business a year these days, heading towards $1.8 trillion in 2035, ten years from now, is the current forecast, conservatively. And we're connected into that growth, in our business and across our business areas. I've probably talked to all of these things in terms of the resulting growth that we see with that CAGR that I just mentioned in the overall space sector, with us participating in everything but launch. The things that are causing this growth in the space sector, I've mentioned. The first is the lower cost of launch. As a result of the lower cost to launch, the growth in space networks commercially is rapidly increasing.
The opportunities of space enabling global connectivity, giving the third of the world that's currently not connected, that's not on the internet, that doesn't have connectivity, that will now come from space connectivity in the next few years, as a couple more billion people get connected into the internet and to direct-to-device communications. There is renewed interest in living and working in space or space exploration. That's turning itself into commercial space stations. There's at least four in development these days. And some of the commercial partners on that are quite interesting. You start to get large hotel chains now partnering in commercial space stations. We start to see pharmaceutical companies looking to get involved, to be able to do research on new chemicals, new pharma.
In addition to 3D cellular growth in space, which is starting to open up the potential for a human spare parts business, basically, to be able to send DNA up into space, grow new organs, to grow new parts and bring them back down, for health sciences and to be able to do repair on any individual person. And so that's all gonna grow and emerge as we go through the next few years. In addition to material sciences, to be able to build new materials in microgravity, people are looking at in-orbit power stations, and in the future, on-orbit mining. So there's a lot of activity where historical space exploration is now turning into on-orbit industrialization. With all that growth and activity, there's an increasing defense presence in space. It's more congested, it's more competitive.
It will keep getting that way. As a result, space demand is or defense demand in space is increasing, for the reasons I mentioned, to observe the Earth and provide communications for defense, but also to be able to play defense in space, to protect assets and explore or provoke other assets, in space. MDA Space has been active in this market for several years. We are a business that is built with about 50% commercial and government revenues. We've got good distribution geographically around the world in terms of Canada, the United States, and the rest of world.
On the left of this chart, great relationships with a range of space companies, those that have been in the fifty-year club, like us, in addition to a wide range of startups that have come into this space sector in the last decade, that we can interact with, both as customers and as partners in the space economy. Recently, we've seen significant growth in our business. So, in the 2020 timeframe, we became a standalone independent company once again, spun out of a larger U.S.-based company. 2021, a year later, we went public, and we IPO'd. At that time, back in the sort of the 2020 timeframe, we were sort of a CAD 400 million a year revenue business. We had around CAD 500 million of backlog. Obviously, that's changed significantly.
We've continued to grow at around a 25%- 30% annual clip of revenue growth, while maintaining a 19% to 20%, at least, EBITDA margin throughout this period. Which has now brought us to a situation where, you know, we've done our first double in size, and we're in the middle of our second double, with 2024 being forecast to be slightly over CAD 1 billion. Our backlog has grown tremendously, so the surety of our future and the surety of our sustained 25%- 30% annual growth continues to be more sure as that backlog continues to climb, as you can see now, around CAD 4.5 billion, you know, probably a bit higher than that at the moment.
One of our competitive differentiators that allows us to perform well in this market is the combination that we bring to the customers. One is being a member of that 50-year club, that historic legacy, large project experience in space, having supported our technology to over 450 missions in orbit. And so that heritage allows us to be able to behave like a large prime contractor and compete against the Boeings and the Lockheeds and the Northrops and the Airbuses and the Thales in the market.
But the size of us being sort of a billion-a-year revenue, couple billion-dollar coming up soon, hopefully, market cap company, we've got the agility of the smaller businesses and the flexibility and friendliness to work with customers that people comment on quite regularly, and that they love to work with our people. We've got great proven technology solutions, but they love working with our people, and they like the responsiveness of us in the marketplace. We have excellent facilities across our production environments to be able to produce, test, and operate assets in space, with more being added all the time in our new facilities. The backlog growth we expect to be steady to be able to continue.
We've got about a 20 billion plus pipeline that we're tracking at the moment of opportunities that could be closed over the next five years. The majority of that comes in our satellite systems business. We have a really strong pipeline for low Earth orbit and mid-Earth orbit, LEO or MEO constellations, in addition to strong commercial opportunities for MDA Skymaker, our new commercial line of robotics, and for our Geointelligence business through CHORUS and some upcoming new Earth observation satellites that we can offer into the market. So we're expecting continued growth as we go forward into the future. In terms of the guidelines or the guidance that we're working against for this year, we're expecting to do slightly over CAD 1 billion in revenue this year, while maintaining that sort of 19%-20% EBITDA margin rate.
Then we'll start to give guidance for the next year, but we expect to continue at this 25%-30% clip of annual growth for the next three to five years on this CAD 1 billion-dollar base that we've established this year. I've commented on a number of these things, but I'll just spend a couple of minutes and then take questions on each of the business areas. In Geointelligence, we're all about Earth observation, like I mentioned. We're world leaders in radar-based Earth observation satellites. So on the left-hand, the right-hand side of this chart, we're involved in sensing. We put up the sensors and the assets in space. We operate those. We deliver ground stations to our customers, so our defense and intelligence customers can collect and inform themselves, receiving the data from our satellites.
We have analytics teams, whereby we analyze the data from our satellites. For customers that don't want to receive and analyze data themselves, we do the analytics and just provide them the information products. Could be an ice report of ice in the Arctic or the ocean, or a ship report of all the ship activity off a country's coast, or a deforestation report in a certain forested area, whatever. Whatever the information product is, we will do the analytics and provide that information products to folks. In end-user operations, we will also pick up contracts to operate Earth observation satellites, primarily for the country of Canada. We currently operate about 88% of Canada's satellites for them under services contracts.
The big activity these days in geointelligence is CHORUS, us designing, developing, and launching, about a year and a half from now, our next-generation Earth observation capability, which will consist of two satellites, a broad area surveillance radar satellite, and a zoomed-in, synthetic aperture radar satellite. One will follow the other so that we can detect things and then zoom in and see what they are in the same orbital path. So that's a new capability in the market we're very excited about, and we're building a very long-life satellite, fifteen-year design life, that we would expect to last for probably at least twenty years without any unforeseen incidents. I've explained all of that. In Robotics and Space Operations, we build sensors for proximity operations.
These are laser-based sensors that build 3D images of the environment around the sensor in real time to be able to guide things like docking and berthing and robotic operations in orbit. We deliver robotic systems, and we now provide increasingly the operations for those robotic systems. We've just received contracts that will have us become certified robotic operators of Canadarm2 on the International Space Station, our Canadarm3 contract that we have to deliver the robotics for Lunar Gateway, the new space station that will orbit the moon. We will be the robotic operators of that robotic system, and we have built robotic mission control centers in our new facility in Toronto, Canada, to be able to operate those robotics, in addition to robotics for commercial customers in the market.
Big activities these days is Canadarm3, our largest contract, to build the robotic system for Gateway, the new space station for the moon, and then we are investing in MDA Skymaker, the commercial derivatives, of those, of that Canadarm3 product that we then offer to the commercial space stations, to rover customers for the moon, in addition to commercial customers for on-orbit servicing and debris removal, in addition to on-orbit assembly in the marketplace. Great to be moving out with a new line of commercial robotics after, you know, forty years of delivering this to government programs. In satellite systems, the primary growth area these days is LEO and MEO constellations. MDA Aurora is our sort of key product here in terms of our new digital satellite, a fully software-defined, reconfigurable satellite, for the marketplace.
We sold that into a Telesat Lightspeed constellation, 200 satellites there, with an option for 100 more, as our anchor customer for this new product. We've also announced a contract with an unnamed customer that we're currently working with on their constellation, and as I mentioned previously, have a really strong pipeline, over CAD 13 billion of opportunity for that Aurora product, in the marketplace moving forward. A different satellite design, but one that we're in the process of producing at the moment, is for Globalstar to expand their constellation. Globalstar delivers services, 85% of its capacity goes to its customer, Apple. Apple uses the Globalstar network for all of the direct-to-device communications to iPhones, and we're building the satellites for Globalstar and Apple to provide that service. So that's it, MDA Space.
Pure-play space company, 50 years experience, growing at 25%-30% a year, generating 19%-20% EBITDA across that growth, throwing off about 75%-80% of EBITDA as operating cash. Over the last several years, we've had a large investment program to invest in growth. We've been using our cash and some debt to be able to fund that growth ourselves. We're now in a position where in 2024, we've indicated we will become net cash positive at the end of this year. That's one year ahead of schedule. As a result of that, the cash proceeds that we're generating are being used to pay down our debt, so we're in the process of de-levering. We had a leverage ratio of 2.6 in Q2. That came down to 2.0-- sorry, in Q1.
That came down to two point zero in Q2, and will continue to decline as we go through the year. It should be less than one by the end of the year, and we should be debt-free as we go through 2025. So a strong, growing business, generating cash, with a strong pipeline of opportunity, with our growth really being de-risked by the incredible lift that we've seen in our backlog, which are signed, funded contracts, that as we execute, will be the foundation for the next few years of 25%-30% continual growth. That's it. How's that?
Perfect.
All right.
Let me see. Where do I start? Maybe just for this year, guiding to 30% growth-
Yeah.
Can you maybe talk about that relative to the three product areas that you laid out, intermediate term, you know, where you're kinda seeing the biggest lift, knowing that you kinda talked about satellite as-
Yeah
... the biggest TAM?
For sure. So in order, the biggest lift comes from satellites. The second biggest lift in the near term comes from robotics, and then the, you know, a steady ship right now in geointelligence. It's gonna get its turn in a couple of years. We kinda look at these three market segments. It's kinda nice. We call them the waves, and we get to, like, sort of surf different waves of growth at different timings, depending on, you know, where the surges are. But right now, the largest growth is gonna come from the communication satellites in the LEO and MEO constellations. Our backlog is the biggest there.
If you take something like a Telesat Lightspeed, for example, we've had CAD 2.4 billion of a signature there, and we've only burned off a couple hundred million of that in the early phases of execution. So, you know, we'll have over CAD 2 billion of execution over a 36-month period, starting in January. So-
Yeah
... big numbers there to be able to deliver as we go through the next three years that will drive a significant lift, and then in robotics, you know, we just signed in the last quarter, a CAD 1 billion-dollar execution contract on the robotics for the moon, and so that will cause the second level of lift.
And then just thinking about the growth, I mean, that chart's pretty impressive, dating back to 2020. What's the investment required to actually capture that growth? Or is there investment, just thinking about capacity, you know, and the assets required to grow at that speed?
Yeah. So our investments typically go and get focused on technology and in facilities. We've gone through a large initiating growth investment period, us becoming a standalone company in 2020 and then going public in 2021. We put together this CAD 600 million-CAD 700 million package, and we invested across the three business areas to initiate this growth, and it's clearly working out well for us. We invested in technology in each of the three business areas: CHORUS as our next-generation satellites and geointelligence, MDA Skymaker as our commercial robotic line in robotics, and MDA Aurora as our digital satellite product in satellite systems. We had to invest in facilities in Toronto and Montreal so that the robotics and the satellites could have their production environments to be able to scale up with the growth that's now emerging.
With that then, the completion of that investment package is occurring this year and next year, and then a little bit in 2026, so we're doing about CAD 200 million plus a year in CapEx right now. We did that last year, this year, next year, and then in 2026, it should come down maybe like 150, and then, you know, 2027, it should be sustained at around a 100 million level, a year of CapEx on a much larger business, so we have about a CAD 30 million-CAD 40 million maintenance CapEx profile, and then we need a bit of an envelope there just for steady renewal and tech insertions and upgrades in the R&D side of this technology base that we've established.
So we don't have on the books any plans for a big growth in surge of CapEx like we've seen in this current project. We expect to be in a more of a steady state, continual update mode once we get into this new posture.
And you've announced some new products, and my guess is you're probably more vertically integrated than some of your peers, given you're both a merchant supplier and
Yeah, sure
... you know, full provider. I mean, how do you think about the benefit of that when you kinda draw the chart of new space versus the primes?
It does definitely help us from both an experience-based perspective, so our heritage, our experience across the full solution for a satellite or the full solution for an earth observation system, or the full solution for a proximity and robotic operations system. That does help us in the engineering of the full solution, and in having access to the core technologies that we need to be able to manage the roadmaps for those solutions in the market, so being slightly more vertically integrated than the other, the more startup-y types is true, in addition to more experience, that helps us as well, and then as we go forward and look at having some resources available, as I just mentioned, as we become in a much stronger cash position, I can imagine us doing... You know, considering M&A more in two areas.
One is in securing technologies further to secure our roadmaps better, in areas where we wanna control the technology a bit more to secure our roadmaps, become a little bit more vertically integrated. In addition to looking at, acquisitions that could give us more capacity and/or, geographic footprints differently, give us access to other geographic areas like the United States or Europe.
Just given you, you mentioned M&A, and-
Yeah
... just think about the current environment, and-
Yeah
... you obviously, in any market, you have a surge of new entrants, and then there's always some level of consolidation. I mean-
Yeah
... what are you seeing just competitively? You know, how has that maybe changed over the past year, and just how does that impact the MDA Space?
Yeah, I think there's increasing opportunities are gonna happen. We had a surge of enthusiasm in space company creation, you know, back in that 2018 to 2020 timeframe. And, you know, there was lots of capital available, and people kicked off all kinds of things. You know, some of those are now running out of steam, and there is acquisition opportunities. I think even some of the large players, like historical aerospace and defense, who've created large space divisions over 50 years, primarily off of government programs, that governments are increasingly switching to look at commercial offerings, as a service, as opposed to buying and building everything themselves. As a result of that, even some of the, the big players would be happy to potentially get rid of some of their pieces.
And so I think there is legitimate opportunity for consolidation in the market that's coming now into the future. For us, we would see that as an opportunity, being a, you know, Canadian-headquartered company, global position, strong resume, a lot of talent in the company, and now about to be in a good financial position to consider picking up other pieces.
And then just on the Canadian front, I mean, how does that change your opportunity set, where you may be limited versus having additional opportunities from?
Yeah
... from your domicile?
Yeah, I think in terms of like, in helping us grow as a global space company, we have a bit of a, a bit of a moat around us in the, consolidation, consolidator domain. In terms of Canadian government approvals, it would be very difficult to get approvals for us to be sold, and so we're in a position to acquire others, for sure. In terms of a technology perspective, a lot of our technology is, Canadian-based, and so internationally, in some cases, that can be attractive because it's not U.S. State Department-controlled technology as much. It's Canadian-controlled goods technology, and so that, in some countries, that's perceived as a friendlier interface sometimes for tech. And the challenges side, in the U.S., we do well. We sell, for example, into all the primes on the U.S. Department of Defense SDA constellations.
We sell them antennas and products and technology, so we can get decent access there and be part of things. But if we wanted to scale up a bit, then we would have to, like, change our structures to be able to have, you know, more of a presence in the United States or more of a presence in Europe. If we wanted to come forward and pick up higher-order contracts with those customers, you'd have to- we'd have to have a bigger presence with the appropriate security clearances in those countries.
I mean, I think there's been a lot of changes within the satellite market, just thinking about GEO- LEO.
Mm-hmm.
And it seems like there's maybe more of a focus on GEO and back to there and, and MEO. If you think about that thirteen billion that you laid out-
Yeah
... how much of that's replacement? Because you did talk about a fifteen design life, and now we're talking about, you know, five to seven for LEO. I mean, how do you think about replacement versus kind of expansion within that overall TAM?
Yeah. So for us right now, our CAD 13 billion pipeline in for LEO and MEO constellations is very large majority, almost primarily initiating contracts. So these are people looking to get constellations established, primarily for communications. So the next five years, we see a string of initiating projects with customers as we go through that time and deliver capacity into customers' initial space networks with success, they will then want to expand and there will be an expansion opportunity. If we look at ITU filings, where our customers have filed for permission to fly satellites, you know, someone like Lightspeed, who's ordered 200 satellites from us, they've gotten permission to fly 1,600 satellites. Globalstar, you know, has bought 17 satellites, but they have permission to fly 3,000.
These people have much bigger plans and room to expand their businesses with success of loading up their networks. Over the next five years, we would get initiating contracts, maybe start to see expansion contracts, and then around that sort of four to five-year mark, expect to start to see replacement orders. A very sustainable business model in the LEO and MEO constellation market, which is incredibly new to the space sector. We haven't seen that before, and so it's a very exciting new opportunity to be able to sort of see that moving forward.
I think we talked about this back in June, but just thinking about Telesat, kind of.
Yeah
... and I think there were some key dates and milestones coming up. I mean, kind of where are you in terms of that contract and building that out?
Yeah, so we're fully active on that contract. Back in May, Telesat had its term sheets of for financial support from the Canadian government signed off and approved. They're working still on the definitive loan documents, but that's expected to be, you know, completed imminently. But once we passed that May threshold, we also completed key requirements review phases with them and went actively into execution mode. At the end of Q2, we had awarded about 75% of our contracts with suppliers to us. As we came into August, we hit about 90% of our suppliers to us had been contracted for. So we're in full swing in execution on that project at this time. Now we're coming up to a preliminary design review in the middle of this fall.
I will take one from the-
Oh
... the audience then.
Sure, yeah. Hi.
Just had a question. Do you mind sharing your thoughts on future regulation, particularly when it comes to LEO? A lot of these assets only have a three-to-five-year life. There's gotta be some sort of debris mitigation-
Yeah
... policy at some point.
Yeah.
You know, how does that, I guess, affect you as a manufacturer of these payloads?
Yeah, for sure. Increasingly in the regulations, one of the first things that comes from that is that people have to have plans. To get your launch permit, you have to have a plan for how you're gonna get your asset out of orbit when it's done its useful life. It used to be, and it still is in some countries, that you had 20 years after its useful life to get it out of orbit. With the amount of activity in space, that's starting to feel like a pretty long time. So the United States, for example, has changed that so that you have to get it out of there within 5 years of it being done its useful life. And so different strategies come with that for people in their thinking.
Our customers, for example, our baseline MDA Aurora product, it's actually a 10-year design life satellite. So it's got a bit more, a bit more features and length in it for LEO, because our customers are higher-order customers, and they want that. So we sort of have two customers. One's a five-year design life customer, and one's a 10-year design life customer. Strategies that people are using to do that, some folks are just looking at fuel management, and they're looking to make sure they have enough fuel that when it's done its useful life, hopefully it's healthy enough that they can use the remaining fuel to gradually deorbit it, burn it up in the atmosphere in a planned way. But it might not...
It might stop working, or you couldn't do that, and so people will have other strategies to have what we call grapple fixtures, mechanisms you can go up and grab onto, so that you could then deorbit this thing. And then, in our robotics business, we build robotic systems and, you know, grappling mechanisms, that even if you haven't planned it, to do, to grab something, you can go up and grab it anyway and deorbit it. So I think that, with the increased pressure on needing to get your asset out of there, quickly after it's done its useful life, that's-- will increase the need for on-orbit servicing and active debris removal businesses.
And so for us, in our business, we look for opportunities where our, you know, our robotics business can have more opportunity, and many of our customers look to buy our robotics systems to go and have a business that's gonna grab ahold of satellites, service them, fix them, change their orbit or deorbit them when they're done their useful life. And, we think that potentially could grow in the future, so that the same assets that are used for on-orbit assembly can be used for on-orbit inspection and fixing and can be used for deorbiting. Yeah.
And we'll leave it at that. Thank you.
Okay, thanks a lot.