Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Clear Blue Technologies Fiscal 2023 Financial Results conference call. My name is Ryan Freemantle. I work with Sophic Capital, and we help Clear Blue Technologies with their investor relations. On the call today, we have CEO Miriam Tuerk and CFO Farooq Anwar. They will provide an overview of the financial results and then provide a business update, followed by a question and answer period. So at any time, please feel free to submit questions using the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. I will now pass the call over to Miriam to begin the fiscal 2023 financial results. Miriam, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Ryan. Good morning, all. Good afternoon for some of you in Europe. As always, please take everything we say under the guidance of forward-looking statements. We do our best, but we cannot forecast everything that happens in the world, so please take that under consideration as we give you our presentation this morning. So just gonna spend a few minutes on an overview of Clear Blue. Our product portfolio has changed quite a bit, which is expanding our addressable market, so we'll talk about that a little bit. Then we'll go through our 2023 results, which for those of you who know me, I'm a fairly blunt person. I'm actually quite proud and thrilled with the results that we have delivered.
Given where we came from and the downturn that we had in 2022, 2023 is a great launch platform to make 2024 fantastic, and I think you can see that in our results. So once Farooq has gone over that, I will then talk a little bit about what we see going forward and give you my best ability to give you guidance on what we see as a company. I've shown this chart a couple of times, and I went back and took a look at it, and I really feel like we're actually at that inflection point. Now, you can only know that when hindsight is 2020, but when the world in the telecom marketplace went from everything was wired to hybrid wired and wireless, there was an explosion of telecommunications. And I was listening to CNBC this morning.
They were talking about the explosion that is expected in electrification, and I believe that we are starting to see those leading indicators in the market as well. Once we see that, we see that the potential is that there will be significant growth, and that wireless power may, in fact, significantly overshoot wired, connected-to-the-grid power. And of course, we are the leading provider in North America, certainly, and I think we have leading tenants globally as a wireless power service provider. So why do I say that the trends in power are accelerating? I think that, given what's happened over the last few years, people are, you know, customers in infrastructure, strategic planners are starting to say, "You know, this isn't a one-off. This isn't an edge case.
This is more normal." And so, for example, power lines are causing forest fires. We know that that happened in Canada and in the U.S. We've seen it in Maui. We've seen it in California, I believe in Alberta and British Columbia. But you're starting to get people talking about it as something that is a much more aggregate. So, for instance, Texas is talking about the fact that they believe 4,000 forest fires were caused in the last three years by power lines. And so what you do is you see, instead of just the edge people, you're seeing the core infrastructure, such as power utilities, taking note. Having conversations with power utilities where they say, "Listen, I've got this long power line.
It's only operating a few remote telecom sites," or, "It's only operating streetlights along a highway at an off-ramp intersection." They see looking at off-grid now as a way to reduce their operating costs and to reduce the risk of forest fire liabilities and all that comes with that. So to see a grid-wired power infrastructure player, like a power utility or a ministry of transportation, start to look at off-grid as a viable option is kind of a new inflection point in the marketplace that we've really started to see in the last six months. On the solar street lighting side, we're now at a point where it's reached what I would call grid parity.
One of the benefits of monitoring and managing systems is that we can show and demonstrate the types of uptime that we can deliver, and for those of you who live in Southern Ontario, you know that it's very dark, overcast, no-sunshine periods of the year. We've been able to show one GTA large municipality that for a six-year install that we have had with them over the last six years, we were able to deliver 99.9897% uptime, which certainly is on par with grid uptime. And then the second piece of that is you've got cheaper and more reliable LEDs.
You have more reliable solar, and hybrid solar solutions, and with the advent of lithium batteries, which is being driven by the electric vehicle, all of a sudden, the cost to replace an existing grid light with a hybrid solar grid light or the cost to put in a new solar light instead of a highway, street, or pedestrian lighting, grid-powered light, has reached grid parity. So it's now cheaper or equal to, and we're seeing significant increase in adoption around that.... and then I think lastly, in a more global way, so those two are specific to North American conversations. In a global way, AI, and of course, the earlier foundations of that data, predictive analytics, and how it can deliver lower operating costs and higher clean energy operations is a key market driver.
So we're seeing a lot of our large telecom customers really focused on offsetting their ever-increasing operating costs and CapEx costs through innovation and through innovation with data, which is where we're focused. And then on the other side, the financial institution industry is pushing really hard to invest in Clean Tech and to look for ESG metrics. And as a result of that, you're seeing that, you know, the money is what leads everyone to move more aggressively in this direction, and we're seeing a lot of greening of infrastructure, which is a great opportunity for Clear Blue and obviously good for all of us on the planet.
Last year, one of the biggest tech trends was virtual power plants, wireless off-grid, and we continue to believe that that is a big tech trend, and it is the key focus of Clear Blue, and what we have been all about since the company's foundation. So for those of you who are new, just to kinda summarize, what is it that we do? Well, the first thing is, we manufacture leading-edge power electronics. We make rectifiers and chargers and controllers and inverters and all of that, that kind of power management, power supply control technology. The reason we make the technology is that in order to have smart systems, you actually have to embed edge computing into your power devices, and you have to change the power electronics controls.
You can't just go and get an old-fashioned, dumb, power electronics device and make it all of a sudden smart by communicating to the cloud. You need functionality and features inside of it. So we make that smart power electronics. We then connect it to our Illumience, our smart power cloud service, and through the management capabilities and the troubleshooting capabilities and the forecasting capabilities of that technology, we're able to deliver unparalleled energy, uptime, and performance management. So number one, we can make the solar energy or the reduction of dependence on diesel much better than any of our competitors because we've got the data and the predictive analytics and the IP in order to do that forecasting. Alongside that, the cost of maintenance, operation, troubleshooting, and outages that result from that is a big headache for anybody who's operating power systems.
The ability to do that remotely, to remote troubleshoot it, to actually remediate it, take action, do maintenance on the batteries, is also technology that we've built. In order to talk about delivering the value to the ongoing operation of the business, we believe that not only do we have to be able to develop good software or develop good hardware, we've actually gotta get out there in the field with our customers and understand what it takes to do that. Every system we sell, we actually manage and operate it from our NOC center, and today, that's more than 14,000 systems in 55 countries. So what is our core product line? Well, at the center of every product that we have is our Illumience Cloud Core technology.
That is the software, the hardware, the cloud data, the connectivity, so that every device anywhere in the world can send data to the cloud, either every 10 seconds or every five minutes, and through that, provide us with the data, the analytics, and the remote control management. We've two key verticals that we're focused on. One is telecom, which is really large systems. It can be 500 W or 1,000 W or 25 kW of energy that's required, and for that, we have two products, our Nano-Grid and our eSite product. eSite was an acquisition we closed in early 2023, last year. It's part of last year's financial results, and we did deliver a fair amount of revenue for eSite last year, and we expect to get more this year. So we're very excited about that.
On the other side, the smaller infrastructure, so smart city, solar lighting, Internet of Things, satellite, and Wi-Fi is a very key market. Just because it's really small doesn't mean it's any less mission critical than the bigger systems, and through our Illumience Cloud Core technology, whether it's really itty-bitty small, like our Pico-Grid, or really, really large, like our 36 kW or 32 kW eSite-Micro system, we are able to manage it with the same smart tools.
So in telecom, our product line is, the eSite-Micro, which is the larger systems, and it's really good support for hybrid and generator; our Nano-Grid, which is our core technology that we've had for a few years, which is really the leader in its class when it comes to solar-only and solar grid applications that are more rural or satellite-type applications, 20-3 kW worth of power; and then, as we start to get down into satellite direct to the customer, bypassing the cell phone network for community internet, our Pico-Grid product, which is also perfect for IoT, such as security cameras, sensors, agricultural, you know, farm watering stations for bulls and cows, as an example, are the types of projects I hear about from our salespeople nowadays... on the Illumience side, we have matured our product quite a bit.
Three years ago, all we had was the Strada series, and this is our, one of our nice projects, which was done in downtown Toronto. So it's not just rural, it's right down in the city core, where the cost of infrastructure underneath all that concrete is way too cost-prohibitive. And, we were able to do a Bloor West Village with our Strada series, requiring lead-acid batteries. And with the advancements of technology and our own R&D development, we've now been able to launch, our Cammi series, which allows us to go with, lithium batteries, one-third the size and significantly lower in cost, making your opportunities much more flexible. This is a picture of, Interstate 80 in Nevada, one of the off-ramps that is newly constructed, where we are providing all of the lighting.
So in the middle of nowhere, you drive 20 miles, 40 kms, you come to an off-ramp, and instead of seeing, you know, five or 10 or 50 power poles connected to power utility lines that go for miles and miles, now you have completely standalone, independent, off-grid solar lights where, you know, they're not gonna cause a fire. And Senti, which is our new all-in-one streetlight, has some innovative patents technically around the physical layout. But again, your ability to get it into a single integrated device has only been launched by us now. It's been around in the market by others for many years.
But without the smart management and without the reliability, we have advanced our technology to the point where it's reliable and we can deliver the kinds of uptime that I just talked to you about, and with our technology design, we believe we've got a better product in the marketplace than anyone else. So hopefully you've seen this before, but very thrilled and proud of the marquee list of customers that we have and the presence that we have. Most of our products and markets are in Africa and in North America. Our intention is to expand into the South America, Latin America market, or Latin America marketplace and Southeast Asia as we grow over the next few years.
I talk a lot about our software, but I haven't really shown it to you, and I thought maybe just a few quick slides might be interesting. Our IP and our core intelligence relates to how smart our technology is and what you're able to do with it. These are some example live production screens of some existing customers that we have. The next few slides are actually videos. I'm gonna go through them very quickly just to give you an idea of what the customers can see and the richness of the data that our NOC operators and our customer operators are able to use. We launched the Hub last year, and you can get an overview of what's generated, how the battery's doing, how things are consumed. You can see the profile through the day.
You can vary it quite a bit and really look at spikes and things that have occurred and why did they occur. We have a new tool called the Power Flow Management . This is hugely valuable because you can really look at not a point in time, here's the data, you can look at what happened over a period of time, and that's critically important because, you know, when something derails in a power system, it's kind of like you're driving off the side of the highway, and now you're on the shoulder, you're going into the ditch. There's a lot of opportunity to re-steer that system back online to be able to perform directly, and this Power Flow Management provides significant capability of it.
You've heard me talk a lot about scalability, and I just thought I would show you our new dashboard, where you have the ability now to look at it from a macro perspective. So I wanna look at all of my operations in Nigeria, and I wanna see how things are doing and which ones have problems and where is there an issue. And the ability to look at that much data, understand that there's more than 1 trillion data elements below the system, underneath the covers, is a key aspect of what we launched last year, which is allowing our customers to manage things at scale. So those are just some examples of how we're on the road to AI. Before you ever get to artificial intelligence, you've gotta get the data. You've gotta learn how to manage, how do I manage such large volumes of data?
How do I describe what's happening in a way that's usable and consumable? Can I analyze why it happened and automate that? Can I then turn that into prediction? "Hey, I'm seeing a decline in the power profile that is a slow decline over a period of time." So it's not because it was, you know, dark today or rained yesterday, but it's more of a different kind of trend. That means that my systems in Cameroon are getting dusty, and I need to deal with it, or I don't need to deal with it because it's gonna rain next week, and even though there's degradation, it's not actually impacting my performance. That's what predictive analytics is all about, and we're able to do that today.
Then you go to the next step, which is AI, where it starts to think on its own, to do the work on your behalf as you scale from as I said, we're at 14,000 or 15,000 devices so far, to 100,000 devices and 200,000 devices. As you take your core technology of Nano-Grid and Illumient are street lighting, and you move upstream to this larger power, which is much more complicated, much more sophisticated powering, and you move downstream to tens and tens of thousands of small little devices that need to be managed in the same way as a critical power infrastructure. That is what the tools are needing, that are needing to build. Again, telecom is a great example.
Back in the old days when we had landlines, when you picked up the phone, even when the power was off, the phone was on because all of the electronics were at the central office. You had a big central office, you had a couple of technicians working in that central office, and everybody on all their power, telephone lines was getting something off of that central switch. Today, we have a little piece of that central switch in our house, and it's called a router, and somehow our telcos have figured out a way how to support all those router installations, remote manage them, remote troubleshoot them, by building the tools to be able to do that. That's what's needed when you go to a wired... a wireless power infrastructure, and that's what Clear Blue is focused on building.
Clear Blue, our key focus this year that we're working on with some of our bigger and strategic customers is getting on the road to zero diesel. In a very big part of the world, most of the telecom infrastructure cannot rely on the grid 24/7, and therefore, they have to supplement with diesel generators, which is just a really ugly, ugly, costly, just forget about climate change, ugly operational infrastructure and moving away from that. The interesting thing is that, you know, Eastern Canada has never had to worry about diesel generators because they always had the grid, and then after a few hurricanes hit over the last few years, you'll have heard Bell Canada announce that they've implemented diesel generators at all of their sites. Why?
Because when the grid goes offline, you still, through storms and other climate change, you still need power. So even the most developed infrastructures are starting to have to get to hybrid power solutions. And Clear Blue is working on developing the AI analytic performance capability, data, predictive data, and analytics, and then going to AI on how you can get rid of diesel. We've already proven that with 40% lower upfront cost on a system. If you buy a Clear Blue solar system, you need 40% less solar panels and batteries than the competitors, and we believe that that will also translate to our hybrid customers with diesel, where we're gonna deliver 20%-50% reduction in customer diesel consumption. That's our target.
Maintenance windows are reduced, uptime, and then at the end of the day, my job is to deliver 5%-10% extra profit margin to the customer's bottom line. Okay, thank you for letting me talk a little bit about Clear Blue. Now we're gonna get into the 2023 results. I am going to turn it over to Farooq. Just say next slide when you want me to hit the slide button.
Sure. Thank you so much, Miriam. So, we can see that, we're returning to strong revenues. If you look at the bar chart on the right side, you can see Q3 and Q4, pretty solid bars. So revenue for Q4 2023 was CAD 2.1 million, which yielded a trailing four quarter result of CAD 5.4 million. We can see a steady increase in revenue throughout the year. The first two quarters of the current trailing four quarter was impacted by the economic downturn, triggered by the macroeconomic events of early 2022, as companies around the world paused their capital spending. We now see that the customer spending is gradually returning.
In the latter part of 2023, the company saw a return to strong bookings, and some of those orders began to ship in Q3, resulting in a record third quarter, and the company has seen the trend continue in the fourth quarter as well. The company foresees trailing four quarter revenues will continue to grow going forward. Next slide, please, Miriam. So, if you look at our revenue based on our sector and regional results, the Q4 quarterly revenue shows that Clear Blue is now back to revenue growth mode. And we, as we move forward, trailing four quarters revenue has begun to grow again, and continue to do so going on forward. Our lighting vertical has grown significantly, mainly due to the fact that solar lighting is now at grid parity for cost.
Also, increased awareness of the cost and hazards from power lines and focus on climate change initiatives in the North American market has increased adoption. Therefore, we now see an increase in revenues by vertical, both, you know, by vertical and also by region. Our telecom vertical has been returning to pre-pandemic levels since the customers have resumed the capital expenditure and that they had paused in 2022. Customers are now resuming their deferred rollouts, and we're working with these customers to accommodate them for the revised rollout schedule. When we speak about bookings in the later part of the presentation, you will see that the orders have now started to increase, which is also reflected in our revenue for the fiscal 2023. Next slide, please, Miriam.
So if you look at our revenue by product, as you know, Clear Blue Technologies completed the acquisition of eSite Power Systems in Q1 of 2023. We now have launched the next generation of that product by integrating eSite's unparalleled industry-leading power electronics with Clear Blue Technologies' smart power management cloud software and our services and business model. This can be seen by approximately CAD 1.8 million in eSite-Micro sales in 2023. We can also see increase in Illumient solar light due to increased awareness and solar grid parity in Canada and the U.S. The decrease in Nano-Grid is attributable to the timing of the customer deployments that I spoke about. Nano-Grid customers had delayed their rollouts due to funding delays, and we work closely with these customers.
As we work closely with them, we see that, seeing, you know, that their funding is now resuming. We've seen that, and rollouts are going to follow. So while normal sales cycles are typically 18 months, as you can see, eSite-Micro is now already continuing strong results in 2023. But 2024, eSite will be a large component of the company's revenue, and we are quite bullish about its potential in 2024 and beyond. Next slide, please, Mary. So now, if you talk about Illumience and EaaS recurring revenue, recurring revenue is the revenue that the company earns from its Energy-as-a-Service, Illumience's ongoing management services, and cloud software. Every single system Clear Blue has ever sold includes an ongoing service component. Clear Blue manages and operates the power systems on an ongoing basis for our customers.
This is the heart of our business and value proposition. As telecom customers increase wireless telecommunication bandwidth to support an ever-growing customer base, so too do, you know, so do we increase the power needs of those sites, and our product helps in that. The ongoing growth of telecommunications, telecom systems and ongoing operations and maintenance of power needed to keep these systems functioning is what drives the growth in our recurring revenue. As you see, additions of our telecom customer rollouts over the years is having a nice impact upon the growth of our recurring revenue. Recurring revenue includes all revenue from existing installed systems that are undergoing ongoing management by Clear Blue. Clear Blue will sometimes undertake to expand the capacity of these sites as telecom traffic continues to grow, and these one-time transactions are also included in the company's recurring revenue.
Beginning in Q3 2023, the company saw the return of strong bookings, which including one-time revenue. As a result, Q4 recurring revenue was CAD 200,772, a 20% increase from the same period last year. For the trailing four-quarter period, recurring revenue increased by 26% to CAD 1,032,056 for 2023 compared to 2022. In general, recurring revenue is expected to increase every quarter as Clear Blue sells more units with a subscription model. And as companies' base for telecom installations grows, telecom systems tend to grow their capacity and power consumption, which also increases the recurring revenue for Clear Blue. Next slide, please, Miriam. Miriam, do you wanna speak about bookings?
Yeah. So, bookings consists of two components in our bookings. It is assured revenue on a go-forward basis, and it consists of two components. It consists of the pre-booked, the pre-sold multi-year ongoing maintenance and management contracts that we have, and as of the end of December, we had CAD 760,000 worth of that. And then it has upcoming orders, where we've got a purchase order, but we've not yet done the shipping of that purchase order. And so that, at the end of this of December, was CAD 1.7 million. In that CAD 1.7 million, we would include the Illumience's deferred revenue portion.
So when we take that $1.7 million of revenue, some of it will show up in year one, and some of it will show up in year two, in follow-on years, which is why we show you the breakdown. So as an example, January 1 of this year, we had $1.8 million of revenue in hand for the year. As of December 31, 2023... Sorry for the typo there, should have changed it from September. Clear Blue's bookings had increased 24% year-over-year. And we anticipate that we're gonna continue to deliver those services this year for $1.8 million, and then $700,000 beyond that. Back over to you, Farooq.
All right. Thank you so much, Miriam. So if you look at the graph on the right, we can see that the company has been able to grow its margin over the years, and now it's maintaining margins at around 40% range. With high inflation and increasing commodity prices, there has been pressure on the company's margins. However, in most cases, the company has managed to either innovate lower costs elsewhere or pass a portion of these increased costs of materials to its customers, which has made it possible to just because of our value proposition and our software and service. Trailing four quarters gross margin, you know, for this year has increased to 46% when compared to the comparable period.
Given the acquisition of eSite in 2023 and other cost pressures on the company, we do not expect to maintain, you know, these higher 40% margins. I think we should expect margins to drop a little bit to be in the mid-30s range, which is pretty reasonable based on, you know, based on our trend and based on what's going on in the market. Next slide, please, Miriam. So in this environment of higher inflation and resulting higher costs, Clear Blue's management is focused on reducing operating expenses where possible. In Q4 2024, the operating expenses did increase by 31% compared to the same period in 2022. But the increase is mainly attributed to higher share-based compensation expense, which is a non-cash-based item, compared to comparative quarter of CAD 120,000, CAD 377.
Professional fees a little bit higher by CAD 77,246, and research and development expenses, which is our bread and butter, were higher a little bit by CAD 250,000 when compared to the comparative quarter of 2022. For the trailing fourth quarter, however, of December 31, 2023, overall, the operating expenses decreased by CAD 258,133. This decrease was mainly attributable to lower salaries and benefits of CAD 118,643, and business development expenses of around CAD 93,155. Okay, Miriam, next slide, please. Okay. If you talk about EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA, so our EBITDA increased, improved by 68% to -CAD 401,330, compared to -CAD 1.2 million in the comparative quarter of 2022.
For the trailing fourth quarter, EBITDA increased, or improved by 49% compared to the comparative period. Improvement is mainly due to higher revenues and higher margins. The company excludes... So, and when you talk about our Adjusted EBITDA, so the company excludes its government R&D as part of its Adjusted EBITDA calculation. As the company has commitments for these grants for at least the next three years, and it's fundamental part of our fundament-, or of, of our financial plan to assist in R&D development, it has been included in this calculation. Adjusted EBITDA loss decreased by 70% for the quarter and 48% for the trailing fourth quarter. The delta of, in non-IFRS Adjusted EBITDA between Q3 2023 and, between Q4 2023 and Q4 2022 can be attributed to the funding received from governments toward, you know, towards these operating expenses.
As Clear Blue's revenue is expected to grow nicely over the remaining, you know, or in the future, we expect our non-IFRS EBITDA to improve as well. Next slide, please. Miriam, do you wanna, do you wanna talk about the overall?
Sure, sure. Thank you very much, Farooq.
Mm-hmm.
So, upon reflection, you know, when I stand back and I look at the year, I'm very pleased. We doubled our revenue. Our gross margin was very high, and I would like to comment that, it is because of the IP we have built into the revenue. Most of our one-time sales is hardware sales, but there's so much software and functionality and value add in that software that we're able to make good margins, even though we're quite a small volume manufacturer. As we grow our volume, that those numbers should continue to improve. The reason why we're giving a bit of guidance lower for this year is because of the product mix. When you have a product that's more mature, like Nano-Grid, you can get higher margins.
When you have a product that's still a little bit early stage, like Pico, Senti, and eSite, your margins are gonna be lower. So, you know, we're always on a continuous cost reduction, and improvement phase. We need some time to do that with our newer products. We cut our EBITDA loss in half, and quite pleased with that, and I think that as we target our growth this year, we should hopefully see that number swing positive. I'm not giving that as guidance, I'm just saying that's our target. Have to see how the results do, but we are furiously, furiously managing cost expenses, and rightsizing the organization on an ongoing basis as we need to.
Resisting pressures to grow our staff where we need to, and sometimes I wish we could do that a little bit faster, but just waiting for the business to grow and validate itself as we grow. I've had a couple of people tell me that hitting the CAD 1 million mark for recurring revenue is a milestone. I know a few years ago, everybody was saying, "Miriam, you're talking about recurring revenue, and you're never gonna get there. It's not growing very much." As we all knew back then, it does have a multiplier effect, and as your install base grows. So we're very thrilled to see the growth to hit over CAD 1 million. Next job is to get it so high that it alone carries the OpEx of the company.
I think we're a few years out, but maybe not too many to get there. But in summary, I really feel that these are strong fundamentals. At the size of company we are, to be able to generate a gross margin and get our EBITDA down, so low, given the level of R&D, the number of products, the software, the hardware, the testing, the service, very proud of the team we have in place. And I guess lastly, I would just like to say that we are also getting strong support from the government. Energy technologies, Clean Tech is a key focus of this country. AI is a clean focus of the focus of the is a large focus of this country. And the company is at the intersection of those two things.
So we still have more than CAD 2 million of remaining funding from SDTC grants and FedDev 10-year interest-free loans over the, as of the end of December 31st, and ongoing fundraising in the marketplace to avail ourselves of more opportunities there, is something that I continue to work with to build positive relationships with the key organizations and leadership. I do wanna make one shout-out. Many of you will be aware of SDTC, and the delays in the grants as they try to move forward with the proper governance needed. The staff in that organization, in the ministry, and right up to Minister Champagne's office, were very professional and supportive of the company as we were waiting for those funds. They were material for us in Q1, and really appreciated their support.
Okay, let's talk a little bit about outlook, and then open it up into questions. From my perspective, you know, 2023 gives us a strong platform for growth. We've shown that the trajectory has changed. We've now delivered. Q2 was up, Q3 was up, Q4 was up, Q1's up. It's diversified across four products, portfolios, and across various marketplaces, and that is the best thing we can do as we're growing the company. We're not a one market, one product hit wonder. Our ability to bring the sophistication and management we have to the diverse portfolio, right from the very large, you know, 30-kW eSite diesel-grid solar-hybrid systems, right down to little, itty-bitty boxes that are the size of a small computer, and having all the sophisticated functionality, is a key value in our IP.
I would make one other comment. One of the big things we did in 2023 is we took an acquisition of a fantastic hardware technology, with a lot of edge smarts in that hardware power technology. eSite's got unparalleled performance reliability in the market on the hardware side. We married that and integrated that to our smart cloud platform. As a go-forward view, I'm not planning on doing any acquisitions in 2024, unless something comes along. But beyond that, the opportunity to roll up other acquisitions into the company and do the technology integration. I had one strategic investor say, "You know, acquisitions are really hard. Can you really do it?" And yes, they are very, very hard, but we've demonstrated that we can do it with a very key technology.
We are seeing industry adoption of innovative technologies that benefit climate change, reduce cost, and we're seeing that accelerating, and it's hitting the mainstream. Lastly, from a guidance perspective, we continue to see strong growth from our 2023 results. You will see our Q1 results very soon. They should be out hopefully within the next five to seven business days. We will let you know when they come. We will not have an earnings call again, because it'll be so close to this earnings call, but happy to take any inbound interest if that's the case.
But what I can tell you is that our top-line results for Q1, again, doubling our growth from last year, I think even higher than that, maybe even 200% growth, but I'd have to go and double-check the math, but very strong growth from last year. So, all of that, I'd like to open it up to questions. Ryan, do we have any questions?
Thank you, Miriam. As you said, we'll now begin the question-and-answer portion of the call. Once again, if you have any questions, please feel free to submit them in the question-and-answer tab located at the bottom of your screen. So we have a couple questions here that are kind of asking a similar thing: "So how does the company plan to navigate the balance sheet challenge in 2024?
That's a great question. I, I call that the cash question. So I, I wanna say a couple of things on that matter, and I told Farooq that I would take this answer, but I'll open it up to him after I finish. We are now out of the tunnel. As a company, you know, we'd say we were in the tunnel. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We're out of the tunnel. We have good visibility to cash flow coming in. As an example, I am expecting over CAD 2.5 million of inbound cash in the next two months. I'm confident that CAD 1.5 million of that is, is a few weeks. It could be tomorrow, it could be in a week or two, very conservatively.
Where we sit as a company, as I said, is we're out of the tunnel. We're in the bright sunshine now from a growth perspective, but the credit cards are maxed. So the company has implemented significant focus to manage our cash flow. We've been working hard to get government grants and other support, and we have been working with our suppliers and working with our customers to match inbounds with outbounds. So, we still have some challenges ahead while we pay down those credit cards. We expect to get additional government support in the short term, and we're working on a number of different avenues for that, for continued support there.
But given where we came from, you know, we're pretty much through the backlog of the surprise inflection point that we hit in 2022, where we went from very strong growth, building inventory, to, you know, a complete crash in the market of customer rollouts, with customers even pulling purchase orders, which of course are not cancelable. But if you have a strategic customer that calls you and says that they wanna, you know, dial down the volumes, you have to respond to that. I think the other thing that we've seen in working very closely with our customers, we've been working beside our customers, helping them in their fundraising, and we have visibility near term to three of... one, two- three, four.
Four of our long-term, large customers have imminent sales closing and, imminent cash, funding closing. And given that we're at the table with the investor, and we see what's happening there, we're feeling comfortable with the forecast. So it's still tight, and we're working on it very tightly, but I'm confident, given it where we've been, if we weren't going to make it, we wouldn't have already had an issue with it. Our balance sheet is improving. We are paying down our debt. We are paying interest on a monthly basis, reducing our expenses on that side, on the balance sheet. So I do see that it's going to improve. Farooq, do you wanna add to that? Please feel free to give-
Yeah.
Your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I just wanted to add a couple of things. So when Miriam saying, credit cards are maxed, it's not like, credit cards are maxed, it's basically, you know, that, we have to pay our suppliers. So we're working with our suppliers closely to manage, you know, expectation and timing, and we are matching, as Miriam said, inflows and outflows. One good thing about our balance sheet right now is that we've got inventory. So one main outflow that we had was paying for the inventory that we bought from, for strategically from eSite. So we've got our strategic- our supplier, you know, one of our suppliers manufacturing goods for us. So we've got those finished goods with us, and then as our sales...
As we sell goods, in which we've done in Q1, and going forward, that inventory is gonna go down. So it's gonna be a cash positive effect when we sell those, those items. So, so I think, that is, that is something to note.
Thanks, Farooq.
Okay, this next question has a few parts to it: "Do we have any kind of visibility or presence, even if minimal, with the World Bank? Similarly, the Asian Development Bank. If not, why not? And cannot an entity like the EDC assist? Also, can we not get a pre-approved technology status with either of these organizations?
So, when you look at investment funding of things, there's kind of a tiered structure of NGOs and organizations. You know, the World Bank is doing a lot of funding for education. We have a partnership with Avanti, where we're working on that, and we've done some pilot projects, so we've been pre-approved as an acceptable technology for that. EIB, Finnfund are two other funds that are very prevalent in this marketplace, as is the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank. What tends to happen is those organizations are working with our customers to fund their projects, and the funding trickles through. It's not us that would get that funding, but as I said earlier, we are working with our customers.
So, for example, in Nigeria, we have been getting ourselves spec'd in to some of the different agencies where we needed to get listed. We are working with, directly with financing organizations. We're receiving new leads and opportunities from financing organizations that were involved with previous projects that we've been working on. So yes, we are doing that. The higher up that curve, so if you go, you know, as you will all know, it's easy to go get a credit card at 60% interest rate. It's not necessarily easy to get financing you want at good rates. But, similarly, when you look at the stack of things as you go higher and higher into the World Bank and UN, it is harder and harder and longer and longer to get those funds closed.
I know of a number of customers who had pre-approvals, you know, what we all thought were solid deals with organizations like EIB, and the practicality is it might take 5-10 years for those deals to close. So with some caution, we put our foot in the fire for some of those organizations, but those are really, really long-term. On the Avanti partnership that we have for education, where there's $6 billion a year of funding available, they can't even deploy the capital, and we're now, I think, more than 2 years in from the beginning of that where we were already pre-approved, and we're hopeful that some of those projects will result this year. But the more those are global entities, the harder it is to get funding there. Takes longer.
Okay, it doesn't look like we have any more questions. So if we haven't answered your question or you think of something else after the call has ended, please do not hesitate to send follow-up questions via email, either to investors@clearbluetechnologies.com or nick@sophiccapital.com. So this is going to conclude the question and answer session of today's call, and I would now like to pass it back to Miriam for closing remarks.
Okay. Well, thank you very much, everyone. As I would like to thank the team, the stakeholders, the shareholders, the investors, the suppliers for their support and what we were able to achieve in 2023, and we look forward to returning significant benefit to all of you with our results in 2024. We'll be back to you in the market very, very soon with Q1 results, and then onward to Q2 and the rest of the year. Thanks very much.