Okay. Hello, everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. Hello, Germany. Hello, Canada. Hello, hopefully, Sweden and other parts of the world. Welcome today to our 2024 fiscal earnings call. My name is Miriam Tuerk. I'm co-founder and CEO of Clear Blue Technologies. I'm joined today by Farrukh Anwar, who is our wonderful, illustrious, hardworking CFO, as well as Jonathan van der Veen, who is leading marketing from a Clear Blue perspective. We're gonna give you a presentation, an overview of the results, as well as as much information as we can going forward. I do want to encourage you to please feel free to ask all the questions you think you want to ask. Obviously, there's been a lot happening at Clear Blue, and we want to make sure that we address all of your concerns.
Of course, please be aware of forward-looking statements. I'm gonna talk about the financial restructuring that we have now completed. The last piece of the financial restructuring that we needed to undergo was to deal with our banking relationship and our bank line. That was successfully concluded a few weeks ago, and the share consolidation occurred. It's done. It's behind us. We're finished. Our plan going forward, for 2025, is to deliver positive EBITDA, positive cash flow, and growth that shows that Clear Blue, that everyone's support and assistance through this process has not been wasted and that there's good future value going forward. We're gonna talk a little bit about the 2024 results.
I was looking at the template we use with results, and I could have shown a graph with a, you know, upward trajectory line going from the bottom left to the top right for margin and for recurring revenue. I just don't think there should be anything with a, a line going from the bottom left to the top right. We've shortened the results a little bit, in our presentation to you. We're gonna spend a bit of time talking about the future outlook and take some questions. How did we get to where we are today?
I think, as I've said to a couple of people, first of all, I don't want anyone here to think that we are looking at this going, "Oh, there's all these old third-party results, you know, third-party things that happened that didn't, that we don't own personally," etc., etc. We own this. We're accountable. You know, we're not letting anybody else be the get-out-of-jail-free card. That being said, I think that we have had a series, not just one; any one thing wouldn't have mattered, but a series of events that have had an impact on us. I think that, you know, the new normal is chaos, uncertainty, and impacts from an external perspective.
Making sure going forward that if this lists out two or three more things and you could add trade wars to this potentially as an external factor, we need to make sure it does not impact us. The net result of four years of this stuff was that we had a cash crunch, not because of our ongoing operations, but because of the historical buildup of what happened in the past. We have asked ourselves the question, "You know, some companies out there have done very well. Like, why is Clear Blue not just, you know, shining star and all that stuff?" I think, you know, when you are an early-stage company and you hit the inflection point at the early stage, at that inflection point, you have got a couple of key customers and a couple of key products that are starting to ramp.
We went into COVID having doubled our revenue the previous year and expecting to double our revenue into the COVID year, and we hit a wall, and our early customers hit a wall. We kinda lost that momentum, from a go-forward perspective. What we've done in the last few years is add significantly to our product portfolio so that eventually that momentum shifts.
Recording in progress.
Overcomes everything that is happening in the market. We are looking at it internally to see what we need to do always and holding ourselves accountable. In terms of the problem that happened last year, the biggest issue that we had was that our balance sheet had not been able to raise equity as pure shares starting when COVID hit. We are a technology company. You know, if we were a U.S., Silicon Valley, VC-funded company, we would be putting CAD 10 million into the company every year instead of CAD 1 million or CAD 2 million that we have been doing. We stopped being able to do that as pure equity and ended up doing it as loans and debentures that were convertible.
The need to convert those equity, you know, debt-equity structures into pure equity and to reduce our expenses significantly, to consolidate the shares, get a little bit of extra help and restructure was a key thing that we needed to do. We have done that now. We did a restructuring in 2024, Q4. We have reduced our expenses by over CAD 3 million. In addition to another CAD 1 million in interest savings realized, figuring out how and when we scale based upon revenue is going to be something that we're gonna be very careful about. We're probably gonna scale resources later than we would have in a, you know, optimistic world, but we're gonna be very conservative. We are a lean team now, fully capable on executing on our 2025 plan.
We have a lot of growth opportunities in front of us, and just figuring that out's gonna be key. We've undertaken a share consolidation to clean up the cap table. We had one customer come to us and say, "Hey, I wanna help out. I know I have this long-term loan. I'm gonna pay it in advance," which was fantastic. That helped out. We did a small private placement with many of our long-term shareholders participating, management participating. We had both suppliers and employees who converted accounts payable to equity. And so really, every company stakeholder participated and supported this: the customers, the shareholders, the lenders, the government, suppliers, and employees. Lastly, we said, "Listen, you know, we've come through this.
We need a little bit of breathing room." We also got reasonable loan extensions, installment reductions, deferment of and reduction of interest rates, and loan conversions to the point where we feel very comfortable that we can support the debt that we have. No company should be zero debt. Debt is good because it's not all then on the cap, on the equity side. We're happy with the balance we have now. Farrukh, I think you are going to take it over here. Would you like to walk through the restructuring a bit and give your commentaries on this?
Yeah, for sure. So basically, hello everyone. Thank you for joining. We went into this financial restructuring thinking that, you know, how do we set up the company for success? In order to set up the company for success, what we wanted to do was conserve cash and be in a position that our cash outflows would basically be lower going forward. The first thing that we did on that was we converted our debt into equity because there were convertible debentures where, you know, interest-bearing, long-term, you know, interest on that. What we did was we converted our convertible debentures and related interest. It was around CAD 7.2 million, and we converted all of that into equity. Obviously, some of you who are on the call helped out with that. So really, thanks for that.
The shareholders, which, you know, some of our management/shareholders, they had loans to the company of approximately CAD 1 million. They pitched in as well because they wanted to lead from the front, and they converted their debt into equity as well. Along with that, we had a certain other external debt from, you know, some of our shareholders in Sweden, other places as well that helped out in the past. They converted their debt as well into equity. You can see in the second line over here, CAD 994,000 of shareholder loan, plus external debt of CAD 1.5 million, we converted into equity at 33 million and 50 million common shares along with warrants, respectively. The way that we priced this was CAD 0.03 per share with a full warrant on converted at CAD 0.05.
This was basically post-consolidation. We consolidated. You can see the consolidated numbers over here as well. The second thing that we did in order to conserve cash was, we converted our business line, which was with the bank and our royalties, one of our partners. They helped us out in converting that into three different streams. It helped on our balance sheet as well. Now some of that was converted into equity. Some of that was converted into a term loan and some of that into royalties. Now we do not have, so when we get our royalty revenue, that is when we have to pay royalties. This royalty is at a lower rate than compared to what we had in the past with the previous royalty partner that we had.
Then, included, that's not in the slide, but Marian mentioned in the previous slide. What we also did was we worked with our long-term loan partners and restructured their debt as well. Now we've got, for two of our biggest lenders, they have increased the term of the loan for two years. The principal payments are also a gradual increase. It's not a flat repayment going on forward. That also would help us conserve cash. Thank you, Miriam. Do you wanna take the next slide?
Thanks, Farrukh. Expense reduction on the OpEx side was a very big part of it. We did a number of things, and significant effort was required to do all of these things. The first is that we moved our Illumience cloud service to more of an open-source platform. That resulted in about CAD 600,000 worth of savings. It doesn't have any real impact on the service level to the customer. Some of the data is now slower to go and get access to. We got a bunch of people who have to do a lot more manual work to keep the cloud service up and running. The savings was significant, and we really wanted to make sure that we had an OpEx budget that was something we could live with. We did do quite a bit of headcount reduction across the company.
Some of that was attrition. Some of that was obviously making very, very tough decisions. We have had to be very, I think, slow down our R&D development progress. Part of it also was that we had a very large project for our Pico product, which I will be talking about later. We, you know, had some major investment that needed to be done over the last few years around that, partially supported by SDTCs. SDTC provides 35% of the funding for that project. A big chunk of that has come to conclusions. While we are significantly down in headcount, some of that was just we were able to handle from a product completeness perspective. I do want to comment, in this high increase of cost of living in the marketplace.
No one in the company has had a salary increase for two years. We have not had any material attrition of people leaving for that reason. Those people who have left have left for personal reasons that are, would've happened no matter what. Management has taken almost no salaries through 2024. There were many months where there was zero or very, very low. That's not sustainable going forward. Eventually, someone's gotta pay the bills. Huge sacrifice by everyone. I can tell you that 'cause I'm the recipient of the questions, everybody just sucked it up, believe because we believe fundamentally in the value of the company, obviously the debt to conversion to equity. You put all of that together, and the impact for 2025 is CAD 4 million in savings.
As part of this, when we went to everybody, you know, they wanted to see that their, you know, the debtors and the lenders wanna see the shareholders helping out. The shareholders wanna see the debtor. Everybody needed everybody to help out. We did do a private placement. It was led by management putting more money into the company in addition to the loan that was already converted, etc., etc. Just so hugely honored to have our two major shareholder bases, the Ventum Echelon team and our Germany, Switzerland, Sweden investors all helping out and participating in the private placement. ARI Royalty did also top up the loan by giving us a short-term bridge. I do wanna emphasize it's a short-term bridge. We got CAD 125,000 this month, and we'll be paying back CAD 100,000 of that in Q3. It is just to help us transition.
We, I should comment that the SDTC next payment for CAD 1.3 million is making good progress. We've passed through all of the technical aspects of the review. STDC is now called the IRAP Green Fund. It's part of the IRAP NRC program now, whom we've got a long relationship with. The final financial approvals and reviews are just being finished. We expect those funds in Q2. That CAD 100,000 was just a small bridge to help us get over that hump. I'm now going to turn it over to Farrukh, who's gonna walk us through the balance sheet. Farrukh, over to you.
Yep, for sure. As I mentioned earlier, and you can see on the balance sheet, we've completed a significant debt restructuring in the latter part of 2024, eliminating over CAD 4 million in convertible debentures, CAD 1 million of shareholder loan, and replacing short-term obligations with a combination of equity, royalties, and a new term loan. Some of that you can see in the year-end balance sheet, and some was completed in Q3, Q1, which is basically the short-term loan on the CAD 750,000 that you can see with the note number 12 in front of it. That's the one that got replaced with CAD 325,000 in Q1. That would significantly improve our balance sheet even further in Q1. As a result, we improved our balance sheet flexibility with aligning our obligations with the company's revenue generation capabilities.
We also restructured our long-term debt for year-end to Q1, and now we've got extended payment terms and a longer period to pay off that debt. It would also help in our cash, you know, cash conservation efforts and, you know, set us up for success. Total assets at the end of the year were CAD 5.8 million compared to CAD 12 million the prior year, but that was basically a planned reduction in intangible assets. You can see the main decrease is just because of intangible assets, a non-cash item as such on the balance sheet. It is, you know, over the years that what we incurred on our intangibles, those were there. When we were improving our balance sheet, we just restructured it to not show on the balance sheet.
That's what you can see, the reduction mainly in our assets. You can see the working capital remains positive at around CAD 928,000, and we ended up the year with around CAD 340,000 in cash. Miriam, do you wanna talk about the cap table? Miriam, you're muted.
Sorry. There you go. I'm talking to myself. I don't usually do that. Post-year consolidation, we now sit with a cap table that I think is reasonable. We have 77 million shares issued, fully outstanding. We have 61 million shares. Of the 61 million shares, there are 54 million which has an exercise price of CAD 0.30. There is a fair amount of runway in the share and the stock price before we hit that item. That is as a result of everyone that basically had to help with the restructuring. I think because there was so much of the shares, equity raises over the last few years were done as convertible debentures, hopefully there is a wide audience of people who have those warrants and therefore would be happy to be in the money for them.
It positions the company in a good way, from a go-forward perspective. Now we're gonna move over to 2024 results. I'm gonna pass it over to Farrukh, who's gonna talk a little bit about the P&L table, from a profit and loss perspective and EBITDA as well.
As you know, the company was conserving cash in 2024. As a result of that, revenue for the year-end came up at around CAD 2.76 million, reflecting the deliberate delay in timing of project deliverables, compared to around CAD 5.4 million in 2023. Gross profit was CAD 1.35 million, delivering a gross margin of 49%, an improvement from last year of 46%, a result of tighter cost controls and improved product mix. As Miriam also pointed out earlier about the operating expenses and other cost savings that we did, you can see a portion of that being reflected over here. Operating expenses were reduced by over CAD 700,000 year over year, demonstrating our commitment to managing our cost base prudently.
The benefits of these reductions would be more prominent in the current fiscal year, because some reductions were, you know, during the mid to the end of 2024. Now, some of the savings were previously being capitalized in intangible assets. That would also, you know, be reflected in the current year as well. We remain focused on executing our strategy, managing liquidity, and capturing growth opportunities, particularly in the smart off-grid telecom power markets. You can see the net loss for the year was CAD 11 million, primarily because of CAD 4.3 million on the impairment of intangibles, and we had higher interest expenses associated with our pre-restructured debt.
All of this that if you can see on the financial statements, you can see the interest accretion on convertible debentures, interest and accretion on the short-term debt, short-term loan, and other charges. Those would reduce significantly going on forward. Yeah. On the next slide, Miriam. You can see over here, if you look at our non-IFRS suggested EBITDA, it did, you know, it did increase. The negative did increase a little bit. There was some degradation, but it was mainly because of the reduction in revenue. All the other items, you can see those one-time, if you take the EBITDA and you take out the effect of all those one-time items, which includes the impairment of intangibles and, you know, around 4,744 again from the debt modification, which reflects our successful restructuring initiatives, restructuring initiatives.
You take effect of all of those. The non-adjusted IFRS EBITDA, it degraded, but not to the extent as it was completely, completely restricted, and it was just mainly because of the reduction in revenue. Miriam.
Okay. Obviously, I think everyone can understand that we're not going to provide guidance. No one in the market is providing guidance, and given our own situation, you know, things, we're still too small a company to have things predictable. We are going to avoid providing any sort of firm guidance going forward. I think we're gonna be very focused on showing results. In a month, at the end of May, you will get the Q1 results, and we will continue to move forward with results. In terms of the results at the end of the year, though, we did have bookings of over CAD 5 million, which is a big increase from the previous year. It's over doubling the amount.
As you can see, if everything goes according to the timelines, that should have CAD 4.5 million in revenue in 2025, with ongoing recurring revenue from a go-forward perspective. It does position us to have, you know, going into this year, what we did have is a nice order book of opportunities from a go-forward perspective. When I take a look at the future, I just want to speak a little bit about the macro outlook from that perspective. Obviously, I think there's a question about tariffs. We get less than 20% of our revenue from the U.S., depends on orders, etc., etc. My estimate this year is that's going to be 15%-20% of revenue. We have been dealing with tariffs. It's been chaotic.
The amount of time and energy that the company has needed to undertake to ship stuff early, to deal with tariff issues, to fill out new CUSMA forms, to have lots of different discussions with customers, that has caused a lot of time and energy to focus away from just getting out there and selling. That's the real challenge of the tariffs. However, it seems like the U.S. customers are resigned to having to pay them. It's not like people are walking around in the U.S. going, "Oh, well, we're not gonna pay for them." Everybody knows they're gonna have to pay for them. You know, the question is going to be whether or not it's 150% or is it 20%. The biggest impact to us is the China tariffs. It's not really about our issues. We're pretty good. Canada is no problem.
Our content's not really gonna be materially impacted. One of the things we did do, out of COVID is, you know, there were these forecasts of three, four, five years without being able to get a power electronics component. As a result, we own a lot of power electronics components for the next builds. And so short-term spikes in microprocessors and stuff do not really impact us in the short term. China tariffs, how much it takes to bring a solar panel or a battery, and these things can only be gotten out of China to some extent. For certainly on the batteries, it's almost 100% out of China. No other country in the world will do something as so poisonous to the environment as making a battery. That's gonna be across the market.
It'll hit every, it'll hit the industry, it'll hit the sector and not really have a huge impact on Clear Blue any more than anybody else. I don't think it adds a disadvantage to us. The question will be, you know, is there gonna be a capital spending stop from that perspective? And what does that look like? We are watching it cautiously, and managing through so far, but don't wanna understate that, you know, of course, as Mark Carney is saying, it's the global macro stuff that we all have to watch for and see what's going on. When it comes to the Africa and telecom market, I'm not as worried right now.
I think the key reason for that is that I always remember the story when we had the bad 2008, you know, I think GM and Chrysler were going bankrupt, but Ford was okay. The reason Ford was okay was because they had had their issues two or three years early. It depends where you hit it in the cycle. Because of what happened with COVID and then with the interest rates and the Ukraine war, a lot of the American projects were stalled because they did not get their funding. That critical funding is now in place. Once you have the critical funding in place and approval, and maybe you are pulling down troughs and doing phases, but you have gotten over that hump, nothing is changing that rollout.
From what we can see, we're not really seeing a lot going on in Africa, from that perspective. I think the other thing is that, you know, I'm in a lot of expat hotels when I'm in Africa, and every country in the world is there, but not Americans. Africa is really very European, emerging markets, Canada focus. Canada has huge pavilions at all the shows. We're very visible there. I don't see it yet. One of the things we did do was funding is so critical to moving forward that Clear Blue has formed partnerships with a couple of funding agencies, one of which was just MPOWER. By bringing the financing company to the table, we have been able to take a little bit more, have a little bit more influence in the timing and the speed of some of these projects.
The hotspot announcement that we did at, in March, which is a very large project, it'll be 312 sites, and, you know, timing to get the contracts and everything in, but we've got the MOU signed and we're at the contract finalization stage. You know, how long that takes is the part that we can't forecast. That deal would not have happened if we'd not brought the funding partner to the table with us. Having funding partners, the partnership with Ari Royalty would also be hopefully something that will help us to do that. I think the second thing is the pressure to deliver connectivity and solve power challenges with solar is just huge. There is, forget about green. We have to reduce our operating expenses as telcos and towercos because they cannot afford to pay for the diesel anymore.
The move to solar to displace diesel, because the grid's not solid. I mean, I was just talking, you know, Spain and Portugal had a huge outage. You know, people are now saying we need this in place for Europe. That pressure is significant. And then connectivity. Governments are saying we've gotta connect our people. I don't see anything yet in the African and telecom market. I think on the other side, satellites got a huge boom, and I'm gonna talk about that a little bit. The need for more Starlinks in the marketplace, both from a competitive health perspective and a demand, is huge. I think obviously we believe we are sitting on a rocket. We have a really good opportunity there. Okay. I'm gonna talk about each product a little bit.
In the North American marketplace, we did two things last year. The first is we launched our new SENTI product. Our SENTI all-in-one product is having a lot of positive acceptance in the marketplace. Obviously, all of these companies and customers start with phase one, see how it goes, and then go with two. The picture on the left is from the Niagara River. The picture from the right is from the Queenston Heights, Brock Monument area. We're pleased to have Pennsylvania Turnpike, Hamilton, Minnesota, Ajax, Port Hope, Imperial, California, Gainesville, Texas. You may have heard me talk about in the past, Kelowna, orders across North America, Mississauga, Toronto, also doing a lot. One of our objectives was to hit the south more strongly. Gainesville, Texas, Imperial, California as a result of that.
I wanna show you just because I've talked to, I'm a little bit of a geek. This one on the right here is actually really neat because it's a classic example of our patent. I've had other lighting companies call me up and say, "Hey, can we buy your patent? We'll pay you for this." The reason is that an all-in-one is one fixture. The challenge is, and this three-pole site is very clear. You gotta put each light in the direction you need it. This one's gotta point this way. This one's gotta point that way. This one's gotta point that way. The light has to point in a certain area, but the solar needs to face south.
Our rotating turret here is our patented IP that allows the customer with an all-in-one to have the light pointing in the direction it needs to point and have the solar panel pointing in the direction that it needs to point. This is for the guys that are geeks in the lighting marketplace. This is really, really cool stuff. We are very optimistic about that. We are seeing lots of projects and lots of opportunities in getting into those. You get phases of projects. We have one project where we did a pilot last year and the customer's going, "Well, you know, we're gonna wanna do a few thousand systems. We're gonna order in quantities of 100 at a time, and each year we'll see what the budget is." You start to get this annuity of ongoing things.
The other thing that we're hearing is doing a couple of small little projects is okay with a dumb system, but if you wanna do large rollouts, you've gotta have smart remote management. Our energy as a service offering is critically important. The other piece is power utilities and transportation, Department of Transportation in Nevada. Those are the big kahunas. Those are the guys that do thousands and thousands. We formed a partnership with Cooper last year. That partnership is yielding very strong relationships. Utilities are in the energy as a service business, so they want managed systems. You know, two years ago, we didn't have any power utilities. We've got SAS Power, who's a huge and wonderful customer of ours. Really pleased with the work we're doing with them.
We're working with a number of utilities across the U.S., doing a lot of pilots and testing. We've got DOTs across, you know, the marketplace. That, coupled with an investment in a new sales team with a new model, we're employing a lot of AI on the sales side as well from an automated tools perspective. We do think and see that, because we have the largest funnel ever in terms of Illumience and our lighting business, and we're getting some very large agents on board, the opportunity in front of us is the best it's ever been. Again, the results are the results, and we'll see where we end up. Micro, as you know, we acquired E-Site two years ago, and it's really coming fully online.
This is a, it was still raining and we had not gotten everything installed, but this is a new Micro product. What we acquired from E-Site is this upper piece right here, building a very small modular capability, adding in our, and integrating our Illumience software, dealing with cost reductions for cost competitiveness. Then of course realize that for these larger contracts, it is an 18-24 month sales cycle and we just, you know, last year we brought on our new Micro product with the smart management capability. We got the test systems and the production systems and the first installs out. Where we are sitting right now is we have two orders. One has got a contract, the other one is at the LOI stage. That, you know, we are targeting rolling out 190 sites just from those two contracts, which would be CAD 3 million in Q3, Q4.
Timing to be confirmed, and moving forward, but that's what we're having in our sales funnel. I think the other thing that's really key is these customers who buy these large systems almost always are dealing with hybrid. They have diesel and they need to get off of diesel. Sitting with, you know, senior leadership of large towercos and talking about the road to zero diesel and how we're gonna get to zero diesel is something that's getting people's attention and is part of our focus. You know, Nano is the, the dog, the, you know, the dog that she just keeps hunting. It's now, it's our oldest product, and it's in third generation. For its use cases, it's still the best, most competitive, most wonderfully packaged product in the marketplace. We are frequently now competing against Huawei. It's between us and Huawei. It's between us and Huawei.
It's between us and Huawei. And we win on the service, the value of the product, both the hardware and the software. If anybody's ever told me, heard my story, so why would you have four cabinets? Why aren't you just gonna, you know, if you look at the traditional telecom, they have these big cabinets that are huge. You know, I kind of actually went to the engineering team and said, "Why can't we just have one cabinet instead of four?" Guess what? Look what's around this site. You have to hand bomb these boxes, and cabinets. So instead of having to get a lift truck with a cherry picker to carry this huge heavy thing, we've built a modular system that a bunch of guys can carry it from the road up the hill.
Even on our hardware side, you know, I remember Francis Letourneau, the CEO of NuRAN, said to me, "I just love your product. I'm so excited." This is very early days and I'm like, "Oh, he's gonna tell me how great the software is." He goes, "I love the cabinets because we are in the field and we know what it takes to get this stuff." Might be because I have to take a boat to get to my cottage that I think about these things. Anyways, the cost savings and the value to the customer is so significant that we're strong able to get, I think, which are unheard of, margins for a small volume hardware company. That's the value of the software and the solution and the package we bring together. This is just a wonderful product.
In November at the AfricaCom pro conference, Eutelsat and Clear Blue did a joint announcement of the partnership between the two of us. Basically, it's important to understand that Eutelsat has their Eutelsat product, which is their geo product. They also acquired OneWeb, which is the low Earth orbit product that competes against Starlink. The demand for that product with really good internet is significant. You know, all markets eventually get to a point where there are multiple vendors in the market. Certainly, there's a strong desire now by Europe to ensure that they have a value proposition from that perspective. Eutelsat is getting significant advancement by the E.U. They are planning on doing very aggressive rollouts. They understand that power and network connectivity go together and they need a smart power capability.
It is our smart energy management technology, that valuable IP that we, you know, all that money that converted on the cap table to equity was spent in R&D dollars. They were not spent in OpEx. Please do not think that it was spent in OpEx. It was spent to build the best technology in the marketplace that nobody else has. When you get somebody like Eutelsat that says, "I'm gonna take Clear Blue's Pico product and I'm gonna bundle it with every modem I ship to the emerging marketplace." And we are putting, I think, I do not know for sure, but I believe the E.U. has announced that they are gonna put CAD 2.6 billion into satellite services to make sure they have a competitor. Eutelsat is very much part of that. It is a huge opportunity for us.
We believe that the long-term value proposition is that this partnership with Eutelsat could deliver in the next three to five years as much as CAD 25 million revenue for Clear Blue. It is very exciting and it is one of the reasons why management and the employees have doubled down so much in why we believe in this company. I just want to cut to two more summary slides and then we will open it up to questions. Why Clear Blue? We are unique in our focus on small industrial power applications. We are unique in our focus on an ongoing recurring revenue and service model. We are out in the field. We are actually dealing with the realities of the problems out there, managing on an ongoing basis. We are unique in our approach that we have always been focused on going after a global market without a significant dependence on the U.S.
I should have really said on any single or major market area. It's not just the U.S. We love the U.S. and it's a great market and a great opportunity for us, but it has its cycles. We just need to make sure that we're diversified. Smart power for solar, hybrid, weak or no grid, getting off of diesel, managed. We put our money where our mouth is. Our energy forecasting, our smart load, predictive analytics, and growing that into AI and the fact that it's full service. That's why Clear Blue is, that's why customers come to Clear Blue. We hope that's also why shareholders believe in Clear Blue from a go forward perspective. I call this Clear Blue 2.0. It's been a tough pill for all of us to swallow.
I don't think, I actually hadn't even realized the level of stress that everyone was under until the end of January where I actually realized I was starting to sleep again and every muscle in my body wasn't painful. You know, I have a mentor, his name is Chip Hazard, and he's one of the tier one VCs in the U.S. He said to me, "The only value is the value at exit. The value of the share price or the pre-money valuation in a private company in between is really just your cost of raising capital." We've had to raise capital at the very part of, you know, part of the market where it was. It is Clear Blue 2.0.
We've come through that and, really going to be pushing the rest of the company now to stand back and say, you know, "What's the best of Clear Blue 1.0, but what do we need to change? How do we transition? How do we take ourselves to the next level?" Our number one focus and plan is positive cash and positive EBITDA in 2025. We believe that we're gonna deliver that for the year. We are targeting to try to deliver that every quarter, not just at the year. We wanna show that we're at an inflection point. It, you know, somewhere along the line, you never know when you're there, but when you look back, you know you hit an inflection point. We could have hit that inflection point when COVID hit, but it got knocked out from under us.
Hopefully, and we believe with the sales funnel we have, that that inflection point is still in front of us and we gotta get it, get it going and into the results. You know, we want to build back and build and grow our investor confidence. We're gonna do that with backward looking results. We are very busy on a lot of projects. We're gonna try to get out to the market a little bit and tell you more about what we're doing. The proof is in the pudding and that's what we know we need to deliver. Jonathan, I'm hopeful. I think there may be a lot of questions. Do you wanna just throw them at us and then Farrukh and I will answer them? I think I might need to unmute, Jonathan. Hold on one second.
There we go.
Okay. Thanks, Miriam. Perfect. Yeah. So we had lots of questions coming in throughout the presentation. I'm just gonna start at the top and work our way through those. Sure. Okay. The first one is from Russ, regarding the SENTI product. He's wondering where and who is the current largest market for the product, penetration, price points of SENTI , and if there's energy as a service component to each sale. Just kind of overall outlook on the SENTI product.
One of the beauties of having a smart product is you have the ability to take one product and use it for multiple applications. It's important to understand that what's inside a Pico product is also what is inside the SENTI product. Right now, our primary focus is in North America.
We may expand to Europe in a few years, but we're focused in North America with this product. It is currently priced somewhere between CAD 1,100 and CAD 2,700 per light, depending upon the configuration, quantities, et cetera, et cetera. The all-in-one streetlight marketplace, I will tell you that we often sell, sell, sell the pole. Sometimes the order's like CAD 3,000 a system. It is the most compelling of the solar all-in-one. Just like your light bulb today is now 2 watts because it's an LED light bulb and that 2 watts is replacing a, you know, a 40-watt light bulb. LED lights that are 6, 7, 8, 10 watts work really well now. One of the big aspects of our Pico and our SENTI is low energy consumption.
We've had to really work hard to make sure that there's a really efficient system in that, in that technology. Price point, I think I've talked about. We believe that it's probably 50% of the addressable market in North America. There isn't a really good market size out in the market because it's an emerging market and the forecast. I've got two market research studies from two years, three years ago, and one of them has a market sizing that's 10 times the other market. It's a completely different definition. I'm not comfortable talking about size of market. I don't believe there's any real good data, but we launched the product last year and you can see the list of orders. Everybody has a project and they're happening everywhere.
I don't think there's any municipalities you drive through where you don't have these solar lights. The market is quite significant. Next question.
Great. This is from Felix wondering about what the decision process was when it came to reducing the headcount.
What was the decision process when it came to reducing the headcount? It was gut wrenching. It was gut wrenching. It was a mixture of where we could reduce the headcount without impacting revenue. Obviously our R&D budget had to slow down. We would not have invested in our R&D budget if we hadn't gotten the SDTC funds and we were able to bring, you know, we just had to bring that back a little bit from that focus. Some of it, like the software, you know, can we deliver in a different model?
I will tell you it takes a lot of work to manage that software infrastructure, without all those automated tools. We just had to do it. Part of it, I have to say, would have also been salary and cost. When you do a downsizing, you know, kind of look at the, you, people have a tendency to wanna keep the management team in place and we, you know, looked at it and said, we, it's gotta be from top to bottom. Our management team is pretty lean. We went without salaries and then the middle management we had to reduce.
In Africa, unfortunately, you can have two employees who are of the exact same skill set and if one of them has three years of a reference working for a Western company, their salaries will be five times what the other ones are. That forced us to have to make some tough choices.
Awesome. Thank you for that one. We have a couple coming in from Todd. This one is regarding the U.S. accounts. Just in regards to tariffs, what are, if we have any, the mitigation plans surrounding the tariffs?
What we have done is, we've updated our pricing calculators to take into consideration the tariffs. Some of it we've been able to bundle in and some of it, so it's costed in and we can take it, but our margins are the same.
Some of it we're, we're like what we've done, I'll give you an example. We've quoted a job last week where we said, this assumes 10% tariffs with 25% with China. If it's anything different, we're gonna have to charge you extra or, you know, we'll give you a rebate on it. But that's what we've used as a baseline because there's so much uncertainty. Now, the interesting thing is these projects take two years to construction plan, et cetera, et cetera. You can't just up and change it. The timing of when we deliver, right? That's how we're mitigating it right now.
I think the most important thing that needs to happen if you wanna say, how can this not impact Clear Blue, you know, this market is number one, get to, you know, a stable base where people kind of know where they think it's gonna land and it lands there. That's number one. Number two, let's avoid a global recession where people don't pull all of their investment. In terms of the near-term projects for the next six months, those are down the road in terms of construction projects. We have one customer that I didn't speak about. It's a data center company and we have done, I believe, four projects. Two of them are shipping this year and there's a fifth one coming and it's kind of a nice big one. I'm like really looking at going, geez, we get that one, woof.
You know, we're happy. What's the chance? And, you know, my comment back from my sales guy is this, I said, well, can you guarantee it? And he's like, oh, I can't guarantee it. Sales is ruthlessly trying to improve its forecasting to make sure that we're not overly optimistic on timing. I go back and I look at what did I say we were gonna do and why didn't it happen? And all the November forecast, that October, November forecast from last year, every one of those deals has happened and is happening. They just didn't happen in the timeline and we had to kind of delay the shipments a little bit, because of what we were going through. That's a 450-page construction drawing package. It's not gonna get changed. We're spec'd in, so.
Okay. So this one now is, we're around raising funds.
Do we foresee the need to raise funds in the future?
No. We are working very hard not to raise funds. Our plan assumes we do not. What I will say is, if the company delivers its results and we show good trajectory, like if we have a good year this year, we're gonna wanna invest in sales. If we have a good year this year and the stock price just goes up and the market's interested and people have some appetite, we might do a small raise to improve the cash balance, working capital, pay down some debt. At this point in time, our 2025, 2026 plan that management is tracking does not require us to raise money.
Awesome. Okay. This is again from Todd.
You're saying that in this area of the country, he's seeing lots of solar light towers along highways and parks, which are Clear Blue. If we've considered, not, have you considered a non-managed lighting product to compete with the broader market?
No. When you provide an ongoing manag, service, it's kind of like getting naked, right? Think of yourself as someone, you know, an investor, investment advisor comes along and he says to you, oh, I wanna take over your stock portfolio and I'm gonna deliver X %, wonderful, wonderful. After he sells you and you're actually tracking how that portfolio's doing, the money is where he's actually showing the results. For us, because we manage and operate on an ongoing basis, we know that those systems have a short end of life. They don't last. They don't work.
We actually have a couple of customers who are like, yeah, I know they're disposable. I throw them out and I buy new ones in two to three years. The reason we don't offer a non-managed product is because for our market and our use case, we're focused on middle mission-critical infrastructure, and we're focused on making sure they work. Actually, we're talking right now to a Western company about doing a farming agricultural project where we would be powering, you know, the water system for cows through the wintertime. I'm thinking to myself, the power runs out, you know, the cows are gonna die of thirst. You know, it's mission-critical. That's what it's all about. That's why we don't do it 'cause it's not gonna work.
A good example would be, Eutelsat quoted us the statistic that 30% of their deployments in Africa are not producing revenue because the power system failed. They are not going with us 'cause it's brand new and it's the first time. They have been providing unmanaged power systems to their customers and 30% of them are failing within a year. That's why we do not do unmanaged. Awesome. Okay. I have another question here about Eutelsat. A couple of folks are asking about this. It's just like, Russ is saying he thinks he heard saying, 25 million Eutelsat in three years. Wondering if we can go over just the Eutelsat deal again. People are very interested in it. Right. We are very excited about it as well. Eutelsat, if you can say here, is going to combine Clear Blue smart management technologies.
Our smart energy forecasting, our Pico grid product with their own power optimization capability. We, energy forecasting will be all about, I've installed the system and I'm going to be running for the next few days. I don't have power and we're gonna forecast whether or not the system's gonna have enough energy to run. Oh no, it's cloudy, rainy, whatever's gonna happen, we're not gonna have it. We're gonna be able to use smart controls to communicate with the satellite modem so that it modifies its power consumption. Maybe it just doesn't transmit as much. Maybe it goes to sleep more frequently. It does a number of things to allow it to deliver in a sustainable way. That delivers two key benefits. The first key benefit is that you have an ability to deliver better service, right?
You know, when you're watching a movie and it's caching the data, you don't care when it's slow versus fast as long as it's smartly basically making sure it delivers to you what it needs to. Voice signal might get a little bit less good or more good. On the other side, managing that smart power is what makes sure that the systems are dead in a year, right? Thirty percent of their systems are garbage and, you know, not working. If we can now eliminate that 30% and 100% of their systems are working and delivering energy, it's gonna have a huge impact. They believe that partnering with us to bring the smart power is going to enable their product to be successful in that emerging market.
We're gonna be covering both their LEO product, which is the direct competitor against Starlink, as well as their GEO product, which is the higher Earth orbit piece. Our technology is built for something that will work well in Africa, both at a price point, cost point, and install basis. The forecast that they've given us is for deployment of 25,000 systems over the next three to five years. Some of the systems will be much bigger, but a lot of them will be a lot smaller. I've used an average of about 1,000, saying that the opportunity is about CAD 25 million over three to five years. I do wanna note, you know, I can't even make this stuff up, but we had this partnership with Viasat.
Viasat last April was launching their new satellite, which was supposed to then support all of our product, et cetera, et cetera. That satellite had a catastrophic failure, and, so the, I think the market cap of Viasat went from CAD 30 billion to CAD 2 billion in junk fund status, blah, blah, blah. They're in recovery mode. They are now out of the business of ground equipment, which is why we lost that key sponsor for Pico last April. The good news is, you know, in the satellite industry, companies work together. They buy bandwidth from each other. They're kind of in a co-opetition model. Eutelsat had been following all the work we've done. We would not have this partnership moving forward if it wasn't for the partnership we've had with Viasat.
If it wasn't for the R&D investment we've made over the last three or four years, you could say, you know, Clear Blue, why didn't you not spend this money over the last two or three years? The answer was, you're not gonna get this kind of an opportunity unless you spend, you know, millions in investing in R&D. That's what we did. That's the bet. We're not here to be a, you know, what do they call it? A life, they call it, I don't like the word lifestyle business 'cause most small business entrepreneurs don't have a lifestyle. You know, we're not here to make a little bit of money. We're here to be a CAD 200 million revenue company that has a market cap of, you know, I don't know, CAD 750 million. That's what this is about.
That's the opportunities we've been investing in.
Perfect. Okay. This next one is surrounding the stock dilution. Just, yeah, like what were, did we consider the risk of shareholder, you know, kind of pushback and as the only investors that may profit are, you know, the more recent investors, just kind of what the thought process was behind that.
The TSXV mandated that we had to do it. It was not an option. We were required to do the share consolidation, and there was really no choice. You could argue whether it was a good thing to do or not. I think that the cap table was gonna be very bloated with too many shares at a small penny. Some companies can't buy shares under CAD 0.10, and so, you know, it wasn't beneficial to anybody.
Theoretically, other than people reacting to the consolidation with a little bit of a step back, which is pretty much normal, you know, it shouldn't make any difference. At its short end, we did it based upon what the TSXV said. In terms of the six to one number, we took the guidelines from the TSXV, but we also spoke to expert industry people. The six to one was done with us speaking to people who, not insiders, but we have a number of investors and, like Vesttoo is a partnership who represent a large pool of shareholders and have a lot of industry. We went to them and said, you know, what price should we do this round at? The three cents and five cents full warrant wasn't dictated by us.
It was recommended by the investor community. We try to get those types of outside advice to do the best that we can. This was a mandate of the TSXV. No choice.
This next one is pertaining to the leadership not taking salary increases recently. However, based on performance, seems the pay is excessive. Do you have a plan to reduce the executive salaries? I know you spoke to this already, but if you could just address that again.
Based on performance, the salaries executive. My T4, my T4 for last year was CAD 35,000. I did not take a paycheck from September till now. I sold my house and put every penny of my money that is not in an RRSP into the company. I currently have CAD 100,000 worth of expenses sitting on my credit card.
I'm not sure I understand why people think the pay is excessive. That description that I just gave you applies to pretty much everybody in management. I think we're hoping to pay ourselves CAD 90,000 a year this year. Most of my conversations with my management team are, look, you know, I get someone who'll call me and say, look, in order to pay the, you know, my mortgage and my monthly grocery bill, et cetera, et cetera, I need this. Could you at least cover that because my line of credit's growing? Management, I don't know why. Please follow up, whoever sent that, where you see that we've taken a significant amount of compensation. I'm not, I don't see that. Maybe I'm wrong.
Awesome. This is the last one that we have in for now.
Oh, sorry, one more coming from Russ as well. This one is the fact that we're, you know, speaking to becoming, I think you just said a CAD 750 million company. Just what is the strategy to achieve that and if we have some major milestones or timing?
I think that, obviously we wanna grow the base in the market. We need to sell more, get more traction in each of the products that we have. This business should be growing to CAD 10 million-CAD 20 million, you know, in revenue and opportunity by getting into the larger accounts. I think the lighting market could expand into Europe very well. I'd like to get, you know, open a sales office in Europe and go after Europe with our SENTI product. Expanding our sales team once we get that.
It's important to remember that we're in, in North America and in Africa. We're in telecom and we're in lighting. There's many other IoT use cases, from that perspective. Signing up, rollouts like the partnership with, with Pico and those kinds of things and getting more of those integrated OEM partnerships where we're very sticky and it's an integrated product is quite significant. I think the last piece, which I want to talk about here, is bringing the financing partnerships to the table. The hotspot deal that we've announced, which will actually be our Nano grid product, that closes this year, like that's a, that's a, as in and of its own, that the hotspot contract is quite significant. Would it be the largest contract we ever did? Yes, it would be the largest contract we've ever done. It's multiple million dollars.
A big part of what we did was to bring financing to the table. We are in the business of selling energy as a service. Our financial model is to sell that energy as a service with a significant upfront one-time cost. Obviously, there is a big market opportunity to do more of an ongoing service fee with less upfront cost. That is part of what our growth plan will be. Expansion into Europe, expansion into Southeast Asia, expanding the footprint of the sales and the markets that we have as they grow and they mature, SENTI, Pico, the Micro product, the mass conversion from diesel to solar, making sure we get, you know, 30% market share of that.
and then, you know, moving from less one time, you must go out and find the financing to us providing a finance package, probably with a sub co that has the debt and equity financing in it so that it's not being carried by the shareholders here because project-based financing is not what you wanna do for a tech startup. You wanna deal with that in a separate model, sister company or something like that. All of those put together, this still has the potential, even more so than ever before. Clear Blue, you know, CAD 100 million revenue in three to five years is totally a still realistic, opportunity for us to go after. The key is the inflection point. We haven't had the inflection point in the last four years.
If you look at the sales funnel, the inflection point is in front of us very, very soon. Now we just gotta deliver and prove it.
Awesome. Okay. And this is the last one we have in the queue so far. Is, can we replicate the relationship with Eutelsat, have we had with Eutelsat with Starlink or have we kind of considered that opportunity?
No. Starlink is in a portfolio with companies that has a power company in it. It is related to Tesla and Tesla has its own energy services business. They have no interest in working with anybody outside as a vendor. And our investment and focus right now is to grow our relationships in Europe and Africa, other markets to be a strong and good player in North America. That is not a partnership I would seek out.
Okay.
I think that's all the questions that we have in the queue. If anybody has any last minute questions, please feel free to post them either in the chat or in the Q & A section of the meeting.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to me, Miriam at clearbluetechnologies.com. I do try to text or speak to anyone that wants to get in touch with me anytime. I do want to say, first to Farrukh, who, without him, we would not have finished this restructuring or even come up with it. We had some guidance that put us down in the other direction. Oh, there's one other thing I need to say to everybody.
and to the whole team of the company, but customers who paid us early, employees who went without paychecks, employees who said, take my, you know, pay me in shares for my expenses, suppliers who've taken deferred payment or converted some of the early monies that we still owe them from COVID into, into shares. and shareholders, every convertible debenture holder converted their debenture into shares on a voluntary basis, 100% support. I am a very, very lucky and honored person. I serve at the pleasure of the shareholder and the stakeholders, and I do not forget that any day. The one thing I will say is, we had two independent directors, Mr. Steve Perry and Jane Kern, who had been on our board for many years, probably time to get some new blood on board anyways. They stepped down in October, November. Mostly, well, it does not matter.
They did. It was time for transition. We wanted to get through this phase and we will now be looking to bring on at least two new, independent shareholder board members. In the meantime, please know that we went out into the marketplace and asked a few friends of, and advisors of the management team, one who was a VC that was a board member that I've reported to in the past and who's been very tough on me through my career, but helped me to be a better person to come in as advisors, and advise. Although the board is right now just the three co-founders, we're gonna be fixing that as quickly as we can.
Please know that we have sought everyone's advice to make sure that we are doing all the good things that we need to do through this process. I thank everyone for their patience and support of Clear Blue and myself and the rest of the management team. Have a great day. Happy May 1st. I look forward to speaking to you at the end of May with the news, hopefully in between.