Thank you for standing by. My name is Joe Diaz, and I will be the conference call operator. Welcome to the Zedcor Incorporated fourth quarter of 2024 financial results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. We will be having a question and answer session at the end of the call, and questions will be limited to analysts only. I would now like to turn the conference over to Amin Ladha, our Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Joe. Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. Also joining me on our call today, we have our President and CEO, Todd Ziniuk. Earlier this morning, before markets opened, Zedcor issued a news release announcing our financial results for the fourth quarter of 2024. This news release will be available on our website under the Investor Relations tab and is filed on our SEDAR+ profile. Please note, a portion of today's call, other than historical performance, includes statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under the safe harbor provision of those laws. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current views and assumptions. This discussion is qualified in its entirety by the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements that is appended to our news release.
Please review our press release and Zedcor's reports filed on SEDAR+ for various factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from projections. We use terms such as gross profit, gross margin, and Adjusted EBITDA on this call, which are non-IFRS and non-GAAP measures. For more information on how we define these terms, please refer to the definition set out in our MD&A. In addition, reconciliations between any Adjusted EBITDA and net income are included in the MD&A as well. An important non-GAAP measure that we use is Adjusted EBITDA. The company believes that Adjusted EBITDA is a meaningful financial metric as it measures cash generated from operations, which the company can use to fund working capital requirements, fund future growth initiatives, and service future interest and principal debt repayments. Adjusted EBITDA should not be construed as an alternative to the net income determined in accordance with IFRS.
Please note that all financial information is provided in Canadian dollars unless noted otherwise. Following the prepared remarks by Todd and I, we will conduct a Q&A session during which questions will be taken from our analysts. Moving on to the company's financial performance for the quarter. Some highlights for the fourth quarter and the year include record revenues of CAD 10.3 million in Q4. This exceeded our previous high set just last quarter by CAD 1.1 million and is an increase of 78% year-over-year. Our recurring revenue for Q4 remained steady at over 85% of total revenue. We also had record Adjusted EBITDA of CAD 4 million for Q4, and this was a 185% increase year-over-year, and the EBITDA margin remained strong at over 38% for the quarter. Our tower count and customer base continues to grow.
More importantly, our weekly tower production, which is a key metric for us, continues to increase. During Q4, our weekly tower production count grew by 108, or sorry, our total tower production grew by 186 towers, which was over 15 per week despite some holiday weeks for Christmas and U.S. Thanksgiving. Our goal remains unchanged: 20-25 towers produced per week with the ability to ramp up based on customer demand. Some highlights for the year-to-date numbers include 12-month revenues of CAD 33 million, recurring revenue of over 80% of total revenues, Adjusted EBITDA of CAD 12 million, which is up 57% year-over-year, and a 36% EBITDA margin. Our fleet size at December 31st was just over 1,330 security towers, and this represents a 62% year-over-year, and utilization for the fleet continued to be over 90% for the quarter.
Diving a little bit deeper, our Q4 shows that the strong growth continues. Revenues increased 12% quarter- over- quarter, and this was driven by an expansion of the fleet and strong utilization. Gross margins increased to CAD 6.8 million, or 66% of revenues. This was driven by operational efficiencies and higher utilization rates. The operational efficiencies we have talked about previously, and they continue to pay dividends while allowing us to maintain service levels. We anticipate gross margins to continue in this range going forward. Adjusted EBITDA increased to CAD 4 million, or 38.7% of revenues versus 37.2% of revenues in Q3 2024, and 24.1% of revenues for Q4 2023. Just wanted to point out that Q4 2023 is a bit of a lower quarter as we had two of our large pipeline construction projects end, which resulted in lower utilization and lower EBITDA margins.
Not the best comparative, but still impressive growth. Once these projects ended, we were able to diversify our revenues, and they remained diversified throughout the year. Adjusted EBITDA worked out to CAD 0.04 per share, again driven by higher revenues and margins offset by a higher share count. The fleet was 1,337 at the quarter end, an increase of 186 total towers and 512 towers year-over-year. Utilization continued to exceed 90% in the quarter. In terms of the future outlook, we completed an equity raise in Q1 2025 and have started to expedite our growth. We are aggressively expanding across the southern U.S. and ramped up our sales team. While this will result in slightly lower margins as we expedite U.S.
Growth, the revenues continue to grow, and we are already starting to see the spending pay dividends as we gain traction in areas like Austin, Texas, Denver, Colorado, and Phoenix, and Nevada. We continue to expand our revenues in the retail segment and residential construction segments. These are two verticals where we are seeing large potential, and we will continue to allocate resources in those areas in order to grow. However, we're seeing opportunities in all verticals in the U.S., which is great. While we have areas of focus, this is a truly customer-agnostic industry, and we won't be picky. We continue to grow our revenues with key customers as we expand our footprint. Current customers are requesting service at more and more locations, and we're trying to service that to the best of our ability.
During the year, we successfully onboarded over 190 new clients to the platform throughout Canada and the U.S. Customers are requesting services; Canadian customers are requesting services in the U.S. and vice versa. The financing that we completed allows us to exploit some of these opportunities. As you can see from the chart, our customer base is fully diversified by industry verticals, and despite recent tariff and potential economic threats, we aren't seeing a slowdown in demand or opportunity. In fact, some of our customers, such as in the home builder segment, are even taking more security to protect fully built homes. Moving on to a discussion on the balance sheet, it's really been set up to support our growth trajectory. We exited Q4 with a cash balance of CAD 5.8 million. We have CAD 10 million of available borrowing room on our current banking facilities.
Our net debt at the end of Q4 was CAD 14.4 million, and our net debt- to- EBITDA increased slightly to 1.19 times. This will increase over time as we deploy capital, but it will be offset by growing EBITDA. CAD 1.2 million of the debt is expected to come due in the next quarter, which will be retired from free cash flow. Property and equipment increased almost CAD 6 million to CAD 42.7 million, and we continued investments in growing the company's fleet of security towers. A portion of that increase is sitting under assets under construction as we purchased a number of long lead components in order to ramp up production growth and meet our targets. We try to keep this around one month's production and actively manage assets under construction so that unnecessary capital isn't tied up.
A review of our cash flow statements for Q4, adjusted operating cash flow increased 585% year-over-year to CAD 3.3 million, demonstrating the growing cash flow generation capacity of the business. Capital expenditures ramped up in Q4 as our manufacturing capability was streamlined, and we have staffed up our team and established our processes. Maintenance CapEx continues to represent a small percentage of the total. In 2024, it was less than CAD 500,000, which is all for older cameras or older technology equipment that broke and we replaced. Free cash flow for Q4 2024 was just over CAD 3.3 million, reflecting continued investments in fleet expansion and working capital supported by our expanded capital facilities. I'll hand over the call to Todd, who will provide us with an operations update and some insights into our go-forward strategy.
Thank you, Amin. As you saw, the numbers, we had a strong and great quarter. The business and the opportunities heading forward are endless. At year-end, we were operating in the U.S. cities that we were all operating in were Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Midland, Texas, Denver, Colorado, Las Vegas, Nevada, Phoenix, Arizona, and Atlanta, Georgia. In Canada, we are operating in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa, and Toronto. We're seeing great growth in all branches. Opportunities are endless, all of our, especially in Canada as well, as we mature our relationships and partnerships with our clients. You know, a lot of internal growth in our customer list, which is quite exciting as a company. We're not seeing turnover with our clients, which tells me as the CEO of the company that we've got great service for our clients and things are moving forward.
We see some projects end, but the clients we have that end that project end up taking towers to new projects. It's been exciting. We're seeing lots of opportunity in Las Vegas and Phoenix right now. I'll move into some operational updates across the company and sales updates as well. You know, while everybody's excited about the U.S., we're seeing huge growth as well in Canada. Obviously, the margins in Canada, we've got our platform built. You know, our contribution rate's quite a bit higher because we're not adding a whole bunch of SG&A and G&A in Canada. We're starting to see that in our platform as well. In Texas, we've got our branches built out, buildings in place, people, salespeople, managers in place, all of our field techs.
It's probably going to be the next part of the puzzle that shows good margins due to the fact it's maturing and the customers list just keeps growing. We're seeing a lot, like Amin said, lower R&M on our equipment. We've got a lot of things streamlined. The AI portion that's in our cameras is helping our growth, or I'm sorry, to keep costs down in the monitoring center. As the platform grows, we're going to keep continuing to get stronger with the AI side of the business as well. You know, the maturing side of the customers is a big part of it. Our customer list now is probably north of 500 customers. You know, and a lot of these clients, they come on in an early stage.
Maybe that represents five to 10 towers, but we have the ability to grow some of these clients upwards of 50-100 towers, as some of them are across Canada, some of them are across borders, Canada, U.S., and multiple states as well. We're moving into different regions just due to the fact that clients are taking us there. We're seeing great opportunities for growth that way. Strategically, you know, hiring once we have the opportunities to get in there, we go in behind that. We get our facility set up. For example, right now, we've just hired people in Las Vegas. We've got 38 towers deployed, and we have no people on the ground there. We've been servicing that from Phoenix. The opportunities are large.
I was just in Phoenix and Las Vegas last week, you know, doing the interviews, bringing people on board with myself and James Leganchuk, our President of Operations, United States. You know, we spent two days in each city and traveled around and looked at the opportunities, and they're just endless. You know, something Zedcor is doing is we're all about our clients, and that's how we operate our company. We're not designing apps or different things to give to clients and put it on them. We remove all that from the client, and we put it on us as a company to maintain service levels for clients. Clients that are running these projects or building homes, they've all got multiple things on their mind.
They don't have to worry about the security being looked after and referring to an app and turning, you know, monitoring off and on. We do that, and we see big value, and we're seeing that in every city that we go to, that the clients are very happy with the service levels. You know, the great thing that Zedcor has is we run high levels of service, but we also got a great product. When you run those two together, all of a sudden, your client base, they act as salespeople for you, and we're seeing that referrals. You know, it makes it quite easy to grow. You have a guy in construction, and he's telling his friends in the same line of business at a different company that these guys, you know, they do what they say they're going to do.
That's our culture at Zedcor. We've seen big value from that. The demand's not stopping. Like I said, you know, we're moving into, you know, moving forward here for the growth in the next quarter here. We're moving into Tennessee. We've just hired a fellow there. It'll give us the ability to reach out to Knoxville, Tennessee, Nashville, Atlanta, cover down into Florida, Jacksonville. We have clients that want us to go into Jacksonville. We'll be Q3, Q4 moving into Florida and California. We have some towers deployed right now in the northern region of California. The growth isn't stopping. We're seeing a big demand on that side. As Amin was talking about the manufacturing, to dive a little deeper into that, we're producing right now 25 towers a week. We've got 35 packages as of the beginning of this week coming into our facility.
What I want to see happen there is we'll build up about 30-40 packages, and then we'll start doing 35 towers a week. That way, we never stop production. You're pulling them, you know, onto the floor instead of waiting for more packages to show up. We've done a great job of securing all of our procurement stuff, cameras. We're not heavily affected, actually, at all with the tariffs. You know, our steel component of our tower, for example, I'll give you an idea of it. It's about CAD 0.95 a pound prior to tariffs. Our towers weigh, the steel components weigh about 2,300 pounds. You know, 10% on that's CAD 230, right? The rest of the steel components come in are made up of the labor portion as well. We're, like Amin said, we exited at 1,330 towers.
Today, we're actually sitting right at about 1,600 in the fleet. We're, like I said, we're going to 25-35 as we're moving towards 35. You know, the highs, the upside here is about 1,400 towers to build this year, 1,100-1,400. We're right on track for that. The demand, we've done a great job of balancing how fast we're building our towers and how fast we're bringing on salespeople, moving into new regions. You know, by the end of this month, we're going to have eight operational branches across the United States. Obviously, we got our six in Canada. We're looking at probably before the end of the year expanding into Quebec as well. You know, it's not, it's, you start feeding these branches, 10 towers every couple of weeks or every week. That's a lot of demand.
It's going to keep going, and we'll just keep growing with our growth. You know, the 1,100-1,400 towers, that's not, that's what we're doing regardless. Now, if we land a large enterprise customer, let's say another 200-300 towers on the outside, somebody in the retail space, you know, that'll be built on the outside. We'll schedule that, how we're going to get them deployed to all the different locations. You know, nobody expects us to drop off 300 towers in 30 days. It would be over a six-month period, maybe eight months, and we'll work with the client. We've seen it with working with Home Depot across Canada. They have a bunch of logistics items to do on their end as well before we can start dropping the towers off.
You know, I already covered the fact that we're going to be focusing on California and Florida. We think it's a big opportunity there as well. You know, to speak a little more about the culture of Zedcor, I'll say it again. We're all about our clients. When you have your clients on your side, it puts everything else in place, right? You know, it looks after our investors. If you have happy clients, it looks after everything. We're doing a great job of that. I'm a big component and a believer that they're number one, just behind safety. It's exciting times. I think we can open the floor up, Amin, to any questions from the analysts. Thank you very much.
Excellent. I'll hand it over to Joe.
Thank you, Amin. We will now take questions from analysts only. Please unmute yourself when you are prompted. The first question comes from Kyle McPhee from Cormark Securities.
Good morning, Kyle.
Hey, guys. First one from me. As you mentioned, you started disclosing your detailed financials by country, Canada and the U.S. Operating margin is much higher in Canada as of 2024. It's 58% versus 21% in the U.S. Is that difference just highlighting the benefit of regional density and cost absorption that you have in the relatively mature Canadian region? The U.S. should be able to catch all the way up to that? You know, is there something structurally different about the margins in the U.S. that may keep it lower long-term? Maybe as part of that, I'm curious where you're accounting for the power assembly operations, all the costs related to that that are in the U.S. but benefit both Canada and the U.S.? Is that in the corporate segment?
Kyle, I'll answer the second question first because it's easier. All those costs related to manufacturing for the people, like if they're directly involved in the manufacturing of the equipment, those get capitalized to the piece of equipment themselves. The cost, like the pricing we kind of quote to you guys, includes the cost of labor, our cost of assembly. We don't put a ton of overhead into it, but it's more direct costs for that. Those all get capitalized, and they get included in the depreciation over time. With respect to the operating costs, it's not necessarily a scale thing. The scale more impacts the SG&A side and the EBITDA margin. The operating costs last year, we had a bunch of the towers come back from those two pipeline jobs.
R&M was high as we were cleaning them up and getting ready to put them back into work. The other thing is partly as the fleet diversifies. Before, it was more kind of solar hybrid-based where it was engine-based, and we had to have mechanics on staff. We had to have engines, parts. It was a complicated piece of equipment. As the fleet has grown towards the more simplified solar electric and the electric towers, the cost of maintaining those solar hybrids becomes less and less kind of as the fleet on a whole. We have also done a bunch of upgrades to those solar hybrids. We have upgraded generators, upgraded engines, and they are starting to pay dividends in terms of the lower R&M and the lower wages related to maintaining that.
That's kind of what's driving the operational efficiencies as well as the AI in the cameras.
Got it. Okay. Just going back to the first part of your answer on, you know, labor for the assembly functions capitalized, but what about all the, you know, OpEx for the assembly facilities, that type of stuff? Is that going into corporate or is that going into U.S.?
Those are leases, so that would just go into like the right of use depreciation. We do not capitalize that. It is just in and out of one line of depreciation to another.
Okay. Second one for me, just, so you mentioned in your filings that you're, you know, considering moving into the manufacturing part of your supply chain. I assume that's for the steel towers. Correct me if that's wrong. Is this supply chain change versus your current outsourcing of that manufacturing function? Is that something that would require a big lead time and CapEx investment to get up and running? Is this change more about reducing supply chain risk, or do you also think there's a big benefit when it comes to internalizing margin in your supply chain?
It's, like you said, it's kind of taking the metal components in-house right now. That's outsourced where we outsource the welding, the cutting, the painting, the metal. We're looking at taking it in-house. We're not saying we're going to. It's a kind of a mix of, like you said, being more in control of our supply chain where we're not in kind of reliance on vendors where they can increase prices and shift demand to other customers. Obviously, we're one of their many customers, but it's partly that, and partly there's cost savings as well, which would reduce the cost of the towers. Again, it's a mix of both. I don't want to attach a percentage, but we're definitely looking at it, and those are kind of the driving factors, like you said.
Yeah. In the short term, you know, right now, Kyle, to stop gap that, we got multiple builders in place. We can step it up with the ones we have. You know, to explain it, even the control box at the bottom, we had that outsourced. We brought that in-house. For example, the used cost was about $1,700-$1,800 . Our cost to do it now in-house is about right around $950. You know, it just saves the cost. Right from day one, when I got down there, we knew we were going to do this in stages. That was one of the last box. That last box is one of the last components to bring in-house on the tower. Yeah, the last piece would be the metal side of it.
To answer your question even a little deeper, it'd probably be about CAD 4 million spend if we were to go down that route. Then getting key people to run it. We'd obviously, you know, ease into it, start building it. If we were to go down that road, you know, start out by, let's produce 10 a week, get to 25 a week, and get it to where we could be fully in-house. You know, that would be obviously the end goal on this. You probably, you know, I think where the business is going, to be quite honest, we might always need another builder. We might just become one of the builders, and you'd end up, let's just say, for example, we're paying CAD 7,200 for metal components now coming in that are painted.
If we could do them for about CAD 4,500-CAD 5,000, you're going to end up with a blended price depending on how much we're doing compared to our builders of around maybe that CAD 5,500. You know, it's all just about, I'll be quite honest, Kyle, I don't see the growth stopping at all. As we're building this platform, it's going to ramp up. We know that. We're seeing it. We're getting very, very good salespeople coming on board. You know, one thing about our culture too, just to dive into that, is it's all referrals. We haven't rounded out in our shop yet for the manufacturing side. Now we're starting to see that in our sales side, manager side. These guys worked at other machines. For example, our fellow in Phoenix, he's brought a whole bunch of referrals in that we hired for Las Vegas and Phoenix.
He explained to the people that we interviewed that this is what we always thought it was where we worked before. These guys do what they say. It is great to hear that. It is great to have a culture that these people that work for us are reaching out to friends and telling them, "Hey, you know what? You want to get over here? This is an up-and-coming company." We know the growth is there. Obviously, I think a lot of the people know on the call, Amin and I are all about holding margins and keeping guardrail on the growth, and we will stick to that plan. Us being able to do that raise post-year end gave us the ability to step on the growth pattern.
We are, you know, the platform, we're probably, I'd say, Amin, what, ahead six months on the program compared to where we thought we'd be, or at least a good quarter, quarter and a half.
Especially with the kind of the locations we're operating in.
100%. Yeah.
We're not going to be picky, like you said earlier, but yeah, some of these kind of opportunities pop up, and that money gave us the flexibility to take advantage of it.
Okay. Thanks for the detailed answers. I'll pass the line.
Thanks, Kyle.
Thank you, Kyle. The second question comes from Sean Jack from Raymond James. Please unmute yourself, Sean.
Good morning, Sean.
Morning, guys. Just quickly wanted to touch on enterprise customers and see if you guys had any more details, any updates to share on how that's progressing.
The enterprise customers take time. Like we've started working, we started putting an NDA in place with Walmart. They're doing a trial. Those guys are so big, they get distracted. They have multiple priorities on the go. Kroger's doing an RFP that we know about, so we're going to be on the list for that. Again, they just take time. Some of the other big retailers that we're working for, we're just completing a security audit with them. We are continuing to invest in that section and chase that down. It just takes time. It's a longer lead space. It's not like the construction world where some of the field guys take care of that and the paperwork falls in afterward. The kind of the enterprise world, it's the other way around where the paperwork, and they need to check their boxes before they could bring us on board.
We want to be flexible and easy to work with. Like Home Depot Canada, it started off being a few stores and it grew kind of year-over-year. We're happy to do it that way, but we're happy to do it the other way too where if somebody wants to place a big order, we'll figure it out and make it happen, like Todd said on the manufacturing side.
Also, Sean, to touch on that, you know, the other part of our business we're growing out is our national sales team, right? You know, the national sales team is focused on a few different things, building out the customer list. You know, we might be working for a client in Texas, but they're actually in 22 different states. You know, I look at them as a fairly large enterprise customer. You know, they might have 20 towers in Texas, but we have the ability to grow that account to 200-300 towers. It goes from there into different verticals, the REITs, retail. It just goes on and on and on the list. You know, sometimes it's not in a bad way, but it gets to be a little overwhelming because everybody's a client.
It's 100% customer agnostic schools. We're seeing, you know, different areas of that. It's all kinds of things. You know, that's where we're very confident the 1,200 this year is, you know, the 1,100 on the minimal growth side. That's just day-to-day sales, right? Without any big enterprise changes. You know, that's where we put, you can see on the chart here or the bar chart, 1,400, 1,400 could lead to 1,600. We're preparing the back end of the business for that, for the ability to step on it. I talk to my manufacturers of the steel components all the time. They're aware of it. You know, they need about a 30-day lead time to start adding to it too. Over, you know, the span of a month to three months, they could be ramped up quite heavy as well.
Yeah, it's exciting that side of it.
That's great. Also, just one more from me. Thinking about the growth that's expected coming up here and also these new territories that you guys are going to be expanding into, wanted to see how we should think about margins moving through 2025. They were quite strong in this past period, but are we going to see any sort of movement with, you know, increase or decrease in spending?
I'll speak a little bit to the margins. You know, I think this business, we've seen a bit of a trend in hockey sticks. You know, the hockey stick doesn't stop so much, but for example, in Q1, we've hired a lot of people. It's going to be a strong quarter, but it kind of, you know, plateaus there for a minute while you get everybody in place. You know, the platform's that much bigger, you start getting that many more towers out and the revenue keeps growing. I think we're going to be able to maintain margins. I think, Amin, I'll pass it over to you. You'd agree with that.
Yeah. Operating margins we could definitely maintain. The EBITDA margins will probably drop a bit in Q1 just because of all the hiring we've done, but it's not going to drop substantially. We always think we can hire more people than actually happens. It's like Todd said, it's kind of growth, plateau, growth again.
Okay. Perfect. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Thanks, Sean.
Thank you, Sean.
The third question comes from Doug Taylor from Canaccord.
Yeah. Thank you. Good morning. I'm curious to dig in on something you said earlier regarding the demand profile. I think you've said, you know, seeing no signs of waning demand, but also some pockets of strength in response to the current political or geopolitical environment. I think you said home builders specifically. The question is, I mean, would you say that response is to perceived increased security risks, or is there a function of the labor shortages given some of the, you know, recent, you know, changes in this administration's put through, or is there some other factor we should be thinking about there?
Specifically on the home builder side, it's a mix of they keep building and the sales sometimes slow down in certain regions. They have unsold inventory that we're watching that they probably hadn't anticipated us to be watching. That's probably the most important stuff for them where the house is done. They need to be able to move it quick, and they don't want appliances getting stolen or somebody coming and vandalizing or stripping copper from the walls. It kind of, unfortunately for the customers, is a double-edged sword where things slow down, you need more security. We kind of saw this in COVID. We just expanded into the space, but we saw a Trans Mountain when stuff shut down. It's not like they could assume that security, like people weren't going to steal stuff just because they were forced to stay in place.
It is kind of, like I said, a double-edged sword. Some verticals might slow down and some verticals might need more. We are kind of balanced in that sense. We are excited, kind of in a bad way to see what happens, but we do not see the growth slowing down because of tariffs. It might even ramp up.
Maybe I'll double back then on the labor shortage part of the profile because it's been a long demand driver for you for years now. Have you noticed any change in behavior as a result of that where security guards are just harder to find or things like that?
I think, Doug, the biggest thing in that component is people are starting to realize these towers, you know, I'm not saying nothing bad about security guards, but they're way more effective. We're kind of on that, you know, right on that bubble right now where it's people are moving into it. They're like, these guards cost more money. They're not doing their job. They're looking at their phones in their car. They're sleeping. They're maybe not even at site. They're at the coffee shop. You know, the beautiful thing is, you know, the name of the company is, you know, Zedcor Security Solutions, but these clients get a lot more out of the tower than just security. You know, they all have portals. They can watch their job sites.
You can't do that with, you know, you can have, let's say, four towers for CAD 10,000, but you have a guard at night or a couple of guards, it's CAD 20,000. You can't go on a portal and watch your job sites. You know, they're saving a lot of money. Secondly, something happens on your job site or cameras are recording 24/7. And then the clients are seeing big value in that safety stuff happens on the site. For example, in the home building, a common thing is a poor driveway. A vehicle pulls into it, backs out. Now they can see who did it. You know, let's take a company like D.R. Horton. They're not stuck paying for that. They can bill it back to the contractor that drove into the driveway. The uses of the cameras are unbelievable. Time-lapse videos. It goes on and on.
There's a lot more value added. You know, Doug, to even answer that a little deeper, and that's a big thing with our sales team that they're really well versed in is educating the client. This is what this tower can do. It's not just your typical tower that you're used to. Some of these regions had camera towers or cameras before, but all they were doing was recording. Then you get the guy that comes along and now he's going to start monitoring and now it's done overseas. Or like I said earlier in the call, it's an app that the client watches. You know, and I've said this multiple times. When it comes down to client success, you can't have the heartbeat of your business being around overseas. You got to keep it in-house. They need to be employees of your company.
It's the heartbeat of our business is that monitoring center. If that monitoring center is missing stuff every night and you have no control over it, man, you don't have a business and you're actually not giving your clients the success that they want. These people need to go home from their job sites at night, know that you're protecting their facilities. We do a great job of that. Partly it is, you know what? We have challenges in our room, but we're on them every day and we're evolving. Even the layout of our rooms, how we're changing it, the different things we're doing. You know, we don't think, oh, we're just monitoring. This works great. You know, we look at bringing AI in. AI works great in the cameras, the AI portion that you can overlay on your servers. They're not dependable yet.
You know, we actually just had our auditors in yesterday and they run AI, but they still double-check everything. It kind of shows you where AI can be. It's evolving. We really, you know, we want to make sure that when we put the proper AI in, we know the stuff that we have in our Axis cameras works and we know the abilities of it. Before we overlay any other AI into our servers or into our system, we're going to double-check that that works properly. You know, I think it's going to get to the point that your frontline alarms, AI is going to help with that. We're investigating a whole bunch of that right now. That helps cut costs, right? It helps bring margins up and it helps the room stay the size as the growth carries on.
You know, those are all efficiencies, but when you have that sent overseas, it doesn't work. I don't mean to go off on a different direction on you, Doug. I just wanted to explain that in detail. That's, you know, it's a big part of it, but the clients out there are really starting to move towards camera towers and cameras in general. It's interrupting the security world. You're never going to get away from a security guard required at the front desk of a, you know, a skyscraper or the, you know, the guys roaming the malls or the airport security guards. There's going to be a place for them. They're not fully replaced. A lot of this remote stuff, you know, deterrent-wise, it works a lot better. You see the blue lights on a tower.
You know, if that helps, Doug, I could go on for a long time on that.
No, I mean, it's great color, but, you know, maybe I'll press on some other questions here. In a release, and I want to say it might not have been today's, but in an earlier release, you alluded to, you know, the potential. And it seems like you've got the, you know, your cost of your towers as it relates to tariffs or any other inflation seemingly very much under control. You did allude to the potential to use pricing to, you know, protect your return on investment. I guess my question here is, you know, have you, as the discussion progressed, anywhere on using that step at this point? Maybe can you talk to the market willingness to take price here in this environment?
I think you hit the nail on the head, Doug. We try to push pricing whenever we can, but it's more market-driven and more market willingness. I think the easier way to go about pricing is to get in with the customer, show them the value, show them the results, and then kind of up the pricing rather than push it on the back end and blame it on tariffs and government policies. Honestly, living in the U.S., like nobody really mentions the tariffs kind of on a day-to-day basis, especially in B2B sales. Like most people are, unless you're like direct consumer of, say, for example, metal, you won't see a tariff impact. Consumers might see it in a few months, but it's a rapidly evolving situation.
I think it's a little early to start pushing pricing on customers because of tariffs, especially every day they seem to change the policy. We are definitely going to try to push it any which angle we can, but I think the better approach is the one I talked about, is more get in, show your worth, show the value, and then go to the customer to talk about pricing.
Okay. I'll pass the line. Thank you.
Thanks, Doug.
Thank you, Doug. The next question comes from Gabriel Leung from Beacon Securities.
Morning and thanks for taking my questions and congrats on all the progress. I want to touch on the enterprise side of things again. You guys talked about doing some initial work with Walmart and Kroger. I'm curious, you know, whether these are competitive displacement opportunities and if they are, you know, why the client might be looking to an alternative provider. Is it around pricing and is it around service level agreements, et cetera?
I think a lot of it's service level. Having the platform, you know, Gabriel, it's a big part of it. You know, the other thing is locked into contracts. I know contracts are great in the markets. People love contracts. I have a different view on contracts, obviously. We'll get contracts wherever we can. I think a lot of people get a contract signed and then they forget about their client. I can't go on enough about the client. You know, we want to make business easy for our client. I think if we go to work for a client, we're not doing our job, I ask them to get rid of us if we can't fix the problems. You know, I think that in the retail space right now, everybody wants to lock these guys down. I've met with quite a few of them.
That is something they're tired of. They're really tired of being locked into contracts. Some of it is competitive space. Some of it is new. Some of it goes back to what I just talked about, Gabriel. They've had guards. They've had nothing. They know the world's getting worse. They need a deterrent in their parking lot or cameras on their buildings. Some of it is a shift that they're moving towards that type of security. Some of it, they want to do a blend of it. Liability with the guard that's on site. They need something to back them up. That is a camera, the eye in the sky, right? You know, obviously, I think a lot of everybody on this call knows Walmart. They've had a client or a competitor for quite some time. That is how they started their business.
You know, Walmart's grown a lot, obviously, and they're going to add to it. I don't know if they're running off a competitor or nothing. They just want to add to different parts of their business, distribution, more stores. We're seeing that. It might be a blend of us and a competitor. You know, a lot of them now are going towards renting them. Some want to buy them. It's all different, Gabriel. It's independent. We're at one right now that we're doing a large cyber audit. We're going to be complete with that at the end of April. That's going to open the doors for that one. You know, we don't know to what size, but, you know, it's through this cyber audit that we've moved forward on. It's great for Zedcor. It's great for everybody.
It shows the, you know, the next level of where Zedcor is at that we're obviously cybersecurity is a big thing. You know, even to talk a little more on that, we make it easy on our clients. A lot of clients don't want you on their internet. For example, like a Home Depot Canada, they don't want us on their internet because obviously in their cyber world, they have a lot of people's personal information. That's the other thing that Zedcor does is we just supply our own SIM card and we go direct and we don't need to be on their systems. They like that. A lot of the competitors run on the internet or that's how they operate their business. We've made it standalone, which kind of cuts us apart. I mean, do you have anything to add to that?
No, I think you covered it. Some of the things we did not talk about of why G&A is going up, we are also investing in the back end in terms of upgrading our cybersecurity, upgrading some of our processes, et cetera.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah. Excellent.
Anything else, Gabe?
I think he's done.
Great.
That's all the questions, I think.
For Alex.
Thank you, everyone, for your time. We look forward to speaking with everybody and getting more results out there.
Thank you, everyone. Have a great day. Are we losing?
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