Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Nick Swenson, Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer of Air T. This meeting is now called to order, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to our 2022 annual meeting of stockholders. Under your company's bylaws, as Chairman of the Board, I will preside as Chairman of today's meeting. Mark Jundt, who is our General Counsel, will act as the Secretary of this meeting. In addition, Brian Ochocki and Scott Loveless of Deloitte & Touche, LLP, are with us on this line today. Deloitte serves as the company's independent registered public accounting firm, and Mr. Ochocki and Loveless will be available during the Q&A portion of the meeting to respond to any questions you may have.
I'd also like to introduce Craig Colosso on the phone today from Equiniti Trust Company, which is the company's stock transfer agent. Mr. Colosso has been appointed to serve as the voting inspector for this meeting. As voting inspector, he will determine the number of shares of common stock represented at the meeting, determine if a quorum is present, assist in the tabulation of votes, and perform such other duties as provided by the general corporate law of the state of Delaware in any such matters should they arise. There are 3 items of business on the agenda for today's meeting, as listed in the notice of annual meeting.
As no other matters have been submitted to the company for vote in accordance with the terms of the company's bylaws, only the items of business set forth in the notice of annual meeting shall be considered at today's meeting. After all items of business have been introduced, there will be a period during which you may express your views on any of these items before the polls are closed. After the vote has been taken on the matters for which the annual meeting has been called, we will have an opportunity for stockholders to ask general questions or to make comments about your company. Consistent with the rules of this meeting and in order to provide for the orderly conduct of this meeting, questions will only be addressed during the appropriate discussion period.
The record date for determining the stockholders entitled to notice of and to vote at this meeting is the close of business day on June 28th, 2022. Will Mr. Jundt please present the notice of annual meeting, the proxy statement, and form of proxy card, and the list of stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting today?
Mr. Chairman, I present the notice of annual meeting of stockholders to be held August 17th, 2022, the proxy statement of Air T, Inc., and form of proxy card, which were sent by United States Mail or electronically on or about July 8th, 2022, to each stockholder of record of Air T, Inc. at the close of business on June 28th, 2022, addressed to each stockholder at the address of such stockholder appearing upon the books of the company at such time. I also present a list of the holders of the shares of common stock of the company of record at the close of business on June 28th, 2022. This list is available upon stockholder request.
This list shows the address and number of shares of record owned by each stockholder on the record date, and it has been available at the principal office of the company for more than 10 days prior to the meeting.
At this time, any proxies that have not been submitted should be delivered to Mr. Jundt here at the front of the room. If you have already submitted a proxy, it will not be necessary to vote today on any of the matters to be decided in today's meeting. I now recognize Mr. Colosso for a report on the shares represented at this meeting.
Mr. Chairman, on the record date, the company had outstanding 2,866,418 shares of common stock, of which 2,621,465 shares, or 91.45%, are represented at this meeting.
Thank you. Since more than a majority of the outstanding shares of the common stock of the company are represented, either in person or by proxy, we have a quorum for this meeting, and I declare this meeting properly organized for the transaction of business. I now declare the polls open. Before we proceed, does anyone need a ballot, annual report, or proxy statement? If so, please raise your hand so we can supply your needs. As a reminder, stockholders who have already sent in proxies and who do not wish to change their vote do not need to vote by ballot today. The first item of business of this meeting is the election of the members of the board of directors. The number of directors constituting the board of directors has been set at 6 by a resolution adopted by the board of directors pursuant to the company's bylaws.
The board of directors has nominated 6 individuals for election to this annual meeting. The list of the board of directors nominees, along with biographical summaries, is included in the company's proxy statement for this meeting. Each of these nominees has agreed to serve as director if elected. The nominees are myself, Nick Swenson, Raymond Cabillot, William Foudray, Gary Kohler, Peter McClung, and Travis Swenson. On behalf of the board, each of them is hereby nominated for election as a director. Directors elected by plurality, in other words, the 6 nominees receiving the most votes, will be elected as directors. The board of directors recommends that you vote for the election of each of these nominees. The second item of business listed in the proxy statement is approval of the following resolution, which is now presented to the stockholders. "Resolved.
The stockholders hereby approve on an advisory basis the compensation paid by the Company to the named executive officers disclosed pursuant to Item 402 of Regulation S-K of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Company's proxy statement for the 2022 annual meeting of stockholders. The stockholders' vote on this resolution, which is referred to as the say-on-pay vote, is advisory and non-binding on the Company. The board of directors and the compensation committee expect to take the outcome of the say-on-pay vote into account when considering future executive compensation decisions. The board of directors recommends that you vote for adoption of this resolution. The third and final item of business is the proposed ratification of the appointment of Deloitte & Touche LLP, as the independent registered public accounting firm for the Company for the fiscal year ending March 31st, 2023.
Deloitte was first appointed by the audit committee to serve as the company's independent registered public accountant on September 27th, 2018, and Deloitte has rendered its opinion with respect to the company's annual financial statements for the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2022. As I mentioned earlier, representatives of Deloitte are on the line with us today and are available to respond to any questions you may have. The audit committee has appointed Deloitte as the company's independent registered public accountant for the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2023, and the board of directors requests the ratification of that appointment by the stockholders. Accordingly, ratification of the appointment of Deloitte as the company's independent registered public accountant for the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2023, is now presented for a vote at this meeting.
This matter will be approved if more shares are voted in favor of the ratification of the appointment of Deloitte than are cast against ratification. As set forth in the proxy statement, the board of directors recommends that you vote for the ratification of the appointment of Deloitte. Now that all items of business have been presented, is there any discussion of these items or questions for Deloitte? If you have a question or comment on these matters, please first identify yourself and indicate whether you are a stockholder and are otherwise affiliated with the stockholder or speaking on behalf of whom you speak. Everyone will have an opportunity for their comments to be heard. I will also ask that you limit your comments to 3 minutes. Again, we will have a more general discussion and Q&A period after the voting of these matters has been concluded.
Any questions or comments? Would anyone who needs to cast a ballot today, please do so now by delivering it to Mr. Jundt in the front of the room. Thank you. I now declare the polls closed. I will now ask the voting inspector to report the outcome of each of the votes at today's meeting.
Mr. Chairman, the ballots have been counted, and the 6 nominees for director have received the plurality of the votes cast at the meeting in person or by proxy. The number of votes that have been cast at the meeting in person or by proxy in favor of the advisory resolution approving the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers represents a majority of the shares present or represented at the meeting and entitled to vote. The number of votes that have been cast at the meeting in person or by proxy in favor of the ratification of the appointment of Deloitte as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending March 31st, 2023, represents a majority of the shares present or represented at the meeting and entitled to vote.
Thank you. All 6 directors named in the proxy statement have been elected. The advisory resolution approving the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers has been approved, and the appointment of Deloitte as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year 2023 has been ratified. A complete tally of votes will be reported in the company's Form 8-K to be filed with the SEC within the next 4 business days. If the business portion of this meeting concluded, I adjourn the business portion of the meeting. Before we turn to Q&A from shareholders, we have a short presentation to share about Air T and our fiscal 2022 results ending March 31st, 2022. If you have any questions during the presentation, you can ask them at the end of the presentation on the line here.
If you have any or if you are attending remotely, you may submit questions on our website under the Submit a Question section. We will address those questions during the Q&A section of this meeting. Okay. We're showing page 3 on our executive summary regarding Air T. I hope most of the shareholders have reviewed this stack in the past, but it gives you a general overview of the company and the overall statistics of revenue and operating income for Air T. Let's go to the next slide. On slide number 6, please. Thanks. Slide 6 just describes the purpose of the company at a very high level. We're very much interested in generating free cash flow to shareholders and generating value. Those things might be aligned completely. Those things might take time to develop and be obscure for a while.
We definitely believe in an operating model that empowers business leaders to generate business value and a good culture and growth at their business units over time. Our committed management team has committed to the business and aligned itself with common shareholders by open market purchases of the company's stock, as you can well tell. I think well over 50% of the shares are represented on the board. Page 7 just describes some of our operating approaches. You can ask us questions about those. We've had this in our material for a while. It places emphasis on a bit of a servant leadership approach to the people who are running our businesses from the center, from the resource group, from the corporate holding company out to the people whom we call dynamos running their businesses.
The flywheel, page 8, I think I might give our board a quiz on the flywheel, 5 positions of the flywheel. We began putting this into our materials last year or the year before, and it's an evolving approach, but we think it makes a lot of sense as we work through our growth model. Brian?
Thanks, Nick. Fiscal 2022 revenue is $177 million, $11.4 million of adjusted EBITDA. We've got 3 core segments that we disclose and discuss in our SEC filings: commercial aircraft and engines, aviation ground support equipment, and overnight air cargo. I'll discuss each of those in a little more detail in the following slides. Within those segments, we have 11 major main companies, and as of March 31, we had exactly 500 employees. Financial highlights for the 12 months ended 3/31/2022. You can see that revenue remained flat within the segments air cargo and commercial jet engine part segments started their COVID recovery. They were up $8 million and $11 million respectively, offset by Global Ground Support down $18 million. We'll discuss those segments in more detail in the next 3 slides. The theme here is that the COVID recovery. Fiscal 2021 was exactly when COVID started.
Fiscal 2022 is the start of that COVID recovery. On the operating income side, fiscal 2022 operating income was up significantly, as was Adjusted EBITDA versus fiscal 2021. That was driven in part by improved profitability at the operating groups as COVID recovery started, but it was also heavily influenced by $9 million of employee retention credits that we applied for under the CARES Act. Those have been a very valuable source of funding for the company as the COVID recovery starts and continues. Commercial aircraft engines, this is the segment we have several companies in this segment: Contrail, JetYard, AirCo, and Worthington Aviation. This segment trades, buys aircraft engines, and we then lease, trade, or part them out. This segment was by far the most heavily impacted by COVID. Just for reference, fiscal year 2020, the last year completed before COVID, revenue in this segment was about $101 million.
We're encouraged to see in fiscal 2022 that recovery has started. It's not complete yet, but as commercial air traffic continues, we're recovering along with that, and we're hopeful to see that air travel continue to recover as airlines spool up and increase their activity. Next segment is overnight air cargo. This is our oldest segment. They've been Air T companies for 40 years. We have 2 of the 7 FedEx feeders, Mountain Air Cargo and CSA. They were not as heavily impacted by COVID, but they have had a remarkable turnaround from fiscal 2020 as well with significantly improved operations, and the team in North Carolina and Michigan are doing a phenomenal job flying for FedEx. This is an asset-light business. We lease the aircraft from FedEx and earn, as you know, contract fees for flying their schedule. Very predictable as well.
Last segment is Aviation Ground Support Equipment. This is solely Global Ground Support located in Olathe, Kansas. This has been an Air T company since 1998. What you see here on this drop is going into COVID, this business unit had a very historically large order book that they were able to work through during the early months of COVID. Fiscal 2022, you're seeing a delayed COVID impact, but you can see that the order backlog is healthy: $14 million at 3/31. That's continuing through the summer. We disclosed in our June 30, 2022, 10-Q, which we filed on Friday, August 12th. That backlog is $17 million at the end of June. This company, as you can see, has had historically high profitability, and we're optimistic that this is going to start their COVID recovery as well.
I'll turn it back over to Nick on the next slide to talk about some of our investments that we've made in the past years.
Thanks. Slide entitled Segment Four, page 14, investment businesses. We have 3 wholly-owned investment businesses. One of them is our investment manager, BCSM Advisors, and the other is the printing equipment manufacturer, Delphax Solutions. The final is AHD, our software development ERP for MRO shops in the aftermarket community. Each of these businesses is in a startup mode. Each of these businesses is cash flow negative at this point in time, and we have very competent management teams in each of these businesses. We believe that each of them has an addressable market that's very significant and is bringing to market great products for our customers, and we're very much looking forward to continuing to develop those businesses over time. Their income statement is reflected in the other corporate expense line, and our income statement is that right, Brian?
Correct.
Page 15, we wanted to highlight 3 events. One of them is the acquisition of a Dutch holding company that owns 70% of a data company that's focused on cargo data, global cargo data. We made that acquisition and closed it in February of this year. The second is the spin-out from Contrail of Crestone Air Partners. Now, a completely independent company that's focusing on managing the JV assets that we have with our investment partners. That team has great strengths in whole aircraft leasing, which is the focus of the JV. Finally, last year, December of 2021, we made a purchase of the corporate headquarters here on a leveraged basis, on a non-recourse leveraged basis. I think interest rate on our loan is 3.5%. Is that right, Katrina?
Yeah.
Typical corporate real estate transaction. Page 16, Brian, you want to take that one?
Yeah. You can see over the past 7 years that current management has largely been in place. We've significantly not only grown our revenue through organic growth and acquisition, but also significantly diversified it, standing up a completely new segment, commercial aircraft and engines. That diversification continues, as Nick talked about in the previous slide. The Dutch software company is a good example. The lease revenue from the building is another good example. This is going to continue in the future. It's our plan to continue this, to continue to diversify our revenue base as we continue to grow. I'll turn it back over to Nick to discuss some of our non-operating assets.
Air T's balance sheet is a complicated balance sheet. Included on the balance sheet are the investments that we've listed on page 17, approximately 30% of Insignia Systems, Inc., a publicly traded company that recently had a market cap of our share value was $4.6 million at roughly today's price, approximately 19% of Cadillac Casting, Inc., which is reflected here at the purchase price of $2.6 million. I believe it's now marked down to 0 on our balance sheet. Is that right, Brian?
Cadillac?
Yeah.
No, that's carrying value right now.
Oh, that's Securing Value. Okay. Our investments in our own investment funds, the investment alongside our investor partners in our JV, which are so the $7 million of aircraft asset management investments are LP interest in our own JV. TFS Partners is an investment in a small local LBO that we completed approximately 5 years ago. You can see these carrying values are represented here. We do intend, as we grow Air T, to be using our balance sheet to make investments of this type. Obviously, we would be doing this on the basis of expecting healthy returns on investor capital.
I want to note in the interim here that if you want to submit a question to us about these slides or anything about Air T, you can go to the webcast that you're participating on, or anytime, you can go to our Air T website at airt.net under the Investors tab and submit a question through the Slido app. Or you can go to slido.com and use #airtqa to submit questions to us, and we intend to answer those on a quarterly basis in writing and hopefully create a good dialogue and rapport with our shareholder base.
Nick's going to talk in the next slide about islands of asset and liability segregation. That's a key concept on our debt capitalization table here. The top section of the debt highlights the amount of debt and the kind and amount of debt that's direct and guaranteed by the parent company. The middle section are borrowings that are segregated from that and isolated at the business unit level, primarily 4 different areas. Contrail has $55.9 million of debt that's collateralized by the asset purchases that they've made over the years. Air T guarantees $1.6 million of that debt. Otherwise, that's non-recourse to the parent company. Wolf Lake Mortgage, Nick just mentioned, that's the mortgage on our building, also non-recourse. Air T Acquisition 22.1, that's the financing that we took out to acquire GDW, which Nick mentioned a few slides ago, the Dutch software company.
AirCo One has a Main Street loan that's also non-recourse to the company. The other thing I would highlight on here is you can see moving back to the top section, close to half of the corporate direct debt is the trust preferred securities. Those are a unique instrument if you're not familiar with those. That has, as you can see, a 26-year remaining maturity term, 8% coupon that's paid dividend paid quarterly, and no principal amortization until it is all due in full at June 7th, 2049. That gives us a lot of flexibility to invest and think long-term with that kind of capital structure in place. Turn it back over to Nick to talk about how we think about bets and further discuss that capitalization that I introduced.
Yeah. Back on page 19, we highlight a couple of our approaches to managing Air T. One is that we want to make sure that we tailor and limit our exposure to any given investment or any given business that we own. Under investment, we would include wholly-owned businesses, of course. Those limited exposures hopefully give us extra and convex exposure to the upside. That's one of our goals. As an operating business, we naturally have and are constantly developing options in our businesses which allow us to continue to grow businesses, expand into new markets. Those kinds of investment activities are also considered in this notion. Then sort of downside protection, a very similar idea that we're working, as Brian said, to segregate our assets and businesses.
Each of those businesses has its own management team, and we work hard to manage risk in each of those businesses. On page 20, you can see that our return annualized is 9.5% as compared to 11.2% for the S&P 500. This is the first time we've run this that I've seen that we've been lagging the S&P 500. We hope very much and plan to work hard to beat the market if we are able to. Once we go to the next slide. I think we could just let the shareholders review our 4 growth strategies. They're very straightforward. Build our current high-performing businesses, acquire new businesses as we did this year with the cargo data company, invest in marketable securities or alternative assets. I'd highlight our investment in our aviation JV as an example of that, and create unique investment products alongside third-party capital partners.
That allows us to invest and participate in the very capital-intensive aviation markets in which we operate. Next slide. Why don't we keep going? Yeah. Page 28, this is our theoretical toy model that shouldn't be taken seriously as a reflection of reality. However, if you just do the numbers, it's interesting to note that with some basic assumptions about holding periods of a private equity firm being less than 10 years, 7 years or so, and the likely longer holding period of Air T assets, you can see that if we do our job correctly, because of the lower tax infriction of buying and selling businesses, we have an advantage with a structural deployment of capital in a public company as compared to a private equity sort of model, in our view, in my opinion. We'll wrap it up there.
We can, again, remind people they can ask questions of us on the website. We have already received 3 questions that I'll go through here. Can you hand me the first question? Can you please update us on the status of the Aviation Ground Support Equipment segment and its outlook? Does the recent slump in sales suggest future demand? I would say that in that segment, we did, as Brian mentioned, have a very significant and happy result in fiscal 2021, which wasn't repeated in fiscal 2022. We do have a terrific management team at GGS and a very consistent long-term track record of generating high returns on capital. We would just point you to the historical results, and you can make your own conclusions about the future. We do expect to see increased cash levels.
We have not received our ERC from the U.S. Treasury or a recent tax refund expected. Those 2 items add up to a significant cash infusion into the company, and we expect them in the future. We have decided to use Air T Preferreds, AART 8% Preferreds, as a long-term source of capital, and they serve as a terrific way for retail investors to get income. At the same time, they allow us to capitalize Air T and do things that we want to do with our investment on balance sheet. The last question is $9.13 million to $3.45 million less truck sales to the U.S. Air Force. Any possibility of diversifying sales to other customers in the ground support equipment sector? We do see an up and down and back and forth with regards to sales to the military or sales to airlines or sales to commercial de-icing companies.
Those are year-in and year-out fluctuations, so we do expect those to continue. We're constantly working on and have a dedicated sales team focused on airlines and the commercial aviation space. We certainly expect both those customer bases to be very much a part of the GGS future. I'll note that we announced our recent product development at GGS, the remote aircraft de-icing unit, which will be on display at this fall's GGS ground support show. It allows an operator to remotely control a de-icer from anywhere in the world over the internet, which allows people to much more easily manage their staffing and training of staff. Those are all the questions that we saw on Slido. Anything else, Katrina?
No. I have no further questions.
Okay. All right. No more questions. Again, you can submit questions anytime you want, and we'll answer them on a quarterly basis in the public filing. To conclude, there being no more questions or comments, the annual meeting of stockholders is adjourned. I would like to thank you for coming today. This concludes our proceedings.