All right, well, good afternoon. Hope everyone enjoyed lunch and the panel presentation. We are kicking things back on again with OpenText, and we're pleased to have Chief Financial Officer Madhu Ranganathan. Madhu, thank you for joining us again at the Nasdaq conference.
Yeah, thank you for having us. It's great to be at Nasdaq in London.
Awesome. So just to give you a sense, OpenText is now almost a $6 billion business, serving 120,000 enterprises, and 150 million users. And so, Madhu, given the scale of the business, for investors new to the OpenText story, what is the pain point that OpenText is solving for your customers, and how would you describe the core opportunity the company's pursuing?
It sounds great, and it's a great place to start. Think of OpenText as we are focused on the singular, powerful concept of information management at scale in the cloud and AI. With the Micro Focus acquisition, we truly have the most comprehensive information management platform in the industry. And to address Sanjit's point and the pain points, I'll talk about what do we do? We build software, and we build software to power and protect information and ranging from content management to, you know, business networks, we call it that, geared towards industrial, commercial, automotive, supply chain, cybersecurity, right, and IT operations management, application automation, and of course, AI and analytics, kind of the full... You know, kind of the full spectrum.
Now, what we do is all sorts of information, content, documents, email, video, archives, all of that, and the exciting opportunity ahead is intersecting GenAI through, you know, through, you know, all of that. Now, with respect to pain points, think of, customers have very, very complex work streams, and the data and the information sprawl has, you know, has never been more complex. So where we really intersect with our software is, there's a lot of talk about AI and data warehousing, but we come much before that in terms of organizing data, storing data, protecting data, analyzing data, so that you can, in fact, apply the data warehousing and AI, and, that's really where we come in. So I would say the pain points are really the data sprawl, the information sprawl.
And it's still unfathomable how much of unstructured data is out there for a company like OpenText to apply its software. And where the evolution happens, it's really getting into the GenAI capabilities as well.
Great. Yeah, you can't have an AI strategy without a data strategy, clearly. So the company made some news on its earnings call, and which was a, you know, a very solid quarter. But I think what caught my eye is around this strategic shift from a less reliance on M&A-
Yeah
... which has been a focus to a renewed commitment to deriving organic growth. Can you talk to us a little bit about the motivation behind this shift in strategy? And what does that mean for, you know, M&A going forward?
Yeah.
Like, will you not do any M&A, or is it just gonna be a different size and type of M&A?
Yeah, absolutely. I will say we're a 32-year young company, and to just kick it off and say, as a technology company at scale, we're always gonna do acquisitions, right? So that's kind of the leading statement there. So for the last 32 years, the framework of information management has clearly been built through acquisitions. We've also had a couple unique approaches to M&A. We have been, as you can call it, a value-based acquirer. You do not see us pay very, very high multiples on businesses, and we also believe in getting the businesses in, acquiring, integrating, and getting them to the levels of profitability that OpenText has. That sort of has been kind of the full M&A model.
Now, with Micro Focus acquisition, we are near $6 billion in revenue, but we also have we can also operate in a $200 billion TAM. Now, previous to Micro Focus, we were about 90, 100 billion, so we have a $200 billion TAM, and at near $6 billion, it is very clear that we do not need more TAM. We could grow into this TAM, and there are plenty of, you know, areas for us to unlock. And this is not an overnight strategy, Sanjit, and that's something I do want to clarify. This is, this is, you know, this is, you know, multiyears at it. And of course, the size and scale of the TAM allows us to make this pivot. But there are two very important aspects that lead into this.
One is obviously R&D and innovation. We are at 14%-16% of revenues in R&D. That is also, you know, reflective of 40% of our workforce of 25,000 employees involved in R&D and innovation. And our go-to-market engine, we believe, at the size and scale of OpenText, is like none other, which is we probably have the strongest direct salesforce team, and we have a very strong partner network from the SAPs of the world to Google and AWS, and to many, many other partner channel. Now, the investments we've made in M&A, our next sort of, value unlocker is gonna be organic growth. So, so again, we're gonna lead in with organic growth. We can talk about the divestiture. The divestiture is gonna allow us to delever earlier than we anticipated. That means we return to capital flexibility.
The muscle memory of M&A does not go away, but we will lead in with organic growth, and M&A will definitely be in the picture. But the next 30 years, so to speak, of OpenText is built upon the framework of M&A that we did and plenty of value areas to unlock for organic growth.
... Great! Let's talk about that divestiture.
Yeah.
So in the last couple of weeks, you've announced the divestiture of the application modernization and connectivity business to Rocket Software.
Yeah.
You guys are gonna get $2.27 billion in cash. Can you describe what this business was? How large was it in terms of revenue and-
Yeah
- EBITDA? And why did the team make the decision to divest?
I want to start with the why first, and then we can work our way back, back to your, to your other very, very valid point.
Perfect.
Look, when we acquired Micro Focus, we did not have an intention to divest. We acquired the entire business, and the intent was to keep the entire business. This is AMC, right? Application Modernization and Connectivity. It's the COBOL and the mainframe business. And we did get an inbound call, and as we diligenced the inbound call, a few things came to light. One is, you'll hear us talk a lot about our cloud journey. AMC was all non-cloud or off cloud, which actually also meant that in our product roadmap, which is a very aggressive product roadmap, AMC was the farthest in our cloud roadmap to be able to cloudify. J ust by DNA, AMC is also a very self-contained unit. So again, when you think about divestitures and carve-outs, we want to make sure it is carve-outable in a very successful manner.
And by nature of everything I described about AMC, Rocket Software is a great home for AMC, and, they have invested into cloud and hybrid, since that is the bread and butter of their business, and AMC would do very well there. For us, if we were to cloudify AMC earlier than, we had planned, it would mean we would not be able to cloudify other products and solutions, and it's a very important aspect here. AMC is $500 million in revenue, $275 million in EBITDA, but it was also a flattish business, right? So we had chosen to put our roadmap into more of the growthy areas of our products and solutions, and it absolutely made sense to, to do this divestiture. We expect to close it by June, and you're right, it's about $2.275 billion.
Last but not least, it's gonna allow us to delever, which is about three quarters earlier, to get to below three times our Net Leverage Ratio than we had planned. Most importantly, the focus and the opportunity for us to release the resources, the mindshare, starting from our CEO and CTO to the architects, to cloud and AI opportunities, just seem too large to, you know, not consider, and we are delighted to be able to do this.
Yeah, it sounds like a transaction makes a lot of sense. And just to follow up, and I think you addressed it in your answer, it sounds like the, with the proceeds, you'll be using it for debt paydown?
Yeah. 100% is gonna be focused on debt paydown. If I could just expand the answer there. OpenText has taken a pretty holistic view on capital allocation. I mean, like, historically, we were 20% trailing twelve-month cash flows, free cash flows on dividend. Now we are, when we return to capital flexibility, able to add buybacks into the mix. And as you rightly asked earlier, M&As will always be in the mix, and this is a strong free cash flow business. Yes, some cash flows is going out of the business with AMC, but we still are gonna be at the low 20s in terms of free cash flow to revenue, only to grow.
So the full stack capital allocation is something I think we'll be ready to implement.
Excellent. Let's talk a little bit about Micro Focus.
Yeah.
In August 2022, the company purchased Micro Focus for about $6 billion. Can you give us a progress update since making the acquisition? What has been completed, with respect to the integration and what remains ahead? We'll talk about the top-line growth in terms of-
Sure
... Micro Focus in a bit, but just in terms of the blocking and tackling of integration, what's been done and what's left, what's left to do?
Yeah. Well, first of all, the Micro Focus acquisition brings me personally, operationally to the U.K. more often than I used to, and we have a strong workforce in Reading, and I'm gonna be there tomorrow. So we went after Micro Focus integration like none other because it was a transformative deal, and also, we had to bridge the gap between the market's reaction to it versus where we believed the value could be sort of gathered from the asset, right? And what do I mean by that? We went off at what has been completed. Corporate integration, product integration, sales integration, product roadmap, and customers, all done.
We spoke about renewals in our last earnings call, which is about 65% of the business we acquired from Micro Focus, and they were at low 80s in terms of their renewal rate. Getting them to the high 80s, which is the goal for this fiscal year, June, and getting them into the mid-90s, which is really the OpenText standard, is really the journey that we are very well on, and we spoke about it at our earnings call as well. I would say Micro Focus is predominantly off cloud, very nascent in the cloud, and getting some of their key products, like Voltage and Fortify, into our aggressive cloud roadmap, and, you know, we've been able to do that as well.
The last thing we can get to AI when you're ready, you know. Two of the Micro Focus crown jewel products are gonna be part of our AI solution, and we couldn't be more delighted to do so. $2.3 billion is their baseline of revenue. We expect to organically grow from that base in fiscal 2024. The last but not least, I'll tell you that we can get them to 36%-38% Adjusted EBITDA in fiscal 2024, which is also about six months earlier than we had planned. So all in all, we are very pleased with where we are.
Let's turn the conversation into, you know, what we talked about at the top of the call, in terms of driving organic growth.
Yeah
... and how, how, how do we achieve that. So as a company, you've laid out some, some multi-year targets.
Yeah.
In 2026, I think you guys are targeting ARR growth to go from 1.2%, which is roughly where it is today, to 2%-4%-
Yeah
...by that time. So maybe just starting at the high level, we'll go into the individual businesses in a second, but what are the basic pillars to get you to that acceleration?
Yeah. So, we have the materials in our investor deck, that really the first place to start is cloud. And the cloud bookings growth we've spoken about at 15% annual cloud bookings growth. And for those of you who are newer to the OpenText story, I'll share that our cloud revenues was zero about 8 years ago, right? So, it's, I mean, it has been an amazing journey in the cloud. So the fiscal 2026 aspirations include 7%-9% organic cloud revenue growth, which is the biggest and the leading growth driver for the overall 2%-4%. Now, cloud organic growth rate has been trending steadily up.
In our most recent fiscal year, we did about 4%, and then when you think about the next 2-3 years, getting to the 7%-9% is gonna be the leading driver. Our customer support install base is a very solid marquee install base, and that runs about flat to low single digits in growth. We optimize for gross margins is about 91%. So that's what gets you to the 2%-4%-
Mm-hmm.
ARR organic growth. We call out licenses flat. We've chosen to be in the license business more as a customer deployment choice, right? So when you do the math there as well, we get to the 2%-4% growth. But starting at the top of the stack for us, the ultimate destination is cloud. 80% of R&D goes into the cloud. So I say the starting point is 15% cloud bookings growth, and we work our way from there into cloud revenue growth and to the overall 2%-4%.
If we look at core, core OpenText ex Micro Focus, can you frame out the opportunity to accelerate growth by driving more conversion to SaaS and-
Yeah
... greater adoption of the cloud portfolio? Well, as you answer that, is there any sort of uplift that the company sees when a customer goes from off cloud to your cloud product, your cloud products and cloud portfolio? What does that uplift look like?
Yeah. So I'll say, one of the important distinctions of OpenText's journey to the cloud is we did not take the approach of, the maintenance being the base that we have to cannibalize out of or substitute out of, right? So the greenfield, new opportunities for us for cloud, has been very strong and continues to be very strong. So when we speak about the 15% cloud bookings, you know, Sanjit, none, like, none of that is expected to come out of maintenance, kind of, you know, like cannibalization, right? Again, across our pillars, we see the pipeline and the opportunities to do so. Now, the OpenText cloud, we're the largest private cloud provider, so we continue to see growth in that.
You know, particularly as you intersect AI for large enterprises, they'd rather stand it up in a private cloud than they would in a public cloud. We have a lot of opportunities in the SaaS, right? We went after complex cloud businesses that will continue, but many of our products and solutions are moving from the on-prem to the SaaS version, and we see a lot of growth in there. Now, you know, content is gonna be a leading cloud growth driver, and right next to it is going to be cybersecurity, you know, like, products as well. And when we talk about the Micro Focus intersection, Value Edge, SMAX is the service management tool that Micro Focus did not have a chance to cloudify. You know, Fortify, all of that is gonna be part of the cloud journey.
Keep in mind, we call it Titanium. That's our R&D project of how much we drive into the cloud. 80% of R&D investments-
Mm-hmm
... are directed to the cloud. Titanium was driven for OpenText cloudification. Now, Titanium X is driven for Micro Focus cloudification. When we talk about cloud, it's getting our products to public cloud parity.
Mm-hmm.
Because many of our customers have already made the decision about their cloud home, whether it's Google or AWS or Microsoft, and our job is to provide the products and solutions agnostic of the cloud parity, right? Those are the areas where the cloud solutions, you know, come into play.
Yeah. As part of that growth strategy, obviously, AI is gonna be, you know, play a role in that better growth story over time. Can you give investors the reason why OpenText will be an AI winner? What data assets does the company possess that'll allow you to effectively monetize your AI ambitions?
Yeah, absolutely. So the 32-year history we have, it has been all about, working with and working on customers' data. So to start off with, the customer's data is not a product, but we have visibility, access to the customer data, and as we can all appreciate, and there's no AI, excuse me, and there's no AI without data, right? So let's start right there. We sit on 75,000 enterprise customers who've been with us for a very long time, and, we get access to the data to offer our products and solutions. And the number two things, you know, Sanjiv, is, it's kind of missed in this AI hype in our view, which is we today have the product portfolio ready. It's our product, our technology, to go do this AI, you know, I mean, I mean, like AI journey.
That's what we call the Aviator. It comes together with a Micro Focus IDOL product, the Vertica product, which is the vectorization of the database, as well as our own analytics tool called the Magellan. So at the start of this AI hype, you know, we went about it very systematically, and we were able to pull this together as Aviator. Now, if you recall me mentioning the different pillars. We kind of splashed this Aviator across our pillars. So we are offering the AI, an AI solution to sit across every single pillar. Every single pillar is sitting on trillions of data, whether that's content or transactions. So that's really the approach we're taking. At OpenText World, we rolled out our general availability product. So this Aviator is gonna be released in December and we rolled out pricing.
We call purchase your wings, which is the initial pilot phase of what the customers want to think about as use cases, which again, what we're seeing, it sits across every sector we operate, setting up an aviator persona along with the kind of the real life, whether it's claims or whether it's HR, or whether it's tech support. Right, that's really the approach we're taking.
Awesome. And you sort of addressed it in, in your answer-
Mm-hmm.
But just to put a pin in it, which products do you see as the most significant contributors near term, and what do you see as the biggest long-term AI opportunity for the company to monetize?
Yeah. So the near-term AI opportunity is gonna arise out of search. It's gonna arise out of IoT. And when you think about the long term, I'd encourage us to think about it in two aspects. There's this hype asking, what is your AI revenue, right?
Mm-hmm.
There's gonna be a lot of pull-in effect for OpenText, where our customers who have, who are ready to move into AI also realize that they have to work through this unstructured content, and they have to get the content organized or get ready for AI, and that's where the core OpenText cloud solutions come into play. We called out in the context of the 15% bookings growth, we called out 20% near term-
Mm.
In our second quarter, which is December quarter. It'll have some AI contribution in it. But I do think the long term is gonna be a pull-in opportunity for our cloud solutions as well as AI, and the AI curve could be slower to kind of, you know, begin, and we'll call it out as we see it. We in the numbers you asked, and I shared on fiscal 2026, it does not include AI at the moment, and we'll just call out as we see it.
Mm-hmm. Is there with across the product portfolio, is it like the content management side that's probably most obvious near term versus other parts of the portfolio?
Yes. The content management and the search side is ripe-
Mm.
-is ripe for that, but that does include a lot more of the pull-in effect as well. With respect to where there's more unstructured data-
Mm-hmm.
Customers wanna get ready very fast, which would mean purchasing our core content management solutions.
Mm.
We do see, as I said, IoT as a key opportunity as well.
On the last earnings call, you mentioned that Micro Focus would return to organic growth by the end of fiscal year 2024.
Yeah.
Looking longer term towards your 2026 targets, what are the specific things the company's doing to accelerate organic growth at Micro Focus?
Yeah. So, you know, one of the challenges of Micro Focus that was well sort of seen from the market perspective, that we were well aware, too, is their continued customer churn, right? So, we will return Micro Focus organic growth. And recall my comment, about 65% of the business we bought was support and maintenance. So we right away had to address the maintenance and the renewals piece, right? A couple of sort of strategic aspects and, more operational aspects, right? From a strategic aspect, as many of us who've been in software for a long time, the customers are looking for the future direction of the product roadmap. And right or wrong, the Micro Focus customers did not get a lot of love and visibility on the future roadmap. And Mark, our CEO, the team, mean, like, address that first.
As soon as a couple of months into the close, we went in front of all the Micro Focus customers, spoke about the current product roadmap, what we could do in the future. As we know in software renewals, the renewal doesn't happen for that product. It happens for the vision of the future product. So that had to be addressed sort of right away. Now, the blocking and tackling is some philosophies around, around in the renewals management, and our philosophies, it has to be centralized. We don't outsource renewals. You know, Micro Focus had it decentralized, also had it outsourced, so we pulled everything in within two months. Now, their low 80s% renewal rates, we see a path to high 80s% in fiscal 2024, and we see a path to the OpenText standards of mid-90s% in the next 1-2 years.
So that's gonna be a major driver for returning to organic growth. Now, our philosophy is every one of the Micro Focus products has to grow. Now, I spoke about AMC, that was sort of flattish, and we have an opportunity there. But aside from that, all other products have an opportunity to grow. Now, cloud was nonexistent or nascent for Micro Focus. Their customers are looking for a private cloud roadmap, for a general cloud roadmap. We provided that. So step by step, we will be cloudifying the Micro Focus products. That is also accretive to growth, right? So those are sort of the big drivers, but I will say the, you know, foundational aspect of what needs to be done, it has been set, right.
Excellent. This is my first, CFO-specific question.
All right.
Let's sort of lay out the total return framework you plan to deliver to shareholders. If we think of the key, the key inputs here, revenue growth, margin expansion, share repurchases, and dividends, and what does that sort of sum up to that investors can expect over the next 3 or 4 years?
Yeah. So, so maybe not directly answering, and I, and I will do that. Look, we are very clear that today we're not getting full value for what we have done and for what we have out there, and specifically, I mean, our fiscal 2026 aspirations. And there's a little bit of, of a history or a journey there, which is all good.
Mm.
Putting the negative thesis on Micro Focus in the rearview mirror through the strength of our integration, the strength of us posting the numbers, that's been priority one, and I believe we've done very well on that, and over time, we will put that in the rearview mirror. The leverage was top of mind from an investor perspective, right? And we do have a solid path there, in addition to our normal repayment, to get to accelerated, you know, delever. So I will say with that, the capital allocation framework, if you think about it on a three-legged stool, with M&A, has been a big aspect of the capital allocation, and, dividends we've been a 10+ year dividend issuer. We expect to continue to maintain it.
Share buybacks, we've done some, not so programmatically, and with the June expected close of AMC and the big bang delever, we do expect buyback to be back on the table, from a return to shareholder perspective. Yeah, so those are kind of the three big,
Mm-hmm.
Three big, you know, levers we have. But coming back to the model of OpenText, for software companies, we've chosen to be very profitable, strong cash flows. And now, I believe our organic growth rate will catch up to the expectations of where this addressable market and the product innovation can come together. So that's really where we believe that the convergence of what we've done and what we can do to where the share price is trading and the valuation is-
Mm-hmm.
We do expect that to converge.
Awesome. And just, just to follow up on that, you know, going back to the total, from the revenue growth standpoint-
Yep.
-we're looking, I think, sort of turning 2%-4%.
Yeah.
EBITDA margins from today to, you know, 2026, where does that, where does, where are you starting from, and where, where does that?
Yeah.
Where does that go to? And then in terms of the dividend piece, what's the policy in terms of free cash flow allocation?
Yeah, sure thing. So from a growth perspective, I'll probably reiterate that the starting point is the cloud bookings growth.
Mm.
That's the 15%, and the cloud revenue organic growth is 7%-9%. And again, when you look at customer support at flat to low single-digit growth, that's where the math of the 2%-4% comes in, right? I did wanna, I did, I mean, I did wanna clarify that. So from a dividend and buyback perspective, we're looking at 30%. So we've been at 20% trailing twelve-month free cash flows for dividend. We're putting another 10% to buyback. That's certainly not the cap. If we believe our stock is a better buy than doing an M&A, we, I mean, our, our, you know, choices are gonna be very clear. With the AMC, kind of the potential divestiture, our EBITDA range is 36%-38%. It was previously 38%-40%.
We are bringing it down, just the pure math of AMC, and I'll remind us that we still haven't baked in AI revenues and the productivity coming out of it. And as we get to the closing of the divestiture, we'll certainly come out with sort of the better math on that.
Yeah. And there's also a key point that you're not necessarily baking in any sort of AI-
Absolutely
... interest monetization-
Yeah
Monetization into the forecast. I guess my last question is, just in this as a CFO in this higher rate environment, how has that changed your perspective on how you allocate capital to the business with these higher rates between, you know, the interest that you're getting on cash versus-
Yeah
... debt paydown versus the funding needs of the business?
Yeah. So two things. Again, back to the AMC divestiture. About $150 million annually is gonna come off of the interest burden-
Mm
... and the cash flow burden from the divestiture. You know, pre that, very cognizant of raising interest rates at an average of 6%, we had committed to a $175 million repayment. So definitely that's sort of in top of mind. But your question about allocating investments within the operating model is a very important one. And, I will say OpenText is very distinctive in the sense we could do 36%-38% adjusted EBITDA margin after allocating 14%-16% to R&D. And the 14%-16%, we have to consider that as 40% of our workforce. That's 10,000 out of 25,000 people around the globe doing R&D and innovation. And we're also doing 16%-18% for sales and marketing.
I believe, CFO perspective, it's a very well-allocated, very well-invested model, and we get a lot of mileage out of this in terms of the growth rates we talked about.
Awesome. Well, Madhu, thank you so much for, you know, coming to Nasdaq and walking us through all the things that are happening in OpenText. I really appreciate it.
Thank you to Nasdaq, and thank you as well.
Thank you.
Thank you all.
Easy-peasy.
Thank you.
And now the story told from days of old, when guys from paradise ran around. They patiently wait with pieces of eight, so everybody could smile one more time. Poppy. Yeah. All right. Please join me in welcoming David Mansfield, CFO of VinFast, a very exciting new listing on Nasdaq in the electric vehicle space. So, David, if you could start off, maybe give the audience a brief overview of VinFast and walk us through how you guys are coming along with all your different models.
Sure. Thanks, Jeff. So, VinFast, we're a Vietnamese automotive company. We're a pure-play EV manufacturer. We're the first international automotive company from Vietnam. We've been a manufacturer, a young company. We've only been around for about six years since we were established. Done a lot in that time. Ticked off a lot of milestones, including, as you say, the listing on Nasdaq, which was an exciting event, subsequent volatile share price as well to boot. But yeah, we've done a lot in the six years we've been around. Started manufacturing vehicles for the Vietnamese domestic market. We started as an ICE manufacturer, where in order to learn the business, we licensed IP from BMW to become expert in manufacturing automotives at scale.
We built out a 300,000-unit capacity manufacturing facility in Vietnam. Since 2019, 2020, we've pivoted to be a pure-play EV manufacturer. We stopped last year selling ICE vehicles to the Vietnamese market. We've produced a range of seven EVs for the domestic market and for export internationally into our target markets in North America and Europe to begin with.
You've got seven different models, and so kinda walk us through how those kinda scale up and where you're at with each one of those so far?
So we launched. Well, the philosophy is to have something at lots of different price points.
Yep.
The EV business is gonna become very, very competitive at all price points, but in particular, in the belly of the curve, where most of the vehicles are sold, there is not a great deal of consumer choice at the moment.
Mm-hmm.
We want to try and correct that by producing and delivering vehicles at an attractive price point. We've started delivering our D segment vehicle, which is our VF 8, globally now, including into the European market, with our first deliveries last month in France, Germany and the Netherlands. We've already got over 25,000 of those and other EV vehicles on the road in Vietnam. So we've got the D segment VF 8, that's a price point of about $43,000, and then adjusted for different market price points and features elsewhere. Then we have a larger VF 9 vehicle, which is a full-sized E segment three-row SUV that's at about $80,000.
But then, where we're, I think, really going to be competing and attracting consumers is really in our smaller vehicle segments. So we go down to a C segment VF 6, which we've just released in Vietnam, and started making deliveries in Vietnam. Next year, we'll be delivering a VF 7 vehicle to Vietnam as well. And we've got a kind of a small micro sub-A segment, two-seater vehicle, that looks like a little bit like a shrunk Jeep. That's very exciting. And again, trying to compete with some of the very low-cost vehicles that are being produced by some of the Chinese manufacturers in particular.
Very cool. And so let's move to, operations a little bit. So you've laid out a target of 40,000-50,000 deliveries for the year.
Mm-hmm.
Through nine months, you're about a little over 21,000.
Mm-hmm.
So how do you plan to close the gap here in the last few months of the year?
Well, I said we have over 300-- Well, we have close to 300,000 units of annual capacity, so we're not really running at full capacity-
Yeah
... as yet at all. We're kind of getting into our stride this year in Vietnam, as we transitioned away from ICE vehicles into EV manufacturing. We have a backlog of orders. We've been ramping up the delivery of our vehicles, principally the B segment vehicles and the A segment vehicles into Vietnam this year, where we delivered both to B2B customers as well as retail customers. But we simply just up the rate of operations to close that gap with the backlog of orders that we have.
Sounds good. Let's talk a little bit about the B2B customers. Could you share a little bit about GSM and your relationship with them?
Yeah. So, our chairman, who is... And again, the relationship with our chairman, our chairman is chairman of Vingroup, which is a parent that is a much larger and broader parent conglomerate in Vietnam. Vingroup is the largest private conglomerate in Vietnam, and it has extensive operations across real estate, schools, hospitals, commercial real estate, retail malls, and is a very prominent feature of the Vietnamese economy. So he has separately and independently established an e-taxi company, and we have an order to procure up to 30,000 EVs for that business and up to 200,000 e-scooters. So in addition to our EVs, we produce e-scooters and also e-buses, which are on the road in Vietnam at the moment.
So we have that backlog of orders that we can deliver into the GSM business. Really, that kind of B2B customer is similar to the and the growth that it allows us to achieve is similar to the way that other Chinese EV manufacturers have engineered their growth and underwritten the breadth of their fleet by B2B relationships. You know, I lived in Hong Kong for many, many years, and whenever I would travel to Shenzhen, I would see the BYD e-taxis on the road there. What it does is it places our vehicles squarely in the eyesight and in the day-to-day usage of people so that they can see how they perform, how the vehicles look, feel, and then become an attractive proposition for them to buy.
So kind of a dual kind of advertisement and experiential marketing for the vehicles.
Very cool, and I love the fact that it's all electric too, so it's very good sustainability story there, too, for Vietnam.
It is all electric. We are leapfrogging the ICE period of our development in Vietnam, going straight to electric.
Great! Well, let's shift focus a little bit, and let's shift to your plans to expand internationally. If you could just talk about where you're at on that journey, and where are the vehicles currently available, and where do you guys plan to expand to?
Yeah. So we're already exporting the vehicles to North America, U.S. and Canada. In the U.S., it's principally California. In Canada, to the major metropolis. Doing very well in Quebec, as it happens. They have really picked up on our vehicles and receiving very positive feedback on the cars there. California, we have about 15 owned and operated showrooms there. We are going to expand our business model throughout the rest of the U.S. by signing up dealerships. We've got about 70-75 dealerships who are interested in carrying our vehicles and distributing those into the U.S., where we'll have then comprehensive distribution across the U.S. with our EV vehicles. And then in Europe, we are already in France, Germany and-