Calnex Solutions Stock

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Calnex Solutions plc Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Tommy Cook, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining. And sorry, we're a few minutes late. We're just having some technical issues here, I'm sorry. So we're probably going to switch our cameras off. But hopefully, you'll be able to hear us and see the slides and go through the results for you.

So first of all, let's just remind everyone who Calnex is. So if you're new to Calnex, give you an update who we are Calnex Solutions designs, produces and markets test instrumentation for the network synchronization monitoring and emulation markets. So basically, anybody that's using a network, whether it's telecoms, enterprise, defense data centers, we provide test solutions into that area.

We're now just entering our third decade, so we're going to 20 years. And through that period, we've actually shipped product to over 600 -- 700 sites around the world in 68 countries. And you can see with the graphic in the bottom right-hand corner, when you look at the whole life cycle of developing new network equipment, the bits that we focus on is that design validation conformance test and the kind of maintenance monitoring part.

These are very much where the high value, where customers need equipment that's aligned to the latest standards, the latest requirement. So it's low volume, high-value equipment is what we provide.

In terms of where we started as a company, we very much started in the telecom space, which is obviously in the kind of 5G phase at the moment. But we always sold to different sectors as an enterprise. So it's always been a multi-sector environment. But in recent years, as you'll see through the presentation, that is developing even further.

We now sell into data centers because in some ways, a data center in my world feels like a network in a building. But we also sell into things like the satellite networks in terms of evaluating them and more and more into federal and government type military type applications.

It's the same equipment, but different groups of people using it provides an opportunity for us. So what are our key strengths? Our strengths are that we have now established, been in the market for 20 years. We have a reputation for continually delivering high-value quality products with a high customer base.

We have a high-level repeat business where customers buy equipment from us and then continue to come back and buy upgrades to that equipment or additional pieces of equipment. And we've over the recent period, tried to diversify our business.

We have a global footprint, you can see there, but also from the end markets as well, we've continued to try when the last few years, telecoms has been a bit more subdued market, take the opportunity to expand into other sectors into the digital infrastructure and government and defense sectors. We have a strong revenue profile with a robust balance sheet.

And today, we are operating, as you'll hear later on, in markets that are very large and high-growing, fast-growing markets. And that's where we believe that will provide opportunities for us to grow in the future. And we continue to invest to accelerate that growth in terms of our new products, but also in our infrastructure to be better aligned to maximize these opportunities.

So what has happened in the last year? Well, last year, we're pleased to say that our revenues are up 19% to just under GBP 22 million. Our profit also increased substantially, and we continue to have a strong cash base in terms of closing cash level. And we will increase the dividend this year from 0.62p to 0.68p.

Our strategy really has continued to play out the three pillars that we have, basically innovating into the telecoms space, and we did that through our new product, Paragon S that came out just at the very beginning of the last financial year, the 800 gig, the leading edge capability, and that drove a lot of the business that we got from that sector last year.

But we've already started to invest into the next generation of 1.6 terabit, which is the leading-edge technology today, and we'll have that available on shipping next year. But of course, a lot of the focus internally has been in terms of trying to expand our footprint into the digital infrastructure and government and defense sector.

In the government and defense sector, what we're finding is our products are well suited to the need. We haven't really had a lot of feedback requiring enhancements to our products. So it's really been about go-to-market. We hired key people last year to focus and get into that, especially in North America and to understand how to get involved in some of these large projects and ably make sure that our products are considered for inclusion in these projects.

And we've made good progress. We've always felt it was going to be an 18- to 24-month initiative to get a strong foothold there. We're a year into that, and we feel that we are on track and -- but still a long way to go, but we build the knowledge and better understanding of how to get involved in these projects and how to sell into these big projects that are happening.

And on the digital infrastructure, that's really about understanding what's happening, the impact of AI on the whole data center cloud computing infrastructure, where it is the acceleration of the size of it, the change in architecture to move some to the edge and as well as central is an area we've been focused on to really understand where the opportunities are.

And I'll talk later on how we feel we have identified places where there's opportunity for us that we look to maximize or look to start to realize later this year and into next year. And the third strand is really partnerships, strategic partnerships. We've done acquisitions in the past. But in the last year, it's been more about strengthening -- using partnerships to strengthen our go-to-market.

We started working with Viavi in terms of the wireless group. And if you're familiar with us in the past, we used to work with Spirent, which provided our route to market for us, our channel partner facility. And now that, that part of Spirent is with Viavi, we're in discussions with them at the moment to allow us to continue to build on what we -- the relationship we had before and give us a stronger footprint by using where they are strong in the market space.

So a lot of change happening in our sales footprint, but a lot of positive change that we believe will be in a strong position for FY '27. So if I look at what some of the key things that we've changed in the last -- in FY '26, as I said, the NWA network emulation products, we've had really good engagement with a number of key players and some -- and through that, we've identified where we can strengthen our position.

And it's not from a change in product a lot of time. It's really about focused sales collateral that we can present our products to customers in a way that they fully understand how they can see the benefit and the value and maximize the value, which obviously encourages them to spend.

We've also had a large repeat order from a hyperscaler that we've been working with for a few years, and that's significant in terms of what's happened and also for our product program, which again, I'll talk about later because I guess a product that we've been selling the Sentry, we're going to start and work on a new version of that, which will bring additional value in FY '28.

And we continue to work on our products to tailor to what our customers need, the ever-evolving needs. And of course, the sync products where as a company, we started, but remains really important in terms of our base rate, and we continue to see opportunities to grow that in the future.

And then the other part of the strategy and action in the last year has been into that U.S. federal and defense sector. As I said, we have started to see, we've had some key wins. We've got a growing sales funnel. It's a challenging go-to-market. It's completely different than our market. You really have to kind of get to know where all these programs are and deal with them one at a time. There's not a kind of simple website you can broadcast to everyone.

So it is a long road, but it's a valuable road for us and a road that we believe we can continue to strengthen moving forward, and we made really great progress in FY '26.

So at this point, I'll hand over to Ashleigh, and she will give you an update on the financials.

Thanks, Tommy. Before I take you through the next slide, which is the revenue model, I thought I would just briefly remind you of our of how our two revenue streams work. And so hopefully give some background for anybody that's new to Calnex as well. So we have two revenue streams.

The first one we call bundled hardware and software, which is the biggest one. And then the second one is our software support program revenues and warranties. So a typical customer will come to us to purchase one of our hardware products, and that will have a number of software options included at the time of purchase. And that's invoiced as one bundled sale and they can come back for upgrades or additional options that are added to the existing hardware through the provision of a license key over the life cycle of that product with that customer.

And we can sell the software sales and upgrades as stand-alone sales as well. Bundled hardware and software sales pricing can obviously differ for each order as it just depends on the the makeup of the hardware product being purchased and then the options are chosen at that time from the list of numerous options that we provide.

And then each customer obviously can purchase different combinations, just depending on what they need at that point in time. So as a result of that variability, the average revenue earned per bundle can just vary from order to order, creating a mix effect.

So that revenue is recognized when we dispatch it to the customer or when we deliver the software license key if it's a software -- it's a stand-alone software option. And as you can see from here, that is the black block in this -- in the top left graph here. And that takes up the majority of our revenues. And then each of our products comes with a standard warranty period, which can also be extended for an extra fee, and we also sell software support programs alongside that.

And this makes up our second revenue stream, the gray block. This revenue is recognized over the life of the product and different customers can take different lengths of contract out with us for support. So those that last longer than a year, contract-wise, the revenue for that is spread over the life of the contract and anything in the year is deferred on the balance sheet and leased over that the relevant number of years.

So coming to that graph here on the top left. In previous years, prior to the years that are shown on this chart here, we did have several years with the trend was 90% hardware and software and 10% software support revenues. Over the past couple of years, the software support revenues took up closer to 20% of our revenues, but a lot of that was to do with the fact that our hardware and software revenues have taken a dip just while CapEx budgets had been less available out in the marketplace.

As our -- as you can see in FY '26, that ratio is closer to 83% and 17% for support revenues. And that's as a result of the growth in the hardware and software sales in the year. Our goal is really to keep that support revenue at that 15% to 20% range going forward as we grow revenues in general for the business.

So just moving across to the top of the slide here to the middle chart. As you also know, if you're not new to Calnex, our revenues are generated across a global customer base and partner network. And we have three geographic divisions. That's the Americas, North Asia and Rest of World. And Rest of World covers EMEA, India, Southeast Asia and parts and Australasia as well.

The global spread obviously helps us mitigate the risk for us as well as giving us opportunities to understand new end market dynamics from a global perspective as well. There's more information on the regional and product line revenues and the trends coming from that in a couple of slides' time.

So as you'll remember from our previous presentations, our sales were previously predominantly derived from telecoms customers in the past, where the end application was within the telecoms network. And we previously showed metrics from -- up to last year that split our orders into telecoms and cloud computing market customers.

And that cloud computing bucket of customers included hyperscaler data center customers, enterprise and government and defense, to name a few. We've decided this year going forward to give a more granular split, as you can see from the top right graph here on our end market customer base, just given the growth in our more diversified end customer base or end customer use case outside of the traditional telecom sector.

So at the top right here, you can see we split our analysis into government and defense, digital infrastructure, which is still the cloud computing, data centers, enterprise, et cetera, and telecoms.

And you can see that in FY '26, the split of our orders in the year was 21% government and defense, 49% digital infrastructure and 30% telecoms. We've seen an increase in customers from the digital infrastructure sector over the years, which is partly driven -- there are new customers in there, but it's partly driven by equipment vendors who initially developed products for use in telecom applications, now selling the same products into other data network applications where the same technology is implemented.

And those new applications are becoming the primary market opportunity for our customers' product, which is contributing to the kind of move in the metrics here in this graph between telecoms and digital infrastructure. So it's not as if we've lost the customers that are in that telecoms block. Some of them have actually moved into the digital infrastructure categorization in this chart here.

So moving on to the bottom of the slide here, you've got two pie charts that are kind of interlinking in terms of the drivers. So the bottom left one, I'll start with, over the last 3-year rolling period to March '26, our top 10 customers contributed 51% of total orders.

And in addition to that, our top 10 customers as a group have an average length of relationship with us of 13 years, which just demonstrates that repeat nature of business and strong customer relationship that we have with them. So we have -- for those of you that don't know and this is related to the next pie chart, we have a high level of repeat custom from our customer base as well as new customers coming in.

So we see customers coming back to order from us frequently from a repeat perspective as they buy different bits of kit for testing different things or different sites to add into different sites or want to add new kit as they grow their labs, their testing requirements.

They might want to add new software options because they've already got the hardware in years gone by or they want to upgrade or they want to move on to our newer products as they get released. So that repeat revenue demand is quite an important metric to us. We have -- we would call ourselves a repeat revenue company as opposed to a recurring revenue company.

And that's a metric that we measure across the whole business as well as just our top 10. So you can see here the repeat revenue orders usually are in that 70% to 80% mark, and that hasn't changed for this year compared to previous years.

Just moving on to the next slide here, just a summary before I take you into the regional splits in the P&L and cash flows. So as Tommy mentioned earlier, FY '26 revenues growth of 19% on the prior year. The improved profitability has been driven by that increase in revenues, obviously, and the maintenance of our gross margins.

Gross margin has gone up 1 percentage point. It does tend to move up and down by 1 to 2 percentage points just depending on mix because we are a low-volume, high-value business. So maintenance of strong gross margins. And our fixed cost base in this situation has acted in a positive way.

So the positive operational gearing we get from that fixed cost base and the increased revenues has driven that improved profitability. So you can see that from the underlying EBITDA margins and the PBT margin, but the underlying EBITDA margin is sitting at 8%, up from 6% last year. PBT of GBP 1.2 million compared to GBP 0.7 million in the previous year, driven by those factors.

The balance sheet remains strong. We ended the year with cash of GBP 9.3 million. That was versus GBP 10.9 million at the start of the year. However, Q4 was quite a high-volume trading quarter for us. So due to the timing and phasing of timing and phasing of our Q4 shipments, the trade receivables balance was higher than normal at the year-end.

Most of that cash was collected by Thursday last week and continues to be collected ahead of the calendar month end. So at 21st of May, before we published our results, the cash was up to GBP 11.2 million, and that's as a result of these debt has been collected.

So just on a regional split perspective, to give you a little bit more flavor there. Rest of World, and you'll remember this from previous presentations. Rest of World is one of the regions that has the most broad mix of end customers and sectors, and it's always effectively been like that for us, and that just helps to manage trading risk within any single sector.

Revenues, you'll see grew by 48% in that region year-on-year, largely due to a repeat order from a major hyperscaler customer. But even when you strip that back, underlying revenues also grew in the region, and that was driven by a couple of things. So growth in telecom sector opportunities in EMEA and digital infrastructure sector deals across both EMEA and India.

Americas, although when you look at the reported numbers, the revenues have declined by 8%. If you adjust for -- from a reporting perspective, the hyperscaler customer was reported within our rest of world region internally. But if you adjust for the fact that we understand a large amount of the units that we sold to the hyperscaler will be deployed in the U.S. If you adjust for that, underlying performance is broadly stable year-on-year in the Americas region.

The Americas region did contribute most of the increase in government and defense orders for the group as a result of our targeted higher strategy at the end of last year and the start of this year and to support the expansion of the U.S. federal customer base over there.

And revenues in North Asia have grown 8% despite China remaining a challenging environment for us. That was coming from growth in digital infrastructure and as cloud computing and data centers demand increases and in telecoms as well.

Lab from a product line perspective, Lab Sync, that revenue grew in the year. That was from increased trading across the Americas from the government and defense sector and in the Rest of World region, particularly in EMEA in the telecom sector.

Network Sync is our century product. That is a product that feeds into the data center the hyperscaler orders. So the hyperscaler order sitting in there. So that obviously grew in the year. It was a healthy order. NAA is our emulation product range. That can be split into SME and NE-ONE. The SME experienced revenue growth, particularly within government and defense in Americas and across all sectors in the rest of the world.

NE-ONE saw a very slight growth in orders. We would like to see that growth increase in future years. So we do continue our focus on returning that product to increase growth in FY '27.

So just on the P&L, I've covered revenue already and I mentioned gross margin as well. So you see that here. Headcount did increase slightly as a result of the targeted hires that we've talked about, predominantly in the global sales and marketing teams just to enhance our team to support the growth in the diversified markets.

So the administration cost increase is being driven by a couple of things, predominantly by the sales and marketing team increases and hires over the year. Channel enhancement activities, things like contract negotiations and things like that have been quite a lot of them this year as well. And then the -- also the effect of our year-end profit share accruals that were in this year's numbers and not in last year's numbers because there were no -- the targets for our bonus and profit share accruals weren't met last year.

R&D amortization, that continues to follow the same trends as in previous years. Our R&D -- the majority of our R&D spend is capitalized on our balance sheet and amortized to the P&L over 5 years. So the increase in this amortization line here is very formulaic based on that profile. If R&D CapEx spend has increased in previous years, that drives the amortization. So that's obviously to support the growth in our product ranges and to support our road map.

I mentioned profit before tax of GBP 1.2 million and the drivers around that from an operational gearing perspective. Effective tax rate reported is 41%. There are prior period adjustment drivers within there, predominantly due to our change in accounting policy around our RDC income.

So the underlying rate there is closer to the standard 25% -- then just on to the cash flow. I mentioned cash at the year-end was GBP 9.3 million. We have received some significant level of cash coming in since the year-end. But just as a summary on the actual cash flow itself, net cash inflow from operating activities, taking into account that trade receivables increase at the year-end was higher than last year at GBP 5.5 million.

The driver there is very much trading in the year compared to last year. Investment in R&D, GBP 6.3 million compared to the previous GBP 4.9 million of last year. The increase there is very much not -- there has been some inflationary increases for people costs and some graduate hires. The increase in spend there is a one-off spend in the year for access to spend on early access fee to gain access to new silicon technology for our development program for the 1.6T Paragon project.

And dividends, you'll see have been -- the cash spend has been in line with last year. So just to wrap up before I hand back over to Tommy. Revenue growth, maintenance of strong gross margins and that positive operational leverage in our fixed cost base has driven our profitability in the year.

FY '26 R&D investment increases for the early access scheme are being driven by the early access scheme fee. FY '27 will see further investment in R&D from a cash perspective, and that's to leverage that's to further our product road map to leverage opportunities in the AI and data center markets as well as the 1.6T project as well.

Targeted investment in our global sales and marketing teams that we made this year to diversify our customer base is starting to gain traction, as you can see from the market split. And again, strong balance sheet remains that underpins our continued targeted investments in key product development and it supports our accelerated growth ambitions from FY '28. Over to you, Tommy.

Okay. Thanks, Ashleigh. So just the last section here before we take some questions. Just a quick update on our outlook and our strategy that we're playing out in FY '27. Just to remind you our product program, there's three main tranches of product or platforms that we have. All our products are platforms, we call on platforms and that we continue to add enhancement to them and increase the value we can deliver.

We've got the two on the left, which are really about that synchronization, transferring very high accuracy time through networks. The ones in the Lab Sync an R&D environment. And then we've got a network for telecoms, one for data center, where it's monitoring time once -- monitoring managing time once it's deployed. And then on the right, we've got our network emulation products.

Now all of these products, we continually add capability to them, and that's how we get that repeat business is both customers buying new products, but also buying upgrades to the products. And you can see from a summary picture here in the last year, we've had some fairly big releases in terms of new platforms, the 800 gig at the very start of the financial year.

And in the middle of the year, we come out with the first 400-gig network emulation available on the market to target that digital infrastructure. And the line across the bottom is really trying to show the color dots on it is really showing that we continue to release minor enhancements to all our platforms.

And this is going to add new functionality, customer-driven enhancements, changes to the standards that we need to keep up. So it's a continuous investment in terms of keeping the products relevant and valuable to our customers. We look into '27, there are actually three fairly major developments going on.

First of all, for our Sentry product, which we sell to the hyperscalers, and that's for monitoring in a data center. That product has been sold for about 3 years. And really what we've learned from -- through that success that we're building a version 2 of that, which will add key functionality that makes it more attractive to that into that environment.

So that project is underway at the moment, and it's due to get released in H2, and we would expect to start to see revenue from that by the end of the year. And that will also allow us in FY '28 to really go to a number of other data center companies and see whether we can repeat the success that we've had to date with a wider base.

If I jump to the right-hand one, we've also, as already mentioned, are already underway with a 1.6 terabit neo-S that's to prove high accuracy time in the R&D environment. And as Ashleigh said, we got access to key technology that we needed early in the year. So the project is underway, and that will release at the second half of FY '28, very high complexity project, but a high-value product as well. And that can again build on our success of being the market leader in that sector.

And that sells both to the telecoms, but because a lot of the data center people now are using equipment they're using the very high-speed interfaces, then we'd expect to sell that into the companies that are making equipment for deploying into the data centers as well.

And then the third very important one is this middle one. As we all know, AI is completely changing the way the data centers are having to scale and the way they're going to have to change their architecture to meet the needs of that, both for running models and training models. But then once it's run the models is to run with the real world and how inference happens, that's when the models interact with the real-world situation.

And as we know, potentially, there's a lot of discussion of the edge networks and actually moving storage out to the edge of the network. So what we've done is really taken a step back because to really understand where there's opportunities for us in the middle of this because it seems to be moving so fast, you really need to focus in and understand the value.

And what we found with our first product at 400 gigs is that we need to enhance it to get that full bandwidth. And so what we've really done is looked at how do we get to these very high bandwidth. So although there's NIC cards available that run at 400 gig, -- we don't just run at 400 gigs. We have to manipulate all the traffic at 400 gigs. And that really means that we have to wait until the next second-generation cards come out.

So we're just releasing at the moment what we call our aggregated solution. And our Ignite platform uses FPGA technology. So it gives us full control and ability to manipulate all the packets in there. And the aggregated uses a switch along with the product so that the switch can select traffic, passes it down to the Ignite, we manipulate it and pass it back to the switch.

And that's a bespoke switch that we're working with a supplier for that, and we'll supply as an aggregated switch and product together. And then 6 months later, we're going to come out with our native version, which means we don't need to switch anymore and you can use the -- you can go in straight into the card and manipulate it.

But the key thing is this gives us the ability to talk to customers about our road map to the higher rates because everybody wants to talk about 400. We know they want to start talking about 800 and very soon they want to talk about 1.6. And so we can use the products we have in an aggregated format to offer the higher rates and then as soon as we can get the technology come out with a native.

So we're just really presenting that to customers at the moment. We would hope to get sales in the next period from that and then that allow us to really engage deeply with customers and try and understand where is the long-term test needs going to be and how can we build platforms that can sustainably deliver value, keeping up with our customers and delivering products.

So that's really quite exciting from our point of view going forward and really trying to build on what's happening as we all know, there's a huge amount of change happening there, a huge investment and make sure we can find an opportunity that we can sustainably deliver value from but it's not only just about products, it's about the way we go to market.

And as we've mentioned, there's been a huge investment in '26, and that will continue in '27. In the middle of '26, we brought in a new VP of Sales. And we've also brought in some other key hires an operations -- sales operations person, a new partner manager as well. And really, it's about making more systematic in the way that we go to market. And the fact we've got a lot more partners now that we keep them all -- we communicate sustainably and consistently with everybody.

And also within our sales and marketing and our marketing groups, we've changed the structure in there. A year ago, we put a new VP of Sales in there, a VP of Market products -- sorry, a VP of Product Management and Markets. And that again was to really take a step forward in the way that we do business and the way we manage all our partners.

So there's a lot of change happening inside. We've got the new Viavi partnership coming on. We'll use a new PRM tools and new approaches to make sure we can maximize the potential from the sales channel opportunities both with Viavi and all the other sales partners we've got.

So to wrap up, we feel positive going into the next year. We've got a strong balance sheet. We've got an exciting road map there. And we've -- again, we've already started to diversify our market footprint that we plan to continue to work on in the year ahead.

In '27, as I talked about, there's a lot of platforms to continue the fact we've got three new platforms is slightly unusual as well as minor releases happening. So we've got a lot of things happening to build as we go towards '28. And we definitely continue to try and diversify into the other digital infrastructure and the government defense space but also keeping close contact to the telecom space because telecoms will remain really important to us both from a business point of view, but a lot of the technology innovation happens in that space and that feeds into the other sectors.

So there's a lot of synergies between all these sectors and makes sense that we look to stay strong across all these areas. And as we go forward, because of the new platforms we'll have coming out in '27 or early into '28, we expect to see stronger growth or accelerated growth as we move into FY '28 and beyond. So at that point, I'll hand back to Louie.

That's great. Thank you so much for presentation this afternoon. [Operator Instructions], I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed by our investor dashboard. Guys, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation.

And Ashleigh, if I could just hand back to you just to run through the Q&A, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Sure. Thanks, Louie. So I can see a couple of questions for financials here. So I'll kick off and hand to Tommy and a couple of questions. So David has asked gross margins have remained at circa 75%, but the operating margin at EBIT level was only 5% in FY '26. When can we expect to see operating margins return to the 20% plus levels achieved in FY '21 to '23?

So Absolutely. In terms of that operational gearing, I was talking about earlier, that has worked against us in the years up to now, just given by the -- given the dip in the subdued telco market. So as part of the diversification strategies that we've got, we're aiming to -- our goal is to start getting that 5% level working up the way.

So in terms of the guidance that's out in the market just now for FY '27 and '28, that our aim is to notch that up to not necessarily up to those levels yet because we have to be quite prudent in terms of our growth strategies around diversified markets at the moment. But our aim would be to get those profit margins heading in that direction.

We obviously are working with different markets now than we were before. So there's different drivers, but the goal is to try and get those margins up into the double digits again in future years.

And then in terms of -- the next question here. There's a pre-submitted question. What -- it doesn't say who it's from, but the pre-submitted question says, what percentage of your current revenue mix is driven by recurring software licensing seats versus one-off hardware instrumentation sales? And how do you plan to scale the SaaS model to hyperscalers by 2030?

We actually -- hopefully, what we talked about prior in my bit of the presentation here helps answer that. We don't actually have a recurring SaaS model within our revenue model. We've got more of a repeat revenue model as that point of sale and software licensing profile goes through our revenues. We do look at SaaS options to bring in SaaS models with new products or new opportunities. We don't -- the types of customers that we have within our traditional market space don't really work with SaaS models.

However, we are open to looking at that going forward if the opportunity arises and it works for the customer. Up until now, it hasn't quite worked for the customer in our customer base. So at this moment in time, we don't have SaaS model in place. Hopefully, that answers your question there.

And there was another pre-submitted question that says, how is your Sentry product sales performing this year? Any new deployments or repeat orders from your existing hyperscaler clients like Meta and how do these sales -- sorry, and do these sales include an ongoing software monitoring subscription?

Hopefully, my question -- that question has been answered by what we presented in the presentation. There isn't an ongoing software monitoring subscription included in that. But hopefully, the rest of the question has been answered by what we talked about already.

There was another one of the pre-submitted ones following the global go-to-market partnership with Solutions. Can you update us on the early sales pipeline? Are you seeing immediate traction within Viavi's enterprise hyperscale client base or are these long valuation cycle -- sales cycles that will only reflect into FY '27 and '28 order book?

So the Viavi thing is kind of slightly complicated. There's kind of two parts to it. There's the part that we signed last year with the wireless group, where they are taking our product and selling it. And that is we're starting to see a buildup of sales pipeline and some 1 or 2 early orders that really, I think, will come through this year because we are actually -- now we have the Viavi team trained.

They are taking it to customers and start to gain good traction. But of course, the Viavi relationship has got another element to it because as you may know, if you know, we worked with Spirent for many years and part of Spirent was sold to -- most of it went to Keysight, but then they spun it apart to Viavi was a bit that we've been working with in Spirent.

And we've continued the relationship at a kind of low up until now because once it was going to them, then it made sense that we try to work and we're just currently reengaging the contract there with them, and we'd expect to see that pushing later this year.

So again, we know that the Spirent guys well. We know we've got strong relationships, and we hope to see that in both into the enterprise hyperscale and even into the government and defense sector as well.

So again, we would like to hope that as we go through this year, you'll see a larger proportion of our business coming through Viavi. And remember, they're a sales channel for us. So they don't control anything other than the sales channel. So it's -- and we will potentially push some business through them that we could take to other partners if we chose.

But obviously, you need to manage partners and make sure they've got significant business that makes sense for them to be committed for our products as well.

Another pre-submitted one Tommy, you mentioned engagement with hyperscalers and DC customers. Can you be specific where Panic solutions are deployed today across lab deployment, pre-deployment validation, production, manufacturing and live network operation? And how has that mix shifted over the last couple of years?

We can sell into everything. We talk about the large hyperscale order that is because our Sentry product is part of the template buildout that they do when they expand their data center capacity. So you could call that into their production environment.

And that has been successful for us there, and we want to try and repeat that success. But we actually sell all our products into the R&D space. So the R&D teams, I think, use our Lab Sync Products and all our emulator products for a number of different applications.

And we continue to see these sales there. So it's really into that lab deployment and the kind of pre-deployment validation is pre the key area where we get opportunities with these guys, and we continue to look to develop these as we move forward.

Sure. There's a couple of related questions here, so I'll try to kind of cover them off in one go. So James has asked, your results release mentions the targeted step change in FY '28 revenue. How should investors interpret or range bound quantify that? And then also Jeffrey has asked, how fast do you think revenue can grow in FY '27 and how about fiscal 2028? And then there's a related question after that, that I'll cover after this.

And so in terms of the guidance that is out in the marketplace just now, for FY '27, we've mentioned FY '27 as a year of investment. And we talk about when we talk about investment, R&D investment in terms of the products that Tommy was talking about there in that slide that showed you those three products that we're working on in FY '27. -- that then will drive that revenue growth in FY '28. But in terms of sort of growth metrics, FY '27 from a -- just because we're still working with this in discovering our diversified end markets, we've kept quite a prudent growth metric for FY '27 in the single digits, low single digits.

But in FY '28, that should start to increase into the low double digits for that year, all driven by the impact of the things that we're doing in FY '27 from an R&D perspective, but also from the sort of platform that we've built from a diversification go-to-market side of things from what we did this year as well.

And then Dean has also then asked what trends are you seeing in terms of orders booked in pipeline?

So in terms of -- if you take what I just said into account, our -- what we're seeing right now from a sort of tracking perspective, things are tracking as we would expect for this time of year into this new FY '27 year.

We are starting to see the trends and the diversification trends within the pipeline are also -- you can also see them as well. So quite a varied and diversified opportunity pipeline there as well. So hopefully, that answers those three questions.

I got a couple here I can take first one, hyperscale scale to 800 and 1.6 terabit architectures, can you give examples of network and modes that your systems or validate that would not typically be caught by broader optical protocol or system-level test platforms from other vendors?

Yes, we very much -- first of all, a lot of our -- the Lab Sync is really a standard conformance test first and foremost, is to prove that the equipment meets the tight standards. Time is an interesting thing because when it goes wrong, you don't know it's going wrong. It's like you know your watch is wrong. We only when you compare it to somebody else's watch, you know it.

So you can get all sorts of strange fares happening in the network. So where we've seen deployments like in the hyperscalers, what we are doing is monitoring at the time, we are not distributing the time or verifying that the time is being distributed correctly across the network because we know that if the time off, they're going to get data errors, things are going to go wrong, and that's going to slow down or reduce the overall capacity and bandwidth that they can process.

So it is really important if you're using time that you have a way of, first of all, proving that it delivers the time accuracy that you expect and that the equipment -- each and every piece of equipment that comes along and gets added in is added in aligned to the standards or you could find the whole system has drifted off and is actually not delivering the accuracy that you're relying on.

And then once it's there, having a monitor in place to ensure that at any point in time, the time doesn't just drift off because I said mostly time doesn't just stop, it drifts off and of course, you don't know that it's drifted off. And that's where the kind of monitoring systems come in and is essential for the continuous use within the environment.

Another question that was pre-submitted here and a different topic altogether regarding the global expansion of low earth satellite constellations at Starlink -- the gateways for these network functions as high bandwidth edge data centers require synchronization. Our products like Sentry and your SME emulation tools actively being sold into the satellite ground station market and how large is this opportunity in the next 3 to 5 years?

I wouldn't say Sentry being sold at the moment. We're definitely selling our emulation tools in there in terms of being able to emulate the satellites moving across the sky, the fact that the delay is constantly changing and sort pattern as a satellite moves away, the delay is obviously constantly getting longer and then it disappears over the horizon and the system jumps to use another satellite, then you get a sudden shift like a pattern.

So that's where it's being used to prove and verify applications that are running over satellites to ensure that, that changing in delay profiles doesn't cause any problem to the actual application. We're probably selling more of our Lab Sync products at the moment into there where, again, it's about proving that each piece of equipment is operating correctly before it's deployed.

So far, we haven't seen a lot of opportunity for the monitoring going on, but it's interesting as that goes forward, it may become an opportunity for us. Again, it does look like it's a growth opportunity. It doesn't feel explosive at the moment for us because, again, we are involved more in the R&D stage than in the deployment stage.

But obviously, as more and more services start going through the satellites and satellites are more and more used to provide that connectivity across the world, then that definitely feels an opportunity that we should expect to see growth in that market over the next 1, 2, 3, 4 years.

And one from Stephen here. What do you look for in the telecom space to assess where the CapEx is beginning to be deployed again? And what is the situation currently?

What we've always looked for, Stephen, is what's happening at the front end of the food chain. We are at the back end of the food chain, which maybe are the best place to be. But I guess it's build out, it's the operator starting to start major build-out and expansion of the network. That really has always been the kind of the driver at the front end.

So as we've seen a few years ago when cost of debt went up, they slowed all that down. So therefore, the equipment vendor slowed down the program, and we were kind of sitting behind them. So we are actually starting to see -- it's interesting in the last year, we monitor the top 20 customers, all our top customers.

And I would say in the last year, there's been an increase in what we sort of call traditional telecoms people reenter our top 10. They didn't disappear completely. They moved in to be more of our top 20, but they have slowly started to increase the spend and kind of edge themselves back up again.

So we are seeing the situation easing slightly there. I think in a lot of things, things like edge networks, how is edge computing going to be deployed? How is it going to be -- who's going to put it there? Because obviously, the data center people probably want it at the edge of the network, but they don't have real estate.

And obviously, the telecoms guys have got the towers. They've got real estate at the edge. So it's going to be interesting over the next year to see what happens there. As you've probably seen last year, NVIDIA invested $1 billion into Nokia.

And we felt that was all about knowing that as edge computing come along, there's going to be new pieces of equipment put at the edge and it's -- potentially it's going to be the network operators that put in there now is that a joint ownership with the data center guys? Are they going to lease the equipment?

This is all the kind of change that we like to see happening because change that means there's going to be different approaches taken different architectures. And hopefully, that creates opportunity for us going forward.

Ashleigh, have you got a question, you can jump on...

I think the next one from Julian is more for you, Tommy, data centers.

Well, let me pick this one up from Julian. In 12 to 18 months, what proportion of your revenue do you anticipate to come from CPO and data centers?

That's a good question. I expect it to grow, Julian, which is probably not as much detail as you're hoping. I think there's a lot of our growth opportunities are going to come from that area. And it's quite hard to see because it's a fast evolving market at the moment to kind of pin it down exactly what's going to happen.

A lot of our internal -- in terms of the telecom space, we stay in contact with our key customers. But in terms of investigation work, it's more into that data in the digital infrastructure that we've been doing a lot of investigation.

So we definitely would hope to see that grow. I think when we get a new Sentry V2, we'd like to see that going into more customers, continue to build on the success we've had already with a few customers, but hopefully take that to some more customers -- and we are seeing the whole way that people are testing applications that are running on data centers changing and evolving.

And hopefully, that will continue to give us growth opportunities moving forward. And I think we're just about at the end of the time, and I think we've done all the questions.

That's great. Thank you for answering all those questions you can from investors. And of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to the company, Tommy, can I please just ask you for a few closing comments?

Okay. Yes. Well, first of all, once again, thank you very much, everyone, for taking the time to listen today. So as we enter our third decade as a company, there's kind of three things I would say have been absolutely the same every single year in the first 2 decades, and they'll probably be the same in the fourth decade.

And that is that there's challenge, there's opportunity and there's change. And there's no shortage of all three as we go into this third decade. There's always things changing in the world that create challenge. And from a change point of view, we might be 20 years old, but we're not finished in terms of trying to make ourselves more effective at go-to-market.

So there's a lot of things happening in the back office in terms of changing utilization of AI technology to make us more effective at go to market. But most important is there is plenty of opportunity.

And I think hopefully, I've expressed with the new platforms that we've got, but we believe there is a lot of opportunity starting to appear out there, and it's really up to us to go after it and make sure that we can realize it in the next few years ahead and make sure we've got a strong start to decade. So thanks very much again today for joining.

That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as shall now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations.

This may take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.

Good morning, and welcome to the Calnex Solutions plc Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll.

And I'd now like to hand you over to CEO, Tommy Cook. Good morning to you, sir.

Good morning. Good morning, everyone, and thanks very much for taking the time to dial in and listen to our results. So before we go into the results, I'll just take a few minutes to introduce Calnex to the people that are less familiar with the company, and then we'll go in and talk about the recent period, what the results were and progress we've made during that period across a number of areas.

So Calnex Solutions brings clarity and confidence and certainty to the world's networks and applications. What we do is deliver test solutions that allow the equipment vendors or people building networks to prove the performance of the equipment or the networks and ensure it's going to work under all conditions. You can see on the left-hand side, the type of companies we've sold to over the years. We started selling a lot to telecoms customers. So you see the telecoms vendors, Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia, the key players there that are using our products as well as the operators like AT&T and BT and component manufacturers like Broadcom, Qualcomm, et cetera. But we also have been selling to the data center and enterprise market.

And on the right-hand side, it shows just some of our heritage and where our spread of business is at the moment. So very much it started in telecoms where the company started. As I said, really proven performance of equipment to the international standards. But a lot of the equipment and standards that come out of telecoms are adopted by many industries across the world. And that's allowed us to move into places like cloud computing and data centers as well as moving more into government and defense type infrastructures as well, providing the same solutions. So we are a company that's sold in 68 countries around the world. We use a partner network, which we'll talk about later that gives us a global footprint. And we're in a lean model where we outsource our contract manufacturing to a contract manufacturer.

So what areas of test that we generically focus on? We focus on design validation and conformance test. So this is -- you can think of this as somebody that's building a new switch or a router or a piece of equipment. And the R&D engineers as they're building the equipment and get the prototypes and the early production units need to put it through its paces to check that it's going to do exactly what they expected, meet the specification and also prove that it meets any international standards that they're going to claim conformance to. So that's really the area that we focus on. And it's an area where effectively having the right tools at the right time, you enable your customers to get their new revenue streams to market quicker. And it's not just about quick and time through, but it's robustness that they know that once they release it into manufacturing, they won't have yield problems. And once it's deployed in the networks around the world, it's not going to have problems in terms of operational problems.

So the right tools at the right time, you can command a healthy price because you're basically enabling your customers to enable revenue streams. So that's the primary area that we focus on. The one other area we focus on is shown here in the far right, and that's a high-level maintenance and monitoring. So it's not so much about building networks, but once the network is there and running, either monitoring its performance or if there's a fault after you've determined it's not a straightforward fault that can be fixed by just replacing equipment, you have to do a deep dive to understand what's happening. We provide the tools to give that deep insight to allow that sort of work to be done.

So that's who Calnex are. So let me take -- go straight into the review from the first half of FY '26. For the period, we closed revenue of GBP 8 million, which was up from GBP 7.3 million the year before. We made a slightly less of a loss this period than we did for the same period the year before, and we continue to have a healthy cash balance of over GBP 10 million, and we plan to distribute a dividend of 0.31p per share. Through this period, we've continued to innovate in our products and continue to push ahead with our building our market presence. So at the end of the last period, we launched our 800 gigs product, which was market-leading, and we continue to use that to build momentum in the telecom space.

But we've also seen strong demand for our other product portfolios in the U.S. government and defense space. And we're doing a lot of ongoing activities, which I'll talk about later on, to really understand what's happening in the cloud and computing world as an effect of AI. We are not directly involved in AI, but we're in the vicinity of AI in terms of really trying to understand where the opportunities it's going to create as they try and build out the infrastructure to deliver the AI that's needed by the modern world.

As I said, telecoms was a place we started. It's still a very key market for us, and it has been subdued over the last few years, and it continues to be. But we continue -- we are starting to see a slow increase in business there from our deals and in terms of engagement with customers, there is more and more deals coming our way in terms of customers want to talk about upgrading units or buying new units, which is a healthy sign. But we expect it to continue to be a subdued market going forward. In saying that, we've actually secured access to a set of chips that allows us to start working on a 1.6 terabit version of the Paragon-Neo.

This is the next rate that's going to -- is already starting to get deployed. And it is technically a very complex product to do. So it will take us around 18 months. So we expect to release it towards the middle of calendar year '27. But it's a key for us to continue to follow the technology waves as we have over quite a few waves now from 10 gig right up to 100 gig, 400, 800 and now at 1.6 terabits. So an important part of our portfolio going forward.

The other thing that we've been focusing on recently is on our internal structure and how we go about doing business. We'll talk about our channel partners in a minute that that's changing quite a lot, but we've brought some new leadership individuals into the company. We've recently just hired a new VP of Sales. And earlier in the year, we brought in a VP of Markets and Products. And they're really helping to look at the way we go about business, how we engage with our customers and how we engage with our partners, our sales partners to basically sell our products.

So if you look at this map, it looks the same as it's probably looked for a few years in terms of the countries we work in, but there is quite a lot of change happening. If you're familiar with Calnex, you'll know that we used to work very closely with Spirent in terms of up to about 70% of our sales went through Spirent. They acted as a channel partner. So when it was announced last year that they were going to be acquired by Keysight, it was clear that we couldn't continue to work with them. So we've been migrating our channel to a different set of partners. So we've been successful in doing that and bringing on a number of new partners that basically give us the same coverage, but also looking to enhance the coverage that we get by bringing in new partners that, for example, are focused on the defense sector in North America to give us a much stronger footprint going forward.

We've also invested -- while, Ashleigh will talk about how we've controlled expenses. We have done targeted hires, particularly in the sales and marketing side, and we've invested in partner manager in the U.S. as well as a person focusing on the federal market in the U.S., again, to give us better traction into that market space. And while we used to work with Spirent along the way from when it was first announced that Keysight was going to acquire them. If you're familiar with the market, you'll know that the regulator required Keysight to spin out part of Spirent and we weren't allowed to acquire the whole company. And that part is now part of Viavi, and that deal was just closed literally just 2 or 3 weeks ago.

But the part that went to Viavi is the group that we worked with. And as we go forward, we have continued to work with them, and we hope to continue to work with them in a new way going forward because they've just really effectively arrived in Viavi, these discussions are just getting underway. But all parties are keen that we maintain the strength that we had the relationship we had before. It will be a refreshed relationship in terms of the way we want to go forward, but hopefully, it's a win-win for both parties.

And it's interesting that Viavi is a company that we had already started working with early in the year. They approached us that they wanted to sell solutions to the customers in the O-RAN space, really using their product along with our product to give the market-leading solution to the market space. So we have signed a contract with them, the wireless group in Viavi to sell that, and that's just getting underway. And hopefully, it will bring us new business before the end of the financial year and definitely in FY '27.

So at that point, I'm going to hand over to Ashleigh to talk about the financial results. Ashleigh?

Thanks, Tommy. So just in terms of a summary overview and just to reiterate what Tommy just covered in his introduction, our financial performance in the period was a steady progression on the prior year in terms of revenue growth and profitability. So revenue grew 9%, as Tommy just mentioned, with growth experienced across all regions, and I'll go into more detail on that on the next slide. Gross margins remained resilient and came in 2 percentage points above prior year at 76%. And that's really just driven by product margin mix rather than anything else, our gross margins do tend to fluctuate 1 to 2 percentage points year-on-year depending on what bundles we've sold and what products we sold.

And then as Tommy mentioned, we continue to manage overhead costs and R&D investment cash costs tightly with those costs coming in, although above last year, very much in line with plan. The revenue growth and a slight uplift in margins dropped through to the other profit measures with underlying EBITDA and loss before tax showing improvements on the prior period, as you can see. And cash was neutral on the prior year before dividends, and we continue to manage -- to maintain a strong balance sheet. We do expect those cash flows to be positive in H2 in line with expectations.

So just before I take you through the next few slides on the current year, I just thought it was useful to briefly remind you of our revenue model as I've done in previous presentations. So as some of you may know, we have 2 revenue streams. Our main revenue stream is what we call bundled hardware and software. And we also have a smaller revenue stream for software support program revenues. So on the bundled hardware and software piece, a typical customer will purchase one of our hardware products with a number of software options included at that time, and that's invoiced as a bundled sale to that customer. And that customer can come back for upgrades or additional options that are added to the existing hardware through the provision of a license key through their time dealing with us.

And we sell these as stand-alone software sales or upgrades. The bundled hardware and software sales pricing and combinations can differ from order to order as it really just depends on the hardware product being purchased and the numerous software options that the customer can choose from and each customer, as you might expect, and purchase different combinations of software options for each hardware product, just depending on what they need at that point in time. So as that -- as a result of that variability, the average revenue earned per bundle can vary from order to order. And that revenue is recognized on point of sale effectively on delivery to the customer, so either the delivery of the hardware or the delivery of software license key. And that, as I said, makes up the majority of our revenues.

And then the second revenue stream comes from software support programs. So each of our products comes with a standard warranty period, but that can be extended for an extra fee, and customers can also buy software support programs. And that revenue is recognized over the life of a product because sometimes they can buy it for more than 1 year. So if a customer purchases a support package that spans, say, 2 to 3 years, the revenue that's associated with those future years is deferred on the balance sheet and then released over the relevant number of years that, that package covers. So hopefully, that gives you a little bit background on our revenue streams.

Just on to the geographic and product revenue performance in the period on the slide here. As you may know, we've got 3 regions. So that's the Americas, North Asia and Rest of World. And within Rest of World, we include Europe, Middle East, India, Southeast Asia and Australasia as well. So as you can see from the disclosure notes in the RNS, the split of revenues across the regions was broadly in line with the prior period. Americas took up 38% of total revenues. Rest of World were 36% and North Asia were 26% in the period, so not too different from last year.

The Americas region does continue to be the most impacted by the subdued telecoms market, but we did see a 5% growth in revenues from that region in the period compared to last year. And that was driven by sales into the cloud-based and government sectors, which have been the focus for us while the telecoms market was -- has been slower, as Tommy was saying. We also continue to manage the U.S. tariff situation, working with our resellers to agree pass-through of these costs to our end customers through transparent discussion upfront through the sales cycle.

The Rest of World region was the least affected by the slowdown in the telco end markets, if you remember from previous presentations and is able to take advantage of a more diverse end market non-telco sector mix, which has assisted with growth in the period, that region came in 9% higher in this half compared to last half in terms of revenues. Timing of shipments at the end of Q4 mean that, that region benefited from opening backlog roll-off in the period as well. And the North Asia region continues to operate against the backdrop of the U.S.-China geopolitical tensions, which hasn't changed very much since the last time we presented. So as a result, China still remains challenging for us as a country. However, we have seen some really good performance in Taiwan and Korea as we continue to focus on growing business in the other regions within North Asia outside of China.

From a product line perspective, so Lab Sync, that's our Paragon Neo and Paragon X products. That does continue to be impacted by the slowdown in the telecoms market, although the demand for the 800-gig Neo remains encouraging, and we have seen some good demand for our more mature Paragon products as well, which is encouraging. Our plan for Sentry sales, so that's our Network Sync product aimed at use in data centers are continuing as planned. And we received a significant repeat order at the start of October from a major hyperscaler, which gives us a good start to H2 for that product line. And the NAA product line, that's the SNE and the NE-ONE is seeing good traction in the government and defense sectors where we're seeing use cases for both the -- potential use cases for the SME and the NE-ONE for those customers.

So just on to the income statement itself. I've covered quite a lot of the main drivers in the previous couple of slides, but just to kind of walk down the bullets here. So as I said, revenue growth of 9%, and that's coming from all the regions. That's effectively driven quite a lot of the performance in the rest of the P&L, but it's been supplemented by that slight improvement in the gross margin at 76% compared to 74% last half. As I mentioned, so admin costs, we show that -- we show that separated out from R&D amortization in this table here just to aid disclosure. Admin costs did increase as a result of planned headcount additions, and that's those targeted hires that Tommy was talking about earlier and just inflationary cost increases. But as I said, they are very much tracking to plan.

And R&D amortization has increased slightly on last year. That's very much due to R&D headcount increases in the prior year just due to our prior years, sorry, just due to our 5-year amortization cycle. We haven't seen a huge uplift in heads within the R&D team. So that's effectively that R&D amortization of 5 years coming through to the P&L. And just one last thing to fill out here is just so you've got more information. The effective tax rate is 25% here. It's shown as a credit just because we're in a loss-making position. As that loss-making position flips into profit, that tax credit will become a charge.

Then just on to the cash flow. So net cash flow from operating activities was GBP 2.8 million compared to GBP 0.1 million in the previous year, GBP 0.1 million of an outflow, sorry. So -- and that's been driven by the improvements in the EBITDA and the profitability improvements I just talked about and positive working capital movements. The working capital movement of GBP 1.2 million is really predominantly due to movements in the debtors' balances. So we had a larger debtor balance at the end of last year just due to the timing of shipments and orders coming in at the end of Q4. So that was just larger than normal. That's all kind of rolled off in this half. So that's creating that good cash inflow there.

An investment in R&D of GBP 2.8 million, that's the cash cost of R&D, the cost of our R&D engineers, slightly above prior period, up GBP 0.2 million, but that's very much driven by inflationary cost increases, nothing else exceptional happening there. GBP 0.5 million of dividends paid in the period, very much in line with prior period trends. We are awaiting a GBP 0.7 million R&D tax credit due from HMRC in relation to last year's tax credit due. That was originally expected before period end. So we're expecting it very shortly in this period. Continued -- and that continued improvement in revenue volumes in H2 in line with expectations will generate positive cash flows as we go through H2.

And just to pull all that together, revenue, we've seen good revenue growth and gross margin improvement supports the improvement in the profitability through this half. We do continue to invest in our R&D programs where we see revenue growth potential, and we are keeping a tight control of overheads and overheads are tracking to plan. We are making targeted hires in the front-end global sales and marketing teams, as Tommy mentioned, to support our continued growth. And we are confident in delivering continued growth in H2 and the FY '26 results in line with market expectations.

And I'll hand you back over to Tommy.

Thank you very much, Ashleigh. So let's just have a quick look at the strategy and then take a bit of a more deep dive into a couple of areas that we thought would help to give you a bit more color in terms of what we do and how we go about doing the business. So the strategy, if you've joined us before, looks pretty similar because it's exactly the same as it's been for a while. We really see 2 big market drivers that are not disconnected from one another. The first is the build-out of the mobile network infrastructure to provide that connectivity into the telecoms network. As we say, the telecoms industry is a bit slow at the moment, but it's still key in terms of what's happening.

And recently, there was an announcement that NVIDIA have invested in Nokia to really look at the next generation of mobile infrastructure, that kind of O-RAN network. That's the network that sits beside the radio towers. So we still see this as a very important area that it will come back. It's essential. And a lot of the technology that's used there is used in the other sectors that we focus on anyway. So from a technology point of view, it's important to keep in touch with that area to make sure we're well aligned with what's happening with network technology in all segments.

And then the second area we're looking for is to expand in the cloud computing and data center world and in the government and defense sectors. As I said, this is different in areas we all know there's significant growth happening. And it's really an area where we feel that there is an opportunity for us to expand our footprint and grow our business in these sectors. And thirdly, it's about acquisition and partnerships is the third strategy. We have done acquisitions in the past, and we continue to look for acquisitions, that will actually enhance our product portfolio or enhance our route to market to get us to new customers. The ones we have done in the past, there have been -- there's always an element of just right things at the right time. So it's not something that we can plan to do, but we continue to speak to many companies.

But in the group that actually focuses on that, they also look at the partnerships. So the partnership that I talked about we've just done with Viavi Wireless is really that group to look to see how we can extend our reach through partnerships as well as acquisitions as well as what we're doing in terms of the other markets and products. Our product portfolio really has 3 main parts to it, the Lab Sync, network sync and network and applications assurance. Just quickly for people are new to us, the Lab Sync is really where Calnex started. This is very much into this R&D test in the telecom space, and it's proven performance of transferring high accuracy time through the network, which is required by the mobile network.

What we're seeing is, of course, a lot of the -- that technology is also going into other places. So it was interesting in our 800 gig sales, whereas in the past, when we released leading-edge technology, it was always the big telecoms vendors where the first 10 units were sold into there. This time, we're actually seeing a lot of new names in there. People are actually servicing the data center world. So people are Arista, NVIDIA, Dell, they were actually buying 800 gig because that technology is now used in the data center world. So the move to -- this is a product that we have market leadership in. We've had for a number of years. We have a very strong position. And obviously, going to the 1.6 that I mentioned before is really important to keep moving that forward and show our customers that we're staying in the market and give them reassurance to invest in the platforms that when they need future technologies, we will be there and be able to offer them what they need.

The network sync is more about -- started really on the telecom space with the Sentinel, which was really focused on testing networks, again, the transfer of time through live networks. But we actually find that in some data centers, they're actually using time -- transferring time across the data center to synchronize all the servers because they actually find that they're actually far more efficient in terms of the bandwidth utilization that they can get from the servers. So the Sentry and the Sentinel product actually has about 80% technology leverage between them. They're actually virtually the same inside one another. There are differences, but they're relatively minor. But really from a market positioning, they are very different products and going to a different set of customers.

And then we have our network and application assurance products. These are effectively network emulators, the emulator network. Networks don't always work correctly. They have problems, things go missing, packets get lost, packets get repeated, packets get reordered, packets get delayed by different amounts. And that's what these products do. They emulate the failures to get in real networks so that if you're developing a new piece of equipment or a new application, then you can prove that once you've deployed it, it's going to work well. And we have a whole array of these products from the Ignite, which is a hardware-based solution, which really provides a high-end performance, a very accurate control and high-speed performance to the SNE, which is more about the low speed interfaces, but provides a far more complex network simulation.

And all these products are platform products in that when we produce our hardware-based customers, as Ashleigh described, can buy a new platform, they buy a number of software options and they can come back in the future and buy additional software options to enhance the capability they have. And we continue to invest in all the products that you can see here.

I thought it was worth taking a few minutes here to just look at the 3 segments that we talked about at the beginning, the telecoms, the data center cloud computing world and the government and defense and just kind of look at these markets and all these products sell into all these sectors. So it is a bit of a matrix format. But just to kind of give you a bit more color into them. First of all, the telecoms market, this is where Calnex started, and we have a very large installed base of over 1,500 units in the timing products. So what that means is we can very much continue to work with these customers. We can sell them upgrades. We've started looking to offer trade-in and upgrade programs. So if they've got earlier versions of the platform, move them to the latest version of the platform. That means when they need 800 gigs or 400 gigs or some other capability that's coming soon, they're in a stronger position to move to that very quickly. They just need to buy the option. They don't have to upgrade the platform at that time and replace it in the stand.

So that gives us a chance to effectively sweat that asset of a huge installed base out there and continue to show that we can add value to our customers. We're also looking to promote more strongly what we call our support service. So it's like a maintenance program where the products are under maintenance and you get software updates as well. Again, in the world of maintenance, it's like insurance, there are people that want it all the time. There are people that just won't buy it and the group in the middle that can be persuaded. And obviously, it's the ones in the middle that we're looking to persuade to take it who don't have it at the moment. And as we all go forward and more and more worried about software security, getting the patches, getting the software updated is something many companies are wanting to do more and more with the equipment. So again, hopefully, that is part of that revenue that we see as the only part that's repeat revenue in terms of the maintenance part.

But of course, we want to keep moving forward. And as I've mentioned a couple of times, the next big thing in the world of synchronization is doing it over 1.6 terabit interfaces. There are lots of other smaller enhancements. The standards are still really active in terms of -- in this area. So we continue to add enhancements. But we want to get to that 1.6 terabit. And we've just recently agreed an early access program to get access to our chipset that allows us to support these interfaces. This is a key thing because in terms of -- for us to do it, we need to get access to the technology that allowed us to build a test solution, which is not the same as a piece of the network equipment. So getting the technology is key for us. So we now have access to that. It's a very complex product. It will be hopefully an attractive product to our customers, high-margin, high-value product when it comes out, but it will take around 18 months to bring to market. So we're looking at the middle of 2027 or into FY '28 before we see revenue on that.

But this is still an important market. A lot of the technology that other sectors use really comes from the telecom sector. So we continue to stay in touch with customers. It's a base business that we want to continue to grow as the market grows, but we also want to extend our footprint looking into other areas. The first one of them is the cloud computing and data center world. Now we've been looking to work in this area for a number of years, and you can see that we already are quite successful. Almost half of our business is coming from this area. And we've had success with our timing products into the data center world, where, as I mentioned, some of the data centers and one hyperscaler in particular, has timed all the servers, and we provide the monitoring systems that ensure all the servers are received in accurate time. And that's been successful for us, and we look to replicate that with other hyperscalers.

We also have been successful selling the network emulation products for allowing them to prove performance of their infrastructure. And that's something we'll continue to build a footprint with and look to expand the people that we work with. As an aside to that, the standards have just approved a profile for the PTP protocol. The PTP protocol is a time stamp protocol that's which used to transfer time through Ethernet interfaces. And there's an overarching standard called 1588. But what they do is they create profiles, which is effectively like a subset of the standard that you want to use if you've got a particular application or sector. So like in telecoms, there's 3 profiles, there's a power profile, there's a number of profiles. So hopefully, this will encourage the data center world to adopt PTP more widely than that at the moment.

But of course, the whole data center world is being disrupted heavily by the arrival of AI. And what we are seeing is this huge change happening in terms of the architecture within these data centers, how are they going to be architected? Are they all going to be just in one big cloud wherever that is in the world? Or is there going to be edge data centers or edge computing sitting near the edge sitting next to the towers, again, referring back to the Nokia NVIDIA link up that they're doing some of the computing at the edge, so they got for machine-to-machine communication, they get far more predictability in terms of latency and response times and things.

And there's also things like inference testing. That's once you've built the model and it's working with the real-world situation, it uses the data that it collects from the real world to basically respond to. So there's so much change going on there. It's been quite a challenge and a lot of our discovery activity, this is when we're looking at right at the very end, front edge of our marketing. We do product marketing from the point of view with our customers that have our products sitting down and asking them what they need next, where they're going. But there's also about just looking at the market in general. And trying to understand where the opportunities are because there's a huge amount of money everybody knows that's flowing into this infrastructure. And it can be quite challenging to understand where we can see opportunities because they're just trying to move so fast that they want everything yesterday, let alone tomorrow.

So I think there's still a huge opportunity. There's so much change going there, and we made real progress over the last 6 months of trying to segment that opportunity and find real opportunities that we can take our current products to and start to engage with customers that will also help us understand future opportunities that we need to direct our road map to. So we are starting to do programs in the rest of this year in terms of engaging with customers. And hopefully, we'll see revenue from that in the next financial year.

And of course, we're utilizing that customer engagement we've built over the years of being able to go in with engineering teams when they ask for something and say, well, we don't quite have what you want today, but we have this, let's come in and sit down together and we can try and see if we can adjust your test plan to allow you to do testing along the lines of what you want to do today, which helps them, and it also helps us understand what's happening. So a really exciting area, a challenging area, but an area that we really spend a lot of time on our discovery activity to look for new opportunities going forward.

And lastly, the government and defense. Again, as we know from what's happening in the world, there's a lot more money going into these areas. And at the end of the day, they are just using network technologies that are coming from telecoms coming from other spaces. And we realize there's programs happening there that we can sell our current products in. So to date, it's not about changing our products, it's more about route to market, understanding how to sell into there. The first place that we address that we've been trying to increase the penetration, as we talked about at the last discussion is into North America. We've basically hired a salesperson with experienced selling into the federal. We've hired a channel manager to set up the right channel because you need different channel partners to sell into these customers than you do into the other ones and really trying to understand how the whole ecosystem works there, how we get part of these programs and ultimately sell into these programs.

So we're starting to see reasonable progress in terms of deals starting up here. So good progress there. And very much, we do believe there should be all the dynamics thinking about -- whether you're building for a federal department, whether you're building in a defensive environment, there's far more networking going on between assets. So that just means that there is a need to prove that it works under all conditions, whether there's problems with connectivity, et cetera. So everything tells us there's real opportunity in there, and that's what we're starting to see.

And of course, this is not just the U.S. It's increased its government spend. It's happening all over the world. And the next place that we will look is to expand our footprint in Europe. And the first 3 countries we're going to do starting really as we get into the next calendar year is the U.K., Finland and Sweden, which may seem a strange set of countries, but it's because it's where we have people and we have already got connections to partners that are working into these government spend programs. And so we'll build from there. It's not that you can just decide to do Europe because Europe, as we all know, is 20-plus, 30 countries. And especially in government spend, they all have different ways of working. So you really have to look at each country in turn and figure out how it works, who are the right partners we need to work with, how do we get part of these programs. And of course, in the future, we'll extend that in Europe to some of the other big countries like Poland, Germany, France, et cetera, to expand our footprint and hopefully build our business going forward.

So as we enter the second half of the year, we feel there's encouraging momentum in terms of what we're doing internally, both in internal processes and improving our sales channel, the whole way we market our products as well as in some of these initiatives that we've talked about in terms of expanding things. We expect to hit -- anticipate that we will hit market expectations at the end of the year. And we've continued to expand our market footprint. Telecoms will continue to be an important focus, but it's about building and expanding into other areas as well, not defocusing on telecoms, but increasing the focus on other places.

We have a strong balance sheet, and that allows us to continue to do this sort of targeted investment Ashleigh talked about into sales and marketing. And we believe we're well positioned with our products, with our operations and our contract manufacturing partners to respond when the market starts to grow and be able to deliver product as and when orders come in. And we believe we'll start to see through this next period better traction in some of these new areas where we've put significant effort in to expand the footprint.

So at that point, I shall stop and see if there's any questions.

I have a question Tommy, I can answer. So we've had a pre-submitted question before the webinar. The question is, what are the forecast growth rates for revenue/profit for the next few years? So [indiscernible] published the forecasts for our current year that you will be able to get access to. But just in terms of just to give you a kind of sense, we aim to grow at a low double-digit rate over the next few years, just given everything that Tommy has talked about in terms of the new end markets and the existing markets that we work in. That will then obviously then drive profitability. Our cost base is largely fixed.

If you ignore direct costs, obviously. If you think about admin costs and our R&D amortization, those costs are largely fixed. There are some variables in there. But effectively, if that growth starts to -- if we start to gain traction in that growth target, we should start to see that drop through to profit being very healthy. So that's effectively where we're aiming for the next few years. I hope that answers that question.

There is a second question here from James. How is the broadened partner network helping you deepen customer access in new markets? And what influence have you seen already in the quality of your pipeline?

Tommy touched on that through his slides on each of the end markets there. But effectively, the broadened partner network, and Tommy, you might want to add to this -- the broadened partner network gives us a lot more flexibility into these different end markets that we're facing into. So effectively, as Tommy was saying earlier about that sort of matrix of end markets, products and our partner network just gives us that flexibility to kind of move and shift into these end markets a lot -- the new end markets a lot easier.

And a good example there is that the defense slide that Tommy was talking about, linking in with resellers that have and distributors that have that connection into the prime contractors and the defense conversations just allows us a lot more accessibility into those conversations. And we are seeing that coming through when it comes to our pipeline and the conversations that we're having with our sort of longer-term view on forecast. So it does -- absolutely gives us that expanded view and expanded flexibility across the sort of global partner network. Tommy, I don't know if you want to add to that.

No, I think you've covered that well, Ashleigh. A question from David. Are you selling to [indiscernible] colocation data center providers such as Equinix, Data Reality NTT, CyprusOne and QTS. Yes and no. So for people that are from a colocate, there's often companies that actually provide data center capacity. So they build the infrastructure and actually host it and then lease it out to other providers. And some of them we're finding really just do as the company they are leasing the equipment to in terms of -- they just do what they're told in terms of building it. So they are not really thinking about how to build. They're just replicating what they're asked. There's other ones like Equinix who are far more engaged, and that's one of the people we do speak to.

So we are, again, trying to understand the ecosystem here of which ones are followers and who are leaders and trying to engage with who the ones are that are actually deciding their own infrastructure structure and see whether we can use development into customers. So they very much our part, although we talk about hyperscalers, we don't just focus on the hyperscalers that are making data centers. We focus on all the other people that are doing it as well.

Where are you seeing the most encouraging early customer demand inside telecoms? Well, it probably is in North America in the defense sector, but that kind of cause an effect. We're putting a lot of effort into to try and do things in there. So that's part of that. I think we're definitely making good progress there. We've got a set of partners. And in some ways, when you sign up partners, you don't just sign a contract and walk away and just wait for the POs come in. There really has to be quite a heavy engagement to train them, making sure they understand the type of people they should be looking for because these companies, some of them are really huge companies that sell many, many different sort of products.

So you have to kind of box above your kind of wait limit and make sure you get time and attention from them. So that whole exercise of managing partners, making it easy for them to sell, making it helpful, making sure they know what the right thing is to do when they're going and sell them is important thing. So we've got a number of partners there. The next stage is really bedding them and getting them going. We've got the contracts in place. Now we're bedding them in, getting them trained, understand where they get connectivity. And then after that, look to see is there still holes in our coverage and potentially, we may bring in other partners after that.

And of course, into the kind of through the discovery activity we're doing in the data center world, that's starting to show some interest in engagement with people where there might be kind of more medium-term opportunities coming our way from -- where we can see that our products can make a real difference to the test beds to test scenarios that customers are using. So again, that's probably further out. But hopefully, through the rest of this year, we start to see some more business coming in from the defense sector.

I've got a question here from [indiscernible]. Can you return to the profitability of 2022? Or has the business model changed?

That is our aim is to return to those profitability levels. So I would say from a business model perspective, I would say it's more our end markets that's changed. So our goal is to return to those profitability levels, but our end markets have changed since that time. That was very much telco driven. We don't want to rely on the telco market coming back to be able to give us that profitability. So for us, it's about gaining more traction into these different end markets that we've just been talking about. We do believe that will give us the growth that is required to return to those profitability levels.

Our cost base has obviously moved on since then has grown from an inflationary and from a targeted hires perspective. So obviously, that requires more revenue to drop down to the profit to give you those same levels. So there's a slight business model change there. But absolutely, that's our aim is to return to those levels once we once we gain more traction into these end markets.

That's great. Well, Tommy, Ashleigh, thank you very much for answering those questions from investors. Of course, the company can field the questions submitted today, and we will publish the responses out on the Investor Meet Company platform. But just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to you both, Tommy, can I just ask you for a few closing comments?

Sure. So thank you very much, everyone, for joining Ashleigh and I today. We appreciate you taking the time. I guess where we feel we are today, we have got a good reputation in the market, our heritage in telecoms and the relationships we've developed with people gives us a strong connection into the whole world of networking. And we feel that's critical going forward and has always been critical from an innovation in terms of directing innovation into products that can deliver real value and real business. We've also seen an increase in diversity in our customers. We've talked about telecoms where we started, we're not going away from telecoms, but we are seeing a wider spread of customers, which is good, and it allows us to spread our business so that we can get in that pie chart we showed at the beginning, a more equal balance not by selling less to telecoms, but by selling more to others. And as a company, having a more diverse customer base gives us more stability going forward as all and less sensitive to the ebbs and flows of every technology sector.

We're still continuing to see innovation as a key in terms of delivering into our products and our position in the market with our investment in 1.6. And also in the SME, we're continuing to look at the next rates in there and higher capability, and we would expect to continue to innovate in all these products, which is core to who we are and what we deliver to our customers. We have a strong financial position. As we talked about, we want to get back to higher profit levels, but we have been carefully managing our cash situation. We're in a good position that if we do see opportunities, we can move quickly as everybody needs to do to basically have targeted investment and go after these opportunities.

And when we look at the underlying market drivers, they are still strong. There is obviously a lot of activity. But fundamentally, the areas we are focused on need to grow to deliver what the world needs moving forward from the smart technologies from the smart cities. And within the company, we have a very experienced team. We feel we're well positioned. We have good experience in various companies, and we've just enhanced that with bringing in new VPs as well. So a really strong management team that are ready to react to what's happening in front of us and make sure we can maximize the business. So thank you again for taking the time. And hopefully, we'll see you next time.

That's great. Well, Tommy, Ashleigh, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of Calnex Solutions plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.