This year has seen SRT transform into a global maritime system integration company,
providing a broad range of maritime domain awareness (MDA) solutions to the leisure, commercial and security market
segments. We closed the year having achieved our financial targets with 25% year-on-year revenue growth, a
substantial contracted forward order book, and an increasing validated sales opportunity pipeline.
Group revenue increased year-on-year by 25% to £10.7 million with a profit before tax of
£0.3 million compared to £8.5 million and a loss of £0.4 million respectively in the previous financial year. The
gross profit margin was 48% which is broadly in line with our long term target of 50%. Cash overheads remained
tightly controlled at the same level compared to the previous year. Gross cash stood at £1.8 million with saleable
stock valued at a cost of £4.3 million.
Revenue growth was primarily driven by our projects business which accounted for
approximately 50% of sales, where we provide a customised, turn-key MDA solution to countries in the form of our
integrated SRT Maritime Domain Management (MDM) product. During the year we closed and completed a US$5.3 million
project in the Middle East, and signed a contract worth up to US$100 million for an MDM system for an Asian country which
will be supplied in phases over the next three years, of which US$2.9 million was delivered during the financial year
under review. We have a significant and growing pipeline of validated project sale opportunities, most of which
have made substantial progress towards contract signing during the year. Coupled with our contracted forward order
book, I expect this to be a significant growth driver in the new financial year and further into the future.
Sales from our OEM, module and direct to dealer sales channels which primarily address the
global leisure and commercial markets grew 5% year-on-year despite challenging general market conditions. AIS is
now a standard technology in the marine industry, sitting alongside radar in terms of importance and utility, and we
therefore expect to see steady annual growth for many years across all market segments.
We continued to see demand from the EU Inland Waterway and Fisheries mandates as
enforcement action has now started following the fit deadline in early 2015. The USCG AIS transceiver mandate which
was announced on 30 January 2015 with a fit deadline of 3 April 2016 has not yet resulted in the expected surge in
demand. We believe that this is due to a combination of factors, including a significant percentage of those
vessels affected being out of operation due to the poor economic climate and minimal enforcement thus far. It is
now our view that this latent demand will show in sales over the next few years as effective enforcement action is
applied. We saw additional renewed mandate activity in other markets such as Russia, Mauritius and Colombia which
we believe generated some sales for our distribution network during the year and will continue to do so in the
future.
We continued to build our market position in the Ports, Waterway & Infrastructure
market segment where we offer a range of monitoring solutions leveraging our core GeoVS and AtoN products. Sales
during the year were £0.3 million with a high profit margin, but most importantly end customer understanding of these
solutions and projects to implement these complex systems have developed significantly over the period which should
reflect in increasing contract conversions in the future, generating a highly profitable business segment for
SRT.
I am therefore pleased to report that SRT has made significant progress across all MDA
geographic and application market segments. The forward visibility of sales opportunities has notably improved during the
year primarily due to the progression of our project MDM opportunities and we look forward to continuing our successful
delivery of those under contract and adding more to our order book and our pipeline in the future.
Operational Review
We have maintained a significant level of R&D investment, but with a greater
proportion focused on our GeoVS display and data management product group to support our MDM system offer. On the
transceiver side we have undertaken various software related enhancements to our existing products to include additional
functionality. On our GeoVS product we have made significant functionality additions that are focused around
enabling users to better harness and understand the large amounts of data generated by these systems. Going forward
we shall continue to develop new hardware products to address the evolving international AIS standards and aggressively
expand the functionality and capability of our GeoVS VIEWER and GeoVS HUB products.
With the growth in the number of active and soon to be active projects, we have
significantly expanded our Customer Support department. We have successfully completed our first phase of this
expansion which, in conjunction with our local in-country partners, gives us the resources to simultaneously support
several MDM projects.
Market Review
Marine domain awareness is a significant global market. The market covers a wide
range of applications from port security, port efficiency, maritime border security, fishery monitoring, search and
rescue, environment monitoring and general waterway management. AIS has evolved to become a critical technology in
all of these applications due to its proven and flexible functionality which in turn has placed SRT in a strategic
position within the MDA market.
AIS is used within the general leisure and commercial markets to improve general maritime
security and as more commercial boats comply with expanding rules and regulations requiring its use, we expect to see
more non-mandated vessels to elect to acquire an AIS transceiver. With many millions of leisure and commercial
boats in the EU and US, we believe that this offers SRT and its OEM and module customers a significant long term market
opportunity which will grow gradually. SRT's full range of AIS product solutions and established sales channels
into these market segments places SRT in a good position to benefit from this developing market demand.
In recent years, the importance of maritime exclusive economic zones (EEZ) for reasons of
security and economics has been recognised by many countries, resulting in new initiatives to implement policies and
systems which enhance their protection. The starting point for this is to identify and track marine activity in
these zones and through data analysis, identify potential threats and or illegal activities. These are significant
national projects which involve the provision of physical infrastructure, intelligent data management and display systems
and AIS-based vessel identification transceivers. These national scale projects present a significant opportunity
to SRT and one which we have started to crystallise following many years of working with governments and authorities
around the world to plan these large national scale projects. Today we have visibility of a significant number of
potential projects of which a subset worth over £200 million are sufficiently progressed to qualify for our validated
sales opportunity pipeline and thus have the potential to convert within a three year time horizon.
Employees
SRT now has 45 full time employees, operating out of two offices: one in Cardiff and the
head office in Somerset. We benefit from a rare capability of being able to develop our own sophisticated products
entirely in-house to a standard which we believe is unmatched in our market. Our reputation for high quality,
innovative products backed up by robust technical and sales support, is directly attributable to the skills and
commitment of the SRT team. I would like to thank all our employees for another year of dedication and hard work
towards delivering SRT's objectives.
Outlook and Strategy
SRT's strategy is to maintain our position as the world's leading developer and provider
of AIS technologies, products and systems and to provide a range of derivative maritime domain awareness solutions for
mariners, infrastructure owners and maritime security agencies such as Coast Guards and Navies with customised turn-key
solutions with AIS functionality at their core. The worldwide adoption of AIS as a technology and our proven
position in that market, puts SRT in an advantageous position to become one of the world's leading providers of not
only black box and module AIS product solutions, but also of sophisticated turn-key maritime security and monitoring
system solutions for ports, infrastructure and national maritime borders.
We expect to see the continuing conversion of projects into contracts from our validated
sales opportunity pipeline as well as more projects qualifying for inclusion before converting into contracts, thereby
generating substantial and sustainable growth in the future. Whilst such growth will not be without challenges, SRT
has proven its expertise and capability to successfully design and deliver such systems and has taken steps to ensure
that, working in conjunction with its partners, it is well able to handle the implementation of multiple projects
simultaneously.
I therefore look forward to a particularly exciting year for SRT and would like to take
this opportunity to thank our customers, partners, employees and shareholders for their work and
support.
Simon Rogers, Chairman
CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF PROFIT OR LOSS AND OTHER COMPREHENSIVE INCOME FOR THE YEAR ENDED
31 MARCH 2016
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