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Cybersecurity attacks continue to be an existential threat to businesses and organizations – particularly as the move to continue to work from home in the wake of COVID-19 becomes more prevalent – and shows no signs of slowing down. In combating cyberthreats, according to a report the global market for managed cyber security services was estimated to exceed 22-billion-dollars in the year 2020. That number is projected to reach over
$60 billion dollars by 2027.
Now, companies like
GlobeX Data Ltd. (
CSE.SWIS,
OTCQB: SWISF,
Forum) are working to reduce the threat of cybersecurity attacks. The Toronto-based cybersecurity company is also an internet privacy provider of Swiss-hosted solutions, including secure data management and secure communications distribution, secure cloud-based storage, disaster recovery, document management, encrypted e-mails, and secure communication tools…among many others.
In this video Q&A exclusive, Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson talks to the man behind this incredible, forward-thinking company – Chief Executive Officer, Alain Ghiai.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: Alain, can we start off with you providing us a brief overview of yourself and your company?
AG: Sure. Thank you, Dave. So basically what we do, we started a company in Switzerland about 12 years ago called GlobeX Data as a myself majority shareholder. It's a private company and we did a spin off about three years ago and we spun off the whole it an exchange for a 10% royalty to Switzerland. The reason why we did that, we wanted to go public in the Canadian market. We did a pure IPO from scratch in July 2019, raise some money pre and post IPO. And essentially the idea is to make North America the hub for our international sales. So what we do is we have two applications, one of them called SekurSafe, spelled SEKUR SAFE is essentially it's a document management password manager found share, and it comes with an encrypted email system. And then we have our newest application called Sekur and Sekur basically has a combo of an email and a messaging application.
So if you will think of, for example, not so private systems like Gmail Office 365 and so forth, we have our own proprietary tech and we have the privacy on email. And instead of using WhatsApp, for example, you may want to use secure messenger because you don't want to conduct business on Facebook. So that's what we offer. We also have a spun of version of Sekur called Sekur Messenger. We're spinning that off probably by the end of May. So does the business model is a subscription model. Anybody can go on our website, Sekur.com. You're by secure for $10 US a month or a hundred a year. And then secure messenger will only be $3 a month or $30 a year. We're also planning a global platform. Hopefully, I would say by mid June where a Canadian customer can come and get Canadian pricing.
An Australian one Australian pricing, in Switzerland will be in Swiss franc and so forth. So they don't have that expensive conversion with their bank and credit card. And that will be tailored specifically to each market. SekurSafe is a bit more pricey because it tailors to SMBs and enterprise it retails for $50 US per user per month. Now our email system has and in fact our whole system has two or three things that nobody else does. First of all, we have a proprietary technology. So we don't use a new open source. We are not hosted on the big tech platforms. We've heard a lot about big tech lately in the last few months, that will be Amazon web service, you know, or Facebook, Microsoft, Google, et cetera. So we have our own proprietary tech. It's all hosted in our own servers in Switzerland.
And we also have this risk privacy laws that protect our user’s data.Because of our own proprietary tech. And we're not using a US infrastructure. We are not we don't have to comply with what we call the Cloud Act. The Cloud Act, that's a new law that came into US in 2019 that dictates that even if the data is in Europe or anywhere else, if you use a US service, that data is basically duplicatable in the us and they can subpoena. So this is a big thing because 99% of people use these main platform. In fact signal, which is a messaging app is on AWS and then WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook. It's its own us infrastructure. So what do we offer is essentially a full privacy high security in communications? And our target markets are typically businesses, C-Level executives, government, or simply individuals who are looking for that privacy aspect because we don't data, mine, anything. We're the only company that doesn't data mine. I mean, you pay us. It's like the old Swiss banking system I'm from Switzerland, of course. So we like privacy a lot. It's kind of in our DNA, you pay us, and that stuff stays private. In fact, it's illegal. According to Swiss law, to even divulge the IP address of a customer. So the Swiss laws are ultra strict, much stricter than any other privacy laws in the world. Really right now one more thing I would like to add about our Sekur messenger and Sekur email. We have a feature in our email called secure sent. So maybe our viewers don't know this, but even if you use a secure email, when you send an email to somebody else outside of your organization, essentially that email becomes an open postcard.
It's like basically transporting gold bars on a bicycle and being exposed to the elements and the thieves and everybody that will steal it, just like data or having a Brinks truck, you know, or let's say a FedEx courier as opposed to an open postcard. So we have a thing called Sekur send a user can send an email to anybody in the world, even somebody that has Gmail or Yahoo or other, not so secure email, obviously the recipient can click on the link and then they can do Sekur reply using that same advantage of the privacy. Because a lot of time an email will be sent, let's say, by a bank, you receive it. Then new email ride back with your bank statement. Maybe you do a real estate transaction, and you're going to email all your tax returns. And this is why we see 95% of all data theft is through email.
We call that business email compromise or fishing, et cetera. And then for the messaging, which is revolutionary, where the only company that doesn't require your phone number, when you download Sekur, we never asked for your phone number. That means nobody even knows you're using it. We don't social engineer, your address book. We don't just upload all your contacts on the system. And the other cool thing is that you can send a secure message to somebody that doesn't have the app. So if I use Sekur messenger and I want to send you Dave, a message and you don't have secure, you'll get an email that says, Hey, Anna wants to chat with you. Click here, you click. And now we're live chatting. We can even create groups. We can do file transfer. I can do voice transfer. And when the transaction has received as complete, I can terminate that entire conversation.
And it will disappear from all your devices, including mine, because you hear about self-destruct and on WhatsApp, you can delete messages. They have a copy on the servers. We delete everything down to bare metal. And we also delete at the recipient level. We also have a self-destruct timer. We've got a few cultures. I encourage everybody to go to secure.com and check it out. So it was a bit of a long explanation, but we have an extremely unique technology and service that is now gaining a lot of attention. And there were a few catalysts this year that, that came, that basically gave us more materiality and more popular in ours.
SH: The company is Swiss-based and stores user data in Switzerland. What was is the advantage behind storing data in Switzerland over other regions?
AG: Well, I started storing data in Switzerland in 2006 and back then people told me the cloud is only in the US and being from Switzerland, we know that privacy is critical. We have the data privacy of a physical and a moral person, a moral person in the legal term means a corporation. I knew that privacy was going to be something that is going to be priced more and more. As a matter of fact, we never lowered our prices. We either increased them and increase the future. So having your data stored in Switzerland and also being a proprietary tech, because you could have a server in Switzerland, Amazon is in Switzerland, but that's not going to protect you on against the cloud app. So you need to be in Switzerland and now you need to be proprietary. Whereas before being in Switzerland alone was good enough. We have the strictest data, privacy laws in the world, and privacy now has a price because everybody's being data mined, right? It's not just being in Switzerland. We also don't data mine. That's a critical thing to mention because we don't even have cookies on our website. We've never had those things. I hear it as a backlash now, but we've never even had that. So Switzerland is critical because it is the leading country for data privacy.
SH: Tormont Group – a capital structure advisory company – just issued a research report on the company. Can you walk us through some of the report’s highlights and the significance of this for GlobeX?
AG: Sure. So the Tormont report, which I fully disclose, we pay a tournament, a yearly advisory fee. It's kind of monthly. The idea with Tormont is to push two 73 high net worth family offices, as we say buy-side only funds. So no hedge fund is our people that invest in the kind of invest for the long-term. In that service, they produce a report which they sent you. There are 73 institutions. In fact, we have another call end of the month with 70 retail broker. So it's a boutique investment, I guess, a boutique corporate advisory firm, a premium one, I should say because they have decades of experience. In the report, we were very transparent. So the analyst who is an ex-Goldman Sachs, and I think Bear Stearns. So somebody would over 20 years of experience, I looked at everything that we have our contracts and our projected potential cash flow, et cetera.
So we came up with this table of what are we going to make on a monthly recurring basis at the end of December 2022, So we looked at how many consuming consumer user we're going to have mostly in the us as we're launching. Now, we looked at 29,000 users in the U.S. at the end of 2022. We feel we can achieve that. We looked at 5,000 Remax users. We signed a deal with Remax. They have 90,000 agents in the US and Canada. We looked at 20,000 users from Latin America. I should mention we're launching this month and into next are Sekur messenger with the largest telecom operator in Latin America called America Movil the seventh biggest in the world. So we definitely should be able to make our target of 20,000 user. And we adjust announced a contract with a leading South Asian telco that basically we're going to get probably 20- 25,000 user with them.
So assuming that we get all of these different price range for each country and your service and different revenue share, they came up at a number of about half a million dollars a month, Canadian in basically free cashflow monthly. So profit every month. Of course, there's no guarantee because you know, we are in the business of speculating here. However, the goal of the company is to meet or exceed this at the very least come extremely close to it. And their calculation is, well, if you make 6 million a year in profit, you're trading at X amount, cash flow, et cetera. That's where the finance specialists come in. And I'm not an expert in that obviously, but the report is very well put together. It's on our website, Globexdatagroup.com. We have that report. We have other things. So I encourage everybody to go to our website, take a look at it. We have another research report that should come in the next six weeks. I think they have a price target on that. Whereas Tormont, it's more gentle. It's more of a general thing. Here's this company, here's a market here's, what's unique. And here's what, you know, the company thinks they can get by the end of 2022.
SH: As you know all too well, cybersecurity attacks continue to seriously threaten businesses and organizations around the globe. Why do you think that is, and what should companies be doing differently to mitigate risk?
AG:Well, first of all, I think I found it on a city TV. I think a couple of years ago, data is the new oil and data is something that's infinite because if you are not going to work from work to home and we will have our phone, we're going to create new data. You're going to text. Maybe you're going to buy something with your phone. You know how you can do tap and go. You have all sorts of electronic payments. Now that's also another big danger because anything that emits an electronic signal is subject to hackers at the end of the day. And it's scary. Now data is something that if it's stale and it's a month or two old, it has low value. So typically hackers are constantly trying to grab the data to resell it in the dark web openly.
I mean, Microsoft sold data to Facebook that was legitimate. And then you have hackers that would sell your credit card information in the dark web. And you know, they have to sell it fast because after a week it's useless. All your credit card data is a money-making business for legitimate businesses and for hackers as well, the hacking will only get worse. I mean, two days ago, I read about Chase Bank, JP Morgan Chase that had a massive email phishing attack, even though they use exchange email from Microsoft and all the security patches on top Microsoft itself had a massive hack called the solar wind hack. And the source code of Microsoft was stolen. According to articles that we read everywhere, we don't know if it's from Russia or China, it's really irrelevant. At this point, it shows that when a company like Microsoft can have its source code stolen, and that is the problem with open source because millions of people work on this solution at the end of the day, you know, the secret sauce is not so secret anymore.
If you had 20 million people working on the Coca-Cola formula, you could recreate the Coca-Cola formula, right? So we are the Coca-Cola formula of cybersecurity because it's proprietary. We keep it tight, and we don't let anybody work on it. So hacking is going to get only worse. There's criminal organizations that make a lot of money. I heard you earlier at the show talking about some of the stats. Let me throw your stat. As of 2021, a cyber is costing the global economy, $6 trillion us a year. This is a thing from the OECD or the world economic forum, which is an organization that has all these stats. So hacking is only going to get worse. So what you can do, first of all, protect your connection. Don't go on wifi everywhere. At least make it secure. And I'm not talking about going to Starbucks and getting a passport for your wifi, real security.
Also, if you use a free service, you are the product and it's not so much the company that's going to hack you. Let's say you use a free service that company because they give you the free service. They're only interested in your data. They're not going to secure their servers so well; a hacker can come and hack that company. This is what happened to many. I mean, I can name a hundred of them and it's not the company's fault. Technically it's not like they just want to hack you. A hacker went there and stole that info. Now it's on the dark web. That company only wanted to make a thousand bucks a month from you. But the priority here for businesses is they are not interested in protecting your data. And they certainly are not interested in your privacy because they make money from your data every day.
So if you're using an email service and I'm going to be biased here, obviously you can't get rid of Microsoft because we run our life on it. But if you want some secure communication and you do some business, don't use WhatsApp, don't use other free service, you know, use a service like ours, and you can use it in parallel. You know, we have discussions with businesses, and they can't migrate all of their people overnight. So typically the C-level executives or somebody that says, you know, I want that secure envelope. When I send an email back and forth, they use it in parallel. Don't be afraid about spending five, $10 a month. How much is your data worth? By the way, little stat: When you have your identity stolen, it costs minimum $30,000 US. By the time you're done just to recoup things and get back them from scratch. And I'm not talking about the emotional unrest, of course.
SH: Your company also recently received approval from a South Asian telecom operator for its secure email and messaging application. What exactly is Sekur and what does this approval mean for the company?
AG: I'm going to mention the name because we're going to have a press release by the time you deploy this message, it'll be out there. So the company name is Axiata Group, A X I A T A. It's a massive telecom operator in, based in Malaysia, publicly traded. They have 150 million subscribers. And in six countries that is emerging market. I mean, America Movil within Latin America has 270 million subscriber. But what I like about Seattle, they are very nimble. They only have 12,000 employee as opposed to America Movil a quarter million employees. So the bureaucracy is a lot bigger in Latin America, whereas where we dealt with. So we signed with dialogue Axiata, which is in Sri Lanka. They have 15 million user. It's a very respected company. What it means is that now businesses in Sri Lanka, which is a country will have very close ties actually.
I was there before, right before COVID, they're able now to use our Sekur Messenger, our Sekur mail. And what's interesting is the government of course, is interested at changing the legacy system, the old emails, et cetera, because they suffer hacks on a daily basis. The ministry of finance is hacked a thousand times a month. I was there in 2020. I met all the senior government level executives, the defense, and businesses. And there's a real need for security. They have an amazing new president who himself was a technologist, mind you, and also in the defense department. So marrying technology and security, it's just a perfect for that country. This president is doing amazing work. So having access to dialogue as a partner, it's like having AT&T in the us, you know, who is not going to come to you after that. So we plan to deploy, of course, the solution in the next three months or four months, and then eventually grow it.
And our hope is that within two years, once it grows in Sri Lanka, we can move to the other countries of the group. And you can have touched on something that it finds me say unlock to comment at the beginning, the company signed a lot of reseller agreement because you know your hustle, you tried to see what works, you know, who's going to get you to business.Today We have two very simple strategy. One is to go globally direct to consumers, starting with the us. And the other one is only to deal with large telecom operator and maybe a couple of very big distributors, like Synnex Canada, which is the one that we started. They distributed it service to all the managed service providers and they have 6,000 resellers. I'm very happy in prophecy that even through COVID and everything where we're able to sign, they're very eager to promote the service. They know there's a market. They don't know how big because there is no solution like that in that country. They've been selling Microsoft and Google and Zimbra forever the same three email service. And now this will be a new experience.
SH: Does the company plan on making agreements in other regions for the platform?
AG: Absolutely. So in fact this is good because I was going to say now having to telecom operator, it's no longer an accident. It becomes a trend. So we hope to get a North American telco. We may get a middle East one, but you know, having America Movil which has Carlos Slim's company, if you Google Carlo Slim, one of the wealthiest men in the world, we start in Mexico, but they're all over Latin America. So hopefully next year we'll do Columbia, Brazil, Peru, I mean, Panama. I have a contact that helped me out. I may get a North American lead, if not, we're looking at a Middle East Telco. So I think my goal, I was thinking about it actually this morning, one telecom a year would be amazing. This is a long-term story. We are here for the many years to come.
I want to stress that this is not a story of a stock in the next 90 days. This is a business that we're building that comes with recurring revenue, innovative solution that we continually innovate and therefore having one telecom a year would be great. I mean, I'm hoping I can get a Telco in Canada, but I think if we get a little bit more hacks in Canada, that that would basically be announced that immediate, because you do get hacked everyday in Canada, but you don't announce it. The media is very hush hush on it. I think slowly it's opening up. Maybe one of these three Telco’s in Canada will contact us. We are integrated with the platform that Rogers’ users. So Rogers would be the easiest to turn on the platform, but they may not be interested. So I think in the last quarter of the year, we're going to really approach aggressively North American Telco’s and say, Hey, you know, we have these two other companies. They love the product. Why don't you try it?
SH: What other highlights does GlobeX Data have in the pipeline that investors should watch out for this year?
AG: So the big picture I have a five-year timeframe. Not every investor can have that. Of course. And then I mentioned the attributes of the company, but in terms of what we have in the pipeline. So this year it's all about the launch in the US. We have several media companies that we have contracted and are still contracting. And this media company, we're just signed up with one, that's going to put us in front of Bloomberg, Fox business, Newsmax. We're looking at millions of household watching their program. It's going to put secure in front of a particular audience that is really privacy sensitive. So we're looking at 50 to 70 million people as an audience. So we're going to push heavily in the US through TV. They have these podcasts that people have, and we sponsor those podcasts. Some of these personalities have six, 700,000 followers on Twitter.
So we're doing a whole campaign on that. Thank God in the US they have more lax email rules, as long as it's CAN-SPAM. And we can buy a professional email list. We identified 800,000 C-level executive that will be basically potential clients for us. So we're going to do the email, et cetera. So the US is going to be a big push for us. Then of course, Latin America, we have two big partner, America Movil starting this month. And the next in Mexico with our messaging app, we are basically going to push until the end of the year and beyond. Of course, then we have another partner, the largest cyber security distributor in the continent called Micronet. We're planning to start in June to do some marketing with them, educate them, et cetera. So they can start selling to their distributors. You know, Latin America is still recovering from COVID.
We don't expect a huge amount this year, but as long as it starts to keep going. So that's going to be on autopilot and then Sri Lanka with Axiom, a dialogue, that's going to be a good start. So this year we have three huge markets starting us, Latin America, Sri Lanka, and maybe, maybe Australia. We have a representative there. We're just doing some little groundwork. It's a little bit slow, but lately we've seen so many hacks over there that I think we'll get sales in Australia. The next two to three years, we're going to push the existing markets. Of course we can't forget about Canada. We hope that we're going to get a telco here or good distribution, but definitely, and maybe in the middle East. So the next two years, we're going to push heavily the existing market. Maybe grab a couple more. We're also going to launch a couple of new products.
So in September, we're launching SekurPro.SekurPro is basically our answer to Zoom and Teams from Microsoft. There'll be voice and video and conferencing. It'll have the email and the chat as well. It'll be $50 us per user per month. There'll be typically for C-level executives. Show government officials would like that to, or high net worth individuals at $50US it's really affordable because businesses spend hundreds of thousands to protect their communication. So it could be, you know, a crisis management tool. It could be a conferencing tool for the senior strata of a company. We're pretty excited. And by September, October, because of what I've had, this kind of awareness of our company to the masses and to C level executives, I think that SekurPro will come in as a natural add on. We also have another solution that we are going to launch where licensing in a perpetual license from a Swiss company.
Actually all of the principals are shareholders of GlobeX. And they have this basically this AI artificial intelligence to filter content on the web. So we plan to launch this as a separate service. So that way we have the gamut, you protect your communication, you protect the content that gets filtered to your device. And then of course you have the voice and video and conferencing. So in terms of product range, we're pretty excited about what's happening. We're going to draw a global platform as I discussed, and then something about our company. First of all, I always say I have one other company that I invested that has these elements. First, you need to look at management. I am going to be biased, but I'm going to tell you what people tell me our own retail shareholders tell us that they're very happy with how we manage our company.
Very happy with how I run things as well with our team. So management, I'm going to say amazing management. I don't take a salary by the way, or a management fee. I have a big shareholding in the company and I'm waiting for my dividend because we do plan to pay a dividend after our first year of full profit to everyone. So that's something to look forward as a growing business. We have the cash now, we have plenty of cash and no debt, no convertible, no debenture. That's rare. We have more cash in the bank. Then what we need to be profitable. That's critical when you invest in a business, we have the product and the demand for the product. So I encourage anyone that has a bit of a timeframe. You know, if you're not a as a speculator for, for quick returns, if you have a medium and long-term view, take a look at us.
We're trading at a 15 million market cap. And I mean we have way more than that as a value of easily. And it's a recurring revenue model, you know, and just to throw a number out there. If we get 5,000 full price, the $10 a month full price from the US 5,000 people, it pays for the bills on the company. So between that, the telco and everybody else, plus what we have already, because we're getting revenues already. We see profitability conservatively inside of 18 months. More like inside of 12. I'm very careful when I make speculative prediction. So I'm going to say 18 months just to be on the safe side. But if you're going to be in a tech company, that's going to be profitable within less than a year and a half with recurring revenue and the management and the cash position and the product that we have. And we're in a very unique position. Not many people are in this position,
SH: Is there anything else you’d like to touch on that I might have overlooked?
AG: Well shout out to all my shareholders. If I may, especially the so-called small shareholders, there's no small shareholder in our company. Everybody's important. I get a tremendous amount of help and interest from our retail shareholder. Some of them, one of them just introduced me to a reseller potentially in the UK. Other people love the product, they buy the test. So thank you for supporting the company. That's one thing, follow us on Twitter @globexdata. And yeah. Thank you for everyone who supported us and whoever is watching this. If you're thinking about it, I recommend if you have like a 12-to-24-month timeline you know, take a, if you have some speculative risk money and you want to get into the tech industry definitely, I would recommend that you take a hard look at us and, and dip into it a little bit.
Again, thank you to everyone who supports us. The website is globexdatagroup.com, If you forget that you can also go to sekur.com, which is a solution by globexdatagroup.com is the website, if you type articular in Canada, Swis S W I S, in the US. S W I S F if you type the take care of, you'll see news, we have a very steady flow of news, especially lately we're on Yahoo finance. You can find all our news. And then in the news release on the bottom, you can always go to our corporate site.
For regular updates, visit
globexdatagroup.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.