Calian Group Ltd. (CGY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
February 11, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Kevin Ford
executiveGood afternoon, everyone. My name is Kevin Ford. I'm the CEO of Calian Group. Before we begin, I just want to set the stage for the next hour. Shortly, I will be passing the floor to George Weber, Chair of our Board of Directors, and he will conduct the formal proceedings of our Annual General Meeting. Following the formal AGM proceedings and the completion of the voting, Patrick Houston and I will provide a management update. We acknowledge that we are on a virtual platform this year using a new software called Lumi and understand there may be some technical issues, which we'll work through live, and I want to thank you in advance for your patience. This is our first time in a virtual format and appreciate that maybe some of you are first time here as well. There are instructions on how to use the platform, which can be found on the left-hand side of your screen, including how to submit questions at applicable times during the meeting. At this time, I'd like to pass the meeting over to George to conduct the AGM. Over to you, George.
George Weber
executiveThank you very much, Kevin. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Calian Group Limited Annual Meeting. As Kevin mentioned, I am George Weber. I'm the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Calian Group. I'm speaking to you today from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. With me here in this room, of course, at a safe distance and wearing double masks, are Kevin Ford, our President and CEO; and Patrick Houston, our CFO and Corporate Secretary. Although we are disappointed that we can't see each of you today in person, our thoughts are with you, your families and the communities you serve. We want to thank you for your patience as we navigated through this unprecedented situation and hope that you agree that we did the right thing by moving to an electronic meeting in light of the circumstances. [Operator Instructions] We'll be limiting the questioning and answers during this time to the formal proceedings of the AGM. Therefore, we would ask that you refrain from asking questions that are not in direct relation to the formal proceedings of the AGM. If you would like to ask a question related to the business results, I would ask that you wait until after the formal proceedings and that you do so in the management update or, if you so desire, please contact our investor resources e-mail following the meeting today. The voting procedure will appear on the left side of your screens as well. Now on to the actual AGM. I will now call this meeting to order, and I'll ask Patrick Houston to act as Secretary of the meeting; and Kay Harrison and [ Tony Tacondra ] of Calian's transfer agent, AST Trust Company, to act as scrutineers. Also present in our meeting is our external auditor and our legal counsel, the latter who will advise us on any meeting procedures if required. Calian has been provided with an affidavit of mailing from AST Trust Company, confirming the mailing of the meeting materials. The scrutineer has advised us that there are 63 shareholders holding 6,849,576 common shares represented in person or by proxy at this meeting. This represents 69.86%, I would say that's kind of a record for us, of the 9,804,520 issued and outstanding common shares as of the record date for this meeting. Therefore, I declare the meeting to be regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. Registered shareholders and policyholders attending a meeting of shareholders may address the meeting when there is a call to discuss a motion before the meeting. Should you like to address the Chair on any motion, please type in your question or comment in the message section. If there's any discussion or question, the Secretary will read the question aloud. We will conduct the votes on matters before us via poll. On a poll, every shareholder entitled to vote on the matter as 1 vote in respect of each share entitled to be voted on, on the matter and held by that shareholder. We will be concluding on the motions at the end of the meeting once we have been through all of the agenda items. Voting polls on the agenda items for today's meeting will be closed together at the end of the formal proceedings of the AGM. A poll will now be open for all resolutions at this time. I'd ask that Lumi confirm when that is done, please. Thank you. The polls are now open. This will allow you to choose to vote on each resolution immediately or to wait until conclusion of discussion on each resolution prior to casting your vote. The first matter to be considered are the financial statements. The company's audited financial statements for the year ended September 30, 2020, approved by the Board of Directors on November 24, 2020, were made available to shareholders in accordance with the Canada Business Corporations Act. Should there be any questions about the financial statements, we would ask that you reach out to the Investor Relations contact at Calian after the meeting has concluded. The next item of business is the Directors to be elected. The number of Directors currently holding office is 7 and has been proposed that 7 Directors should be elected at this meeting. The following 7 individuals were identified in the management information circular that accompanied notice of this meeting for election as Directors. They are: George Weber, myself; Jo-Anne Poirier; Ray Basler; Kenneth Loeb; Young Park; Ronald Richardson; and Kevin Ford. Will a shareholder please make the motion to nominate these individuals for elections as Directors?
Unknown Attendee
attendeeMr. Chair, I move that the individuals named be nominated for election as Directors.
George Weber
executiveThank you very much, Will. Would a shareholder please second the motion? Patrick Houston, who is in the room with me, has raised his hand to second the motion. Thank you very much, Patrick. Is there any discussion of this motion? Seeing no questions at this time, I will now proceed to the vote on the motion before the meeting. Will all registered shareholders and proxy holders voting delegates please enter your votes in Lumi. [Voting]
George Weber
executiveOkay. Thank you very much, Lumi. They tell me -- the technicians tell me we can proceed. So we will now move on to the next item of business and present the vote -- represent the vote on voting results for both matters at the end of the formal part of the meeting. The next item of business is the appointment of the external auditors. I now ask for a motion that Deloitte LLP be appointed as auditors of Calian to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are appointed and that the Directors be authorized to fix the remuneration. Would a shareholder please make the motion?
Unknown Attendee
attendeeMr. Chair, I move that the firm of Deloitte LLP, chartered professional accountants, are appointed as auditors of the company with compensation to be set by the Board of Directors of the company for the financial year commencing October 1, 2020 and ending September 30, 2021, and to hold office until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders.
George Weber
executiveThank you very much, Will. Would a shareholder please second the motion? Again, Patrick Houston, who is still in the room with me, has raised his hand to second the motion. Thank you, Patrick. Is there any discussion of this motion? I see that there's no questions at this time, so we'll proceed. I will now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. Would all registered shareholders and policyholders, proxy holders, please ensure to enter your votes in Lumi? [Voting]
George Weber
executiveSo one more time, since the polls are still open, at this point, I would give a brief moment for shareholders to finalize their voting before closing the polls. [Voting]
George Weber
executiveI will now ask Lumi to close the polls. Thank you very much. The polls are now closed. I have received the preliminary report on attendance and the voting results. Based on the preliminary report on attendance provided by the company's transfer agent and the voting results for the 2 matters that were put to the vote today, all motions were passed as presented with the majority of shares voting in favor. I now declare the 7 individuals named as Director nominees, who have been elected as Directors of the corporation, to hold office until the next annual election of directors or until their successors have been duly elected or appointed. Congratulations. I declare that Deloitte LLP has been appointed as external auditors of Calian to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are appointed, and that the Directors have been authorized to fix their remuneration. Final results of the voting will be published on SEDAR in the days following this meeting. At this time, we will be looking to close the formal proceedings of the AGM. I would ask if you have any further questions related to the business dealt with -- at this AGM to please include them in the question tab of the meeting now. Seeing no questions in, this then concludes all matters before our annual meeting, and I now declare the annual meeting adjourned. Reflecting on the past fiscal year, it was my pleasure to assume the role of Chair of the Board here at Calian, a company with over 19 years of profitable growth and from October 1, 2019 to September 30, 2020, provided shareholders with 95% in total shareholder return. Thank you all for attending today, and I would invite you to stay on the line while we begin the management update. We will start with a brief video and will then turn the meeting over to Kevin and to Patrick. As I say, on with the show. [Presentation]
Kevin Ford
executiveHello, everyone. I'm back to provide management update for Calian Group, and I want to thank George for conducting the AGM so efficiently. It's been almost 6 years since I've taken over the company as CEO. When I came on board, my objectives as CEO, there are 4 primary objectives. Number one, I wanted to see organic growth in all of our segments. I wanted to ensure that we continue to invest in organic growth, whether through research and development, innovation. I wanted to ensure we're also completing meaningful acquisitions and acquisitions in support of our 4-pillar growth framework and specifically customer diversification and new innovations. I wanted to organize the company for consistent growth. When you're a $100 million company, a $250 million company, a $400 million company, a $500 million company, you have to continue to evolve and ensure that you can scale as the company grows. And the last one is, importantly to me, is I wanted to have the Calian brand be viewed as an asset. I wanted to go to market both domestically and globally with Calian. And I wanted our staff, our shareholders and our customers to understand the value of that brand. Next chart, please. We came on board, and those that have known me for the last couple of years, I talked about embracing our diversity, going to market with 4 distinct segments, with Advanced Technologies, Health Care, Learning, IT & Cyber. I still believe this is our secret sauce and a differentiator for us on the Toronto Stock Exchange. In one company, you get access to 4 very distinct segments, domestic global customers, a proven financial track record to manage this complexity and the opportunity that exists within each of those segments. That's why I'm excited about our 4 segment embracing our diversity strategy. It's still working, and we'll continue to work moving forward. Next chart, please. From an acquisition perspective, this is our acquisitions over the last 3 years. And what you'll notice is, number one, there has been quite a few. What you'll also notice is that in each segment, we've been acquiring to support the growth of each of those segments. So in Advanced Technologies, Health Care, Learning and IT, we've acquired capability that has allowed us to not only achieve our strategic objectives, but as well support our long-term growth -- profitable growth objectives. The unique element of Calian is that we can acquire in one segment and then roll through our segments. As one segment integrates an acquisition, we can move on. And while we've had 6 in the last year, if you look at our IT services area, other than a smaller acquisition called EMSEC last June, we haven't acquired anything major in the last 2 years. Our Learning business last year, we got into the acquisition mode with 2 acquisitions in Europe, which I'll talk to later. Our Health Care, it's been a year since we've acquired Alio and Allphase and, obviously, recently with our InterTronic acquisition announced in January. We will continue to do M&A, and I think this is a telling sign, as you can see on this chart, that we're committed to M&A moving forward. Next. I think in acquisitions, one of the downfalls, I think a lot of people look at is just the financial element of an acquisition. That's important. It's critical, and we spend a lot of time in that area. But it's also important to recognize that within acquisition, and I think the acquisitions we've done demonstrate this, we're acquiring patents and IP rights. We're acquiring amazing talent, both domestically and globally. We're acquiring software assets and in the last year in health and training. And we're also recruiting -- acquiring product assets in companies such as Tallysman, InterTronic and IntraGrain. So it's not just about the financial element of the transaction. It's about the assets we're getting and making Calian a better company. And I'm very proud of what we've done over the last couple of years because in every element of these, I think we've actually become a better company. Next chart. So how do we do? Well, what you don't know as shareholders, I've talked about our 2020 achievements. And 3 years ago, in 2018, we launched something we called internally [ 2020-400], and it was really about taking this company to a $400 million company by the year 2020, achieving a 10% consistent growth rate, 5% organic, 5% through M&A. Crossing the finish line last 2020 at $432 million was a strong sign that not only did we achieve that, we blew through that, including doing it in a global pandemic. That is not about Kevin Ford. That is about the amazing team here that did that, and I congratulate them on that. From a numbers perspective, you can look at the organic growth here over the last 3 years: 45% in Advanced Technologies; 67% in Health; 10% in Learning; and 20% in our IT services group. And in fiscal 2020, at a consolidated level, we grew 21% during a global pandemic. Next chart. I'll provide a quick update on each of our segments. Those that have attended our Investor Relations Day in person in Toronto would recognize normally that I have the segment leaders come up and give a detailed update. I hope you can appreciate in this format. I wanted to keep this concise and shorter, and we will have an in-person Investor Relations Day as soon as possible to get even more deeper into our strategy and how we're moving forward as a company. With Advanced Technologies, what you've seen over the last year is continued expansion of our product capability. Our global navigation satellite capability with the acquisition of Tallysman is a new market for us. But with demand for precision location, whether it's in precision agriculture, autonomous vehicles, drones, we believe this is a market that we have to address within the context of our satellite family, and we're so excited that Tallysman as part of our team. We've extended our antenna line with the acquisition of InterTronic based out of Québec and Montreal area. And again, very proud company, long company -- a long-term company that's been profitable and expands all that we're doing in ground systems. In IntraGrain, our ag tech company, basically, we continue to look at how do we expose and go after that ag tech market with more innovation. And Tanner and the team are doing an amazing job as we not only look at our current products but new evolutions, new versions of that product that move maybe more to lower of the SaaS model. And we launched our carbon fiber antenna. One of the first in the world, frankly, of antennas built out of the carbon fiber material. We continue to expand our services capability and software and basically generating all the -- developing next-generation satellite management solutions that are basically used by the world. And finally, in our services in Advanced Technology, we have a very robust services organization that sometimes we don't talk about enough, I think. We have a test aerospace and defense group. We have groups that are helping defense, whether it's in airworthiness. We have our nuclear team working with nuclear organizations, very deep experience in nuclear engineering and airworthiness engineering and, again, a very strong segment of our business within Advanced Technology that we expect to grow over the next foreseeable future. Next chart, please. In our Health business, clearly, this has been, in 2020, another stellar year for our Health organization. With the acquisition of the Alio and Allphase over a year now, as I mentioned, expanding our presence into the pharmaceutical sales market as well as patient support programs, the COVID-19 demand in our Health Care business has been significant, including supporting S&C in the federal government for our 10, 100 bed respiratory care units. Our DND health contract continues to go well, and we are so proud to be a partner to the military and helping the men and women of our military stay safe every day. And we've also signed an extension agreement with Loblaws for our Primacy Clinic network supporting Loblaws on their health agenda. Moving forward with health care, it's going to be about exposing our network of national practitioners, I think one of the strongest in Canada to new customers. It's going to be about inserting new technology into everything we're doing in health care and innovating how the health care system works. And frankly, we're also looking at opportunities now outside of Canada, and we have an opportunity right now in Europe and potentially the U.S. to expand what we're doing on the Alio Health line area -- into those areas. So exciting times for health, and we expect that the demand on health care not only in COVID, but post COVID is going to continue to be very, very strong. So congratulations to Gordon and team and all that they're doing there. Next chart, please. Our Learning business, it was affected last year when COVID struck. Being able to take in room -- in-classroom training, virtual exercises that are normally hundreds of people and moving that to a virtual platform frankly took some time. And I want to again thank National Defense and our team for working together to come up with innovative ways to continue to learn and train the military and work with our customers because they have no choice, but to be ready. And we're their partner in helping them do that. We then decided, you know what, this is not only a Canadian challenge. What we do in Canada is totally transportable globally. The intellectual capital working with the military and the Canadian military for over 25 years is something that we can do in other geographies because we've done it, and we've done it very, very well. Hence, we've decided to target Europe, and we've done 2 acquisitions with the Norway and U.K., which expands our European presence, companies called Cadence and CTS. We've also expanded our emergency management capability into provincial organizations in the municipalities across Canada, partnerships with First Nation communities also across Canada. In our customer retention element of our growth strategy, we've rewon our Canadian Forces School of Aerospace Technology and Engineering, a $54 million contract that keeps us basically engaged in boarding, supporting the military and everything they're doing in that area. And we've also been working on innovation, taking all that we do, productizing that intellectual capital in our products called Response Ready and Maestro, because we believe that if customers want to prepare for when bad things happen, maybe they don't want to engage us to run their exercises, to help them with their exercises, but they want access to the best practices. So the team has been working hard with our own investment to have products now that are available globally, specifically Response Ready and Maestro. Moving forward with Learning, it's going to be all about continuing our presence, growing our presence in Canada, looking at commercial customers to complement our public sector customers. Looking at Europe very strategically, the initial work that we're doing in Europe right now with CTS and Cadence and NATO is going very, very well. In fact, it's going better than our expectations. Not only we're working with NATO, we see opportunities with other militaries, and what a great opportunity for us to bring our story from Canada into Europe to talk about how we've been doing it for the Canadian military for over 25 years. It's resonating. The Canadian brand is still very strong globally, and I think sometimes we forget that as Canadians. And finally, we're going to continue to innovate in Learning. Virtual learning with the COVID era is clearly becoming a requirement, and we are now prioritizing, looking for tools and assets in our M&A strategy to help us not only bring innovation to learning, but also help us differentiate how we're going to tackle learning going forward. Next chart. Our IT & Cyber Solutions group, in the last year, we had acquired EMSEC, which is basically expanding our cyber practice into RF emission security. We're growing our geographic footprint into Toronto. As many of you know, if you've heard me speak, the majority of our revenues from our IT services group comes from the auto area. A simple growth strategy is to expand our presence, not just from an auto perspective, but Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, major centers, because we think we have a value proposition that resonates, maybe not with the large banks at this point or the bigger customers, but definitely with that mid-market sector. We've done in-contract retention support, a rewin with the DND for numerous cyber security initiatives or a $22 million in contracts, and we are very proud to work with General Dynamics in support of their contract for the Canadian Army in command and control systems. So moving forward for IT, the focus is going to be on geographic expansion, continue going deep in our IT cyber area and potentially looking for synergies with some of our other segments that we work with today. So stand by. We're very excited with Sandra and the team with what they're doing there. Again, stand by. There's a lot of work going on in IT as we speak today. And I think -- frankly, I think there's going to be a lot of change in IT as we continue to look at that cyber practice more strategic. Next chart, please. So with that, I'm going to ask Patrick to give an update, and then I'm going to come back and close out the -- this part of the proceedings. And over to Patrick, please, for a CFO update.
Patrick Houston
executiveThank you, Kevin. I want to speak about the financial performance of our recent fiscal year. Revenue, obviously, was the top line performer, 26% growth, and that included 4 consecutive quarters where we set an all-time record revenue. I wanted to talk about a few themes within that growth. One of them, if you know Calian, historically, we're reliant on Canadian government business. 70% of our revenue came from federal, provincial and municipal governments. We've taken a strategy to try to grow our business outside those traditional markets, and we were able to succeed in that. We almost doubled our nongovernment business last year, and we continue to strive to get that balance to 50-50. We also continued our expansion outside Canada, with Europe being a new market that we're -- we've seen early successes. And if you saw our last quarter yesterday, over 10% of our revenue in Q1 came from the European market. EBITDA continued to grow and outpaced our revenue growth, with 36% increase over the previous year. We've continued to make investments into markets where we feel we can bring our value proposition forward and attract higher gross margins. We've also seen investments in M&A make a meaningful impact on our gross margin and EBITDA margin performance. We've all done this while continuing to invest in places we think are going to generate long-term growth, and that includes investment in our M&A capacity, research and development and sales and marketing. Our free cash flow had a strong performance with 20% growth over the previous year. This is our continued discipline in converting our earnings into real cash that we can use to reinvest in our business, and we deployed $29 million of capital last year that included 5 M&A transactions. Each of those was accretive from day 1 with an average EBITDA multiple on a trailing basis of 5x compared to our current trading multiple of 15. We continue to see strong growth from prospects with each one of these M&As, and it each bring a profitable track record of generating consistent growth and profit. We continue to focus on M&A and R&D as places to deploy capital in the coming years. Next slide, please. We've never been in a stronger financial position than we are right now. The reason I say that is we have $30 million of cash as of our last quarter on hand. We have net liquid assets of over $80 million. We have a contract backlog, which gives us great visibility of $1.3 billion, our highest level ever. We continue to deliver consistent cash flows every year on a growing basis. And finally, we have access to liquidity with a new debt facility we just put in place a few months ago. It gives us access with additional $120 million of liquidity. The combination of all these elements is why I feel we're in our strongest position ever, and this is going to be an asset for us as we exploit our growth strategy in the coming years. Next slide. 2020 was a very strong year for shareholders of Calian. As you can see from the beginning to the end of the fiscal year, the share price increased by 82%, and we continue to pay a dividend of 3% return. Our average daily volume more than tripled from the previous year. Our plan is to continue to pay a dividend to our shareholders. But right now, we've been holding the level and reinvesting the additional capital into our growth prospects. These have been giving us excellent returns, and our current strategy is to continue to do that into this year. That ends my comments, and I'll pass it over to Kevin to finish off the management update. Kevin?
Kevin Ford
executiveThank you, Patrick. So I just want to close with a few thoughts on why is this CEO excited. When I thought about this question, because, frankly, I hope you appreciate those that know me, I just want to go on record, as I can't stand this virtual stuff. I appreciate we're doing it. It's the right thing to do, but I look forward to seeing all of you in person soon, so we can talk about the future of this company. So I'm not excited about virtual, but I am excited about where we're going as a company. And it comes down and really thought about to 3 fundamental points. We have a resilient culture at Calian, and what I mean by that is when you -- when -- last year at this time, as a CEO, when I thought about our [ 2020-400 ] plans and COVID was just starting to ravage the world, I said there is no way that we're going to be able to get through this and achieve our growth objectives. It's just -- I just can't imagine how we're going to step up to that. The team did it, and they did it without me asking. They did it because it's the right thing to do for our customers. It's the right thing to do because everything we did was deemed essential, and everything we do is deemed essential. The other element of our culture that's been interesting is embracing growth. To be frank, many years ago when I launched the [ 2020-400 ] at 10% growth, that was a top-down initiative. When we did our new plan, the growth was coming from the bottom. It was coming from all elements of our organization. People are excited about the opportunity to grow within Calian, and I think they see the opportunity to grow their careers and their opportunities within Calian as being part of this Calian train. So culturally, I'm very excited about where we are as a company. We're resilient. We're embracing growth. And I think, frankly, a key ingredient to any success is you've got to have the culture aligned to your growth objectives. Number two, something I called the growth toolbox. Patrick talked about our financial status, our financial posture. When you look at it in the access to capital, when you look at the talent that's in our toolbox, when you look at our ability to conduct M&A and integrate successfully, when I look at George and the Board who's sitting still beside me, we have lots of discussions about how we continue to grow, but not just grow, grow profitably. How do we continue to do that? 19 years, 76 -- 77 consecutive profitable quarters. How do we continue to grow profitably? Well, the reality is we've got quite a few tools in that toolbox, and I think we're going to continue to use them. Under my watch, we will definitely continue to use them, and I know I have full support of the Board and my management team. The other thing that excites me that we don't talk enough about is we're living our core purpose, and I've included this statement in here because it may not be apparent to shareholders. Calian delivers innovative solutions that help the world communicate, learn, lead healthy lives and stay safe. Let's use [indiscernible] for a second. This is not what we do as a company. It's the impact of what we do as a company. We have had to rise to our core purpose definitely over the last 38 years in business, but clearly, over the last 12 months. And I couldn't be prouder as a CEO to know that these are not just words. And I'm hoping shareholders, investors, I'm hoping customers, I'm hoping everyone realizes how proud we are, and I hope you are of being part of that journey as an investor in this company. Next chart, please. I drive my management team nuts, frankly, because I continue to organize this company for continual growth. Aligning our business to the 4 segments, which we introduced last year, I thought was a key milestone for the company's history, to move away from a 2 division structure, which, frankly, a lot of people didn't even understand to 4 distinct segments of health care, learning, IT, advanced technologies, exposing both the revenue and margin profile, the growth opportunity to the backlog. To expose those was, frankly, a good decision because the amount of interaction and the quality of the interaction with our shareholders and our analysts and our investors has been stellar this year because we could finally talk about our 4 segments distinctly about the opportunity they have, about the challenges they have and about our growth plans for each of those segments. So I'm going to tick that one off as a good idea. I'm not sure I always have good ideas, but that one was a good idea. Investment in our M&A process continues. We have a playbook. I just had a Board meeting this week. We had a debrief collectively as a Board, and I did the same with my senior leadership team, and we're trying to get more feedback from our acquisitions as to how we could do things better, how do we continue to evolve our playbook so we can become one of the strongest, not only acquisition companies, but successful integration companies in support of our growth objectives. And there's been no CEO in the last point that's invested more in our infrastructure in Calian than I have. I think being able to take our digital transformation internally and being able to scale this company on our journey to $1 billion will be critical. I need my team to be able to collaborate around the world. I need them to be able to innovate around the world. I need to know that if I want to talk to somebody in IntraGrain, I don't have to go through some backdoor mechanism. I want to be able to reach out and talk to those people and talk about how they're doing and what I can do to help. I created a CIO position for the first time in the company's history a few years ago, and Jerry Johnson and his team are doing an amazing job. As treating this company as a corporate entity that I'm comfortable, we are actually going to build a solid foundation on moving forward. And I probably should remind everyone, on March 13, which is a little calendar item that Desiree, my assistant, still has in front of her office, we pivoted this company to virtual over a weekend, and that would not have happened without Jerry and the team. So thank you for that. We need to continue to invest both on our scalable, our cyber infrastructure, and we will continue to do so in support of our growth objectives. Next chart, please. I'm also adding new talent to our management team, and I just wanted to spend 2 seconds on 2 recent announcements that have joined the team, and I'm excited to have them on the team: Seann Hamer and Michele Bedford. Seann is going to take on for the first time in company history a CTO role, and the mandate I've given Seann is pretty fundamental. As we've done in the M&A playbook, I need Seann to create our innovation playbook. I need an IP strategy that allows us to harness innovation in every one of our segments, get the patents, get the proprietary elements of this thing because I need differentiation. I need to improve margins. I need to do things that customers will pay value for and not be stuck in a commodity market. So Seann has been with us for years. Seann has developed some of the most innovative products we go to market with today, and he's excited about the opportunity. So he's working with each of the segment leaders now on what we're calling our innovation council, innovation playbook, and we're going to actually productize how we do innovation. Frankly, I need innovation in our culture, and Seann is going to be the voice. And every day he comes to the office, I'm asking him to ensure that every day we innovate on behalf of the world. Michele Bedford is a recent acquisition. Michele, we didn't hire you if we hired you. Michele is going to lead our go-to market operations and sales transformation and building Calian's brand, both domestically and globally. Michele comes to us from Microsoft. I think people may have heard that company. It's a global brand, and she's been operating in that global company, and she's going to bring best practices. She's worked in small companies. So again, she brings a passion and I need that passion, supporting us on how not only do we optimize, how do we modernize our marketing techniques, how do we get the Calian brand out there as innovators and thought leaders in everything that we do. It's no small task, but I know she has the energy, and she's going to do it. So welcome aboard, Michele. Next. So I talked about [ 2020-400 ], and you're going to hear me refer to our next strategy. I'd like to do 3-year strategies, frankly, and the world changes so fast. 3 years actually seems like a long time. We branded the strategy, Imagine 2023. Imagine where Calian could be in 2023. I need to build off the momentum of [ 2020-400 ], and I'm excited about our opportunity to do so. In the next 3 years, I want to complete our pivot to that innovative global growth company, and I've had people ask me, what does that mean. It means that when you hear the brand Calian, you're going to think innovation, you're going to talk about an interaction you had with Calian's men. That's cool, how you guys did that stuff. Whether it's in health care, advanced technology, solid communications and ag tech, whether it's in IT and cyber, whether it's in learning and how they're actually learning as an organization, I want people to understand that the Calian brand equals innovation. Technology in all that we do, we are going to continue to have a services capability account, there's no question, but what you'll see is continued focus on both developing technology internally through investment in R&D as well as through our M&A engine. Global expansion. I do worry the world's going back to buy local in the context of tariffs, not physical walls that we've dealt with in the years past, but walls that are basically cultural, walls that are policy. And for our key customer segments, we clearly need to plant a flag there and take part in that local economy. Our expansion into Europe was not something we took lightly. With SatService now and CTS and Cadence, we do a lot of business and work -- a lot of business in Europe historically. It was important that we put a presence there. But as we put our presence there, we're starting to see, oh my goodness, there's quite a bit of opportunity here. Let's continue to invest. We will look at our U.S. presence. Going forward as part of Imagine 2023, we have many U.S. customers. InterTronic has many U.S. customers as their legacy customer base. And we will, I suspect, be putting a presence back into the U.S. in an Imagine 2023 time frame. Convergence. What about IT and health care? What about learning and health care? What about advanced technologies and IT? What are the opportunities now that my 4 kids have grown up at the office, like my 4 kids at home, what are the opportunities that present when we actually start converging capabilities? It's not lost on me as a health care company, as an IT company, as a learning company, as a advanced technology company, we could talk to organizations maybe about business resilience, not even talk about our 4 segments. Do you want to talk about your virtual infrastructure? We can help you with that. Do you want to talk about your physical infrastructure, do you want to actually assess your business continuity plan? We can help you with that. Do you want to talk about how you're keeping your people safe? We can help you with that. That's going to be the unique value proposition, I think, now that we have such great capability in each of our segments is how do we converge, how do we actually now look at combining those capabilities into something that will allow us to actually do more things that we probably haven't even thought of yet. In our 3-year strategic planning process, we talked about Horizons: Horizon 1, Horizon 2, Horizon 3. Horizon 1, 1 year; Horizon 2, 2 to 3 years, Horizon 3, 3-plus years. And challenging our team to think about now, who we are today, but where could we go as a company and how do we get there with an actually orchestrated road map. That's why I'm excited. Transformational M&A. I've seen many companies that have -- and I've spoke to many CEOs. I'm a sponge. I love talking to people who've been through this journey. And I think we've been on the right path. We started our journey on M&A with some smaller acquisitions that allowed us to exercise that muscle and develop our playbook. We've moved to midsized acquisitions over the recent term. And we've got to start thinking about transformational acquisitions, not because I'm excited about transformational acquisitions, but growing a $400 million to $500 million company to $1 billion, you can't do it $10 million at a time. You have to find those opportunities in each of our segments that allow us to leapfrog, that allow us to move forward, but ensuring that we're buying quality companies that align to our culture, aligned to our strategy and that, in the long term, I can look all our shareholders right in the face and tell them, you know what, that was a good acquisition for this company long term, as I take it very personally in the context of how and I deploy your capital, and this team takes it very personally. So with that, I believe, next chart, please. I want to thank you for your time today. I apologize we can't do this in person, but that's not our issue. It's something we're dealing with -- we're all dealing with. I hope you're staying safe. And I'm going to open the floor now to questions, which you can use by the Lumi tool. There's opportunity to submit questions, and we're going to take a pause and see if there's any questions coming from the floor. So I'm going to ask our friends at Lumi to help us out here and let us know if there's any questions that we can deal with at this time. Okay. We're just giving them one more second here, so I'm just looking off screen to make sure that I'm getting the queue. I could do the weather forecast, I guess, as we're waiting. Okay. It looks like there's no questions at this time. I appreciate this format. It's not always best. The video of this presentation will be available off our Investor Relations -- the link on our Investor Relations website. And as well, if you do have any questions or you want to reach out, I think you know how to get hold of Patrick and I. We're always happy to talk at any time as we do value and appreciate your confidence in us as management of this company. So with that, I'm going to close the meeting. Thank you for your time. Enjoy the rest of your day. Stay safe. And we will have an in-person meeting as soon as we can, rest assured. Thank you so much. Have a good day.
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