Afternoon. Welcome to Plover Bay Technologies' 2023 Annual Results Conference Call. We have just re-released our annual results, and the results may be downloaded at hkexnews.hk or at the Investors section of our website at ploverbay.com. For the PowerPoint slides that we will use in this call, you can also find it from our website. Our Chairman, Mr. Alex Chan, and myself, Chris Tse, CFO of the company, will present our results today. The call will start with a sharing of business updates, and then I will wrap up with a financial recap. Then we will move on to Q&A. So I'll pass to Alex to share with you the business updates. Thank you, Chris. So, I just want to take a second to explain again, and so Plover Bay Technologies, so we enable supercharged connectivity by combining multiple connections together. So these connections can be fixed-line networks, mobile networks, satellite connections, and we just combine them into one single pipe. So, our customers, the users, can build an always-on or a super reliable network anywhere. So, the general expectation of connectivity is mostly around four major factors. So that is, it should be simple. It should always work. It should be cost-effective. And it should be there when it is needed. So this is the general expectations. But in reality, we can see the existing solutions are overly complicated. And the fixed lines cannot reach anywhere, and the mobile network is not always reliable too. So, and when you need the connectivity, most of the time, is it you need to enter into a contract for multiple years. So, our approach to enable this supercharging connectivity is, we build an ecosystem. So this ecosystem is surrounded by purpose-designed SpeedFusion routers. So SpeedFusion is our proprietary technology, and our routers are all based on this technology. And at the same time, we have a package of connectivity software and cloud services just to make all these SpeedFusion routers easy to use, similar to use for apps for various applications. And that is, so our approach for our approach, our go-to-market approach is we work with a group of professional partners to enable all these applications in various different vertical markets. So the customer benefit is we have got a faster, more reliable network, and they can be deployed anywhere. And we can enable a lot of new use cases. So when we look into the connectivity, we can look into the basic wireless connectivity, which is mostly being used for remote work-from-home applications, for transportation, IoT, or both. So some applications, some scenarios, they would require better connectivity, which means better connectivity means they should have failover capabilities, or they should have faster bandwidth or a little bit more reliable than the wireless connectivity piece. So these are the retailers, small offices, pop-up stores, or home offices. So now we go into a bigger network, which is, for example, those large events, construction sites, enterprises, the banks. So connectivity to them is essential. For some other applications, then it's what we call mission-critical connectivity. So these could be public safety applications, broadcasting, telemedicine, and maritime. So you can see, our products are covering from basic connectivity to mission-critical connectivities. So I want to highlight one application with Starlink. So actually, the whole thing started like two years ago. And that is, there are some first adopters. They begin to use Starlink and Peplink solutions in small deployments. So these are, for example, they live in a remote area, or they stay on a recreational vehicle. So they need connectivity. And they are using the Starlink and Peplink solutions combined for their broadband access. And that is, so later on, we also see small business, at-home users in remote communities, they also started to use this, the same solution, which is having a Starlink and a Peplink solution working together. So the awareness of this Peplink Starlink solution started to spread around. And then, so we are starting to see larger deployments. For example, public safety, first responders, they started to use the solution. And that is, so later on, then, we are seeing even larger applications, like the large events, the mining sites, they are putting multiple Starlinks with the Peplink products to bond them together. And then, so last year, we have seen one of the largest cruise boat operators in the world. They deployed the very large-scale Peplink Starlink solutions on their entire fleet. So, yeah, last month, we became Starlink's authorized technology provider. So, in early 2024, we also launched a new product called the B One Series. So this B One Series is, we intend to use this product for fixed wireless access. Because we are seeing the fixed wireless access, and the Starlink connection and the Starlink applications, these internet services, are actually very complementary to each other. So in situations where you have FWA, or when you're what or with a Starlink, then is, so you also want a router with all the integrated features to seamlessly enable SpeedFusion over the FWA and the Starlink. So that's why we started to build this product. We are trying to address a market which we have not been putting a lot of effort in the past. Because in the past, our focus was really into the higher-end market, the ruggedized market or the essential connectivity market. But now we are seeing the Starlink and the FWA fixed wireless access market. These are the booming markets. We believe our technology can play a pretty good role in this space. We're taking a slightly different approach from the general approach. So usually, people just build a CPE for addressing that market. But we see the problem is not really the device itself. It's actually the ecosystem. It's actually the whole user experience. So, we worked on a Peplink App such that we can use this Peplink App to easily set up the devices to route your traffic to different cloud locations. Or even, we can use this app to enable some very simple VPN. Okay, basically, it to turn the VPN process into a much more simple process. And we also believe, with this Peplink App and the B One Series, this is going to open up a new market for us to address more general markets, which people are facing the challenge of having a too complicated setup. Or maybe they having a carrier contract that requires multi-year commitments. But then, so we are not replacing that multi-year commitment. But we are enabling a new option that people could use this for on-demand applications. And over the last year, we also seeing our deployment getting to a different scale and depth. So for example, one global leading electrical EV manufacturer. They have deployed hundreds of our Peplink routers in their factory in Texas. And then, so they also plan to scale this into their other factories in Germany and China. And then, so now our data services, it is exceeding 2% of our revenue in 2023. And while our network as a service business model continues to see some strong growth, but we are also seeing other accounts are also expanding rapidly to contribute to this 10% of data sales. And then, we also what we also did some gear up on growing on the e-commerce platform. So, this B One, we just launched, it is actually available at a very attractive price point. And it is a very easy-to-use product. It is well-suited for the e-commerce shoppers. So the idea is to boost lead generation and sales conversion. So in terms of the investment highlight, this is the same thing we illustrated to the community in the past. So, we have an ecosystem. And this ecosystem is growing. So we are growing our purpose-designed routers and devices. We are enriching our subscription-enabled feature, subscription-based convenience features. So again, our subscription approach is a bit different from most people in the market. We address the convenience features. So we do not enforce our customers to subscribe. But we provide a lot of convenience for the software features that they need. And this is completely volunteer. So they can choose to subscribe or not to subscribe. At the same time, the SpeedFusion proprietary technology is enabling the reliability to this ecosystem. And by the way, this year is the 18-year mark of SpeedFusion. So SpeedFusion is 18 years old. So it is a mature technology. At the same time, we are still developing some new enhancements on that. At the same time, we are really proud of a growing passion-driven go-to-market partners. This is actually a very important piece of us. Because when our customers for those who has experience in working with Peplink, Plover Bay, and that is, they can see, our go-to-market partners is, they are not just doing their job. They are really passion-driven. So, the second thing that we want to highlight is these Low Earth Orbit satellite services. They are expanding our addressable market. So Starlink is growing really fast. So now enabling these Peplink Starlink enterprise solutions. And that is, this is increasing our brand profile. And at the same time, we also receive direct referrals from Starlink. So these guys are for people who wants to have a lot of Starlinks working together. They need connectivity. And they see connectivity as a mission-critical or very essential piece. So the Peplink SpeedFusion technology complements this requirement very well. So the another investment highlight is, we see multiple drivers are pushing the need for supercharged connectivity. So based on some market research, the number of IoT connections are growing. The mobile data traffic expanding. The fixed wireless access connections, they're expanding. They're expected to grow from 130 million to 330 million. Actually, this number is just really big. We are actually a little bit surprised by these numbers. That's why we are seeing this might be an interesting growing path for us. That's why we work on this B One Series. This B One Series routers is designed to address the home offices and small business in the FWA market. Then, so we are pretty excited to share with the investment community that our recurring revenue has grown pretty well. So the underlying drivers of this subscription growth is we have increased our user base driven by the device itself. We are increasing the subscription content value to drive user subscription rates. And our subscription growth is actually pretty strong. So the number of devices under subscription at 31st December last year has increased to 40.2% year-over-year. And the subscription pickup rate increased to 28% at December. Last year that was 24.5%. And then we have additional revenue, additional recurring revenue growth potential with the data services. This thing it was launched back in 2021. And now it has exceeded 2% of the total revenue in 2023. And then we see a compounding growth from growing installer base and increasing data consumption trend. So I've asked Chris to share our results with everyone. Thank you, Alex. So I'll start with the financial recap now. In FY 2023, our revenue increased about 8.6% year-over-year to $93.943 million. Our gross profit increased 9.5% year-over-year to $50.9 million. OPEX, other income and gains, and finance costs decreased by 11% to about $18 million. This is because of a foreign exchange loss of about $1.6 million that we booked in the previous financial year compared to about $300,000 gain that we booked in financial year 2023, this current financial year. So overall, our net profit increased 24% year-over-year to $28.1 million. And our diluted EPS is $0.0255, an increase of 23.8% year-over-year. Gross profit margin increased slightly to 54%. That's 0.4 percentage points increase. And our net profit margin increased to 29.8%, up 3.7 percentage points, compared to last year. Finally, for the second half of the year, we are declaring a second interim dividend plus special dividend together about HKD 0.124. This brings the full-year dividend to HKD 0.194. Diving deeper into our sales growth, our Fixed-first connectivity segment slightly increased by 1% year-on-year to $14.6 million. Mobile-first segment mildly increased by 6% year-on-year to $49.3 million. Warranty and support services segment grew 12.6%, reaching $23.8 billion. And the software license agreement segment rose 46.4% year-on-year, reaching $6.5 million. We believe that the overall picture here very well reflects what we have been working on in the past few years, that we wanted to grow our recurring revenue base by selling products that provide strong value propositions to our customers. Now let's dive into recurring revenue. In FY 2023, our recurring revenue rose 20.7% year-on-year to $28.7 million. Now recurring revenue makes up over 30% of our sales compared to around 27% a year ago. More importantly, it makes up for over 50% of our gross profit, which we will touch on later. The underlying drivers of recurring revenue also paint a positive picture on the continued growth of recurring revenues. So as Alex shared earlier, the number of devices that are under a subscription increased 40% year-on-year. Our takeup rate has increased to 28%, compared to 24%-25% in FY 2022. Subscription dollar amount, the actual dollar amount that we received for subscriptions and booked into contract liabilities, that also increased 22%, year-on-year. Next, revenue by region, sales to North America grew by about 4.6% year-on-year. EMEA grew about 26.7%. Sales to Asia fell around 10%. Other regions grew about 25.4%. The relatively strong growth in EMEA is driven by strong performance of new partners and resellers in Eastern Europe. In other regions, growth mainly came from Australia and New Zealand. Now gross margin. Our overall gross margin increased to 54% from 53.6% last year. The reasons for gross margin improvement include, first, a higher sales mix of recurring revenue. Recurring revenues have a gross margin of around 92%, which is much higher than the gross margin of non-recurring products. The gross margin of non-recurring products, which mainly include fixed-first and mobile-first segments, also saw improvement in the 2nd half of 2023 compared to the 1st half or the 2nd half last year. As you can see in the chart in the top right, this is because we leveraged the economies of scale of our contract manufacturers. We also consolidated our product portfolio. So now, we have more products sharing the same platform, on a smaller number of core platforms. So more broadly, the supply chain has also moved past the acute shortages in the last two years. So material costs have also come down to a more reasonable level. As I mentioned earlier, recurring revenue now accounts for 52% of our gross profit showing that we are no longer just a hardware vendor. Lastly, our balance sheet and cash flow remains very healthy. During the year, cash from operating activities increased substantially. This was mainly due to a significant reduction in our inventories compared to FY 2022. To a lesser extent, the continued growth of contract liabilities from subscription bookings. The significant reduction in inventories is due to a few things. First, as we mentioned, we consolidated our product portfolio, which helped us increase efficiency in inventory management. At the same time, the supply chain shortages with it largely behind us, production lead times have largely returned to normal. All these mean that we can now take a smaller much smaller inventory while still meeting the growing demands from customers. Other than that, bank borrowings and gearing remain minimal. As a result, our cash levels and our overall balance sheet remain very strong for our business needs. This wraps up the financial recap. We can start the Q&A. Like in the past years, you can use the mic to ask questions. Or you can type in your questions. We already have a first question. Can you comment on the business trends in the first two months of 2024? Are we seeing similar growth rates versus 2023? And do you think Starlink will show a material revenue and profit contribution? Sure. So for the first question, actually, today is the end of February. So, looking into the first two months, we are actually slightly better than last year. So question number two is, Starlink will show a material revenue and profit contribution? I think, we are not doing a simple Starlink resale. But there's the momentum with the joint solution with Peplink and Starlink is actually very strong. We have reached a new number of partners than they are looking for or they are impressed by the capability that the Peplink Starlink joint solution can deliver. So, I don't think we have a timeline to say when this is going to be material. But the fundamental of our business is just combining multiple connectivity technologies together. So it could be 5G. It could be fiber. It could be Starlink's. It's just the more WAN connections, the more connectivity options. It is better for our business. Second question comes from Lucas. Hold on. Starlink boosts wired or wireless sales. Why the wired router sales reduced 18% in the 2nd half? So, let me answer this, because in the 2nd half of last year, we started to wind down one of our key products in the fixed connectivity segment to get ready to launch for the launch of the B One Series. So the next question is, can you comment on how the direction of your product pipeline differs from other networking peers? What features do you emphasize that they do not? What trade-offs have you chosen? I think this one is, it contains some trade secret. And I prefer not to answer here. But generally, I would say, Peplink Plover Bay is not a mid-tier company. We see things from a very different way than most general company operates. Because this company, including myself, including a lot of our engineers, including a lot of our teammates, we have a owner mentality. So we still have, the owner and the founder mentality. And that's why, when we look into the things, we always look into the fundamentals of the problems. And then, instead of chasing Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 7, getting back faster and faster speed, so we don't look into it like that. I guess, maybe, for our investors who has been with us for the last couple of years, you have seen, we were sharing with everyone that we are not just an SD-WAN company. While everybody is emphasizing on the SD-WAN, but we believe or we don't think we are just an SD-WAN company. We look into why people need SD-WAN. So when people need SD-WAN, they just need better connectivity. Or they just want to have more connectivity options in a much more easier way. So that's how we emphasize on this. But how do we turn that into a product or how to rematerialize that? So I think in the next couple of months, in the next few months, you will see a series of new products that will come up. Then, so when we have that product launch, you can see from there how we see the market. Next, is Starlink require exclusivity with Peplink? Or can we sell to other LEO companies? Oh, absolutely. Actually, we are already working with other LEO companies. But it's just not in high-profile way like, we do not have a press release with others. But first of all, there's no exclusivity for this. So yes, there's no exclusivity between this relationship. But at the same time, again, SpeedFusion is 18 years old. And we believe we have the most mature technology in the market. And we are also or we have been working with other LEO providers as well. How big was the cruise ship contract with company? Could you share some rough numbers? Was it our largest deal in 2023? Oh, definitely not the largest. Was it? It was? No. Yeah. No. Definitely, it wasn't the largest deal. But. It's between $5 million-$10 million. Right. But I want to emphasize that actually is, we work on projects. But this is not a project-based company. So, a lot of time is, when the customer is deploying our products in, let's say, in this example, they deploy this product into their fleet. And then, so, it started with one, two ships. And after that, they started with three, four. And in addition to all these is, maritime fleet, we also have a lot of bus fleet customers. We also have a lot of other customers who have who are having a lot of branch networks. And we also have customers who have a lot of kiosks. So, yeah. Yeah. We don't engineer our or we don't organize our company like project sales company. No i t isn't like that. But we have a pretty long tail of channel partners, vertical market partners. And these long-tail vertical market partners, they are bringing us a lot of all these exciting opportunities. And that is actually giving us a lot of excitement almost on a weekly basis. And this is also helping our team to be energized almost like all the time. Because we have a lot of all these exciting opportunities that we have never thought of. We have never heard of. And it may be small at the very first beginning. But it could be it may be very small at the very, very first beginning. But some just happening faster than the others. So maybe some, after six months later, it turns into something pretty interesting. And then a year later, it becomes pretty big. And then, sometimes, we worked with these long-tail opportunities three, four years later. And all of a sudden, it turns to be a huge opportunity. And in fact, the Starlink thing is not a day-one thing. Yeah. As we just shared it, our journey with the Starlink deployments. So you will see, a couple of years back, actually it was very small. Now it is, I think this is getting very interesting. But at the same time, this is not the first one. And this is not the last one. Okay. Next one is, do you see greater industry consolidation and vertical integration? If so, how do you see Plover Bay continue to compete as an independent outfit? Oh, absolutely. We are definitely seeing the market is consolidating. And then, there's a lot of vertical integration going on. But, I think this is actually going to be an advantage of us. Because it doesn't mean the bigger is better. The thing is, we are asset-light. We do not manufacture the products by ourselves. But if you look into our manufacturing partners, they are huge. They are very big. And then, they're influential in the industry. So actually, they can help us to turn 100,000 devices in a couple of months. They can help us to build that product very fast in a very good quality. So I would say, this industry-wide integration is actually making everybody become a big elephant. But we are small. And we love to be small. We want to be a small giant in our industry. We want to be dynamic. We enjoy being dynamic and adaptive. Because it helps us to see opportunity faster. It helps us to execute faster. But at the same time, when we work on an opportunity that can scale that needs to scale big, that needs to scale fast, we have the manufacturing partners supporting us to do so. Why the number of employees reduced from 200 to 177 this year? Oh, I'm sure it is, yeah. I was wrong last year. Because actually last year, some investor asked us about the geopolitics. And then, so, I was saying that actually, no, no, no. That's not the case. To a certain extent, I was wrong. But I was not entirely wrong. Because the number one thing is, yes, geopolitics is happening in the world. But at the same time, our business is not really affected by the geopolitics. However, yes, we also face a situation that some of our team members have chosen to move to other countries, to other locations. And the great thing is, our engineers are staying with us. Some of our engineers, they moved to U.K. They moved to Canada. They moved to Taiwan. They moved to Singapore. They are all staying with us. But at the same time, some operational roles have been moved to other countries. Then, I mean, these operational team members, they moved it to other countries. Then, we felt like, okay. Maybe that's the moment for us to reweigh the situation. When we reweigh the situation, sometimes, we even find, hey, maybe we do not need to do that by ourselves. We can just work with our manufacturing partners to do part of it. Or maybe we can just work with our go-to-market partners to do part of that. So, actually, that exercise, that was an opportunity to let us reweigh the whole operations again. And when we reweigh the whole operations again, just like in this case, it is not bad at all. It's actually making us more efficient. Can you share any roadmaps for the future product line? Will Peplink focus on the LoRaWAN network? Oh, LoRaWAN, yes. We do have a LoRaWAN product. Okay. What I can share with everyone is, first of all, everything needs connected. So from an EV charger to a sensor network to a branch network to POS to kiosks, everything needs to be connected. And again, now we are entering into this AI era. And then, with all this AI era, everything, every data, people would love to collect and do the analysis, do the training, and all these kind of things. So there will be a booming of connectivity. But this is not new to us. We always believe connectivity is needed. And at the same time, when connectivity is needed, what people want to have is a reliable and simple connectivity. So, people do not imagine that an AI company, they do not want to bother with the connectivity. They just want to focus on collecting the data. They just want to focus on analyzing their data and build the thing that they're really good at, which is AI. So, for us, we can be a user of AI. We can use the AI to build better products or to help our operations to become even more efficient. Right? But the fundamentals has not been changed, which is everything needs to be connected. And it needs to be connected reliably. So, I think in the future, you will see our product roadmap will basically go into two extremes. One is we will have more and more advanced, high-end, more and more high-dollar value products. At the same time, you will also see we will have more and more affordable products. We will be leveraging the online e-commerce platform and also working with MSP partners to have our products as the building blocks for these MSP partners to enable IP camera connectivity, yeah, phones replacements, and all that kind of things. So again, in sum basically, simply said, we will have more and more higher-end products and more and more mass market products. Could you share with us how you see the business modes going forward? In particular, as you develop new products and revenue streams, are there ways to improve switching costs and network effect? Oh, absolutely. We are a big fan of network effects. And then, so we did various experiments trying to learn more and trying to see how it works. And we are still continuing. This is an ongoing effort. And actually, we are very interested in looking into the network effects of how we can scale even faster. So by having an ecosystem, I believe we will have better chance than before to enable these network effects. And when we are talking about the switching costs, again, SpeedFusion is a great thing. InControl, our centralized management thing, is a big thing. And these two technologies, this is not a new one. Yeah. Both of them are actually 18 years old. So, I think this is actually helping us to make switching costs different, difficult. But at the same time, we are looking at how we can make switching costs easier for other industry players to switch to Peplink, to switch to our products. I saw Fusion SIM was offered by some distributors. Is that the same thing as SpeedFusion data plan? Oh, no. It's different. It's totally different. So, we do not—okay. Our SpeedFusion data plan today is mostly on eSIMs. And we see the Fusion SIM as a different way for us to build an infrastructure business. So in other words, today, we do not have an infrastructure business. We have mobility business. And now we are entering into a more mass market, which is the consumer market. But I think the Fusion SIM is at its early stage, but it could be a very interesting building blocks for us to enter the infrastructure market, which is the MSP or operator infrastructure market. Does the new B One Series address a niche market or can it be significant for a company in terms of sales? Oh, absolutely. We have high expectations on this product. We hope this product can be our flagship series for the consumer market. Can we comment on our relationship with Starlink? What impact will it have on future revenues and profits? Does it require any capital investment? Not really. We don't require it. It doesn't require us any capital requirements. And I think the impact will be a lot more on the branding, the market awareness. And technology-wise, so Starlink is a great technology. It is a great connection method for people having a high bandwidth to connect to the internet. And then, so SpeedFusion or the Peplink Plover Bay Technologies is making it much more reliable. And then so this really complimented each other. And then, so, I think we definitely, it is going to help us on future revenues. But, the way that we look into things is not really driven by numbers. We are again, our thought process is driven by the fundamentals, why people want to use this, and why people want to use that, or what are the barriers, or what are the frictions for people to use the technology. So we just try to solve these problems. Because, over the last couple of years, we have seen, by focusing in these fundamentals, the numbers is just amazing. I see a question from Stephen. So let me. Oh, hi, Alex. This is Stephen. Thank you for your time. The result looks very strong and resilient. I just have, like, one or two quick questions. Sorry because I joined the meeting late. I hope that I'm not asking a question that someone has asked already. The first question is on Starlink. We also then noticed the announcement that you made regarding Starlink. Can you, like, elaborate a little bit more on, like, what's our actual role in that, like, cooperation? Are we the, like, go-to supplier to or distributor for the products? And, like, how does it make the difference between if suppliers or customers go to Starlink and buy directly or buy through us? Like, what are our roles, actually? That's my first question. Okay. Sure, sure. Okay. So first of all, Starlink doesn't need people to sell products for them. They are in hot demand. And then, so this is their product and their services is highly desirable. But then, so but there's a situation. Because this is the nature of the LEO, Low Earth Orbit satellites. These little satellites, they move very fast. And then, this is Low Earth Orbit. So latency is great. But then, so from time to time, there may be sub-second outage. So for most applications, if you are just doing some web browsing, this subsecond outage might not be a problem. However, there are applications that people would love to see, "I don't want to have any sub-second outage. I want a super reliable pipe." And again, even though this is not Starlink, even though this is fiber, yes, fiber is reliable. Fiber is fast. But again, if people need essential connectivity, mission-critical connectivity, if they cannot afford to lose a single second of connection or any downtime, then people would want to use SpeedFusion, our products, to bond these links together. So again, these links could be Starlink. These links could be FWA. These links could be 5G, yeah, 5G FWA or fiber connections. Or it could be anything. Or it could be fiber cable connections. Right? So again, these are the fundamentals. So is Starlink. Both Starlink and Peplink, we are also seeing a situation now. If the customer needs to go to two places, okay, they need to go to Starlink to acquire the Starlink technology, the products. And then they need to go to a Peplink partner to find these products. So actually, this is actually not ideal. But by having one single place to have all these two great technologies working together, it is actually a great benefit to the end users. So that's why we work together. And then we enabled our channel partners, our go-to-market partners to have the Starlink offerings working with the Peplink products, Peplink's technologies together. So basically, this is much more like a convenience thing. But again, Starlink has a huge branding value. Everybody are excited with that. So, yeah, that is why we are also excited about this opportunity. Okay. And thank you. So what about, I mean, the contract or our role? So you meant you mentioned that it's actually not really a very unique or special role. Right? It's more like a recognition of our relationship. But rather than, like, we are taking up some responsibility, I mean, on behalf of Starlink. Right? Okay. First of all, you know, sometimes we have a tendency of us simplifying some really cool stuff as simple stuff. Yeah. Actually, this is not a simple partnership. Actually, there is a lot of effort. Because if you look into the integration of the Starlink product and Peplink product, so the integration is a big deal. Because there is a lot of integration effort. You don't want your customer to go to one portal to do this and another portal to do that. You want a single pane of glass to do everything. So this thing is not simple. It's not that simple. But I would say, yeah, the stuff behind the scenes—yes, the behind-the-scenes stuff—is actually both Starlink and Peplink. We have done a lot to integrate all these things together. But the ultimate goal is to make customers feel like, "This is easy." But the behind-the-scenes thing is actually a lot, including our back-end integration. And again, you know, these days, when you're buying a router, this is not just a router. There's a lot of integrations with the various devices. Okay. My final question is on the dividend. To be honest, I mean, we're very happy to see the payout to be close to 100% for in a four-year basis. Because we previously expected actually, you mentioned or you hinted that the payout would be, it would be reduced slightly because you might want to prepare for, M&A. So are, are we going to expect, like, you will continue to pay out most of the profit, or and does it also mean, like, we are not going to, have any M&A very soon? Thank you. Okay. Actually, these two things are not really contradicting thing. Okay. We when we decide how much dividend is going to pay out, it really depending on our cash level. So when we are having a cash level that we are really comfortable with, then we do not want to keep it in the bank. So we want to reward our shareholders. Again, the reason why is, a lot of our team members, including myself and a lot of our engineers, a lot of our team members, we are shareholders of the company. So and at the same time, we also appreciate you guys being with us for a long time. And, you know, while in a very volatile market, you can see, actually, our stock price actually didn't change that much. And we appreciate you guys' support. So we feel like, we'll do it when we have sufficient cash in the bank, then we will just distribute the extra cash to our shareholders. So actually, this mentality has not been changed from day one. So speaking about the M&A thing, yes, we are still very open-minded on that. But when we look into the M&A thing, because as we shared earlier, now we have really tier-one, world-class manufacturing partners working with us. So they have all these financial resources to build products, build hardwares. And even in some situations, these kind of partnerships are helping us to reduce the need of acquiring chipsets. So that is important. And that is good. So if we are going to do the M&A, it is very likely to be software companies. And if that is software companies, then we want people to feel like, to feel excited about joining the team. I think the best way to reward people is maybe our shares. And maybe our shares is even more valuable than money. And that is also the goal that we want to see. We want everybody in the team to have an owner mentality. So it doesn't mean we are not doing the M&A thing. But if we are doing the M&A thing, the preference is the software. If the preference is the software, mostly that is the people. And then, if that's the case, then, so we do have, and we strongly feel like if we need to raise cash, if we need to borrow money from the bank, it shouldn't be a difficult thing for us. And at the same time, we would also like to use our shares as an incentive, as a valuable currency for acquisition if an opportunity arises. Oh, thank you very much. I hope all the companies in Hong Kong can listen to, like, what you are sharing and, like, what you are doing. Yeah. It's really respectable. Thank you very much, Alex. Thank you. Okay. We'll get back to the list of questions in the chat. So what AI opportunity do you see for Peplink? Oh, absolutely. So I think, at this stage, AI in our eyes is definitely a great tool that we cannot miss. We are actually doing a couple of experiments trying to learn how we could use AI to build better services. Or even can we use AI to enable some convenience features that we could offer as subscription services. So yeah, this is an area that we are very excited. And it is, and there are a lot of potentials. So we are definitely working on that. And at the same time, we are also seeing that AI is going to make edge computing much more interesting. So that is going to enable a new generation of hardware platforms with a lot of possibilities for enabling convenience features. So this is not the next three months thing, the next nine months thing. This is an ongoing thing. But definitely, AI is a great tool that we cannot miss. And this is pretty much like the commercial internet was introduced back in 1995. Next is, could you please comment on the increase in your receivables? Could you please comment on the level of inventory in your distributors' channels? So for receivables, the trade receivables, I think, increased in line with the increase in our sales. However, other receivables increased. That's because of, you know, deposits that we made for the purchase of some goods related to Starlink. Right. Speaking about the inventory at our channel partners, I think these days it's almost impossible to stop the channel. Because yeah, our industry is a mature industry. Many people have been in this industry for a long time. Then you cannot just give them a little incentive and then stop them. Nobody's going to do this. The reason why all these products it changed generations pretty, pretty fast. So, for example, the 5G modem, like the Qualcomm SDX55, now this is the generation of SDX62 and SDX 65. And then very soon that it will turn into SDX72 and SDX75. So all these generations, the pace of all these generations launch is getting faster and faster. So in terms of Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7, and all these things happened in only 2-3 years. So nobody's going to build up the inventory because of some incentives. So, at the same time, a lot of our channel partners, they are owner-managed. So these guys are owners. And they are not stupid. So, they won't be doing anything like this. But at the same time, this is not our practice from day one. Because if we stop the channel, eventually we have to deal with it. So, I would say that our inventory level at our channel partners has been pretty much consistent with the previous days, previous years. Okay. For the new EV car customer in Texas, why do they need our products and services? This is a private 5G application. So for the private 5G application, so there are two important pieces. One that is the 5G the private 5G base stations. So yeah, we are not in that space. So that space is actually have a lot of other players. And then is, so, the reason why they picked up our product is because they need private 5G, they need Wi-Fi, and they want the they, they, they want the devices being able to have a seamless connection. So basically is, this is a SpeedFusion between private 5G and Wi-Fi. And again, they chose us is because SpeedFusion is a mature technology. This is 18 years old. They, when they use our product, when they pick our product during the evaluation, they can just basically plug yeah, it's just almost like plug and play. We deliver a very reliable result in bonding these Wi-Fi and Private 5G connections together, making a seamless connection. So that's how we started to work together. That's how we started to grow the business there. What is the impact of direct-to-cell satellites from Starlink to your business? Oh, the direct-to-cell satellites, I think the analogy is, you can look into all these satellites as base stations. So it is very much similar to we use our phone to connect to a base station. But we still use a mobile router to connect to a base station. So I think it is, these two things are not mutually exclusive. So you can use your phone to connect to satellite, to send SMS, to make calls. But at the same time it is, you still need, you still need the router to connect to the satellite for your, for your, other IoT devices, for your IP phone, for your cameras, for your, other IoT devices. As mentioned, nowadays the AI development is very fast. The cost and difficulties to find out the network vulnerability is much more easy. May I know if Peplink will react on this side? Peplink, probably we are a connectivity company. Our emphasis is to make connectivity reliable and easy and simple. So yes, with all this network vulnerability thing, we see that is, we connect to mobile network operator, we connect to satellite network operator, we connect to fixed network operators. And I'm sure, all these operators, they have put a lot of effort in looking into these things. So essentially, our nature is, we just make a smart modem. And this smart modem is really smart and reliable and simple to use. So, I think, the network vulnerability thing is addressed by other guys already. Okay. On slide 9, we mentioned deals won in 2023. Can you talk us through deals lost? In what industries and reasons of the loss? Oh, great. Yes. So we definitely have some loss. So for example, we lost a deal in one of the world's largest banks. So this is a bank. This is a financial institution. So when they invite us to participate with their RFP, so they like our technology a lot. They like the product and they like the technology a lot. But then, during the process, we have to complete almost like 100-page document about various commercial arrangements. So our go-to-market approach is very different from most networking vendors. Because we always want to work with a channel partner. The reason why is the channel partner, they have the local expertise. They have the domain expertise. They have the local language. They understand the local language. They understand the local culture. So when we answer that document, we also that okay, that was actually our first attempt trying to experiment with one thing. Can we just undercut other players? Can we just give them a near-irresistible price and see maybe we can have a breakthrough? And then so eventually they just tell us, "Oh, we like your product. We love you guys. But the problem is, you cannot just say to be determined. When you want to work with us, you need to say everything is yes. To be determined is not an answer we like to see. We love to" that is not an attitude to work with us. So that's why you guys are out. So we lost that deal. But now looking back is, when we have that kind of opportunity coming back again, we should just work with our go-to-market partners. We just let them to answer those questions because they will do a much better job than us. So that's the deal we lost. And some of the time is, another example is, we lost a deal due to low cost. Recently is, we lost a deal in Singapore. And actually that is, yeah, okay, we work with go-to-market partner there. So we were pretty comfortable that we will be able to win that. But eventually is, we lost that because of price. And then is, so, and I think is, this situation happens is just because, in some industry, they might feel like is, okay, so, this is just a checkbox. So when we fulfill this checkbox, we do not need to really look into the reliability, quality, and things like that. But this is not really a bad thing to us because we have seen opportunity situations like this before. And the customer comes back in a few years and they became our long-term customers. So from time to time, yes, we lose opportunity because of price. We lose opportunity because we have an incompatible go-to-market model, especially with the Fortune 500 companies. But again, if we look into our situation, if we look into our current status, I don't think our approach is wrong. And I still think is, actually our approach is actually a pretty efficient way to grow the business. Because the world is big enough. And in this industry, there are a lot of opportunities for us to chase. And we do not need to become. We do not need to follow others and just follow their path. Recently there are a few number of carrier outages in Canada, Japan, and the most recent one, AT&T, in the U.S. Are the resellers able to capitalize such opportunities? Oh, absolutely. Yes. Because actually, these situations are actually good for us. Because people will start to understand this is not a take-it-for-granted thing. The reliability is not a take-it-for-granted thing. So customers are starting to look into solutions for this. But again, yeah, so our products just now—this is not, we have an outage last week and then our business is booming this week. No, it doesn't work like that. But we truly believe, in the next couple of months and actually, this is just let people understand they cannot just take it for granted to have a reliable connection. So they need to look for ways to improve the connectivity. So this is definitely a long-term advantage for us. So as of 31st December 2023, what is the number of InControl registered users? That's around 520,000 registered users. In the results announcement, you mentioned that reaching the next $100 million revenue much faster. So what is your expectation to achieve that? Can I answer this question? I think it's soft guidance. Okay. Definitely okay. We used to 18 years to achieve today's numbers. But definitely, we don't think we need that. We definitely don't need that. Or, I mean, we don't need another 18 years. And I won't be happy if we took us another 10 years. I won't be happy with that. So, that's my wishful thinking. But again, by enabling network effects, we do believe we will have network effects on our products. We strongly believe we can do that. But again, these are uncertainties. We are dealing with a lot of experiments. And also, we actually engaged with a consultant in USA. And then, that guy is super analytical. So we are working on the various experiments to make that happen. And again, when we have that network effect happening, then it will just grow. I mean, we'll just reach that number way faster. But again, even though if we do not have a network effect yet, we don't need another 10 years to reach that. Is Peplink the only authorized technology provider of Starlink right now? Until now, yes. Next is, could you please comment on your sales to Russia and Ukraine? So, it's very minimal to both countries, right now. Okay. We don't sell anything there. No. Yeah. It's minimal. It's not minimal. We don't sell anything there. Okay. Our products today are still very expensive. And also, our products today, the number of channels is not that broad. So our focused market is still pretty much like North America and Europe. And when we mention about Europe, it's actually usually countries like Germany, Netherlands, U.K., France. Yeah. And I think I mentioned in my remarks Eastern Europe. So that means Estonia. Right. Yes. Actually that is Poland. Yes. Yes. That's us. Yes. Poland and Estonia. We have MSP partners. And these are MSP partners. They are not resellers. They use our products for a couple of transportation projects that we are aware of. So these yeah, these are MSPs for the transportation market. And these are the buses and the trains there. So. Yeah. Sure. Why do you think it's so cheap with such strong growth in EPS and dividends? Yeah. I have this question too. Maybe, maybe we need some investors to help us to answer that. I don't have an answer for that. I have this question for years too. I think, James here is looking for more clarification on our relationship with Starlink. Are they a customer or R&D partner or both? Okay. Let's face the reality. Now, if you want to buy Starlink, then you go to the Starlink website and buy the Starlink. Great. Yes. Now you have the Starlink. Then after a while, you want to have a more reliable connection. The Starlink yeah, there are sub-second outage. So you go to Peplink. So you go to Peplink to buy a Peplink box. So you need to talk to two companies. You need to make two purchases. So you need to spend time integrating all this together. But imagine that if you are now building the reliable connectivity for 100 racing sites. So these racing sites are usually not in the urban area. So you need to go to buy 100 Starlink. So with this 100 sites, maybe you need 300 Starlinks. When you go to buy these 300 Starlinks, then you need to deal with all this logistics and this and that. Then you also need to go to Peplink to buy another 300 routers to bond these Starlinks together. So this is a complicated process. Now, with this partnership, you just go to the Peplink Starlink solution provider. And then you just tell them, "I have 100 racing sites. I want to have a reliable connected connectivity." So the guy, the reseller, is going to deliver 300 Starlinks, 100 Peplinks, and install that for you. So this is making people's life a lot more easier. So this is the thing. And maybe even in some situations, the customers are saying that, "Okay. Out of these 100 sites, 20 of them is, I want to have a network as a service model. I don't want to spend money. I don't want to use CapEx to buy that. Can I use a subscription model for that?" So then our Peplink Starlink solution partners, they are able to provide a managed services for these 20 racing sites. So they are able to offer services for them. So this is the essence of this partnership. This is not a name-dropping thing. Starlink never need to drop their name with Peplink. And Peplink doesn't need to drop the name with Starlink. It doesn't work like that. I think, next question, why can't you bundle Starlink and Peplink as a standard solution? Okay. So again, Starlink, they have more demand than supply. So they don't like people just do a simple resale. And at the same time, you probably seen, when people are buying the Starlink, people might want to go okay, people will go to the Starlink website and buy the products. And some of the time, during the installation, there will be a lot of support issues. There will be a lot of this and that. If we are bundling the thing together, then we probably will become the largest support center for our customers. That is not something that we would like to see. But again, people usually will just buy a Starlink first. When people buy a Starlink, they just go to buy a Peplink B One to connect to their Starlink. We see this is actually a much better scenario and much more practical scenario for both the customers, our partners, and us. Should we see the same kind of revenue growth in 2024 than in 2023? I hope not because our revenue growth was bad. We actually missed our promise. We promised it to grow 20%. But then, we didn't grow 20% last year. We only grow like 8 point something percent. So hopefully, we can ramp back. We can go back to the revenue growth that we promised it earlier. I mean, in the last couple of years. Will the cost base change in 2024? Probably not a lot. Yeah. I believe, this looks like to be end of the questions coming in. So, if oh, there's one more. Okay. So let's continue. I understand you maintain price competitiveness with your operating model, externalized sales compared to various other industry players such as Cradlepoint and so on. Digi. Oh, Digi. Yes. Yeah. Who run on significantly lower operating margins? How do you see the ability of your competitors to move towards a leaner operating model and hence opening up their ability to compete with you on price? This is a good question. Yeah. Because I like to bring up, yeah. Okay. Plover Bay is my yeah. Plover Bay is our baby. But then there's another favorite company that is Ubiquiti Networks. If you look into Ubiquiti Networks, they have been doing a very similar operating model. And then, so, using the same question, same analogy, why Meraki, why Cisco, why Juniper, why other guys are not moving forward to this leaner operation model. So I think this is actually different companies have a different strength, and also a different beliefs. So I think there's actually a shortcoming of our operating model. So again, just like what I shared with everyone, that we failed to win the business from the Fortune 500 companies because they don't like this lean operating model. They would like to work with a much larger company. So we are trying experiments to see, yes, maybe if there's a large MSP, if there's a global MSP. So the global MSP may be able they will be able to address that market. So actually, we do have an example. Recently, we do have an example, one of the world's largest operator, they actually use 100% Peplink Plover Bay products to provide managed services for a global for a large company. And then so we can we can address that market. We can go to that market. But while we can still maintain this lean operating model. And I think it's actually very difficult for a company, for a large company, to embrace this model because, yeah. I mean, they are there already. They have the organization there already. And the team is there already. So it's very difficult to do that. And I think, and another very similar situation is this low-cost airline, like Southwest Airlines. And then, so they have been doing great for years. But why the traditional airline are not able to embrace the same model? Yes, we have seen a traditional airline embracing similar models. But can they deliver the financial metrics like Southwest Airlines? Probably not. So I hope we can answer that: why it is difficult for them to compete, or embracing this model. Okay. Continuing, the next question, what was the key reason that reduced revenue growth versus our expectation? Are we seeing price competition versus other competitors? Not really. It's not really coming from the competitors. It's actually, we want to be a high-velocity company. That means we want to close the deal fast. We want to win fast. We want to lose fast. We want to win fast. So that means a lot of time, whenever there is an opportunity happens with our channel partners, with our go-to-market partners, and then, when they ask for special discount, when they ask for special support on currencies, currencies is a big deal because, in a lot of non-U.S. dollar countries, and then, so, with a strong U.S. dollar, then actually, it will make people's purchasing decisions lengthen. So we want high velocity. So, we'll just offer special discounts or special pricing to help them to win. And at the same time, we treat our go-to-market partners as our extension. So we don't want them to sacrifice their margin. We want them to make good money because, by if they make good money with our products, then this is very addictive. They will just sell more. So that's why, we don't really look into the short-term impact of us. We don't really worry about this and that. But again, last year, it was a volatile year. I mean, in terms of the global geopolitical tension and this and that. So yeah. And a strong US dollar. So, then, a lot of, I would say, actually a lot of demand has actually pushed out a little bit. And at the same time, I would say yes, those are the contribution factors. But this is not really driven by competition. In fact, we do not see direct competition with similar offerings. So when I mentioned that, we lose a deal in Singapore to a lower-cost players. And then, so I think actually, maybe our pricing is not that much expensive than others because this is a MSP deal. We provide the pricing to our MSP, to the operators, an MSP. But there's just another MSP offering a much lower price and win the deal. So, maybe that is not the deal to our price. But maybe that is a deal. But I would say, generally, deploying SpeedFusion, it is not a lot more expensive. It is a little bit more expensive. But we are going to close the gap and, so again, when we look into all these things, we look at the fundamentals. It's not really driven by the numbers. It's not because we need to hit the 20% growth rate we promised you guys. And then, we just do crazy things that will hurt us in the long term. No, we don't do that. We don't do that. Yes, we missed that 20% growth. But we see what we do is good for the company as a long term. And again, bear in mind that this is very much owner-managed, founder-managed company. And I mean, when I mention about owner, founder-managed, this is not myself. It's, again, a lot of our team members are the shareholders of the company. So they have the owner mentality as well. Okay. Let's take the last two questions. What type of competitors do you see with Starlink Peplink combo? Not doing it. They just don't use it. I mean, people really want to have a okay. So I think, maybe people will just initially, they just use single Starlink. Yeah. Because all this outage, you won't notice the outage unless you become a user. So probably this is like a stage thing. So at the very first beginning, then people will just deploy Starlink. And then, so they have high expectations. And then most of the time, Starlink meets the expectation. But then from time to time, so sometimes that's due to weather. Sometimes that is due to various factors. Then there's an outage. So again, say Starlink is great, but just like any other operators. Yeah. AT&T is great. But then there was an outage last week. So whenever people started to see an outage, they will look for ways to improve that. And when they look for ways to improve that, most of the time they will find our solution. And then they will start to use the Peplink products. So again, if this is a single user, if this is a single site, this is probably the buying journey. But then if this is 100 sites, if this is a fleet, this is a couple hundred sites, probably people would do their homework first. And then they will see, oh, okay. Maybe they should use multiple Starlinks with Peplink, bonding them together. So then that's the situation. And again, I think we don't see much competition on this space now. Probably is, I would say, the competition is people not knowing they need this. The last question, any challenges on supply side for chips given the tensions, and restrictions between U.S. and China? Okay. We are not doing rocket science here. We are basically a modem company. We work with tier one large contract manufacturers, manufacturing partners in Taiwan. We use Qualcomm chips. But these Qualcomm chips are very general Wi-Fi cellular chips. So we are not seeing anything like that. Okay. So, I think, we can wrap up the call here. Thanks for everyone for joining the call. And, we'll see you in five, six months. Yes. Thank you, everyone, for the support. We are glad that is, yeah. A lot of you guys are there as well. We've been together for a long time. We truly appreciate that. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.