Yona Ovadia
Analyst · Discovery Group
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, again, apologies for these technical challenges. Let me continue from the point of a business review. Hopefully, this is the end of the challenges we -- the hiccups we had here. So on the enterprise side, I'd like to start the business review with a few words on the recovery of the enterprise business, where we see the fruit of our continued efforts in this segment. I am truly pleased to report that we have closed a substantial deal of tens of millions of dollars with Speedcast for NBN in Australia, to meet the demand for broadband services for business and government customers in Australia. Gilat's multi-application platform will serve Australia's nationwide regional and rural business. In this long-term project, Gilat is responsible for the supplies, configuration and specialist operation support of the satellite network platform and is responsible for meeting strict service levels. In addition, we see enterprise opportunities in Africa. We secured a contract with Openserve, a Telkom South Africa subsidiary that will use Gilat's satellite solutions with advanced Layer 2 functionality to expand its terrestrial network further in areas of need. Furthermore, we are seeing beginning of recovery of the enterprise business in Latin America as evidenced by our project with Telebras in Brazil. And we believe that this trend will accelerate, and hope to be able to report further in the coming weeks and months. Lastly, our business is -- in Peru, is progressing in accordance with project milestones. We plan to complete the 4 regions in 2018 and move to ongoing operations with recurring and more profitable revenue as was our goal. Due to our focus on profitability, we were not awarded new regions in the recent bid of December 2017. However, we expect to bid on additional regions in the coming rounds later in 2018. Again, assuming that we believe we can be profitable in those regions. In cellular backhaul, during 2017, we established our leadership the in LTE backhaul space with Tier-1 MNO wins around the globe, many of them with end-to-end, long-term contracts. This meets our strategy to engage in projects with recurring revenues with the goal of maintaining a more consistent and profitable revenue stream. In 2017, we secured the LTE backhaul business, mainly in North America with T-Mobile and Sprint, but also some wins in other regions, namely with Globe in the Philippines, and a leading MNO in Latin America. In Q4, we also announced an LTE backhaul win with KDDI in Japan and secured a backhaul deal in Europe. We believe that with every win, even the conservatives amount the MNOs realize that satellite-based LTE is a legitimate tool for quality, affordable broadband. We further believe that our advantage in this growing market is not only technological, but also our unique experience in integrating satellite-based networks to the MNO's core network and meeting their rigorous SLAs. We intend to continue to develop this business with equal focus on North America as well as other parts of the world. Mobility IFC is the second key market for us where we have seen noteworthy achievements throughout the year as well as in the fourth quarter. In 2017, we saw revenues in this space grow significantly from our full portfolio of 5C solutions including terminal antennas, transceivers, aero modems and the network platform. Gogo, of course, is one of the pillars of our IFC business. Gogo's IFC service was enhanced with Gilat global and largest of its kind satellite network covering over a dozen satellites. And our Taurus aero modem is now in use by 5 airlines in hundreds of airplanes. And based on Gogo's backlog, over 2,000 aircraft are expected to fly with Gogo aero modem providing an outstanding passenger user experience. As we discussed previously, we are in the process of expanding our IFC product portfolio, with a goal to be a significant player for the IFC antenna terminal. This quarter, we demonstrated outstanding performance for our dual-band Ku/Ka terminal during a live customer showcase in China. We, in addition to our focus on commercial aviation, while exploring adjacent verticals where we expect sizable growth over the next years. We continue to be encouraged by the response we see in the marketplace to our offering. And we expect to see major progress in the coming few months and quarters. In summary, 2017 was a year of major progress for Gilat, as measured by the substantial growth in our profitability and the important initial results of our growth engines. As we look ahead at the market, we see the trend of abundance of capacity continuing and accelerating and consequently driving additional price reduction of space segment. And this will undoubtedly unlock new markets and grow demand and opportunity. We believe that broadband, quality, ample, affordable broadband in mobile cellular backhaul and Mobility IFC are 2 of those markets, and of course, we will keep an -- our eyes open as the market evolves. Therefore, our plan for 2018 is continue executing upon the same strategy and expand within our growth engines, in parallel with further progress in our enterprise business. To meet this goal, we will continue to invest in R&D to maintain and grow competitive advantage in technology. Of key importance for us will be to maintain our leadership in spectral efficiency and cost per bit. Given our achievements to date, and the potential we see in the marketplace, we are optimistic about 2018 in which we plan to deliver even better profitability in comparison to 2017. Adi, we are now ready for your report. Please go ahead.