Probably the most striking point he made was that HGC Global...

Probably the most striking point he made was that HGC Global trialed a Juniper network product before deciding on the Netlinkz software. Juniper is the global leader - larger than Cisco in this sector so its a strong endorsement.

The interesting thing is that HGC says it is a "carrier-of carriers" with 1.4 million kms of fibre optic cable, including under-sea cable across almost S.E Asia, Taiwan and Japan as well as having Points of Presence at Marseilles to link to the EU and at Chicago as a US gateway. There's been mention of Brazil, but whether that is planned or set up I'm not sure.

This breadth of infrastructure was obviously what attracted the New York based I Squared Global in 2017 when Hutchison Whampoa sold it for about $1.9 billion.

I Squared grew out of a Morgan Stanley infrastructure fund. It has been buying up power, water, logistics and telco assets for a decade and in 2021 acquired a similar carrier-of-carriers when a US company called NTT collapsed after being unable to service the debt on infrastructure similar to the HGC network. I Squared paid $2.2 billion for what it called a "high density"' network of trans-Atlantic and European cable assets. This included: 103,000km of fibre optic cable connecting 300 cities, eight subsea cables and 14 data centres.

The new CEO of what became Exa Infrastructure made an interesting comment at the time when he said "We are dumb pipes, but we are going to be bloody good dumb pipes."

This ties in with the data centres which HGC also owns. As data warehouses they are up to a point ""dumb servers." As the software protects data across all cloud services this may have been another reason to turn to chose the VSN network.

So by the look of it the HGC Global gets a jump on competitors with "secure broadband" as a service across all pipes, data centres and IOT devices, This is a new revenue stream which costs it virtually nothing to provide as it shares additional revenues with Netlinkz.

The CEO did say that HGC brings several thousand potential customers to Netlinkz. He also said that all marketing and support will be done by HGC. Netlinkz simply supplies the completed VSN #3.0 with the two or three extra functions which HGC asked for. One was data limitation and logging to ensure the match between the data used and the data plan purchased and another is the multi- tenancy /"white label"; function which allows the down-stream carrier to add its logo and style when on-selling.

He also discussed how satellite inventory had been treated in the accounts as operational expenses when they were stock and a temporary asset. He said that in the next reporting period the distinction will be made clear.