Good day, and thank you for standing by. On today's call, we will be referring to the press release issued this morning that details the company's first half of fiscal year 2024 results, which can be downloaded from the company's website at arqit.uk. At the end of the company's prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period for selected equity research analysts. [Operator Instructions] Finally, a recording of the call will be available on the Investors section of the company's website later today. Please note that this webcast includes forward-looking statements, statements about the company's beliefs and expectations containing words such as may, will, could, believe, expect, anticipate, and similar expressions are forward-looking statements and are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today. The company encourages you to review the Safe Harbor statements, risk factors, and other disclaimers contained in today's press release, as well as in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which identify specific risk factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those described in our forward-looking statements. The company does not undertake to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements after this webcast. The company also notes that on this call it may be discussing non IFRS financial information. The company is providing that information as a supplement to information prepared in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards, or IFRS. You can find a reconciliation of these metrics to the company's reported IFRS results in the reconciliation tables provided in today's earnings release. And now, I'll turn the call over to David Williams, the company's Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer. David?

Thank you for joining our first half of fiscal year 2024 earnings call. Arqit reported revenue for the period of $0.1 million. It is a modest result. However, our conviction in the trajectory of the business has never been higher and is supported by clear evidence that our market is finally maturing. As we said in our earnings release published this morning, our revenue generation for the first half is not reflective of the depth and breadth of engagements which Arqit has with numerous customers. Our conviction in the trajectory of the business stems from these engagements, which we're starting to see come to fruition with contracts announced post year-end. We said on our fiscal year end 2023 earnings call in December that it takes considerable time for channel partnerships to become productive and we hoped to see an inflection point in fiscal year 2024. We're standing at that inflection point today. There were a number of projects across our product lineup that we expected to land an invoice in the period, but did not. None of the opportunities were lost. They all nearly slipped into the second half of the fiscal year. We had observed in the last three months that sales cycles are getting much shorter. Customer contract renewals and contract expansions were solid during the first half. We experienced a 100% renewal rate of expiring contracts, which will show up in the current half-year results. These contracts were for Arqit's symmetric key agreement platform, our network secure firewall products with our partners Fortinet and Juniper, as well as professional services. During the period, three additional major telcos agreed to launch or launched initial test installations of Arqit's SKA products. We now have six major telcos engaging with our product, and we hope and expect that we will…

Thank you, David. For the six-month period ended 31 March 2024, we generated $119,000 in revenue. For the comparable period in 2023, we generated $19,000. Revenue was generated from the sale of Arqit's Symmetric Key platform as a service, the sale of Arqit’s network secure firewall product and of professional services. We executed under nine customer contracts. No contracts expired or were terminated during the period. In fact, we experienced a 100% renewal rate of any contracts due to mature in the first half. The year-over-year growth in revenue reflects growth in the number of contracts for Arqit's Symmetric Key platform. In prior periods, we generated other operating income related to our satellite division's activities. The division had been held as a discontinued operation as we pursued a sale of the division. After an exhaustive effort, we determined that the satellite assets were fully impaired. As a result, we did not generate other operating income for the six-month period ended 31 March 2024. Our administrative expenses equates to operating costs for those more familiar with US GAAP. For the six-month period, our administrative expenses were $16.8 million versus $25.4 million for the comparable period in 2023. Administrative expenses for the period includes a $293,000 non-cash credit for share-based compensation versus an $8.3 million non-cash charge for the comparable period in 2023. Lower employee costs resulting from headcount reductions and attrition were the primary drivers of the variance in administrative expenses between the periods. At 31 March 2024, we had 125 employees as compared to 170 employees at 31 March 2023. And now today we announced further cost saving initiatives including headcount reductions and rationalization of our real estate under lease. Pro forma for the commenced headcount reduction initiatives, headcount will be 81 employees. These cost reduction initiatives are expected to…

Thanks, Nick. As I've said, our conviction in the business is incredibly high. That conviction is based on the progress we've made on multiple fronts, most importantly, the announcement of awards of contracts which are expected to generate meaningful revenues in the current year. That said, we're acutely aware of the needs to convert these opportunities to cash, and we remain very focused on the conversion of revenue opportunities which we've discussed today and additional opportunities that we have identified and are pursuing vigorously. It feels as though this is the inflection point where revenue, which is material, will begin to flow during 2024. We'll keep working hard to deliver strong results for the full year on the back of that momentum that we've been experiencing. I'll now hand the call back over to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Scott Buck with H.C. Wainwright & Company. Your line is now open.

Hi. Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. David, on the award you announced today in the Middle East, I was hoping you'd give us a little more color on timing from here through the end of fiscal 2024. Could you actually see revenue this fiscal year from that contract? And then second, what do you see as the immediate opportunity in that region?

Thanks, Scott. Yes, the EMEA region contract that we've announced is a multi-year seven-figure contract and it's anticipated that the first revenues will arise during the current half year, a number of other contracts have also arisen which are likely to result in revenues in a similar timeframe. And we're also expecting some of the initial tests that we've done with telecoms companies to turn into scale rollouts during the current financial year. Finally, as I've said, there are a number of RFPs that have been responded to by defense prime contractors that incorporate Arqit's technology, and we are hopeful of landing some of those. I do think that the business development that we've done in EMEA is going to yield results in several countries, but equally the work that we've announced with Intel has a global reach to it, and so there's now a strong possibility of generating revenues through that channel partnership much faster and at global scale.

I appreciate that. And then you indicated in the release that all the contracts that were up for renewal were renewed or extended in the first half. Can you talk a little bit about the qualitative feedback you're getting from your partners and what -- I guess what you're hearing as they start to sell on your behalf?

Yes. The feedback that we get on the product is that it's incredibly easy to use, quick to deploy and very stable. We tend not to experience any network outages. On the recent contracts that we've talked about, we've experienced 100% success rate in uptime. It's a very stable platform. The ease of use is its most interesting factor in many ways. Not only is it fully secure against the future of quantum attack, Not only does it harden existing networks through rotating authentication, but through its existing integration with partners like Intel, Fortinet, and Juniper, it's very, very easy to use and deploy, requiring minimal technical input from the customer, and it uses existing standards-based methods to ingest. These are all very significant elements of our success. The Intel white paper that was published quite recently also noted that this implies no burden on performance. There is no change in performance in IPsec tunnels when Arqit's encryption product is used, whereas other methods that are attempting to compete with Arqit suffer from extreme performance lags. In some cases, things like TLS connections simply fail to get established. So we feel that we have very strong competitive advantage in performance and reliability. And that's the feedback that we've been getting quite universally from our customers.

Great. That's helpful. And then last one for me. You guys have been very proactive on the cost controls front. I'm curious, as revenues start to scale, hopefully here in the second half of this year, how quickly you may need to add back to some of that cost infrastructure to support that growth?

Yes, the cost cuts have happened in two areas. Firstly, we exited the satellite business and whilst there remains the potential for upside from licensing of the IP. And some of those discussions are in live conversations right now. There's no particular cost burden that goes along with that. On the software side, we substantially completed the build out of our core software platforms and so we're now down to routine maintenance of the software as well as the support of the software through integrations with customers and that gives us the opportunity to scale back our investment in software. As the contracts ramp up with customers, we feel during the remaining part of the year that we've got adequate resources in pre and post sales engineering to cope. The only additions that I can see happening probably into the next financial year would be in customer support and service and they would be relatively modest and low cost resources. So right now we're happy that the cost base can remain stable with the scale of contracts that we're expecting turning to revenue in the current half year period. That's great. It sounds like investors should start to see some operating leverage then as business scales. Appreciate it, guys. Thanks for the time.

Thank you, Scott.

Thank you. We have no further questions at this time. Now I'll turn the call back over to David Williams for closing remarks. David?

Thank you very much. That concludes the conference today and thank you everyone for your attention.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.