During Mal's presentation on H1 results, he mentioned that he's been working on improving the global sales capacity of AVA. Mal wanted to have a head of sales placed in each time zone, with himself coordinating everything in the heart of the world, Singapore. The clients will then have easy access to someone who can actually make the call and everything will be processed in an efficient way.

Here's some information I gathered from LinkedIn.

(MENA stands for Middle East & North Africa)

Clearly, Mal kept his promise and we now have a director/VP accessible to clients across all time zones. Significant personnel changes have happened in the past 6 months. Florent and Robert are from Rapiscan executive team, which was lead by Mal himself. Robin and Ali have been working at FFT/AVA for years. Robin used to cover Europe and North Africa and Ali was in charge of sales in Turkey (maybe he was the one behind the mysterious Istanbul Airport deal, which we still don't know the exact figure). Appearantly, Mal reassigned their responsibilities, which makes a lot more sens now, and promoted them. I'm sure there are way more changes and additions to the sales team that I couldn't find from public resources.

We also have Sanjay Oberoi covering India, James Viscardi who is now the Executive VP of Global Security, promoted from the position of VP Americas in Jun-22, and Pietro Corsaro, joined AVA in Nov-22, focusing on boosting condition monitoring business (basically Aura-IQ) in Germany.

Those changes are in line with the company's strategy of boosting sales capacity first mentioned back in 2021 if I remembered correctly. At that time, the company was focusing on expanding the team in North America. In two years of time, the company now have propraetors placed around the world. Maybe we all underestimated the ambition of the company after all.

So let's just wait and see how the upgraded sales team perform in the next 12 months. In the most ideal dream-come-true kind of scenario, H1FY24 will be amazing with new orders flying in from every corner of the world taking more than 15% of the intrusion detection market with the most advanced systems. (The market share for FFT was 4% back in 2015 according to the prospectus).

In a much more realistic scenario, I'm expecting the FFT sales in H1FY24 to grow by 10-12%. Not quite enough to reach the $70M goal but very achievable.