Double contract win: Cordel expands LiDAR solutions into Mexico and Australia
() , the AI platform for transport corridor analytics, announced the award of a contract to deliver a LiDAR-based solution in Mexico in partnership with Holland LP, and a further project with the National Transport Research Organisation (NTRO) in Australia, in partnership with Ricardo plc.
The contract in Mexico expands on Cordel and Holland's partnership announced in February 2023, and is Cordel's first contract under the new commercial model between the two companies. For this project, rather than mounting a Cordel scanner on a Holland track vehicle for a single network scan, the customer is purchasing one of Holland's inspection vehicles with a permanently mounted Cordel LiDAR unit.
The LiDAR unit will run autonomously while the railway is conducting its regular inspections. Cordel and Holland will provide the railway with a digital twin of the new network, along with reports for various engineering use cases.
The second contract is a A$500k project for Level Crossing Safety Research in Australia, which is in addition to the agreement with NTRO announced on 4 September 2023. Cordel will provide technical competency in relation to data capture at large scale and using automation to extract attributes of interest from level crossings.
This contract has been awarded under round 1 of the Regional Australia Level Crossing Safety Program, a A$180m initiative seeking to improve level crossing safety in regional areas. Future funding rounds are currently under discussion for FY24/25 and beyond.
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Two further significant rail contracts for Cordel, following the agreement signed with the UK's Network Rail High Speed (HS1) earlier in the week. Pipeline momentum is clearly gaining and the contracts reflect the rail industry's acceptance of Cordel's innovative automated capture and analysis technology.
Cordel's technology uniquely combines AI, LiDAR, and data analytics within the enormous global rail infrastructure sector, which should appeal to a wide range of investors. Broker Zeus maintained its forecast on the announcement, pending Cordel's full-year results next week on October 30. Zeus' DCF-based valuation is 22p which represents excellent potential upside to the current share price. Cordel is trading on a forward EV/Sales of just 1.4x.
In a pre-close Business and Trading update on August 7, Cordel reported significant progress with revenue up 32% at c. £3m and plans to hire employees in sales, engineering, and software development. Excluding expansion investment, the company is profitable by Zeus' estimation.
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