Ocean Power Technologies Inc (NYSE-A:OPTT) CEO Phillip Stratmann joined Proactive to discuss the provider of intelligent maritime solutions and services’ recent global expansion and other developments.
He highlighted the company’s ongoing projects in key regions such as the Middle East and Latin America, where demand for their advanced buoy systems and autonomous vehicles continues to grow.
He added that the company has been active throughout the summer, preparing systems for delivery, conducting demos, and finalizing several new partnerships and reseller agreements.
Proactive: It's been a very busy summer for the company. So that would be a great opportunity to get back and talk a little bit about this as we head into the fall.
Phillip Stratmann: We’ve had a really busy summer. It’s hard to believe that we're pretty much into September. And we made a lot of announcements early in the summer on bookings and deals we’ve won. And we've been busy working away on making sure we have systems ready for delivery. for our customers, it's been it's been exciting.
The Middle East has been a big topic of discussion over the last couple of months. The U.S. government as well as Latin America. There are a lot of areas around the world that have been talked about.
Over the summer, we said there was a buoy that we were going to deliver to the Middle East, and it's sitting here at the facility now. It's waiting for its final factory acceptance test, and then it'll be heading out there. So I think that's great. You know, we've had several vehicles out operating various exercises for the U.S. government.
We've been busy doing survey work for our customers in Latin America. Just two weeks ago, we had Latin American customers on both sides off the coast of the United States witnessing buoy demos, vehicle manufacturing capabilities, and then vehicle development capabilities that we have on the West Coast. So, you know, we're excited. And those two regions outside of the US, you know, Latin America and the Middle East, continue to be of great interest. With every system that we deliver out there, we get more inbound inquiries.
How important has it been to have those kinds of tests to create that word of mouth about what you're doing in order to get deals like this signed?
It is vital. We've said this in the past, but nothing beats customers being able to either see the system transmitting data when it is tens, hundreds, thousands of miles away and they can see something in the water off the coast of New Jersey, with you sitting in Dubai demonstrating it to them from a laptop screen.
Nothing beats being on a boat and seeing one of our WAM-V vehicles automatically, autonomously follow the observation boat that we're on and doing a 180-degree turn on a dime when we put it into tank mode during the steering. And the other thing it does when you start delivering these as we are to the customers out in the field, is it removes the stigma.
But part of the systems have as being R&D toys, you know, these are real systems delivering real cost savings and real benefits. That real carbon savings to our customers and are real force multipliers. And that just completely changes the perception. So, we are very excited about more partnerships, more reseller agreements, and more commercial deals coming up in the very near future.
Is that the strategy moving forward?
Yes. Where there is a need for us to work directly with the end customer, we would obviously do that. But we accept the fact that we want to play well with others. Most of these projects and I think spoken about this before, have more than just us involved. And therefore there is always going to be an integrator sitting in between us and the end customer. We like working with them as they bring to their contract management skills, bring together project integration skills. So we will continue working with them.
And we like having a network of partners that we work with globally, and we can't be everywhere all at once. But what we can do is have trusted partners that we like working with, that understand our system that can go and deliver to the end customer, and then when need be, we'll step in and work with them to enhance their capabilities.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and style