Ocean Power Technologies Inc (NYSE-A:OPTT) CEO Philipp Stratmann talked with Proactive about recent strategic developments for the maritime technology company, including new contract wins in the United States and Latin America.
Proactive: Alright, welcome back inside our Proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Philipp Stratmann. He is the CEO of Ocean Power Technologies. And Philipp, welcome back — nice to see you again.
Philipp Stratmann: Yeah, good to see you. Thanks for having me on.
So you've had a couple of news releases over the last few days, and I thought we'd address both of those. First off, let's talk about the U.S. contract. Very exciting — getting a buoy into the Atlantic. This work that you've been doing about expanding the company seems to be paying off again.
Yeah. No, this is one that we're really excited about. You know, we've had lots of news recently about vehicles — and vehicles particularly on the defense and security side. I think it's, you know, we've always said that the ability to provide permanent resident and persistent monitoring that utilizes renewable power so you can be out there for long periods of time is vital for data collection. And I think we've all seen the massive escalation in terms of interest in data for AI and other applications. So I think we're very excited about getting this off the Atlantic — our home ocean, where we’re obviously based — and getting the buoy deployed, further expanding and into the hands of various customers. I think that's great news.
Latin America — another contract win there as well. And I guess the interesting part about all of this is the fact that it doesn't always have to be offshore. That really shows the difference in what your company is producing. There’s lots of opportunity and capabilities in the things you're producing.
Absolutely. I mean, obviously the buoy is going into the Atlantic. But I think the big thing that is really exciting for us is the vehicle that's going for a mining application. What this showcases is just the extreme versatility. As long as there is something that has to do with water — be that a dam, a power generation facility, or a mining facility — our systems can be deployed rapidly, cost effectively, and do the job that otherwise you would need divers for or some other type of risky or costly exercise. So we're really excited about geographic expansions and also the expansion into adjacent industries that might not have been possible to service if we were more of a traditional marine technology provider.
Philipp, just a point on that. I found it interesting when you talked about the cost-effective part of it — also the ability to get into areas where you don't have to put humans in, provide logistics like food and shelter. These hard-to-reach areas are sort of an underserved area maybe.
I think absolutely they are. It's not just hard-to-reach areas. It's also areas where you're trying to de-risk operations. You might currently have humans operating in that environment. I was out with some of our partners and potential customers in the UAE last week, and again, the appetite for replacing traditionally manned assets — that are burning bunker fuel, have lots of people on them — and replacing them with autonomous assets that can do the same job at a fraction of the operating costs when you're going offshore, and materially lower the risk, opens up all sorts of opportunities for expansion and for lowering the cost footprint for our customer base.
We're getting to chat with you at home in the U.S. right now. But that doesn't mean you're staying there, because part of your job is to get around the world and talk to people about what you're doing. And you're going to be on the road again very soon.
Yeah, we’re going to be — well, in different states — but in the U.S., we're going to be at CS Space in a couple of weeks’ time in Washington, D.C. We're really excited about that one, because we're going to be showcasing, together with Red Card Holdings — which is an aerial drone provider — the ability to take out aerial drones on our USVs and then launch them to do additional maritime domain awareness.
I think that multi-domain operations in the autonomy space is super exciting. And then we're going to be in Ocean Business in the United Kingdom, where we're going to be showcasing the ability to service commercial customers — survey work for offshore wind, oil and gas, underwater cables, pipelines, whatever needs you have to survey, we can go out there and service that.
And then we've obviously got more assets coming up in the Middle East and in Latin America. So yeah, we're excited about the additional adjacent markets we're expanding into — not just geographically but also from a use case. So it’s an exciting time.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and style