Chairman’s Statement

I am pleased to report a year of growth in our revenues and adjusted EBITDA, which was achieved against a challenging macroeconomic backdrop. Our Cyber business performed particularly well, winning orders totalling over $32m, while our Diagnostics and Networking businesses introduced innovative new products that are receiving great interest and which we expect to contribute to growth in the current year.

Alongside this operational progress, we successfully navigated some fundamental changes to our business. From 1 January 2023, Dr. Zvi Marom, who founded the company and had been the CEO for over 30 years, assumed the role of Non-executive Director and Moti Nagar became CEO. On behalf of everyone at BATM, I would, once again, like to thank Zvi, who remains a highly valued member of our Board, for his tireless commitment and contribution to the development and success of BATM.

I am delighted that Zvi’s successor as CEO is Moti, who had been our CFO since 1 January 2015 and having joined BATM in June 2014 as VP Finance. Our Board was further strengthened with the appointment during the year of Ran Noy as CFO and an Executive Director, who has already made an excellent contribution building on his experience with other international, public companies, and we look forward to this continuing.

Following Moti becoming our CEO, we embarked on an extensive strategic review, facilitated by a global consulting firm. The process involved consultation with all of our managers across the Group and included assessing how resources can be best allocated to create value and where value should be realised from what we have already. As a result of this, and as discussed further in this Strategic Report, we have adopted a new strategy that is far more focused and is designed to enable us to maximise the strengths across our business through greater collaboration. We presented this new strategy to our investors in June, where it was well received. Since then, we have commenced implementing changes to align ourselves, operationally and culturally, with our renewed strategic vision as well as exploring potential transactions that would add capabilities to our core activities.

Our focus is on the substantial global markets of networking, cyber and diagnostics. In networking, we intend to grow our customer base for our innovative carrier ethernet solutions and establish a leadership position for Edgility in the fast-growing edge computing market. There is a significant untapped growth opportunity for our cyber business to expand into the commercial markets as well as to further government customers. In diagnostics, not only are we looking to grow our existing businesses through greater collaboration and continued innovation, but we are also pursuing a transformational prospect with the revolutionary molecular diagnostics platform being developed by our ADOR Diagnostics associate company.

We know all of this will take time, investment and the commitment of our teams, but we believe that we have the right strategy to enable us to capitalise on the substantial opportunities in these core markets.

As I noted last year, we began a process in 2022 to gain a greater understanding of our environmental impact and to systematically assess the risks and opportunities that are presented to our business by climate change. In 2023, we took a step forward by putting in place new frameworks and procedures to support us in addressing these matters. We have also significantly enhanced the measurement and reporting of our carbon emissions. While it is still relatively early days, I am proud of the progress that we have made to date, which is detailed in the TCFD Report on pages 21-26.

To conclude, on behalf of the Board, I would like to thank our employees across the Group for their hard work and commitment during a time that has not been without its challenges. Your efforts are appreciated and we hope that you are as excited as we are about our future. I would like to thank our shareholders for their continued support of BATM. With our new strategy in place, we are confident in the prospects of the business and our ability to deliver the substantial value that exists within our company.

Dr. Gideon Chitayat
Chairman
03 April 2024