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The growing recognition by electronics manufacturers of the need to differentiate their products using innovative approaches, and to get these new products to market in increasingly shorter time frames, is encouraging the search for new and innovative ways to approach the whole design process. Our job continues to be to provide the design tools, support and training that allow engineers and electronics designers to collaborate effectively, harness the best of today’s electronic components, and most importantly to design and build great products. Altium remains the only mainstream company providing a truly new approach to the design process – one that rejects the silo-based design processes of the past and instead treats the design of electronic products as a holistic problem. This requires a redefinition of what design tools we must provide, and Altium Designer, encapsulating our unified design approach, provides a solution. As we have continued to help organizations make the transition to this new approach to electronics design, our confidence in our solution continues to grow. Although there is still much work to do on the product development side of the business, the solution we offer today already represents a clear step into this new approach for our customers. At times, the sheer magnitude of the opportunity in front of us feels quite daunting. The challenge that this represents, the responsibility of delivering on this opportunity – to our customers, to our employees who are investing their careers, and our shareholders who are investing their dollars – weighs very heavily. But it is the quality of the Altium team, a truly world-class group of people that has grown strongly over the last year, which gives me the confidence that we can deliver on this opportunity. This year, we revealed the next stages of our strategy, as several fundamental technologies have emerged from our product development pipeline. The reconfigurable platform – our new NanoBoard product range, previewed in April this year – allows engineers to combine pre-assembled, off-the-shelf circuit boards to create hardware devices that can be programmed for specific applications using Altium Designer – all without the need to design and manufacture custom hardware. Our new software-to-hardware compiler technology, several years in development, will make its first appearance in our products as this report goes to press. This allows software engineers to really harness the power of programmable hardware, opening up whole new markets for our products. Our new PCB visualization technology provides realistic real-time views of the product under development by our customers, not only making it easier for experienced electronics designers to do their jobs today, but also extending the reach of less experienced designers to much more complex designs. These are just a sample of the building blocks of the next-generation electronics design solution. As we move forward we will continue to focus on developing and progressing these technologies, bringing them into our products, and building an organization that can deliver this technology to an ever increasing base of customers. This is not a game for the faint-hearted. Altium is building and supplying a whole new way of designing electronic products. Although we continue to see financial results that reflect an increasing acceptance of our approach and solution in the marketplace, our real focus remains on the bigger objective of empowering the next generation of electronics designers. Ultimately, our success will be measured on whether Altium Designer and the unified design approach becomes the next ‘standard’ for the design of electronic products, and whether we can help the many hundreds of thousands of designers throughout the world fulfil their potential through their own products. Today, we have a few tens of thousands of designers using our latest technology, so the scale of the opportunity speaks for itself. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone on the Altium team for their dedication and contribution in continuing to make our strategy real. Your efforts have made a difference in the world and will continue to do so into the future. To our shareholders, who have shown the vision and patience to stay with us through the years, we extend our warmest thanks for your support. 
Rest assured that the whole Altium team remains committed and excited by the opportunity in front of us. We look forward to continuing to turn your company into the world-class success that it can be. 
Nick Martin, |
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