"AXON" -- it's Canadian for "body camera." Image source: TASER INTERNATIONAL.
Since introducing its Axon on-body camcorder in 2009, TASER International (AXON -1.09%) has dominated the market for body cameras for police.
At last report, TASER has succeeded in getting more than 3,500 law enforcement agencies to purchase the device for their officers. Precisely how many AXONs have been sold isn't exactly clear. But TASER has reported issuing "approximately 75,000 " licenses for the Evidence.com service that stores and catalogs Axon videos for later retrieval -- so it stands to reason there are at least 75,000 Axon cameras on the market already today.
Most of these users are in the U.S., granted. But TASER is growing its international business as well, and most recently, in Canada.
Canada, eh?
Last week, TASER announced that its Canadian subsidiary has just landed its first pilot project deploying Axon body cameras linked to Evidence.com accounts. The Service de Police de la Ville de Montreal (SPVM) will be the company's inaugural customer north of the border, deploying Axon cameras to 50 officers of the Montreal Subway Patrol and Traffic Patrol for a trial period of nine months.
Financial specifics of the pilot project were not revealed, but the numbers here will not be large. TASER sells its Axons for as little as $399 a unit, and Evidence.com revenue can be as little as $300 a year, depending on the data plan chosen. At the low end, therefore, the total revenue for this project could be as little as $31,200 -- or less, if one assumes TASER cut Montreal a deal to gain entree into the Canadian market.
Now that TASER is in Canada, though, how big could the opportunity become?
How much are Canadian dollars really worth?
Well, let's see here. Seven years into the Axon program, TASER appears to have penetrated something under 9% of the potential law enforcement market here in the U.S. According to Statistics Canada, there are just under 69,000 police officers in all of Canada today. If Canadian adoption of Axon tracks that seen in the U.S., therefore, we might see as many as 6,300 (9% of 69,000) Axon cameras sold in Canada and 6,300 Evidence.com subscriptions signed seven years from now.
That suggests a market opportunity of perhaps $2.5 million for the hardware (probably more, as TASER introduces more advanced versions of the device and users pay to upgrade), spread over seven years -- so go ahead and round it up to $400,000 a year. On top of that, annual subscription revenue will start slow, but might ramp up to something in the neighborhood of $1.9 million (again, "probably more," given that TASER charges more for more robust data plans) seven years from now.
In short, for a company that did $209 million in annual revenue last year, primarily in the U.S., Canada offers an attractive bolt-on market. But even so, it will probably be several years before we see Canada add even 1% to TASER's annual revenue stream.
So what can we surmise from all this, about the 6% rise in the value of TASER stock that we've seen since the Canadian story broke -- a stock price rise that's taken place in the face of no other news but the Canadian story?
Simply put, it's probably an overreaction. Once again, TASER shareholders are getting carried away.
