NEW YORK, Jan. 20, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Starfleet Innotech, Inc. (OTC: SFIO-Smokefree Innotec, Inc.), a leading asset management company and innovation group, is pleased to share details around its pending name change to Starfleet Innotech, Inc., its ongoing transformation initiatives, and its progress towards uplisting to the Nasdaq within the next three years.
Dear shareholders and valued business partners,
This letter marks my first time addressing you all in 2022, and perhaps the final time I will be addressing our community under the name Smokefree Innotec, Inc. In the weeks to come, we hope to receive final confirmation on our proposed name change to Starfleet Innotech, Inc.—a company name I believe truly captures our mission of innovating across new frontiers. It’s a step my team and I could not be more excited about.
When we began developing our plans for a network of innovative companies working in conjunction to explore new frontiers of innovation, we couldn’t help but draw inspiration from the sci-fi classics we grew up with. As Starfleet, we’re leading this new alliance, sharing knowledge and resources to help our businesses boldly go where none of their industries have gone before.
The name change will be a fitting start to 2022, following a big year of restructuring for SFIO. As we continued to grow our global portfolio of companies throughout 2021, we embarked on a series of vertical and horizontal integrations to best consolidate our resources, resulting in a more efficient, more productive, and ultimately more profitable family of businesses operating across a shared, streamlined supply chain. Today, SFIO’s three core divisions—F&B, Real Estate, and Technology—represent a clear, coherent strategy for growth over the next three years.
The Food and Beverage division was a consolidation of the businesses that comprised our international supply chain powering brands like our flagship enterprise Epiphany Cafe. These consisted of firms across food, franchising, coffee, and beverage solutions. To date, we’ve established partnerships with wholesale bakeries and food commissaries; developed better supply chain management, logistics, and administrative systems; localized our franchising and license procurement strategies; and forged new distribution channels for our coffee and beverage solution products.
In consolidating these businesses under one division, we were able to more effectively organize their complementary resources, and focus efforts towards turning our F&B businesses into SFIO’s vehicles for entering new global markets. This year, we’re exploring expansions for Epiphany Cafe across Australia, the Philippines, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. Market research, feasibility studies, and financial modeling are already underway, with pilot sites across these regions currently being selected. We are also in the process of shortlisting our master franchise partners, and developing brand conversion strategies nuanced to these new markets.
In the Philippines, we’ve partnered with FJ Prime Management, Inc. to spearhead the growth of Epiphany Cafe in the country. Similarly, we’ve established a partnership with Epiphany Ventures Corporation to grow our footprint across Malaysia. As part of these plans, we are currently in talks with key convenience store brands in Malaysia and Australia to carry Epiphany’s signature pillow-soft donuts. As for our 5-in-1 instant coffee offering, under our Gorgeous Coffee brand, we’ve already received initial orders from our partner distributors across the United States and Australia, with the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines soon to follow.
To fuel this expansion, we’ve built our Real Estate division around a series of high-yield projects, the proceeds of which we will be reinvesting in SFIO’s future growth. We ended 2021 announcing that local permits have been obtained and land development initiatives are already underway for many of our exciting and innovative township projects. In addition, we are actively exploring non-dilutive funding options for these initiatives, the details of which we will be sharing in the months to come. As we begin pre-selling and staging marketing roadshows for these projects, we will be launching a new brand around SFIO’s Real Estate division, to communicate the type of future-ready communities we aim to create—communities that embrace the best of smart city technologies, health and wellness systems, and opportunities around medical tourism.
Finally, we’ve established our Technology division as SFIO’s key enabler, underpinning all our efforts as a conglomerate. In terms of strategy, this division will not only augment business operations, unlock innovative new revenue streams, and grow our intellectual property assets, but will serve as SFIO’s backbone as we grow as an agile organization.
For example, as we concurrently enter new markets with Epiphany Cafe, part of ensuring the sustainability of our growth is embracing new technologies to better manage our operations at scale—starting with a unified, streamlined logistics platform. With this platform, our goal would not only be to standardize the operations of our different businesses across the supply chain, but to also bring value to our franchisees, and, ultimately, their customers who will now benefit from a truly seamless, tech-powered system.
Similarly, our Technology division is hard at work on a proprietary platform to manage all our global Real Estate projects, specifically when it comes to supporting our agents’ customer engagement and sales workflows. Through the use of artificial intelligence tools, this platform will serve as the scaffolding for future tech services, housing our pipeline of real estate innovations. Our goal with this suite of tools is to eventually offer it to other developers as well, to help them showcase their real estate portfolios and augment their operations.
Our technology efforts around real estate aren’t limited to showcasing them, however, but will be fundamentally integrated into each of our developments, beginning with the big investments we’re making in pioneering community health systems. We recently partnered with Fort Health Data Systems, a startup that develops health and wellness dashboards for communities-as-a-whole. With Fort Health, we’re able to pull in individual health data points, as well as environmental data from Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled sensors to build predictive models for proactive community care. And to really take those data gathering systems to the next level, we have NeuroSky, a Silicon Valley-based biosensor solution firm that develops bleeding edge hardware like brainwave monitoring headbands and smartwatches for tracking wellbeing. We believe that integrating NeuroSky’s hardware with Fort Health’s community health platforms, then deploying those systems across our township projects will be a real game-changer for tech-driven public health systems.
Just as we intend to do with our real estate platform, this community approach to care will then be expanded and deployed to other settings, taking our blend of proprietary software and innovative hardware to health institutions, universities, and workplaces around the globe. By providing the means to meaningfully gather and analyze health data, we will be enabling communities to build measurable, proactive health strategies, leading to greater savings by ensuring people don’t become ill in the first place.
Finally, I would say the new project I’m most fascinated by is the work our Technology division is doing with digital tokens—specifically NFTs—to allow our shareholders, partners, and other community stakeholders to participate more meaningfully in SFIO’s growth and operations. We’ve been studying a lot of the interesting ways grassroots communities are using decentralized technologies to structure their organizations. In designing this new system, we will be taking cues from the firms experimenting with blockchain and digital tokens to build what we hope will be the new gold standard for asset management platforms.
While these technologies will serve us well as we grow exponentially in the years to come, the real test of our conglomerate’s mettle will not be in its ability to innovate, but in its ability to do so collaboratively. This past year we’ve built SFIO into a truly global community, adding to our presence in New Zealand and Australia with the launch of new offices and teams across the UAE, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the US—where we’ve engaged with experienced firms to help lead our marketing efforts. With such an expansive footprint, the only way to accomplish our shared mission is to establish a united front. And so, following 2021’s restructuring, we have embarked on a new commitment—investing heavily in building SFIO into a truly agile ecosystem.
As an asset management company, we have decided to adopt the same lean-agile framework prevalent among hyper-scale tech developments firms for three reasons. First, it is the best way to ensure that as we grow exponentially in the years to come, we do so flexibly and sustainably. It is essential that we decentralize decision-making wherever possible, so as to allow each of our global units and business divisions to champion their own growth and efficiently respond to their own needs. Second, this framework provides the means to rapidly stage new innovations within our divisions and iterate on them independently, before scaling our successes across the SFIO ecosystem-at-large. Third, this framework recognizes the vital role that talent plays in fueling growth.
To accomplish all this, we’ve gathered a world-class team of professionals tasked with spearheading SFIO’s various initiatives. Transforming our corporate framework is no small task and will require a strong community, united by a culture of collaborative innovation. Just this month, we established a new communication team, whose role will be to both shape a clear and consistent external messaging strategy as we operate in concert with our many stakeholders, and to organize our many corporate teams around our shared goals, supporting each and every one of our units, and establishing the channels they need to collaborate freely.
That collaborative, transparent culture extends beyond our business units, encompassing our entire corporate community. Beginning this month, we will be facilitating regular video conferencing calls with our key investors and partners to keep our stakeholders abreast on our activities. In each of these monthly sessions, we will be introducing new initiatives, sharing important updates, and calling for your feedback—all of which reflect our stance that each member of the SFIO community plays a vital role in our growth.
Further, we have been curating the growth of our top-level leadership to guide our expansion, led by the appointment of additional non-voting advisory board members. In my last letter to you all, I mentioned a series of appointments to our leadership: Jonathan Petalver, Roger Oriel, and Michael Venezuela. These leaders have been crucial to helping us achieve corporate excellence in these early stages, and will continue to play even more vital roles as we expand. Joining them now on our board, I am excited to announce, are Jose Gerardo Noble, Stanley Yang, and Vince Caruso, global leaders in real estate development, technology, and marketing.
In the coming weeks, we will be sharing more information on our progress towards developing the audited financials of each of our subsidiaries; introducing a new class of preferred shares to be used in securing strategic partners, hiring key officers, and closing new acquisitions; and placing SFIO on the OTCQB Venture Market, as a stepping stone towards our larger goal of uplisting to the Nasdaq.
I often end my letters with an expression of gratitude for your continued support and generous guidance as we shape our shared future as a corporate community. This journey would not be possible if not for you, our shareholders and business partners.
That said, allow me to end this particular letter with a call to action. What I have outlined here are the strategies we will be employing as we embark on an ambitious mission of growth and transformation. We have a world-class team assembled to make this happen. But to achieve our goal of uplisting in the next three years, we will need a united front—not only among our global teams and divisions, but across all stakeholders in our community. With your continued support, we will accomplish SFIO’s mission to boldly go where no conglomerate has gone before.
Sincerely,
Jeths Lacson
CEO and Chairman of SFIO
www.sfio.co.nz
Forward-Looking Statements: Certain information disclosed in this letter contains forward-looking information. These information are not guarantees of future performance of SFIO and readers should not place undue reliance on them. Such forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown factors. Although forward-looking statements contained in this letter are based upon what the company believes are reasonable considerations and opportunities, there can be no assurance that these will prove to be achieved, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. SFIO undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or the CEO’s estimates or opinions should change.
For media enquiries, please contact:
Craymond Yeong, PR & Marketing Specialist
Epiphany Café
Phone: (+64) 21 0833 2966
Email: info@sfio.co.nz
