Good morning, and welcome to the Microlise Group PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen- only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press Send. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll, and now I'd like to hand you over to the management team. Nadeem, good morning, sir.
Good morning, and welcome everybody. Thank you for joining us this morning. You've got myself, Nadeem Raza, CEO of Microlise, and Nick Wightman, CFO of Microlise. We're gonna cover four items today, so give you some highlights of FY 2025 results. Nick's gonna do more of a deep dive into the financials for 2025, and then I'm gonna give you some updates on market and strategy and finish off with outlook before going on to Q&A. Just to recap on FY 2025, we had really, really good, strong cashflow through 2025, and as well as that, we saw some significant growth in our direct customer recurring revenue, 16% growth there.
It was offset by lower revenues from OEMs, and we'll cover that in more detail in a later slide. We also delivered GBP 5 million of annualized cost savings through a restructuring program that we did in December 2025, and that's really set us up for doing the investments that we're planning on doing in 2026. That's gonna drive margin expansion through 2026 and 2027. We also onboarded a new CTO as of the beginning of this year, and that's really helping us drive some of those product investments, as well as continuing our growth with AI deployments internally for operational efficiency and also within our product set. I'm gonna hand across now to Nick to give you more color on the financial side of 2025.
Thanks, Nadeem. Good morning, everyone. So, highlights for 2025. Adjusted revenue was up 4% to GBP 84 million year-on-year. Recurring revenue grew 8% to GBP 58.8 million. Importantly, direct customer revenue growth was 16%, which remains the core engine of the business. We also saw continued strength in the SaaS model. Net revenue retention, we've got a later slide on that, was 108%, and we continue to have a low churn of just over 1%, reflecting the stickiness of the products and services that we provide to our customers.
From a financial discipline perspective, the group generated GBP 13.3 million of operating cash flow, so up materially last year, and that ended us with GBP 16.7 million of cash, providing us a strong balance sheet and flexibility to make necessary investments that we wanna initiate in 2026. Finally, we completed a restructuring program in December 2025, delivering approximately GBP 5 million of annualized cost savings, which positions the business for improved efficiency moving forward. The key headlines here are strong underlying progress in revenue quality and cash generation, alongside a strategic repositioning for the business. Just moving on to revenue composition, which is where the underlying quality of the model becomes clearer. As I mentioned on the previous slide, total revenue is GBP 84 million, with recurring revenue growing significantly.
We did see a contraction in the non-recurring revenues, which were really down to lower OEM volumes and timing delays on small number of projects which we're expecting to recover in 2026. I think the key takeaway here is the ongoing mix towards higher margin recurring revenues, particularly with our direct customers. What this does for us is it gives us really good visible revenue. These contracts tend to be five years in nature. We are very successful with retaining customers. As the previous slide showed, we have very little churn, so it gives us really good visibility and reliability of the revenue coming through.
Obviously, just from a margin perspective, the transition that we're driving towards is we want to sell more recurring services to direct customers because the margin profile is just significantly better. We've started to see that over recent years. As we go through this deck, we'll see from the investment that we are making that this will help drive that forward. Thank you. Yeah, to the next slide. Thank you. This slide walks through the movement on ARR over the period. We've moved from GBP 56.6 million to GBP 59.2 million, representing steady growth despite the external environment headwinds that we've had.
Breaking that down into the individual steps, there was a modest reduction in OEM, so GBP 2.3 million. We expect that to continue into 2026. That will start to recover, probably back end of 2027 and into 2028. We had some churn of GBP 0.9 million, slightly up on previous period, so I think we were about GBP 0.7 million. The change really reflects the conscious cessation of a legacy hosting contract that we had when we, it was sort of a, it came when we bought ESS, so it's effectively a throughput cost, so v ery low margin.
It's obviously something that was planned, and it's part of the ongoing transition that we are kind of making to get revise the hosting provision that we've got with some of the legacy systems that we've inherited through acquisition. Offsetting those two points is strong growth from existing customers. Obviously, we've had some really positive wins with new customers that added GBP 1.7 million. I think the important thing to kind of call out here is that the ARR growth is coming from our direct customer segment, which delivers high quality, predictable revenues. It really hopefully underscores the resilience of the recurring revenue base and showcases the importance of the growth from direct customers moving forwards.
Just moving on to net revenue retention or NRR. Obviously, this is a key metric and obviously shows how we are growing revenues within the existing customer base. That expansion is driven by cross-sell, up-sell, increasing the adoption of multiple products within a single platform. The one TMS platform is particularly important here, as it will enable us deeper integration and a lot more opportunities for expansion over time. We also expect further improvement opportunity as we expand into the mid-market segment and scale the multi-module adoption that we've seen improve over 2026. That's another area of focus for us.
The key message is that growth is increasingly coming from our existing installed base, with, you know, as we're launching more products and services through the investment that we're making, this will make the quality and the predictability and the margin accretion greater over time. Just onto the cash bridge, please. Thank you. We had a very, very strong year from cash generation perspective in 2025. We moved from GBP 11.4 million to GBP 16.7 million, which reflects operational performance and very disciplined cash management in the period. The principal drivers were the adjusted EBITDA and strong working capital performance. Obviously, we deployed that into ongoing investment.
There's a continuing program of tangible investment that we make, so, GBP 3.9 million, which is a combination of leased and acquired assets, so mainly around the ongoing upgrade program that we do in our data centers. There's a further GBP 2.8 million of internally generated software. The key takeaway is that the business remains very highly cash generative with a strong balance sheet to support future growth and shareholder returns. We also have a committed facility with HSBC, which consists of a RCF facility of GBP 10 million and a further accordion of GBP 20 million. Overall, you know, we've got well in excess of GBP 40 million available to us to deploy to drive the business forwards.
Okay. I'm just going to talk a little bit about market and strategy, particularly in the context of AI and the impact of that on SaaS businesses. We actually see AI as an important opportunity for us, an exciting opportunity not only to enhance our operational efficiencies within the business, but also to incorporate more into our products. We've had our AI in our products for many, many years, but we have also recently launched more AI technologies within our products over recent months. The key thing here is as to why we're in a great place to exploit AI as opposed to new entrants in the market. We have deep industry experience. We have 40 years' experience in the logistics and transport space.
We also have integrated hardware, and we also provide consultancy services. Again, something that a new entrant with AI isn't able to easily do. We have market-leading partnerships with other hardware vendors, software vendors, and OEMs. And we have an extensive data moat. We have over 25 years' worth of data across our customer base, both in terms of telemetry data but also on assets, inventory, people, workflows, et cetera. I think that puts us in a fantastic place to exploit AI and gives us a significant moat against any new entrants as well.
Several growth levers. To give you an idea of some of the things that we've already seen through 2025 and will continue in 2026, our investment and growth in marketing is generating more campaigns and more leads, and more qualified leads. We're seeing particular growth in our digital product sales. That's particularly in our compliance and camera sales. Seeing good growth in cross-sell opportunities. Although we have eight different product sets, our average customer has approximately four. We still see lots of white space in our existing customer base for us to do upsells and further growth of share of wallet. The other area that we're focusing on is velocity, so how we compress that cycle time from first contact to contract win through to deployment and invoicing and cash generation.
We're working hard to reduce those time frames across all of our different products. Our digital products, that cycle time is measured in a few days, b ut with our more complicated, Transport Management System products, those can be months. And we've already had good success in reducing that time frame down, which allows us to deliver more of those higher value products much, much faster. Thirdly, in terms of the quality of leads and lead generation, we've done a lot of work there to better qualify leads, better target particular sales opportunities, particularly in our high value, higher margin product sets.
Also, an external consultancy that we've used to provide better packaging options, again, to put together certain products in a format that allows us to increase margins in those areas as well. Th at's also intending to deliver margin expansion. Just looking back on 2025, key takeaways are that we had strong direct customer momentum. Again, very low churn and really good growth in our recurring revenues with those existing customers and onboarding of new customers. We did see our EBITDA impacted by OEM headwinds and some deployment timings on some customers that were impacted by cyber incidents last year.
We did GBP 5 million of annualized cost savings through a restructuring program. It was a restructuring program where we've reduced headcount in particular areas through efficiencies, but also increased headcount in other areas, really building in 2026 for further margin expansion. In FY 2026, it's really a build year where we're investing in several projects. The three key ones are that we are growing our TMS product and really focusing on expanding that and delivering it faster. We have already this year contracted more TMS customer contract wins than we did in all of last year, so a significant increase in velocity in selling that TMS product. We've also seen good expansion in that mid-market space, so that's the 100- 500 vehicle fleet segment.
There's still a lot of penetration to happen in that space, and w e are investing in improving our products in that area to really exploit that opportunity. Thirdly, we are changing some of our architecture and our hybrid cloud infrastructure really to allow us to scale more cost effectively, and that will also return cost savings in 2026 and 2027. Where else we're making investments in terms of actual headcounts is in our go-to-market team. We are increasing our quota-carrying heads by 20%, and that is again to drive further expansion in those product sales in TMS and mid-market space. That expansion is international. It 's not just in the U.K., it also covers increased quota-carrying heads in Australia and also in France.
We're continuing to grow our EBITDA margins, and that will come about because of revenue mix shift. Again, we make more margin on direct customers compared to OEMs, so that shift to more direct recurring revenues will have an impact on EBITDA margins. We're investing in our Microlise One product, and particularly the TMS product in that portfolio, enabling faster deployment and higher adoption and cross-sell. In terms of operating leverage, we're scaling our platform and our customer base, and utilizing AI tooling internally and within our products to gain efficiencies there. We're growing our go-to-market team, as I mentioned, significantly increasing the quota-carrying heads.
We're continuing to see benefits from restructuring and further changes that we're making. As we implement process re-engineering and our lean program across the entire, across the entire organization. We target three particular markets, so t he telematics space, which is a GBP 89 billion market; t he fleet management space, which is a GBP 38 billion market; and the transport management space, which is a GBP 19 billion market. Effectively, our Microlise One product actually unifies these three product categories into one operating system that allows customers to use our tools across this entire market segment. Our long-term strategy is to create that transport operating system. It's to unify fleet operations, transport operations, and telematics into one platform. What that gives us is, in the fleet management space, ability to manage assets, maintenance, compliance, and utilization of those assets.
In the transport management space, is management of orders, planning, the execution of those deliveries, quotations, rate cards, invoicing, et cetera. In the telematics space, it's sensor data on vehicles, drivers, journeys, health and safety issues, cameras, temperature data, et cetera. We're bringing all of that together into one platform, which is our Microlise One platform, and layering all of that data with AI capability, so e nabling our customers to predict, giving them recommendations, and allowing them to automate a lot of the key functions that they have. All of our tools are moving from just providing data, and information and dashboards to actually providing value-driven decision support that allows customers to really make decisions that's gonna drive more benefits for their business.
Here, just to give you an example of how we grow with our customers, this is an example of a large U.K. supermarket. We've had an over 15-year relationship with this particular supermarket. They operate 2,500 trucks, over 4,000 trailers, and a few thousand vans as well. Over that period, we've rolled out different products and expanded that footprint within the, within that customer, and really driving them their on-time delivery rates to 99%, and really, you know, making sure that the, their on-shelf availability is at that maximum level. For us, that's meant that we've had a 244% revenue growth with that customer over that period.
Really showing you how we are very, very sticky with our customer base and how we continue to grow into that white space that we have in that customer base. There is a link to the case study for this customer, should you want to see that towards the end of the slide deck. Moving on to outlook, a bit of insight into market conditions. We haven't seen that much supply chain disruption due to the Middle East conflict. However, there has been supply chain disruption through the growth in and the investments that large companies are making in their AI data centers. That's hoovering up a lot of the supply of RAM chips and memory chips, and we've seen a tenfold price increase in memory chips.
Now, fortunately, we don't have lots of memory in our hardware, and a s such, we're not expecting pricing to be impacted significantly on there. However, the availability is something that we are having to constantly keep on top of. The other impact that we're seeing from the Middle East conflict is higher fuel pricing. Now, for our third-party logistics customers, those people that transport goods on behalf of other customers, for them, they already have fuel escalators in their contracts, and so t hey are just able to pass that cost straight on through their existing contracts. It's the higher fuel costs are not really impacting them and their businesses.
The other side of it, where we have customers who own and operate their own fleet, particularly that's the retailers, several companies in the pharma space, et cetera, for them, those higher fuel costs are impacting their bottom lines, and that is something that they will inevitably have to pass on to consumers, depending on how long the issue lasts. The other thing that we're really excited about is AI adoption. That is helping us with our operational efficiencies within the business. We've already deployed tooling to and training across our staff base. We've deployed agents within our organization, and we are soon deploying agents for our customers as well over the coming weeks.
It's really caused a shift in upskilling staff, but we see this as a great opportunity to really be able to do more with the, with the staff and the people that we have. Our strategic priorities are we are increasing our investment to grow that direct customer revenue and higher quality recurring revenue that we get from direct customers. That will drive improved margins as well as improving margins through efficiency gains internally within the business. We're gonna continue our development of Microlise One platform because that overarching software solution that covers all three of those market segments that we talked about earlier means that we are highly competitive. We don't have any other players that cover and span those three segments, and it makes us very sticky within our customer base.
We're also continuing with market-leading partnerships with OEMs, with other hardware providers, and with other software providers. We continue on with our international expansion and M&A as well. A reminder of the investment case. We typically have five-year contracts with our customers, and that explains the low churn rate and the consistent performance that we've seen. We're also selling multiple products into our customer base, which again drives that stickiness and continues to grow our share of wallet with customers as we expand and sell them more products. We have margin expansion programs going on, and again, we'll see those coming through in 2026 and 2027. We also have significant market opportunity internationally, and we're working through that with Australia being our fastest growth region.
We have a track record of growing our annual recurring revenue, as you can see from that graph on the right-hand side of the slide. To summarize, we expect OEM revenues to be subdued through to 2027. We are investing and growing our investments to accelerate that growth in our direct customer market, particularly focusing on our Microlise One TMS product and the mid-market segment. Then, by using AI tooling in our operations and further also in our products, we expect strong growth in our direct customer market together with cost reductions and increases in margins through 2027 and beyond. At that point, I'm going to hand back to Charlie to orchestrate any questions that he wants to cover off. Charlie?
Thank you both for updating investors today. Could I please remind investors to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen? For your reference, a recording of today's presentation will be available in the Investor Meet Company platform shortly after the meeting has ended. Guys, as you can see, we received a number of questions during today's presentation. If I could just hand back to the team to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, then I'll pick up from you at the end.
Thank you. First question was from Charlie. "How are system integration improvements affecting customer onboarding times and implementation costs?" For some of our products, we can obviously onboard customers very, very quickly, but the more complicated the product, then obviously the longer it takes to for that customer to onboard it, integrate it to other systems, train people, et cetera. You know, prime example of that is our TMS product. The contracts that we did last year were averaging 9-12 months for deployment. The contracts that we're doing this year are averaging around six months. Our expectation is that by the end of this year, we'll be able to bring that timeline for integrations and onboarding down to two months, and we're not stopping there either.
What that will allow us to do is onboard more customers more quickly and reduce that cycle time from first contact to invoicing and cash generation. You also ask how this is expected to drive professional services and margins. Well, it's gonna drive margins up. But in terms of professional services, what we see is a shift from things like training and project management because there's lots of other tools available for training, and the project management time becomes shorter because things get implemented faster. We'll see a shift from professional services for those types of activities to professional services that actually help our customers drive benefits because our customers don't buy software. What they're actually looking to buy is the benefit that that software delivers.
Given our extensive expertise in logistics and transport, what we're seeing is deploying our professional service resources to help those customers actually deliver the benefits and the value from our software, not just deliver the software. The next question from Andrew. "How much of ARR growth is coming from pricing versus expansion within existing customers? Is pricing power strengthening or becoming more competitive?" We do have clauses within our contracts to increase pricing for inflationary reasons. I don't know Nick whether you wanna give more specific data on that?
Yeah. It'd be around GBP 1 million of the GBP 4.1 million that we saw on the bridge. Obviously, from a direct customer perspective, as Nadeem refers to, we have the clauses that we can increase on an annual basis, and that's been the case probably for the last three or four years. As you would expect, these things are probably one of the consistent points that are always challenged with customers is the inflationary clauses. Obviously then, they're generally negotiated fairly hard on both sides, as you can imagine. It's right to point out that we don't have inflationary clauses on the contract terms on OEM customers purely because they pay for multiple years up front.
With our biggest customer, for example, they pay for five years in advance, so the price is effectively locked for that particular service contract. However, we do review pricing both on the software subscriptions and the hardware on a routine basis.
The other question was, is pricing power strengthening or becoming more competitive? I don't think we're seeing it vary that much, to be honest. I think that we're not expecting pricing increases, et cetera, to change that much over the coming year. Next question was from Steven. "What are the OEM headwinds you allude to, and why do you think that it will reverse in late 2027, early 2028?" I think there's a number of factors there. One, what we saw last year was shortfalls in volumes, but I think there are two other factors that are worth pointing out.
One, with several of our OEMs, the new contracts coming on versus old contracts that are coming off contract, new contracts are lower pricing, so t here is some price erosion a fter five years. I don't think that should be a surprise, so I think that has some impact on it. I think the bigger impact is that what we saw in 2025 was that there are a certain proportion of contracts with customers that after the first initial period, whether it's three years or five years or six years, after that initial period, a certain proportion of end customers have contract renewals. What we've seen is that that contract renewal rate is far lower than it has been. We suspect that that's down to economic conditions, et cetera.
But that's, that's having an impact on overall OEM revenues. Now, why do we expect this to change in the next 18 months? Twofold. One, we're seeing forecasting revenues to go up through, one, increases in volumes, changes in pricing. Secondly, we expect that the renewal rates will also plateau out. I think the combination of those things will mean that there'll be a leveling out and a small increase in OEM revenues, and that's probably a pessimistic view, but that's how we've modeled it at this point in time.
I think that, really, the focus should be on the growth in direct customer base, because we're seeing that, 16% last year, and we still expect that to be in double-digit growth over 2026 and 2027 as well. The next question. Can you provide an indication of respective margins between direct and indirect sales? I'm assuming you mean direct and OEM sales. Direct, I think, it's not something we disclose, but I think it's fair to say that direct sales tend to be significantly higher margin than OEM sales. OEMs will generally take a small proportion of our product set, as well as hardware.
Given the volumes that they shift, that tends to be higher volumes but lower margins, w hereas direct customers will be taking far more software than hardware, and that tends to drive far bigger margins on our direct sales. The next question from Michael. "Please comment on respective growth rates between U.K., large U.K., mid Australasia and France." So, U.K. large market segment, so vehicle fleets above 500. I think there aren't that many more big fleets in that space, given that we already have about 60% market share in that segment. But what we are seeing is growth occurring through upselling and selling new modules into those existing customers. The mid-market space, we're onboarding lots of new customers, so the growth rate there is a lot faster. Australia is probably our fastest growing market by far, you know.
We are obviously starting from a much smaller base there, but A ustralia is definitely double-digit growth and growing much faster than France. Next question was, what are target run rate indirect CapEx and development costs? I don't know if you want to answer that for 2026 and 2027, Nick?
Yeah. So, CapEx costs for, if we're talking specifically around, we'll handle tangible CapEx first, so w e're expecting that to be consistent at around between GBP 2.5 million and GBP 3 million, which is what it's been historically. From an intangible, so effectively internally generated software, we've typically run at around between GBP 2.5 million and GBP 3 million, so around 3% of revenue. We are expecting that to increase, and we're expecting that to increase for two reasons. One is that we're obviously investing in a number of people to undertake these investment initiatives that we've been talking about. We're also expecting to see an underlying increase in capitalized development. Essentially, we're taking a very prudent approach historically.
If you look at our peer group, they tend to capitalize between 6% and 12%. Ours will be increasing, but it is only increasing on the basis that it's a better reflection of the underlying investment, not a change in the economic reality of it. It's not a change in policy. We are improving a number of internal controls and the governance around applying the accounting standards, which will mean that we will be able to effectively capture the underlying investment better than we have done historically. That's where we'll see a change in that level of capitalization moving forwards.
I think there's two other points to add to that. One is that we've rolled out AI tools to our development, as well as in various other parts of our operations. That's also meant that we can focus more of our time on product development as opposed to, you know, some of the technical debt aspects that you end up spending time on. That's gonna have an impact. The second impact, which isn't on capitalization, but it's more on just to be clear about some of the investments that we're making. We are growing our go-to-market team. In terms of quota-carrying heads, we're growing that by 20%. That's in the U.K. and internationally in France and Australia as well.
That's really to drive that and accelerate that growth in our direct customer base. That's an investment, so o bviously, that's not gonna be capitalized.
I think it's fair to say that, you know, the investment that we are making and the additional resource that we're bringing in both from a GTM and a development perspective will obviously drive ARR and NRR growth moving forwards.
Yeah. As I said that 16% direct customer growth that we saw in 2025, you know, we're projecting that to continue on in double digits and obviously significantly offset the shortfall that we're seeing on the OEM side and projecting on that side over 2026 and 2027.
Thank you, Nadeem and Nick, for answering all those questions from investors today. Before we ask investors to share their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Nadeem, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
Sure. Thank you. I think it's fair to summarize that, you know, we are in a bit of a transition period where we're seeing OEM revenues coming down and then plateauing. Really, that's the reason why we're deciding to invest heavily and grow and accelerate our direct customer sales, which, you know, we've shown is strong in 2025, and we expect that to continue with even greater strength in 2026 and really drive significant margin expansion and profitability in 2027. Thank you very much for your time, everyone.
Thank you both once again for your presentation this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team of Microlise Group PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you.