Thank you for standing by, and Welcome to the Aussie Broadband Limited First-Half Fiscal year 2024 results call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Phillip Britt, Managing Director. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Aussie Broadband's first-half FY 2024 results call. My name's Phillip Britt, and I'm the Managing Director of Aussie Broadband. With me today, we have our CFO, Brian Maher. As you can see, Aussie delivered a cracking result for the first half, and the company continues to demonstrate why we're one of Australia's leading communications and technology services providers. Before we start the results and move to Q&A, I'd like to begin by acknowledging the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the First Australians and their role as original communicators, connectors, and carers of the lands and waters across Australia. We pay our respects to their Elders, past and present. We commit to working respectfully to honour their ongoing cultural and spiritual connections between the Traditional Owners of this country and building an inclusive Australia together.
When setting our strategy, we use a cascade model which allows the leadership teams to set a compelling vision for the future. We call this our Game Worth Playing. We then imagine ourselves standing in that future and looking back at the actions and targets we've taken to get there. We use the word game deliberately when we're referring to our strategy and our breakthrough targets. This fits with 20 years of Aussie being a game-changer and our Have Fun value. But it also sets a broader context that we play hard, and we don't think of performance as a right or wrong situation. This is not about short-term objectives or copying our competitors. It's about building our base for our 2025 ambition to have one million broadband services. Moving to slide five of the deck.
As the Aussie team focused on delivering the FY 2024 strategy in the first half, we continued to build scale, growing our NBN share to 8.3%. Underpinning this growth is our exceptional team and their ability to think big, their dedication to customer experience, and our resilient network infrastructure. With the NBN SAU changes coming into effect on the 1st of December 2023, we implemented a range of promotional activities which we believe allow Aussie to capitalize on the introduced changes into the second half of FY 2024. As a result, we expect to see margins in the residential and business segments improve as this financial year progresses into the future. We're also confident with the sales momentum we are seeing in the E&G segment and that of the business segment.
Despite a modest dip in recurring revenue when compared to the second half of last year, the sales pipeline that we discussed in June 2023 remains on track. Aussie investors once again demonstrated their faith and confidence in our strategy and future potential by strongly supporting our successful AUD 140 million capital raising that strengthened our balance sheet and provided capital for future M&A opportunities. Our decision to acquire Symbio in the first half demonstrates our commitment to diversifying the business across its key segments. We're very excited with how well Symbio complements our existing offering. Turning to slide six and the numbers that matter for the first half. We're very happy to report double-digit revenue and EBITDA growth when compared to the prior corresponding period. During the first half, we repriced all of our customers following the introduction of the NBN SAU.
We've now been through the impact of that, including elevated churn. Despite this, we delivered net connection growth higher than our previous two halves. We now have the benefit that all of our customers are on new plans. The first half saw revenue growth by just under 18% to AUD 446 million, and EBITDA grew by 13% to just over AUD 46 million. Importantly, operational cash flow jumped 58% to AUD 41 million, reflecting the strong underlying performance of the business. Overall, gross margins increased to AUD 154 million, up 17% on the prior corresponding period. Across the residential and business segments, margins were impacted by unfavorable mobile data charges. Residential margins were also influenced by a period of intense promotional activity around the SAU changes. Gross margins in E&G and wholesale segments increased, and Brian will provide more details on these later.
Meanwhile, our NBN market share rose by 1.3 percentage points to 8.3%. This successfully continued the growth trajectory and reflects our consistent efforts to successfully capture the market share in a competitive environment. Pleasingly, the number of broadband connections continued to increase during the first half. While they increased 11% from the second half of FY 2023, they jumped approximately 21% compared to the first half of FY 2023. This was achieved through increased marketing and promotion activities and a campaign specifically designed to offset any increase in churn and take advantage of increased buying activity in the market following the NBN SAU price changes. Since the move to new pricing, 69% of new customers are signing up on higher speed tiers, meaning 100 Mbps and above. The outcome is something that we're very proud of as we head towards our 2025 goal of 1 million broadband services.
Our increasing market activity has continued into the second half of this year. I'll now hand over to Brian Maher, our Chief Financial Officer, to present our financial performance and segment highlights for the first half.
Thanks, Phil, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to present Aussie Broadband's financial results for the six months ended 31 December 2023. I'll take you through an overview of our results followed by a deeper dive into key drivers of growth and segment performance. The business is clearly building momentum, and the results for the first half largely reflect this as we continue to build scale and deliver growth in revenue, earnings, and cash flows.
Turning to slide eight, we provide a breakdown by business segments of the revenue growth between the first half of FY 2023 and the first half of FY 2024. The chart illustrates the strong growth we achieved across the majority of segments. While residential and wholesale revenue growth were standouts, the enterprise and government segment was impacted by reduced one-off revenue. We were particularly pleased with the growth in the residential segment, which exceeded our expectations.
Looking at slide nine, we present EBITDA drivers that have contributed to our first half FY 2024 EBITDA results. Overall, EBITDA increased by AUD 5 million on the prior corresponding period to just over AUD 46 million. The key driver of EBITDA growth is the uplift in revenue of AUD 67 million, which delivered an estimated incremental EBITDA of AUD 10 million. This gain was in part offset by higher marketing expenses. This increased investment was reflective of a number of strategies. Firstly, a proactive investment in retail marketing in anticipation of the changing competitive environment related to the SAU changes, which were introduced in December 2023. Secondly, we've expanded our business and enterprise and government marketing activities, continuing to establish the ABB brand in those sectors. And finally, a dedicated mobile marketing strategy was developed and implemented.
The effects of wage inflation on our employees' salaries impacted EBITDA by AUD 2.5 million, an increase of almost 5%, and there's been modest leverage achieved in administration costs in the first half of the year. Moving to slide 10, reflecting the strong underlying performance of the business, operational cash flow increased AUD 15 million or 58% to just under AUD 41 million.
This helped consolidate our strong cash position, which increased AUD 42 million to AUD 117 million in the first half. There was a 20 percentage point increase in our cash conversion ratio, which at the end of the half was close to 95%. But this was attributable to timing issues called out in last year's equivalent results. On 31 December, we had net cash of AUD 73 million after using some of the funds raised in the placement and share purchase plan to reduce debt in the short term.
This was undertaken on the basis that no M&A outflows were expected in the early part of 2024, and we therefore took the opportunity to mitigate our interest cost exposure in advance of the new syndicated debt facility for the Symbio acquisition. Our interest cover ratio at the end of the period was a comfortable 9.9x . Slide 11 details the reduction in CapEx in the first half of FY 2024 to AUD 16 million. We take a very disciplined approach to CapEx, and following a rigorous assessment of the program of work, it was determined that new phasing could be implemented, which resulted in a reduced CapEx spend against previous guidance. Due to the lower CapEx in the half, we've reduced Aussie Broadband's CapEx guidance for FY 2024 from a range of AUD 47 million-AUD 52 million to the new range between AUD 40 million and AUD 45 million.
Turning back to segment performance, on slide 13, our residential segment continues to demonstrate stronger momentum in what is a very competitive market. Revenue in this segment increased by just over 15% to almost AUD 284 million. Connections growth was particularly pleasing, with over 38,000 NBN connections made in the first half. This number exceeded the connections in both halves of FY 2023. Residential gross margins were modestly lower in the first half, declining 0.4 percentage points to 30.2%. And as discussed previously, margins were impacted by unfavorable mobile data charges. With the SAU changes coming into effect from 1 December 2023, we expect margins to return to growth in the second half of the financial year as they benefit from a full-half impact. In the first half, we strategically realigned all our segments, including residential, for the SAU changes and repriced our NBN plans.
As a result, we went through the pain of changing prices and saw elevated churn, although this was less than anticipated. We expect churn to go back to historical levels in the second half, and we're already seeing evidence of this through January and February. Now that we've been through the pain, all our customers are on the new pricing plans, which, along with our continued growth in net additions, gives us confidence in our revenue and EBITDA targets. From a competitive position, it is our view that some challenger brands in the market may not have yet repriced their existing customer bases and could potentially see higher churn if they do reprice. This could create a churn point, an upside opportunity for Aussie Broadband. Moving to the business segments on slide 14, which reflected consistent growth in both revenue and connections over the first half.
Revenue increased 11% to AUD 48 million, driven by strong sales momentum. Our business segment has a consistently low churn rate, which contributes to a very stable customer base. We will continue to focus on delivering profitable growth in the segment as we take advantage of our investment in Fibre over the past couple of years. Slide five looks at our enterprise and government segment. Revenue declined modestly in the first half to AUD 42 million due largely to a reduction in one-off non-recurring revenue.
However, this result masked the growth in recurring revenue, which for the first half of FY 2023 increased just over 7% to AUD 38 million. Recurring revenues were slightly lower from the second half of FY 2023 as some customers moved from older legacy price plans to new NBN and Aussie Fibre plans, which are more sharply priced. This transition is expected to continue through the second half of FY 2024.
Pleasingly, gross margins, a percentage of revenue, rose up 1.7 percentage points to 52.7%, principally due to changes in the revenue mix. Meanwhile, Aussie experienced increased momentum in recurring revenue with new customers in the first half of FY 2024. The strong pipeline of new accounts that we announced in June last year remains on track for delivery. Finally, on slide 16, our wholesale segment, which is made up of white label, managed service providers, and voice, this continued to deliver strong growth over the half. Revenue grew approximately 53% to AUD 72 million in the first half of FY 2024, reflecting increasing momentum in the number of both NBN and voice customers. The net growth of 31,000 connections made in the half was an improvement over the previous two halves. Strong wholesale voice margins continue to drive overall margins higher.
Gross margins increased 64% to AUD 25 million, while the gross margin percentage lifted 2.6 percentage points to 34%. Pleasingly, this segment once again experienced an increase in services, with a 28% increase in NBN services and a 17% increase in net minutes in the half. We expect that the combined Net SIP and Symbio business will lead to a large uplift in monthly minutes growth through the next 12 months. I'll now pass back to Phil, who will talk to Symbio transaction, some operational updates, and our FY 2024 guidance.
Thanks, Brian. Turning to slide 18, in addition to Aussie's continued growth in financial performance, we also continue to make significant progress operationally. We're very excited by the acquisition of Symbio Holdings. The process, which started in September last year, has now been approved by Symbio shareholders, and implementation of the scheme is expected to occur next week on the 28th of February. Today, we're very pleased to announce that Michael Omeros has agreed to lead the Symbio business as CEO. As you all know, Michael was the co-founder and CEO of Over the Wire and has extensive wholesale voice experience. Current CEO and co-founder, Rene Sugo, will remain with the business as it transitions to Aussie Broadband, and he'll take on a role as advisor to Michael.
In the short and medium term, we intend to run the business standalone and have provided upgraded guidance to the combined group on slide 23. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge Rene's significant contribution to Symbio and our industry over the last 20 years. Rene was a pioneer of Voice over IP technology in Australia and has been a significant disruptor of traditional voice markets in Australia and overseas. Rene has a deep passion for his talented team that he's built, and this passion has been evident through all the discussions I've had with him. We look forward to working with him in his new role and continuing his amazing work at Symbio. Onto slide 19. You'll be able to see across a range of metrics how the acquisition of Symbio will benefit the broader group.
On a pro forma basis, based on FY 2023 actuals, annual revenue of the combined businesses will be almost AUD 1 billion, with an EBITDA of AUD 117 million. The wholesale segment receives the greatest uplift of revenue, while E&G revenue also benefits from the acquisition. We're expecting to realize in excess of AUD 5 million worth of synergies from the acquisition. Moving to slide 20, we've estimated the impact of the transaction by segment across revenue and gross margin, and you can see how, on a pro forma basis, the Symbio business adds to the group overall. The wholesale business becomes a much larger part of the pie on both counts, demonstrating the benefits of diversification for the overall group. Turning to slide 21, I just wanted to update you on some of the organization changes we're announcing today.
In terms of the management team, we believe the changes we've announced today will underpin the company's next phase of growth following the acquisition of Symbio. Current Chief Financial Officer, Brian Maher, has been appointed CEO of the Aussie Broadband business. Current Executive Director, Michael Omeros, appointed as CEO of the Symbio business. On the 11th of March, Andy Giles Knopp will join Aussie Broadband as interim CFO, while an executive search is undertaken for Brian's replacement. I'll become the Group Managing Director for the Aussie Broadband Group, and both Brian and Michael will report to me. This will enable me to work on the things that I really enjoy, like M&A strategy and a continued deep focus on the technology elements of our business. Earlier in the half, we were delighted to announce that Sue Klose had accepted a position as our newest non-executive director on the board.
Sue comes to Aussie with an excellent reputation and resume, being an experienced senior executive and board director with a diverse background focusing on digital strategy, corporate development, partnerships, and business growth. Before we turn to Q&A, I'd like to take a few minutes to touch on our upgraded FY 2024 guidance, both with and without the Symbio acquisition. So turning to slide 24, we've now upgraded the FY 2024 EBITDA guidance to the top end of the previous range before non-recurring items between AUD 105 million-AUD 110 million. This was previously AUD 100 million-AUD 110 million, and this includes the impact and ongoing investment in marketing activity and excludes any contribution from Symbio. We've adjusted our CapEx guidance for FY 2024 down to a range of AUD 40 million-AUD 45 million, previously AUD 47 million-AUD 52 million, based on reduced CapEx spend for the first half of FY 2024.
Although only limited info on Symbio has been provided to Aussie at this time, we anticipate that Symbio will contribute around AUD 11 million of additional EBITDA for the four months owned by the group, taking the updated EBITDA guidance for the combined group for FY 2024 to the range of AUD 116 million-AUD 121 million. It is important to remind our investors that the group remains focused on organic growth but remains open to acquisition opportunities should they arise and which align with our strategic objectives. With that, Brian and I'll be now happy to take any questions that you may have.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Jonathon Higgins with Unified Capital. Please go ahead.
Thanks, to Michael, today. Congratulations on the result. Also, Brian, to you, congratulations on the appointment as CEO and also on Mo to the role of CEO of Symbio. Well-deserved, guys. So first question just from me, just in regards to just the broader sort of NBN environment, like, Phil, can you just explore a little bit to me just with regards to what happened in the first half? You guys obviously put some price changes through, which resulted in some rises through on your lower-speed segments. Just talk to us a little bit how that worked out with churn, price, and also what you're seeing in the second half now that that's been passed through. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Jono. Yeah. Look, we went into the second half knowing or believing that the SAU would come into effect when it did. It gave us an opportunity to basically rebalance all the pricing, some plans lower, some plans higher. We rolled that through to the base. Now, we did a really detailed study on how we were going to roll this through. We executed a particular marketing plan. It was very deliberate, the approach that we got. Our churn during that period was certainly elevated based on historical levels but much lower than what we expected. So the combination of that strategy generated a much higher net connection growth than we were expecting through the period. That allowed us to really do very well out of it. Ultimately, it's allowed us to move our book around.
We'll pick up the gross margin benefit from that in the second half. We had our best connections net growth in residential for a long time, over two years. It was a very carefully planned strategy that played out very, very well for us.
Appreciate the context. Just two more from me. Just on just the wholesale segment in terms of voice and Symbio, obviously, you're completing the Symbio transaction very soon. We saw their results come out, which showed some good sort of earnings coming through, some good cash flows and the like. But your wholesale business also is going quite well. Can you just talk us through just what you're seeing in the market on wholesale and sort of the combined opportunities that you have when you put those two businesses together?
Yeah. Look, I think there's a lot of benefits from being together. We obviously operate two voice networks today. Symbio is significantly larger in terms of the voice network than the Aussie voice network, but they both appeal to different elements of the market. There's also a lot of product sets within the Symbio business that work really well in the E&G segment. So they have some product sets around things called Operator Connect and that that Aussie doesn't have today. And so that'll allow us to hit other parts. Our enterprise sales machine is working really well. And so we believe putting some of that tech that's in Symbio into our E&G team will really help to drive that as well. And I think there's quite a lot of opportunity to talk to the broader voice market as well, coming up with a number of conferences.
And so going in with the United Front into those environments will hopefully show a really strong offering of what we can do. And the broader ABB business being so much bigger and the network that it brings as well, there's potentially other opportunities. Some of these customers might be interested in more than just voice. There could be data opportunities and potentially opportunities for international carriers to bring data products into Australia as well that Aussie can help them with.
And just last one from me, then I'll rejoin the queue. Just for you, Brian, just to get one last one in just in terms of the CFO role. Just on the cash flow side of things, at the FY 2023 results, we saw a really strong cash flow performance. And you commented at the time that there was some benefit there from the NBN changing payment terms. You've had good subs growth. So no, that helps you on the negative working capital side of things. But can you just sort of tell us about any of the unwind that may have occurred from FY 2023 into first half of 2024 in that operating cash flow number? Thank you.
Yeah. No problem, Jono. Yeah. It was a once-off permanent change. So the NBN billing cycle changed from the 21st of the month to the 1st of the month, which made the peak of our cash flow essentially the last day of the month, whereas it used to be mid-month. So it was a phasing of the peak of our cash balance, really. And we got the benefit of that at the 30th of June. That's now normalized. And now, obviously, the cycle runs month to month as normal. So this is what I would say is now a more normalized conversion performance in this half. So there is no unwind. It was a one-off change. And so it's a pretty sort of normal cash flow performance. And obviously, it's a strong one. So we're happy with that.
Excellent. Congratulations. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thanks, Jono.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Ian Munro with Ord Minnett. Please go ahead.
Morning, Phil. Morning, Brian. Congrats on the result. Just looking at the Symbio forecast contribution the second half combined with what they've already reported for the first, looks like they're on track to that sort of guidance range. Are you able to just give us a sense, perhaps, of how you're seeing that business at the moment relative to expectation? Also, perhaps, any intentions regarding change in sort of CapEx direction and any update on potential synergy targets would be great too. Thanks, guys.
I can't take that one, Ian. Yeah. So obviously, through the scheme and arrangement period, we have to sort of observe fairly strict competition protocols. So our access to information is limited. We do have some, but we can't dig too deeply into it because of those competition protocols, which we're just coming out of now. So we've seen their numbers, and we've seen a forecast. We're comfortable that it's consistent with what we expected. The trajectory looks good to us. And all the expectations we have as to how that was going to perform this year are being met. So we're pretty happy with that. In terms of the CapEx elements, we don't really have much to comment on that at this time. There's no changes from our perspective at this point. Was there another element to your question I just missed there? I think there was.
Yeah. Just in terms of potential synergy targets, if.
Oh, synergies, yeah. So I think we've called out that we see AUD 5 million as a minimum. There's potentially more, but we don't want to commit to those right now. But there's at least AUD 5 million synergies in there.
Very good. Just as a follow-up, looking at the resi subs, so just confirming that 19,000 is a net number for the first sort of seven weeks of the second half. And just, I guess, in terms of the second-half skew this year similar to last year, is there any reason why that would sort of normalise to be more of a sort of even half-on-half performance looking forward? Or is it a case of intensive marketing first half, build the sub base to capitalise on the second half again next year?
Yeah. So the 19,000 is net, yes, in terms of the first-half, second-half skew. So this year, we think it's probably certainly more skewed than the year before in our view. The principal reason for that is the SAU changes, which came through on the 1st of December. So they are net positive to us in combination with our pricing changes so that we've only had the benefit of one month of that in the first half, and we'll have six-month benefit in the second half. In terms of future years, generally, we would expect there to be a skew towards the second half, so higher in the second half, largely because pay increases, etc., go through in July. They impact the first half of the year more, particularly in the growing provided we're still growing.
Our revenue is greater in the second half, covering some of those fixed-cost elements of those increases. And again, similarly, some of your admin costs tend to be, for example, your insurance cost, which is a fairly hefty cost. You pay it once a year. And as your revenue's growing, it takes up a smaller percentage of your overall revenue. So yes, continued to be skewed second half would be my assumption. This is without having done a budget yet, but probably less so than this year.
You covered sort of the connections part of that, Ian. We're seeing that connections growth continue into the second half. So whether it will be a more pronounced skew in terms of connection growth in the second half, I don't think it will be so much that. I think it's probably going to be consistent, potentially, between half the two halves. We are certainly working harder to drive that net addition harder. And if the churn does continue to normalise as we expect, then that will help that, so.
Yeah. Excellent. Thanks, Phil. Thanks, Brian.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Eric Choi with Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. I had a few – just five or more at once. First one, I think Brian mentioned one month of benefit in the first half, six months of benefits in the second half. So just wondering if you can give us a sense of how much that gross margin percentage stepped up in December versus the first five months after the new prices in SAU. Secondly, just on that minimum AUD 5 million Symbio synergies, do you think you'll be fully run-rating that by FY 2025? And just confirming that AUD 5 million probably excludes any sort of large wholesale contracts or anything like that. And then, yeah, just confirming.
I think you just confirmed this, Phil, but no second-half skew to subs, which means if you divide that 19,000 by 54 days and straight-line it, you're probably guiding to a net addition number similar to the first-half ex-U niti, so the 64,000. Is that right? Thanks. Thanks, Phil.
I'll pick up the first couple. We're not putting any specific numbers on the improvement in margin second half. But I mean, I think our guidance gives you the second half. Even DAS sort of gives you some sort of indication of how that may improve. In terms of the synergies, no, we won't get the full AUD 5 million in FY 2025, I wouldn't expect. The next few months, Mo is going to go in and listen and observe and just understand the business. We'll find some low-hanging fruit. So some of the listed costs, obviously, will be savings and things like that. But some of the others may take a little while to implement. And in terms of the network savings, there'll be some network savings on the voice side that we can find reasonably quickly.
But the contracts they have in regard to their NBN customers, they will continue to run during the year, I think, for the rest of this calendar year. And then beyond that, we can start to take some advantage of that. I can't recall the second-half skew question, Phil. Maybe you can remember that one.
Yeah. So look, I think the connection numbers, like your maths and so on, if it divides out like that, then sounds reasonably sound. It'll just be a case of we're always changing things. And so we're definitely trying to hedge a bit more out of it in that second half from a connections perspective. But it is a very dynamic market. And we're still seeing a lot of the benefits of price changes of others flowing through, particularly from Telstra. We're seeing about 50%-60% of our new additions into the ABB main brand coming out of Telstra. So if they start to pivot, then that may affect that as well. But we're pretty happy with where that growth is and how it's continued into January and February.
Thanks, Phil. Thanks, Brian.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Entcho Raykovski with E&P. Please go ahead.
Hi, Phil. Hi, Brian. My first question is around the lower CapEx guidance. I'm just curious, are there any projects that you're now not pursuing in FY 2024? And so will this mean there's a need for a step up in FY 2025, or is it just more a matter of you being more prudent with your spending?
Look, it's really a case of being a bit more prudent with the spending. We are rejigging some projects. We had a new Chief Infrastructure Engineering Officer join us toward the end of last year. He's taken a good look at what we're doing in some areas and has really good contacts in a number of different businesses. A combination of being able to get better pricing from suppliers. Some of our suppliers are hungry for deals at the moment. We've been able to get sharper discounts and just rejigging some of the projects that we're working on to we have a number of new strategies going on in the network and our OSS/BSS systems. It's been a combination of those things, which has led to lower CapEx in the first half. We'll continue with that revised program in the second half.
I don't think it will need to step up materially in next financial year. Yeah, we'll provide more color on that once we get closer to that financial year and once we get through the budgeting process that we're just starting at the moment.
Okay. Great. And then in E&G, obviously, you've previously spoken about the AUD 10 million of recurring revenues in that division, which were likely to drop at some point. And you've said today the pipeline is on track. I mean, just interested for the avoidance of doubt, have you booked any of that revenue yet, or is it still to come? And if it's still to come, what's the expected phasing?
Yeah. Some of it is booked. I think we'd started at the time that they take varying degrees of time to provision. And that AUD 10 million was obviously an annualized number. So as they come on month by month, you're not obviously only seeing incrementally part of that. So we estimate there's about we've recognized about AUD 1.4 million of revenue in the half, which essentially only represents three months. So that's about AUD 5.6 million in total when it run rates. So that's about half of that revenue has started to flow but only just started to flow sort of incrementally through the period. And then, obviously, we've topped that funnel up with additional new sales into the second half. So it's just a slow burn. We did call out that the growth in E&G would be a multi-half strategy. So that's the large driver there.
Okay. But obviously, that will run right over the course of the year and then into FY 2025?
Correct. Correct. Yeah.
Okay. And then you've mentioned unfavorable mobile data charges a couple of times. Is this something that's likely to be recurring? Is it a one-off? And I don't know if you're able to explain. Is that due to the structure of your wholesale deal with Optus, which is driving those charges?
Sort of. The margins move by relatively small decimals, you know, essentially. And it's just a lot of that could just be roundings in certain costs moving. So we were trying to find what's the biggest driver of those relatively small percentage movements. And mobile was the big one. But essentially, we had a data pool. We got data pooling arrangement in mobile. We were probably towards the end of last year, we were probably overbuying the data for what we had we were buying surplus capacity. We tried to tweak how we did that, and we sort of got it a little bit wrong and ended up creating some excess data charges, things like that. So it sort of impacted the margin in the first half. We've now retweaked that, and we think that will improve in the second half of the year.
But it's just the biggest thing we could see that was moving those relatively small movements in margin.
Okay. Great. And maybe if I can throw a very last one in, this is really straightforward. The AUD 5 million of synergies or AUD 5 million+, I should say, synergies in relation to Symbio, is that all cost synergies? And is there sort of a revenue synergy potential on top of it?
Yes.
It's all cost, and there is revenue synergy potential on top.
Yeah. Sorry. My answer was more blank, so.
Okay. And I presume you're not prepared to quantify that today?
No.
No. I thought so. Anyway, thank you.
Thanks, Entcho.
Thank you. Your next question comes from John Campbell with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for this. Just still on the synergy line, Phil or Brian, AUD 5 million obviously sounds like a pretty conservative figure. Are you going to come out at some stage in the next three months with sort of a more fulsome upgrade or sorry, not upgrade, but a fulsome run-through on detailing where you're going to get synergies from and potentially a higher level down the track?
It won't be in the next three months, John, because that's the period that most having a look at the business. So we may provide more color when we get to the full-year results.
Yeah. So it's AUD 5 million sort of effectively just corporate costs and the like. It's pretty much those ones that you can almost see within the annual report. Or is there much beyond that assumed in that AUD 5 million?
Well, I mean, yeah, I think that if you just looked at corporate costs, that's probably two of the five.
Yeah. Okay. Yep. Thanks for that. Just on business subs growth, which has been pretty consistently adding about 4,000 per half ever since Over the Wire, really. And you've obviously been approaching the market as one brand, as a unified offering. You've increased your capabilities, I think, in terms of all those other sort of capabilities beyond just straight connectivity for the business segment. So I mean, how are you feeling about subs growth and the trajectory from here on in, or at least for the foreseeable future?
Look, I think it's really for business, it's steady as you go. That's the sort of market that predominantly services the smaller end of business. They're typically time-poor people. And so getting them to change is hard, which is also good for us because it leads to a really low churn. The churn in that business segment's over half lower than what we see in the residential. So getting that to drive, we tend to direct our marketing and so on into basically the areas we can drive the highest growth at the time. And basically, business is very much as steady as you go. We are looking at ways to try and address the time-poor nature of businesses and how we can make it easier for them to swap. And that may move the dial.
But we don't sort of see it materially moving from where it is in terms of that steady as you go.
Yeah. So it really just relates to the fact that most small businesses just don't have the time to be agonizing over slightly upgrading their telco providers, etc., etc., that just don't have the time.
Correct. If it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of mentality, so.
Yeah. And so that obviously also stands you in good stead, I suppose, in terms of gross margin that is just not as subject to those discounting and special offers and the like.
That's right. And it's also helped by there's quite a bit of voice goes on in that business world as well because most businesses have some sort of hosted phone system, and voice runs at a much higher margin than data, so.
Yeah. Okay. Thanks for that.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Nick Basile with CLSA. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for the opportunity. Just two questions. One on the enterprise and government side. Can you comment a little bit on what you're seeing in that market? Obviously, your recurring revenue growth has remained resilient, but the fall-off in project work was a bit of an offset. So do you expect that to stabilize? And can you comment a little bit more about that momentum you're seeing on greenfield revenue with new accounts? And then the second question, I think Brian mentioned the possibility of potential upside from churn if and when some incumbents with prices post the NBN/SAU changes, which I think you said you haven't seen move yet. So can you just clarify those comments? Was it smaller players that haven't changed? Thanks.
Yeah. No worries. We'll start with that one. So look, we monitor the market and who's moving and who's not, I guess. And we do a range of different things and monitor social sites and things like Whirlpool and all that sort of stuff. And so that gives us a bit of a view on typically when price changes go through, customers naturally jump up and down. And so that gives us a bit of a feel. I'm not sort of going to name and shame or anything like that as to who has and hasn't moved. But there are some challenges, I think, that are holding onto essentially those price changes, which will do one or two things that will impact their margins in the second half if they've got customers in the 50 Mbps and below tiers.
Or when they do finally move, what potentially creates a churn benefit for the rest of the challenger pool, which we're part of. So that's really what the comments are around that. In terms of the NBN side of things, the non-recurring revenue is very much project work, and it tends to be limited to one main client. So the peaks or troubles in that depend on what that particular client's doing. Non-recurring's not typically a large part of what we do, but there is some chunky revenue that moves through there when this client does some major changes for a managed network that we provide for them. In terms of the Greenfield side of things, we're seeing very strong growth in our BDM team, winning a lot of good deals. We've got a real sweet spot in that, call it, multi-site retail type business.
Some of the logos we call out there, if you look at United Petroleum that's on there, that's over a 400-site network that consists of security products and a redundant solution for running all of their sites. So we have a real niche with that large site retail type business. And we're consistently winning each month in our deal pipelines. It just takes time to provision. And what we've seen is the average provisioning time for some of these enterprise deals is running at around seven months. And that's partly driven by the client's ability to roll out the solutions through all their sites and also our ability to get the hardware because most of these deals typically have some sort of security-type hardware with them that provides an SD-WAN solution that we're delivering. So that's what's going on there. So we're quite happy with that.
As we called out, we're moving a lot of our older clients onto these newer technologies as well, sort of recontracting them, moving them to these new solutions. So that's changing the revenue profile of those customers. But in most cases, the gross margin's increasing in those as well as we move them onto services where they're either on Aussie Fibre directly, where we have a very high gross margin, or they're moving to NBN Enterprise Ethernet products, which have a better margin than the legacy, say, Telstra services that they might have been on. So that's what's happening in the E&G world.
Thanks very much. That's great color. Cheers.
No worries.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Britt for closing remarks.
No worries. Thanks, everyone. As we said, cracking result. We're really happy and very pleased with the trajectory of Aussie. And we look forward to a solid second half as well. So thanks again for joining us.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.