I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Philip Britt, Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and welcome to today's call for Aussie Broadband Group's FY 2025 half-year results. We'll be using the investor deck as lodged with the ASX this morning when referring to page numbers. My name's Philip Britt, and this will be my final call with you all as Group Managing Director of Aussie Broadband. Before we get into the results for the half, I'd like to acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first Australians, and for their role as the original communicators, connectors, scientists, and carers of the lands and waters across Australia. We pay our respects to 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 to building an inclusive Australia together.
As we announced earlier this year, I will be retiring from my role on the 1st of March to transition into a non-executive and special technical advisor role. I'm joined on the call by my successor, Aussie Broadband CEO Brian Maher, along with Michael Omeros, better known as Mo, a Symbio Chief Executive Officer, and Andy Giles Knopp, Aussie Broadband Group Chief Financial Officer. Before I hand over to Brian to go through the results, I wanted to provide you with one final high-level refresher of the group and what the business has grown into with your support over the years. Let's turn to page five. Aussie Broadband is more than just a challenger brand now. We have evolved into Australia's most trusted telco, best of the best in the industry, and the 33rd most trusted brand in Australia, all according to Roy Morgan.
The fact that we've maintained these industry-leading highs, particularly among an industry as challenging as telco, is thanks to our incredible customer service teams who continue to lead the way day in and day out. That culture of industry-leading quality and service also drives the rest of the business, which is why we've continued to see great success across the board. Revenue grew in the half compared to the prior corresponding period by 6.8%. We've spoken a lot in the past about the advantage that our infrastructure assets provide, and that continues to be the case with almost 2,000 km of Aussie Fibre laid and our high-margin Tier 1 voice networks with Symbio and NetSIP. More than 4,300 buildings can connect to Aussie Fibre today, and we're continuing to invest in our physical expansion of our digital experience.
All that work has led to a business which is increasingly strong financials with healthy cash flow. These fundamentals have enabled Aussie Broadband's growth and investment in our future, which is an incredibly exciting place to be given Aussie Broadband's humble beginnings. We'll talk more about that as we look to 2028, our three-year strategy, later in the presentation. But for now, I'll pass you over to Brian who'll take you through the highlights for the first half.
Thanks, Phil. Before we begin the presentation, I just wanted to say it was an incredible privilege to be given the opportunity to lead the remarkable business that Phil and other founders have built and led. It's an enormous responsibility and honor to continue to change the game in his stead, and I'm incredibly excited for what lies ahead for Aussie and the group. Let's start now by looking at the highlights from the first half on page seven. The half has been strong for the group, with the business recording robust organic growth across our core segments compared to half one FY 2024, with improvements in gross margin and underlying EBITDA. The addition of Symbio has further diversified the group's revenue, with residential share reducing from 64% to 56%. We've also made great progress in delivering the operational efficiencies and synergies that we discussed in our full-year results.
We've continued to bolster our reputation for high speeds and high quality by having 43,652 connections in the half. More than half of our broadband connections are now over 100 Mbps. That's a huge advantage for Aussie and positions us well to take advantage of the multi-gigabit future that will be enabled for Australian households later this year. Speaking of successes, I wanted to highlight the excellent contribution of Symbio. Mo and the team are delivering higher gross margin thanks to growth in the core business. Symbio is on track to deliver its expected AUD 38 million EBITDA contribution for FY 2025, a 30% earnings growth year on year. You'll hear more from Mo about how Symbio is tracking later in the call. We've made a significant CapEx investment in the half, strengthening our technical foundations by investing in new internal cloud platforms and increasing our voice capacity.
We've also identified opportunities to acquire additional IP addresses and incremental enhancements of our intercapital and subsea fiber optic capacity. These investments will continue to ensure our network will be enhanced to support our future growth. We've maintained a strong balance sheet, giving us the flexibility to make a special announcement today. The board has declared a fully franked interim and ordinary dividend of AUD 0.016 per share, along with a fully franked special dividend of AUD 0.024 per share. Now let's look at the core numbers for the half on page eight. We've continued to lead the way in high-speed residential NBN plans, adding more than 43,000 new connections. That has grown Aussie's market share of on-net NBN services to 7.8%. We also maintained our status as the most trusted telco and improved to become the 33rd most trusted brand in Australia, according to Roy Morgan's brand research.
We continue to grow our Aussie Fibre network with another 165 km laid over the half. That brings our fibre footprint to 1,886 km, with 691 connected buildings and more than 4,300 buildings now able to connect. Our voice business has grown as well, and mobile services have increased across the group to 204,000. We now also host 7.5 million phone numbers between our two Tier 1 voice networks and Symbio and NetSIP, with over 4.3 billion call minutes across our networks for the half. With that, I'll pass over to Andy, who will go into our financials for the half.
Thanks, Brian. So let me talk through the first half financials for FY 2025, and let's turn to page 10. The comparable financial results on the page are pro forma numbers, incorporating both ABB and Symbio's first half results for FY 2024. The group has enjoyed a strong performance for the half, with growth in our revenues, gross margins, and underlying EBITDA, despite the ever-increasing competitive market, inflationary pressures, and the challenging cost of living environment.
Revenue is AUD 588 million, which is 6.8% growth on a pro forma prior comparable period and a 32% increase on a statutory basis. At a segment level, we saw double-digit percentage growth in residential, business, enterprise, and government segments, as well as wholesale after reflecting the migration and loss of the white label customers. Gross margins grew by 7.5% to almost AUD 218 million, while our underlying EBITDA grew by 8.9% to almost AUD 66 million.
Operating cash flow before interest and tax declined to AUD 49 million, down 25.8% in the half. This was primarily affected by the timing of working capital cash management, and I expect this to recover over the second half. Finally, and as previously announced, the board has declared a fully franked interim and ordinary dividend of AUD 0.016 per share, along with a fully franked special dividend of AUD 0.024 per share. Let's turn to page 11 now for our EBITDA bridge. At the full year, we bridged FY 2024 to FY 2025 guidance, following the format that the chart outlines the first half FY 2024 pro forma EBITDA to the reported first half underlying EBITDA and the key factors that have played into the half. There are really four key messages.
First, the direct contribution of Origin after the direct customer service costs was AUD 7 million lower half on half, although the final contribution for FY 2025 was AUD 1 million more than forecast due to the migration of customers being slower than the initial period. Second, thanks to the implementation of several productivity initiatives and maintaining tight controls on spending, we were able to deliver greater cost efficiencies than were expected. Third, the core business grew by 22% through the period, and this was at the top end of our expectations, but timing of the SAU price changes in the two halves is important to note. Finally, our net investment in Buddy was, as anticipated, with a half-year impact of AUD 5 million. Let's turn to page 12 now for the summary of our operating cash flow and the leverage position.
Our operating cash flow declined to AUD 49 million, and as a result, the cash conversion was sitting at 74.9% for the half. As indicated before, the lower operating cash flow and cash conversion ratio were driven entirely by the timing of working capital movement. Indicators such as debtor days and bad debt provision percentages have improved in the period, which goes to the quality of cash generation, and I expect for the full year to be in a much better position. The operating cash flow is before interest and tax. The group is now in a tax-paying position, having utilized the historical tax losses and the incremental reversal of the 100% tax depreciation concessions that were available during COVID. With a significant cash balance, we repaid AUD 120 million of borrowings during the half one, and that facility remains available for redraw.
At December, we were well below our net leverage ratio target range of 1.75-2.5 times at just 0.72 times. In line with the capital management framework, we communicated in November our intention to commence a share buyback of up to 10% of the share capital over a 12-month period, and today we've announced a fully franked special dividend of AUD 0.024 per share on top of the interim dividend. Let's turn to the page now to look at our CapEx in greater detail. The group continues to maintain a disciplined approach to CapEx, making investments in core growth, customer growth, life cycle replacement, incremental capability, and our Aussie Fibre infrastructure. We are announcing today a revised CapEx guidance for FY 2025 over an increase of AUD 20 million to between AUD 75 million and AUD 80 million inclusive of Symbio.
The increase is down to the decisions we made in the first half to take advantage of opportunities to invest in our capacity and resiliency to unlock greater potential and greater savings in the future. Some of the significant spending has gone towards migrating multiple technology environments and their associated applications into a new strategic internal cloud platform. This will eventually become a single platform across the group. Our increased guidance reflects our ongoing investment in long-term growth. AUD 4 million of the new CapEx guidance will go towards securing more IP addresses to ensure no more capacity is required through to FY 2028. We're also making a AUD 5.7 million 15-year commitment to inter-capital and subsea fiber optic cable, strengthening our capacity to handle increased bandwidth across our inter-capital and international links, and improving our gross margins into future years.
It's important to note that our internal capitalized software development costs have also remained in line with our original forecasts. I'll now hand over to Brian to discuss the segment performance in more detail.
Thanks, Andy. This now brings us to our performance across our various segments, starting with residential on page 15. We continue to gain revenue and market share within our residential segment, with revenue totaling AUD 327 million for the half, a 15.3% increase on the prior corresponding period. Our gross margin grew by 19.3% to AUD 102 million, while our gross margin percentage improved slightly to 31.3% from 30.2%, thanks to the changes in wholesale pricing. The margin for the half declined modestly against H2 of FY 2024 due to a timing mismatch between when wholesale prices came into force on the 1st of July and when that slowed through to our ABB customer billing. We also saw a higher-than-expected leverage in our customer mix towards 100 Mbps products, as well as greater network costs being allocated to segments after the migration for white label customers.
Aussie Broadband has also maintained its position as a preferred provider of high-speed broadband plans. More than 54% of Aussie's connections are over 100 Mbps, an increase from 40% in December 2023. This is an excellent position for the group to be in ahead of the release of NBN's new plans and products in September this year, which will unlock additional speed and new tiers for users on full fiber and HFC connections. In addition to that, residential mobile services are now exceeding 64,000, which represents our continued growth and presence as an MVNO operator. Maintaining momentum through the Fiber Connect program, particularly given NBN's decision to extend the rollout into 2030, will be a key focus for us for the remainder of FY 2025 and beyond. We'll also continue the good momentum in the mobile sector by continuing to grow our footprint in that market.
We'll also look to continue to increase our broadband market share by scaling Buddy Telco, both through additional product offerings and targeted marketing. Speaking of Buddy, let's turn to page 16 to look at how Buddy is performing in greater detail. Buddy launched in 2024, July 2024, and has seen a particularly strong response in market from competitors, with a lot of significant price-based commercial activity. Although Buddy's always-on pricing remains highly competitive outside of those promotional windows. To date, the competitor response has impacted sales volumes, and Buddy's net growth trajectory is lower than our initial expectations. It is important to call out that we are proud of how we've been able to establish Buddy thus far, with a small support staff based out of our peripherals.
We remain committed to our original target of securing 100,000 subscribers by the end of FY 2027, and we're excited to see how far Buddy can grow throughout the rest of the year. Let's turn to the business segment on page 17. The top line growth is strong, with a 12.7% jump in revenue to AUD 54.1 million, which is a higher growth rate for the first half of FY 2024. The gross margin improved by 6.9% to AUD 23.2 million, although the gross margin percentage declined due to the net impact of wholesale price changes. The team focused on growing their digital presence in the space for the first half, while also revising the operating model to streamline support for customers and drive efficiencies.
Looking forward, the team will leverage our group's brand image as Australia's most trusted telco to increase awareness within the segment, while building on the higher attachment rate of business customers to multi-product offerings. On the next page, we'll look at enterprise development. Our E&G teams have maintained good momentum with new business wins. The team has onboarded major strategic clients in the half. That includes the deal with Bunnings, where Aussie will supply connectivity to more than 350 Bunnings sites across Australia. Almost 200 of those sites have already been completed in the first half, and we expect to complete the rollout across the remaining sites in the second half. Those deals have helped the segment's revenue grow by 13.2% to AUD 47.2 million.
Average gross margin percentages come under some pressure in the half due to the mix of new revenue being weighted to data and price increases from U.S. technology vendors in the client space. For the second half of the year, the E&G team will be leveraging the growing Aussie Fibre network as part of a land and expand strategy. The team will be focusing further on our expertise in data while simplifying the product offering to better match the demands of E&G clients. We'll also be working to accelerate and reduce friction in the Aussie Fibre sales process to better unlock the competitive advantage it provides. Next up is our wholesale segment on page 19, which has been refocusing on new partnerships and driving growth through our Tier 1 voice networks from Symbio and NetSIP.
The segment recorded a higher-than-expected revenue contribution in the first half due to the phasing of the white label onboarding. Organic growth excluding this for the wholesale team grew by 20.2% in the period, with a 35.9% increase in connections. The team will continue to add more wholesale partners going forward, adding to the 58 partners that were added during the first half, and we have an exciting pipeline of partners that we'll continue to explore through the second half. The team will also continue to drive more sales of voice products by improving the alignment between our Symbio and NetSIP tier 1 voice networks and the opportunities they provide. Next up is Symbio, and for that, I'll hand over to Mike.
Thanks, Brian. As you can see on page 20, Symbio has continued with the strong momentum since being acquired by Aussie Broadband, with some solid results in our gross margin and core business growth. The slight decline in revenue by 1.3% to AUD 103.8 million is related to some one-off unexpected decreases during the half. The retirement of Cisco's HCS on-prem platform results in a AUD 3.7 million reduction, while the expected drop in international minutes from our exchange, formerly TNZI Business, reduced revenue when compared to the prior period by AUD 1 million. Excluding those elements, Symbio's underlying growth is 5%, and we are well positioned to continue that moving forward. Symbio's contribution to the group remains strong. Our Singaporean operation is now profitable, which is a huge milestone for the business, and we're also celebrating our significant win with the extension of our partnership with Medion Australia.
The Medion Australia deal will run for another five years, and their reach makes Symbio one of the largest mobile virtual network enablers in Asia Pacific. For the second half, our focus is on delivering the 30% year-on-year earnings growth and our expected EBITDA contribution of AUD 38 million. We will continue to drive greater voice, mobile, and data growth through a greater alignment of Symbio and Aussie Broadband's combined advantages, and we've already made great headway in delivering on the synergies we committed to in previous calls, with the business on track to deliver AUD 8 million-AUD 12 million of synergies by the end of FY 2026. That's it from me. I'll be on the call later if you have any questions, but for now, I'll pass you back to Brian, who will talk through our aspirations to FY 2028 and our outlook and guidance for the coming financial year.
Thanks, Mike. Let's turn to page 22 now. For the full financial year, we're happy to announce that we're upgrading our guidance for underlying EBITDA to a range of AUD 138 million-AUD 143 million based on the strong trading performance to date. Underlying EBITDA excludes significant non-recurring costs related to acquisitions and restructuring, but includes share-based payments expenses. Our CapEx guidance has also been revised upwards by AUD 20 million to a range of AUD 75 million-AUD 80 million, as we outlined earlier on this call. By way of a trading update, since the half year, the business has added 14,129 net connections this quarter, as of the 21st of February, and of those net additions, Buddy contributed 2,131 connections in the quarter to date. Beyond the current financial year, we've been working on a refreshed strategy to better reflect the group's ambition for the coming years.
A summary of this is on page 23. This is just a high-level overview, but the focus is recognizing, building on the strengths in our core telco business. We have five strategic priorities as we look to 2028. First, we will continue our legacy of long-term growth by maintaining our focus on diversifying revenue across all segments to deliver strong margins. Next, we'll continue to grow our Aussie Fibre footprint to better control our destiny while growing our share of on-net connections across the group. Thirdly, Aussie is known for its industry-leading customer service, but we can always do better, and we'll do that by adopting and building digital tools and portals to make our experience even better. Next, having the right foundations is key.
We've already begun the work to simplify and uplift the capability of our systems to truly unlock the potential of our people and our future growth, but this is something that we'll continue to do through to FY 2028. Finally, there's also the most important foundation of all, security. Hundreds of thousands of Australians rely on us to keep their data safe. That trust is the absolute bedrock of our business, and we're constantly focusing on security through every facet of Aussie to ensure that that foundation is as rock solid as humanly possible. We will share more detail on our look to 2028 strategy and our growth aspirations at our investor day on 10th of April at Sydney's Parliament House. Registration is now open, and it is a chance to hear from our broader executive team, catch up with them, and members of our board over lunch.
We look forward to seeing many of you there. On page 24, as we reach the tail end of today's presentation, I wanted to take the time to acknowledge our Group Managing Director and Co-founder, Phil Britt, who will be retiring from his role at the end of the week. Phil isn't saying goodbye just yet. He will remain with the business as a non-executive director and a special technical advisor for the next few years. Phil has been the cornerstone of the business for 21 years and has been a significant player in the industry. We congratulate him on what he has built and wish him well with Rule 5 Capital. As I step into Phil's shoes and as we look to 2028, the group will be re-aligning some of its business units and making some executive changes.
The changes will move us from a purely functional model to a divisional model, enabling end-to-end accountability for the experience of each of our customer groups and, just as importantly, financial performance. For FY 2026, we will have three operating segments: residential, business, enterprise, and government, and wholesale. Each segment will be led by a group executive. I'm pleased to announce that those executives will be Jonathan Prosser, our current Chief Strategy Officer, who will lead residential. Aaron O'Keeffe, our current Chief Growth Officer, will head up business, enterprise, and government. And Michael Omeros, who will expand his role as CEO of Symbio to include responsibility for leading wholesale for the group. These changes will come into effect from 1 July 2025 and, as a result, will not affect financial reporting for FY 2025.
With that, I will now pass you back over to Phil for the last time to sum up our main takeaways from the first half.
Thanks, Brian. Before handing over for questions on page 25, I wanted to make some final remarks about Aussie Broadband and the business that we've been able to build with your joint support over the years. Aussie Broadband has always strived to change the game and leave behind a lasting impact. We started by connecting Morwell and the Latrobe Valley and the Greater Gippsland region. Our presence and reach now extends throughout Australia and beyond. We've always faced difficulties and challenges, and every time the team has rallied to find a solution and a path forward. Having managed a significant migration of customers over this financial year, Aussie has still gained market share, grown its revenue, improved its margin, and now upgraded its EBITDA guidance from the original figures. The same can be said for Symbio.
The business is on track to achieve earnings growth of 30% year-on-year and an AUD 38 million EBITDA contribution by the end of the financial year. The combination of Symbio and our wholesale team is truly game-changing when we consider the products and services their combined powers can offer. This represents an extension to our revenue diversification strategy. Our foundation is strong, as is our balance sheet, and this has allowed us to accelerate investments to enable even greater growth as we look to 2028. That discipline has allowed us to deliver sustainable return for shareholders, with an interim dividend this year, a share buyback announced in November, and the flexibility to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. The best years of Aussie are well and truly to come.
The business is in incredible shape, with an excellent pipeline, a clear three-year strategy, and an experienced leadership team that knows how to deliver. It's been an incredible journey. Thank you all for your support over and for the very last time. That concludes our investor presentation, and we're now ready to take your questions.
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 are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. And your first question today comes from Jonathon Higgins with United Capital Partners. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions today. Congratulations on the results. Look, just firstly, just wanted to say congratulations to you, Phil. 20-year journey. You lead the company in a strong position. You've got leading challenger market share status. You've got improved earnings, a good balance sheet, great culture, plenty of prospects. So congratulations to you and also to you, Brian, just for taking over. So all the best moving forward for the role. So congratulations to you both. Just a couple of questions for me just firstly. Just number one, just around just the NBN, you spoke about sort of the environment that you're sort of expecting into the second half. I think Brian talking towards the NBN's going to be making some changes and sort of looking to promote people onto some higher speed tiers and the like.
Can you just sort of talk us through just how that's likely to affect you and just how you're placed in the broader challenger environment with the two brands now? Thank you.
Thanks, Jon. I appreciate the kind words as well. Yeah, so for about September, mid-September, there's a number of new speed tiers coming in, which essentially amounts to free speed upgrades for customers. So those on 100 speed will be automatically getting 500 speed services depending on their technology and whatnot. And so we see this as a real positive for Aussie. We're very, very strong in the higher speed end of the market, and we think we can take advantage of these changes. And we're actually really looking forward to it. It's quite a significant piece of work. We've got a significant project team working on preparing us for that change. And yeah, we're very optimistic about what that might do for us.
Just another one from me. Just in regards to the costs, I think you've called out sort of AUD 5 million of costs removed in the period. That seems like a little bit ahead of expectations. Obviously, you're losing the Origin earnings into the second half, but still a pretty strong annualized number into sort of second half in FY 2026. That looks a bit ahead of expectations. Can you talk us through just what's driving that? Is it productivity? Is there more to come here? And maybe if you can just weave something in on segment-based responsibilities, what that means moving forward in this context.
Sure. Thanks for that. Yeah, so we've done a considerable amount of work in the first half looking at our management structures and mid-tier management structures and the main number of changes in that regard, broadly expands the responsibility, and as you can see from the restructuring cost line, we've had to do quite a bit of work there, and it's created a one-off cost that obviously won't reappear next year, and that's made a significant difference. We've also done a lot of work in our call center operations, significantly improving the ratio between customers and numbers of staff, and we do think we've got some more work we can do there as well, but it seems like a great job.
Our aim, even though it's still growing very strongly, is to be able to grow our revenue at a sharper rate than we're growing our cost base. That's really the focus going forward. That's partially part of the driver for the changing in segments, as you touched on. The primary driver of moving to this divisional structure is to have end-to-end accountability for the customer group so that each executive can have a single-minded eye on how do we attract customers, how do we bring them in the door, how do we keep servicing them well for their lifetime, and even how do we make sure they have a good experience leaving so that when they look to shop again, they'll come back to us because we handled it so well.
That's much better handled in a divisional approach than that previous functional approach, which did an amazing job in getting us to where we were. But equally, it also means there's end-to-end financial performance accountability for that division as well. That's somewhat harder in a functional model to have a number of people focused on financial performance. That's the secondary benefit of this change. It's both accountability for customer experience end-to-end, but also financial performance.
And last one from me, just on cash flows, probably best for Andy. You sort of spoke to, I think, the terminology used was recovery and recover some of the first half. Can you sort of be more specific on that? Does that mean better than average cash conversion into the second half, like a really good number, or does it sort of mean over the average number? What should we expect into the second half? And if you've got any year-to-date sort of update, that'd be great also. Thank you.
Yeah, no, John, I think in terms of the operating cash flow and the conversion, I'd expect to see the conversion ratio back to between 90% and sort of 100% for the full year. Largely, if you look at the balance sheet, when you get the chance to do that in more detail, we've paid down quite a lot of the creditors and other creditors in the sort of six-month period just with timing and the way that the sort of year-ends and the half-year fell. So I'm not concerned. I won't update in terms of the last couple of months, but yeah, I'm very confident that by the full year, we should be back to a very good cash operating cash flow and also conversion.
Thanks for your time, guys.
Thank you. And our next question today comes from Hamish Fraser with EWP. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. I've got two questions. My first one is on the Aussie Fiber rollout. I know you spent AUD 10 million on Fiber CapEx in the first half, and I was just wondering, given the increase in CapEx guidance, what your expectations are for the Aussie Fiber for the full year, and I know you previously spoke about a AUD 20 million margin benefit from your Aussie Fiber rollout. Now, given the increased CapEx, what do you think this margin benefit can get to over time? Thanks.
I don't know if Andy could pick up this first part of that question on the CapEx and the second half of Fiber, but certainly in terms of the AUD 20 million benefit, it's not a number that we'll continue to monitor because it's just BAU for us now. But certainly, as we grow, that benefit just continues to grow. If we had to, and you could probably increase it just proportion to connections really, if we had to go and purchase that capacity from third parties, that would be an operational expense that we'd have to incur. That AUD 20 million would continue to grow quite significantly as we grow our connections into the future.
Yeah, and Brian, just picking up on the first part of the question, so we'd probably be expecting to see another five to six in the half two for Aussie Fibre. And yeah, again, a part of the increase is to recognize that the rollout has been going well and the customer demand has been stronger. So again, there's a few factors, but that's partly the increase, but about another five to six in half two.
Okay. Thank you. And my second question was on residential churn during the first half. If you could provide any context on resi churn and also how the launch of the Buddy brand may have impacted churn during the period.
Thanks, Hamish. Yeah, residential churn has stayed relatively consistent. There are some sort of peaks and troughs around promotional periods where we also get the benefit of additional sales, like Friday, so there will be a little bit of additional activity during that period because there's improved offers in the market, but relatively consistent over the last 12 months or so. In terms of the impact of Buddy, so certainly initially we had sort of the initial round of Buddy joiners, we had quite a few of those coming from Aussie. That sort of bounced in what we would expect as normal, and if you look at the net growth of the combined brands, we think that's a pretty solid result and is providing a very good outcome for the group as a whole.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. And your next question today comes from Ian Munro at [Ord Minnett]. Please go ahead.
Good morning and congratulations, Phil. Congratulations, Brian. Just looking at the enterprise business, you called out just some cost pressure from some of the cloud service providers. Can you just perhaps give us a sense of whether this is ongoing and whether, I guess, the GP margins you've reported in the first half are representative of what we'd see going forward? I guess trying to understand really the trend of the margin pressure and whether there's more mixed shift to come through. Thank you.
Thanks, Ian. Yeah, so the cause of the increase in cost was largely down to an acquisition. So one of the software vendors in the space was acquired by a large U.S. firm. They have a very different approach to their revenue model, much more aggressive, and that imposed burdens on essentially the whole industry in Australia. We've seen that in some of the other players in the market. So it's a one-off change in that respect, but permanent in that cost base continues going forward. So the impact has been felt and will continue to be felt in the future. The future ENG margins, obviously, the next step is to put numbers on that. But we've talked in the past about our data-first sort of sales strategy.
We get the data wins first, and then we start to upsell other products into our customers, such as voice and things like that. And so we would expect that to happen. How that phases will depend on a mix of how good we are at selling data versus how good we are at upselling products into those customer bases. So that's probably as far as I can go in terms of future margin projections for ENG.
That's fine. Just maybe one for my overhead, just on the Symbio business, just looking at just a couple of active numbers, obviously up on half, and I think that the top line growth should decrease in Symbio maybe. Performance on that is really setting into the second half. Thank you.
Sorry, Ian, I might get you to repeat that. It just came through really broken up, so I was sort of only catching every second or third word.
Yeah, I'm not sure that you can be converted there, no. I was just trying to get a sense of.
I'm sorry to interrupt. This is the operator. Ian, we're having a very difficult time hearing you, sir. Is there a way you can dial back in and we can get you back in queue?
I'm sorry, sir. We're going to move on. We're not able to hear you at this time. So our next question today comes from Liam Robertson. Please go ahead.
Morning, team. Two questions from me. I might ask them one at a time. Just on the incremental CapEx investment in 2025, a couple of things. Can you confirm the elevated spend is once-off, and then how should we think about your go forward BAU CapEx profile? And then just secondly on this one as well, given you're calling out future-dated efficiencies and returns, can you just talk us through how you think about returns on that investment internally, whether that be an internal IRR or a ROIC above your cost of capital?
So in terms of the second part of that question, we're generally running discounted cash flow models. We're talking about the IRU opportunity we've got, for example, with Subsea and Intercapital Fibre. We ran DCF on that using cost of capital. The NPV was very strong. It also delivered an improved margin as well. So it's definitely where we're looking at generating returns above the cost of capital is our primary goal. In terms of the incremental CapEx and what it means going forward, we would hope to come back to a more normalized CapEx envelope similar to the original guidance for this year. It's not one-off in nature, but there will be some phasing issues around how we may invest some of these things that are future investments we need to make in.
Fibre, for example, Fibre is an interesting one because in some ways, I'd love us to be going over forecast on Fibre over a year because it means we're selling more than we anticipated and we're getting great returns. But we do have to obviously manage that within the realms of our capital management plan and our cash flow window. So broadly, we would hope to be at a lower level of CapEx going forward, but obviously, it depends on demand.
Great. Thanks. Makes sense. And then just secondly on Buddy, I mean, I guess subscribers are likely behind the level that you were hoping for. But can you talk to any of the learnings from having that fully automated support environment across the Buddy base? And then if you think you might be able to drive cost efficiency across your core brand?
There are definitely lots of learnings, and we are very much part of Buddy's investment case for sales risk. It's been able to serve as test and learn environments for digital service offerings. So there are learnings. I don't want to share what they are, but there are many. I think we touched on, in our integrated 2028 strategy, part of that is bringing improved digital tools and portals into the ABB brand. Importantly, though, what we need to say there is what's got us here is our amazing personal service. We don't want to walk away from that. What we want to do is make our digital tools and self-service functionality so good that people will prefer to use it rather than call us. So we want them to use it by their choice, not by us forcing it on them, which is in the Buddy model.
We're not giving them the choice. That's what you're paying for. In the ABB model, we try to create something so special they will choose to use it. So that's the way we're applying the learnings from Buddy into the future.
Thanks.
Thank you. And our next question today comes from Evan Karatzas with UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you, Kate. Morning. Maybe just firstly on the new guidance you have, can you just help us maybe with some of the key building blocks to get from the 1H underlying EBITDA to the 2H EBITDA it's implying? Maybe from a, I don't know, midpoint point of view, just some of the key, yeah, growth factors there that we need to be thinking about. Thanks.
So we've had a good start to the year. I think we've seen the bridge with gaining in the first half. We've got some cost savings there that we've put more flex with the second half of the year. We've got a modest additional benefit from the Origin deal of AUD 1 million, so that helps as well. We've got some good growth in our pipeline. We've obviously had the benefit of seeing January's result, and we're very confident that we can deliver the second half as per the guidance.
Just one more. The residential GP margin, I hear you on that timing mismatch for 2H last year. Given that you'll now have sort of the full benefit for that price increase in the 2H, how should we expect that residential 2H GP margin to be? Is that the 33% from the second half last year? Is that a good guide to use there?
In part, it should be better because we don't have that impact of the first month. The issue will depend on mix, so not all products have the same benefit. The 100 speed product is very competitive. We didn't put a price increase on that at all this year. So it all depends on the mix and how that compares to the mix we had last year. So the 100 product will be slightly lower margin this year than last year because it's wearing the NBN increase, even probably didn't put prices up. So we would expect to see improvement in the second half. Whether it gets to the same as H2 last year, probably a little bit less than that, I would say.
Yeah, Brian. And what I would just say as well, which was the third point, was that some of the network costs, so backhaul links, things like that, was allocated across our entire base, which included the Origin volume. And because we no longer have that, it sort of has meant that the margins on all of the segments have gone down a little bit with that allocation. So really, that will ease over the second half as we build volume, but really, until we're back to sort of the more plus 140,000 replacement, it'll just take a bit of time for that component. It's relatively small, but it will have a negative impact for the next half relative to half two of last year.
Yeah. Okay. That's a good point. I appreciate all that. Thanks.
No, no, no. He didn't mean what he said. Because I.
Thank you. And our next question today comes from Ian Munro at Ord Minnett. Please go ahead.
Hi guys. Hopefully, you can hear me okay now. Just a question for Mo, please, just on the Symbio business. Looks like a reasonable jump in the active numbers, sort of half on half. Just can you understand, I guess, how the environment is for new business at the moment? And also a bit of an update on kind of where rates are at in the market would be great. Thank you.
Yeah. I definitely hear you a lot better than Ian. Thank you. So yeah, so in terms of, as you said, the growth, you'll sort of recall when we did the full year, we were talking through driving a lot more focus on revenue growth and growing customers, etc., with the Symbio business. We put some new people on in the team in terms of the BD capability, and it's been a real focus there.
So we've definitely seen the early signs of that, and we do expect that to sort of flow through. Tying that back to your question about rates, the rates sort of have pretty much held. I think we spoke about this at the full year as well, which was that you can only sort of take rates to a certain place, and then it just doesn't make sense anymore, and we were sort of finding ourselves starting to head down that path, so yeah, that sort of helped pretty well. That's not to say that people won't try and drop a bit here and there as they do in any part of our business, but yeah, it always comes down to more than just the price as well as everything else that we offer.
Thanks, mate.
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 very much, everyone. As I said, I truly believe the best years of Aussie are well and truly still to come, and what the team's delivered over the last six months and last 12 months has been nothing short of exceptional. So with that, we'll conclude today. I look forward to seeing everyone at the Investor Day coming up on the 10th of April. You can register online now for that. And yeah, we'll see you soon. Thank you.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.